Life can just grab you up and send you for a ride with no warning. A man's wheelchair got caught in the grille of an 18 wheeler, and the driver pushed the man four miles without realizing that he was there. Startled motorists called in on their cell phones to alert the police of the poor man's plight. Fortunately, the police located the truck, and the man in the wheelchair was okay.
My gosh, I can't even imagine what was going through this man's head as he was propelled down the road at 50 miles per hour unable to do anything about it. People would stand in line at amusement parks for hours for this kind of rush.
Sometimes things can just happen and completely change your life. I can imagine that this is how Julie Amero feels. She is the substitute caught up in charges that she allowed students to view pornography on a classroom computer. Although she was convicted in January, the computer is now being evaluated at a state laboratory, and Ms. Amero is getting a new trial.
Some technology experts believe unseen spyware and adware programs might have generated the pop-up ads for pornographic web sites. Amero and her supporters say the old computer, which she was ordered to leave on, lacked firewall or anti-spyware protections to prevent inappropriate pop-ups.
It all began in October 2004. Amero was assigned to a class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, a city of around 37,000 people about 40 miles east of Hartford.
Before her class started, Amero says, a teacher allowed her to email her husband. She says she used the computer and went to the bathroom, returning to find the permanent teacher gone and two students viewing a web site on hair styles.
Amero says she chased the students away and started class. But later, she says, pornographic images started popping up on the computer screen by themselves. She says she tried to click the images off, but they kept returning, and she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off.
Of course, Ms. Amero could have thrown her body over the computer screen or covered it up with something. Maybe she just didn't think fast enough. Those few seconds probably have replayed in her mind over and over. I can remember having a message show up on my computer from another teacher. The computer was hooked up to my television because I was teaching a vocabulary lesson. The message was not bad but not intended for sixth graders. My first response was to cover the computer screen. I soon realized that this wasn't preventing the kids from seeing the television screen. I felt so silly. It will be interesting to see what happens at Ms. Amero's new trial.