Calif. teacher resigns after leaving family for student

I still find it deeply unfathomable that there are human beings out there that actively do things like this. It... I just cant process it.

and just... this fucking piece of shit...like there's families that are finding out that their kid was abused, and going through all those horrible cycles of blaming themselves for not doing more and... ugh I just get so angry thinking of all the families that are just so completely decimiated by this, and all those kids...

Last year, Jordan Powers was just another student from Mr. Hooker's class. Now she's his live-in girlfriend.

James Hooker -- the 41-year-old married father who left his wife and kids for his 18-year-old-student -- might be the worst teacher ever. Last week, he resigned from his job at Enochs High School in Modesto, California over the scandal that's shaken up a community and pit one mom on a crusade to save her daughter from a man she calls a "master manipulator."

Jordan met her teacher as a freshman, but both maintain nothing physical happened until she turned 18 this past September. Hooker claims he saw Powers as "just a student" and had no romantic feelings toward her at first, but when her most recent birthday came around, things changed.

They changed so much, in fact, that Hooker, left his wife and three kids (one of them a 17-year-old Enochs high school student as well) so that he could move in with Jordan.

If this all sounds suspicious to you, imagine how Tammie Powers, Jordan's mom, feels. She's launched an official police investigation to find out if Hooker's relationship with her daughter began before Jordan was of legal age. Tammie is convinced it did, citing a photo of her daughter on Hooker's lap and text messages, emails and phone records exchanged between the couple that predate her daughter's 18th birthday.

"That's pursuit, in my opinion, with some type of intent," she told ABC News 10 in California.

Hooker denies Tammie's claims and is confident the investigation will turn up nothing. He blames the "stigma of the teacher-student relationship" for the public backlash. But Hooker's former boss, Modesto City Schools Supt. Pam Able, doesn't agree.

Even if their relationship doesn't break any laws, Able says she "considers student-teacher dating relationships to be not only unprofessional, but immoral." She also added in an email to the Modesto Bee, that Hooker's relationship has become a "source of great concern for staff, students and parents."

It must be particularly hard for Hooker's 17 year old daughter, now that her father has left to be with a fellow classmate and become a notorious figure throughout the school.

Still, Hooker claims he has no regrets. In an interview with Good Morning America, he shut down Tammie's accusations as a "pack of lies" and said of his new love, "we really do want to have a future together."

Jordan, a quiet, fragile-seeming young woman, who looks closer to 15 than 18 years in age, gazed up at her former teacher, a man that looks every bit his 41 years, and said, "He's more than just a lover."

Jordan has now stopped going to classes and is finishing out her senior year by doing an independent study. She has limited contact with her mom, now that she's living with her teacher, mom's worst nightmare.

Desperate for her child, Tammie has turned her own Facebook page into a "most wanted" profile for Hooker. She's plastered his photo all over her wall warning neighbors about the man she calls an "arrogant pig". She's also made her wallpaper a photo of a prison cell, sending a message to Hooker should he dare visit her site.

Since the story has been picked up by national press, she's been flooded with messages of support from strangers. Tonight, she'll be taking her crusade against Hooker to Nancy Grace. "Nancy's always been a victims advocate and fights for justice," Tammie wrote on Facebook. "That's the goal here, justice."

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/eNXiKI0flG69ifNppVzQjg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTMxMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/blogs/partner/470_2270136.0

NANCY GRACE

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well this guy's going to have to go into hiding now that nancy grace is on the case

she looks more like an "adult" in that photo but he still looks like a perv

Jordan, a quiet, fragile-seeming young woman, who looks closer to 15 than 18 years in age, gazed up at her former teacher, a man that looks every bit his 41 years, and said, "He's more than just a lover."

*vomit*

more than a touch of CYE in that pic

i think nancy grace is going to be otm for once.

Hooker claims he saw Powers as "just a student" and had no romantic feelings toward her at first, but when her most recent birthday came around, things changed.

what a coinkidink~~

at the stroke of midnight, cupid struck.

stuck by another's cupid

...why did i make that horribly formed joke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgdSfI2HERo

"there are hotel receipts ppl, what do you think they did? homework?!"

i love how they brought this guy in to argue with nancy grace and he keeps trying to argue with her but there's so little room for disagreement that he just keeps repeating her in an argumentative voice.

"business" teacher

goddamn, kinda late to this but,
me: male 20s HS teacher and this shit sends me up a wall for reasons laid out by all yall, but when an adult abuses his position of authority to pursue a sexual relationship, it jeopardizes the trust in all teachers, particularly male, that students have.

i'm the coordinator for academic competitions for my school which means the other math/debate/writing/etc coaches and i spend time with students that's much less structured and impersonal than a trad classroom. i can't imagine being a parent and sending my child to this setting and having in the back of my mind "is one of these dudes a wolf in sheep's clothing?"

Yeah now I think about it when I was in final year of high school, our small advanced english class (about 8 ppl, all girls iirc?) would sometyimes have to go to our teachers HOUSE in the morning before school to fit in some extra hours of work. It was all 100% above board, absolutely, but it amazes me now to think it was ok.

it's funny you mention that but what makes it okay is the seven other girls - i will just absolutely not see one or other student w/o another student or teacher around because it's a huge red flag

not sure where that "or" came from

ditto "other"

90% of high schoolers on tv +movies are played by very sexually desirable 20-something year olds

Yeah, this weirds me out too. The cast of Glee look older than the university students I teach. (Cory Monteith is just three years younger than I am.) (And so the girl in the photo doesn't look for her age to me at all.) But... if every man really does want to have sex with teenage girls as per the sketch referenced above, why would this be the case? Wouldn't actual teenage actors be hotter?

"doesn't look young for her age to me at all"

it's funny you mention that but what makes it okay is the seven other girls - i will just absolutely not see one or other student w/o another student or teacher around because it's a huge red flag

Thats a very good point yeah.

personally i think she does look young for an 18 yo but your point is OTM

it's because teenagers still have little kid faces, regardless of puberty

I went to kickboxing class and now I feel much better! Just one thing:

repeat offenders I only knew by hearsay, and I'm not entirely sure of how far the 'making out' progressed' etc. but still YUK

I'm glad you used quotes there, vg, because this isn't making out, it's sexual assault.

so glad Nancy Grace is involved now

high schoolers on tv +movies are played by very sexually desirable 20-something year olds

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8Sh8wZMrbRs/TaL78I0EYPI/AAAAAAAAAi0/LwamD74PPaU/s1600/andrea1.jpg

xxpost to Laurel: yep. I only knew of one girl who came forward...the offending student was removed from the dorm, and if memory serves the girl did make efforts to press charges against him.

it's funny you mention that but what makes it okay is the seven other girls - i will just absolutely not see one or other student w/o another student or teacher around because it's a huge red flag

― the late great, Thursday, March 1, 2012 6:35 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, it's a sad product of the age we live in, but i'm beginning to be of the opinion that adults should pretty much never be allowed unsupervised one-on-one time w other people's kids. not saying that there should be a law against it or w/e, but if i had kids, i'd be extremely careful abt such situations.

pretty stupid age we live in then

I dunno I'm hard-pressed to think of a time as a kid when I was left one-on-one with a (non-relative) adult with absolutely no one else around. it is sort of unusual.

yeah and as a teacher i can't think of any good reason i would be alone with a student in a private setting.

music lessons?

being alone with one of my schoolteachers would be a bit odd tho yeah

What is it with Modesto? Gary Condit's from there, other things I can't remember.

yeah and as a teacher i can't think of any good reason i would be alone with a student in a private setting.

yeah I guess I was definitely alone in the classroom with teachers at various points (detention, etc.)

xp

i was strictly talking about high school teachers.

nowadays you leave the door open in those situations and you organize to have more than one kid doing detention together. it's a little bit of extra work to organize but actually more efficient than dealing with everyone in a truly "one on one" way.

at my school all the doors and walls are glass so everybody in the halls can see into every classroom, so even when i'm working with one student at a time it's not "private".

yeah that was def the case at my schools - classroom doors were open, windows all around

Yeah if any of my friend or I had to stay behind after class, the teacher was usually cool with leting my friends stand by the door or at the back of the classroom to wait, I don't remember very many one-on-one closed door situations.

We did have a couple of rumored pervy/creepy teachers...I always wondered how true those rumors were.

probably very

yeah, probably true, unfortunately there seems to be at least one at every school ... we had an aide dude who was in college (i think he was 21) get fired last year for arranging to meet up w/ a 10th grade student at an all-ages show ... so, so sketchy.

I can name at least three teachers who either was convicted of molestation or ran off with their 18-year-old former student.

it's such a fine line

anyway i can think of one from my school, and one marriage from my college. college is entirely another story tho, not least for the legal reasons

My parents were both teachers. One of their fellow teachers - a guy who was around my age (late 20s/early 30s at the time) – would drive the 75 miles down to Little Rock to sit with my parents and watch my little (then-junior high) sister ice skate.

They thought nothing of it, but I constantly repeated to them my suspicions of a single dude that age making four-hour road trips to watch a 13-year-old ice skate.

Nothing ever happened that I heard about except that his contract wasn't renewed after he failed to show up a few mornings because he was too hungover.

one of our science teachers had a wall of photographs of female students in his office, and his favored female student in my class used to arm herself with at least two male students for company when she had to go in for extra help. it is insane to me that that dude didn't get fired. it was a private school with a very insular culture, but still.

ime while things can definitely get blown out of proportion, the student rumor-mill tended not to fabricate these kinds of accusations out of whole cloth - when these kinds of questions arose it was usually one of two scenarios. 1) teacher actually DID do something questionable/unethical/pervy and the victim whispered about it to someone else and the rumors spread among the student populace from there ,or 2) "Satanic Panic" syndrome and the students were led to invent stuff based on the paranoid prodding of authority figures (cops, parents, etc.)

xp