A Florida teacher gave his students an unusual assignment: write your own obituary.
This did not go down well with the parents and subsequently, the Orange County School District administrators—to say the least. The teacher was fired.
The assignment, already of questionable judgement, was even more so as it was given ahead of an active shooter drill on campus.
Psychology teacher Jeffrey Keene told Fox 35 Orlando that he wanted to tie an upcoming active shooter drill at Dr. Phillips High School into a psychology lesson, and came up with the idea of having his 11th and 12th graders write their own obituaries.
“If they died 24 hours from now, what would they do differently than they did yesterday? And that’s to get them to get rid of all the fluff and show them what’s important in the world,” Keene, 63, explained to the news station.
“It wasn’t to say, ‘You’re going to die, and let’s stress you out,'” he added, noting that he put a disclaimer at the bottom of the lesson saying that it was not meant to upset them.
Keene, who had been working as a teacher since 2008 and was hired by the high school in January, said he received a notice to end his employment by the Orange County School District soon after the assignment.
“When they said you have the option to resign without violating your contract, I said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,'” he told the outlet. “I said, ‘If I did, tell me what it is.’ They said, ‘We can’t do that.’ I said, ‘In that case, since I don’t know what I did wrong, you can go ahead and terminate me without cause.’ ”
However, he told NBC News that he doesn’t regret setting up the assignment.
“If you can’t talk real to [the students], then what’s happening in this environment?” Keene said. “In my mind, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
