Two stories of American Education

• A middle-aged woman is facing forty years in prison in Connecticut for having spyware on her her school’s computer: Mrs Julie Amero has just been convicted on four counts of “risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child.” She is a teacher, who had taken over a class of seventh graders (I can never do the maths, but I presume this means twelve or thirteen) to teach them languages, when her computer started showing javascripted popups to porn sites. She couldn’t make them go away. Several children testified that they had seen naked men and women on the screen. The prosecutor thought she should have pulled the plug from the machine, and the jury agreed.
• If only she had been good at sports: Saturday’s Financial Times has a grotesquely comic story about a basketball star testifying to ghetto children about the importance of reading:

Dwyane Wade, arguably the world’s best basketball player, is discussing Jane Austen. A crowd has gathered in a community college in Miami one sultry evening to hear why Pride and Prejudice is his favourite book. Most people here, like Wade, are black.
Could he talk about reading Pride and Prejudice? Actually, replied Wade, when he was at Marquette University a professor had read it to him. “I just loved the way she read the book. You know, Jane Austen is a great author. So I’m just happy to be here representing her. It’s a great love story. I like love stories!” More screams from the audience.
“But it’s also about class,” Wade continued. “The higher class and the lower class. You know, this is a thick book, a lot of pages. It looks like a woman book.”
Did Wade feel misunderstood like Austen’s Mr Darcy? “Mr Darcy is the kind of guy that people look at and think is arrogant. I hope people don’t look at me that way.”
That was about all we got on Jane Austen. “It was never like the joy of reading when I was younger,” Wade admitted. He warmed up when the conversation turned to music, telling us that Whitney Houston “changed the world”.
I am not mocking Wade as a literary critic. Given the quality of schools in the part of Chicago where he grew up, it would have been remarkable had he really been a connoisseur of Austen. It is not his fault the NBA chose him as its least improbable ambassador for books. And his experience of having been read to by a professor is a common practice at American universities to usher athletes through degrees.

• The FT is also the only paper to keep its eye on the business of Steve Jobs and his backdated stock options. This is the kind of scam which, of committed by anyone else, would wreck their reputations, but which seems to have been forgotten in the excitement about the iPhone. A leader about a conversation between Jobs and an adviser on his iPhone attempted to puncture both illusions:

“You don’t say, that’s amazing. Sony must be eating its heart out. Wait a minute, think I’ve smudged it dialling your number on the touchscreen keypad just now, let me wipe it on my tie.
Ah, seems I just started up a video.
Hey, last week’s Prison Break. Nice. Wonder if I’ve got Law and Order on here too.
What? No, it wasn’t a joke, really, Steve. There, that’s better, I’m back with you now.
Anyway, the lawyers are worried we may not have been quite as open as we could have been about how involved you were in the whole backdating thing.
Here, they’ll tell you themselves. How about this button?
What?
Ah, yes, that’s the Pretenders, nice.
Yes, I realise Back on the Chain Gang might not have been the best choice of song right now.
Steve, it was an accident.
Steve?
Drat, where’s that signal?”