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Low-Ranking City Teacher Was Inspiration For <em>Simpsons</em> Bully
By
Ben Yakas
Published Feb 25, 2012
Modified Feb 25, 2012
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Feb 25, 2012
Modified Feb 25, 2012
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After a long legal battle, the NYC Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers yesterday. The data came with a particular caveat to media: “The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever,” said the DOE's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky. “No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone and we would never invite anyone—parents, reporters, principals, teachers—to draw a conclusion based on this score alone.” And of course, that's exactly what the local dailies have been doing. But at least one fun piece of pop culture trivia was revisited because of it: one of those teachers was the inspiration for a character on The Simpsons! And based on the data, he's a terrible teacher.
Dolph Timmerman attended high school with Simpsons creator Matt Groening and was the inspiration for Dolph Starbeam, the slouching schoolyard bully and tormentor of Bart Simpson who can speak "Spanish, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Latin, Old English, English, Klingon, and Esperanto." He is also an elementary school teacher at PS 123 Suydam School in Bushwick, and was ranked in the bottom 1 percent of all city math teachers and the bottom 12 percent of English teachers in 2010. On top of that, he was falsely accused of fondling three 10-year-old girls at the school six years ago.
For what it's worth, Groening has commented that Timmerman never really was a bully, but a “really cool guy.” Perhaps Groening doesn't want the man connected to one of his characters disparaged in the same way that Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott doesn't want teachers disparaged based on "old data."
The Times is also offering teachers a chance to respond to the reports here.
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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