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.”

Read more: Shocking allegations against teachers in L.A. school

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.”

Watch: ABC News’ exclusive interview with Hooker and Powers

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.”

You can read the story here …..teachers dating student

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don’t have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

This disconnect may be responsible for many of society’s problems.

With more than a decade’s worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it “intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don’t know.” Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.

Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now at New York University, “have done a number of studies where we will give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etcetera. Then we determine their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they’ve done,” Dunning said. “We ask, ‘what percentile will your performance fall in?’”

The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn’t do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. “For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10^th or 15^th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60^th or 55^th percentile, so, above average,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. “People at the bottom still think they’re outperforming other people.” [Graph]

It’s not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can rate themselves accurately, they cannot. “They’re really trying to be honest and impartial,” he said.

If only we knew ourselves better. Dunning believes people’s inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society’s ills, including climate change denialism. “Many people don’t have training in science, and so they may very well misunderstand the science. But because they don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it, they don’t realize how off their evaluations might be,” he said.

Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, “they’re really not in a position to evaluate the science.”

Along the same lines, people who aren’t talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right about the things you believe you’re right about. And if you try to joke about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think.

So, do any adults out there actually tuck their shirts into their underwear also?

Well,….that’s where!

the 70's

I DO!!!

 
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