Florida Teacher Fired After Making Students Write Their Own Obituaries

A psychology high school teacher in Florida was recently fired after delivering a lesson in which he made students write their own obituaries.

As reported by Fox 35, Jeffrey Keane, a teacher at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, was fired over a lesson plan in which he asked students to write their own obituaries in an effort to teach gun safety. In short, Keane asked his class to put themselves into an active shooter situation, which would help them write about dealing with morality as if they were dealing with a hypothetical event. 

“If they died 24 hours from now, what would they do differently, than they did yesterday?” Keane told the outlet. “And that’s to show them what’s important in the world. It wasn’t to say, you’re gonna die and let’s stretch you out.”

Keane says he even included a disclaimer at the bottom page of the lesson, reminding students that “this is in no way to upset you.”

An upset student reported Keane’s lecture to a counselor, who then spoke with a supervisor, which resulted in Keane’s firing. 

“When they said you have the option to resign without violating your contract, I said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I said, ‘If I did, tell me what it is,” Keane explained to Fox 35. “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.’”