Have you ever excitedly burst out of a bathroom and exclaimed to anyone who was unfortunate enough to be within earshot, "You have got to see what I just did! It’s amazing!"? While that’s a pretty common practice and I do believe we have all done it, I don’t think it is as common to burst out of a bathroom and blurt out, "You have got to check out what this one other person did in here! It was amazing!"

In fact, that practice is so uncommon that when it actually happens, people don’t know how to respond. That is the only possible explanation I can think of for why an elementary school teacher in Dallas was placed on paid leave after she responded to a six-year-old defecating on the classroom floor by wrapping his brown mistake in a plastic bag, putting it in his backpack and sending it home with him.

At first I thought that she was so amazed by his quality of work that she just couldn’t wait until parent-teacher conferences to show his parents the great butt pickle he made during art class. You know, like with a gold star on it and a note that says "I am recommending little Billy for gifted and talented classes." This is one amazing log, I thought to myself.

But no; apparently it wasn’t because it was such a good piece of crap. Apparently, this teacher did it as punishment for the six-year-old because he crapped in class.

Last week the AP reported, well, that exact thing I just said. I thought I could explain it more then that, but now I don’t think I can make it any clearer than, "a first grader crapped on the floor of his first-grade class, the teacher got angry at him for crapping on the floor, she puts it in a doggy bag so he can save it and he goes home with it, probably with a note that says ‘just look what your son thought was funny to do during painting with watercolors!’"

I could paraphrase the AP story again, but I’m already starting to run out of synonyms for feces.

And this teacher’s punishment for giving the kid a piping hot sack of his own doo-doo was to get paid for not teaching. You might be outraged that a teacher is getting a paid vacation for doing this, but think about it: wouldn’t you also want to give this women money if it meant she wouldn’t be going near any children?

Seriously, what the hell did this woman think was going to happen after his parents found that she had packed a hot lunch in their son‘s backpack? I’m pretty sure a six-year-old wouldn’t poop on the floor out of spite for the teacher; that would have to be one seriously pissed-off six-year-old.

But even if we assume that this kid took a dump on the floor simply because he was acting out, and not because he couldn’t adequately keep his buttocks clenched shut enough until it was time to line up for bathroom break, I still can’t imagine the thought process that leads somebody to think, "I bet I can really alert this kid’s parents to his bad behavior if I send him home with a turd in his pocket. I’m pretty sure that’s the proper disciplinary procedure, if I remember my education classes in college."

Now, I didn’t just write this column to let you know that a teacher in Texas has a scatological fetish. There is a lot more to this story then just first graders with sandwich bags full of excrement; there are layers upon layers to this story. So what does this mean in the big picture?

Well, this pretty much ensures that teachers in this country will never be respected. Even before this incident, which I have dubbed "Dookie Gate," the average teacher salary in this country was somewhere between the salaries of the average drifter and the average chemical-toilet tester.

Even before Dookie Gate people didn’t care enough about the abysmal salaries of teachers to do anything about it, and thus start paying them enough so that when they go home at night to drown their sorrows they could actually afford real supermarket bourbon instead of just Listerine and rubbing alcohol.

Now how hard is it going to be for teachers when they try negotiating for more money knowing that one of their ilk dealt with a child going number two at his desk by sending him home with the number two, as if his parents weren’t going to believe the teacher.

This is just like when you first heard that rumor in middle school that some burnouts who worked at a Taco Bell got caught making brown in the beef. Just like how you didn’t patronize Taco Bell for about a year, parents aren’t going to want to give more money to teachers when they’re afraid their children might come home one day with a bag of poo. That is unless they’re paying them more to stay away from their children, in which case there’s that whole "paid leave" thing.

But even more important then that, this fable teaches us an even more important lesson: poop jokes are hilarious.