Teaching is, in many countries, an underpaid profession. That’s why it’s not uncommon to find teachers with side hustles — for example, working at McDonald’s, selling products online or becoming an Instagram orgasm coach.


However, one teacher in Montreal may have taken things too far. According to CTV News, a teacher is accused of taking drawings that students made in class and selling them online, with some works commanding over $150.



The teacher in question is named Mario Perron. In short, Perron has been accused of taking kids’ art, scanning it, then throwing it up for sale on his personal website.


One student claimed that her drawings were found for sale on at least four different websites, and that “her drawings and those of other fellow classmates appear on multiple items, including T-shirts sold for $55, coffee mugs for $41 and even iPhone cases, at $35 a pop.”



Perron was found out because he, idiotically, did this all under his own name.


A father of one of the students “said he learned about what happened when his two daughters came home from school on Wednesday and told him that a classmate stumbled upon the teacher’s website after searching his name on Google,” reads the CTV News piece. “That student went to inform another teacher, he said, and within minutes, word spread fast around the school about what they had found.”


As it turns out, people get a little testy when you tell them you’ve been selling their children’s self-portraits online to strangers. That’s why 1) the school says they’re now investigating the teacher; 2) an intellectual property lawyer quoted in the piece says the teacher likely broke the law and could thus be investigated; and 3) his website is now down, meaning if you want to buy a children’s drawing, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way — bribing toddlers outside of the local elementary school.