Teachers and the Web: A Recipe for Disaster
Justin Bathon on Monday, April 28, 2008 at 7:50PM Teachers don't seem to get the fact that the Web is a public place. I don't really know why, but they just don't. Teachers would never do the kind of dumb things they do on the Web in their classroom or even a public park. The Web is just as public, if not more public, than these places yet they seem to think they can just post whatever they want and no one will know.
From today's Washington Post:
It's almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the
Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school
system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers
unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that
can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional -- or both.
One Montgomery County
special education teacher displayed a poster that depicts talking sperm
and invokes a slang term for oral sex. One woman who identified herself
as a Prince William County
kindergarten teacher posted a satiric shampoo commercial with a
half-naked man having an orgasm in the shower. A D.C. public schools
educator offered this tip on her page: "Teaching in DCPS -- Lesson #1:
Don't smoke crack while pregnant."
Just to be clear, these are not teenagers, the typical Internet
scofflaws and sources of ceaseless discussion about cyber-bullying,
sexual predators and so on. These are adults, many in their 20s, who
are behaving, for the most part, like young adults.
But the crudeness of some Facebook or MySpace
teacher profiles, which are far, far away from sanitized Web sites
ending in ".edu," prompts questions emblematic of our times: Do the
risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if
students, parents and school officials don't see them? At what point
are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?
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