Teachers Gone Wild

This article “Teachers’ Virtual Lives Conflict with Classroom” by Scott Michels from ABC News (shared with me by our district’s New Teacher Mentor) gives (in my opinion) a great example of the best way of dealing with prevention of the “teachers gone wild” issue of inappropriate (as judged by administrators and parents) photos and material on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites.

“Todd Fuller, of the Missouri State Teachers Association, said a school superintendent recently told him he asked aspiring teachers about their MySpace pages during job interviews. He had a teacher come in and asked her if she had a Facebook or MySpace page and she said yes, and he said would you be willing to have a look right now?” Fuller said. “If that would be an issue for you, you should take pause and consider what’s on your page.” “

I absolutely love this way of looking at the situation. It used to be that we were told to think of what our mothers would say of anything we wrote or did, but honestly, a lot of young adults are drinking WITH their parents (legally or not) and share a lot more with their parents than they did in the past - and the behavior displayed in the above-mentioned photos and MySpace pages isn’t necessarily frowned-upon by parents. It is, however, frowned-upon by most school administrators. I can say that I’d be comfortable having my online postings seen by administrators - and a lot of it WAS seen at a CESA #4 workshop last week when Naomi Harm showed my blog and tweets to the whole group! It’s just SO easy to think that anything we write online is only seen by the little world that we KNOW is reading - it’s the unknown readers that so many forget about.

When dealing with how much information to reveal online and your profession, I think Liz on Lizkdc Dislocation said it perfectly in her post “Tweet Your Way to a Job (Social Media Breakfast 7)”:

“More seriously, social media mean people can also see you have this whole life where you go to bars and ballgames and obsess about passions like your music, or travel, or garden, and have (gasp) family and friends whom you love in a way that you don’t love work. It’s up to you to be comfortable with that. In the end, any good boss or client is going to judge you on what you deliver. If they’re the type to judge you negatively because Twitter reveals you escaped your desk and made it to your daughter’s dance recital or hiked Mount Washington this Saturday rather then spending it in the office . . . this is a great time to figure out how to get a job with people with whom you share a perspective on life.”

So, teachers who feel they have a right to post drunken pictures of themself online may just need to find another profession - one in which bosses ARE okay with that kind of behavior. Let me know if you find one of those bosses, I haven’t yet.

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