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Interesting article I found
So, I know that there are a lot of teachers on this board, myself included. I came across an interesting article that some of you may be interested in (even the non-teachers out there). After reading this article, all I thought about was that a frustrated teacher needed an outlet for her thoughts. I'm sure that all teachers have felt the way she did at one point or another. Does she deserve to be suspended from her job or possibly loose it?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41618492/ns/us_news-life/?gt1=43001
Basically, a teacher is being suspended and her job seems to be in jeopardy due to some anonymous posts on her own personal blog where she calls out some of the behavior of her students.
I personally think it's ridiculous that people are making such a big deal of her blog posts. I would have to agree with her that many of my own students are missing the work ethic and parental support that a majority of students when I was in school seemed to have and receive. But I teach in a very low socioeconomic area where many of my students do not have both biological parents living with them. Not that this should excuse a lot of their attitude and behaviors, but it does help me make a little more sense of them. However, I have found that if I set the standards high and refuse to accept failure, most of my students are able to rise to the occasion. I will agree that some of my students seem to think that failure or being held back will not happen to them--that it's almost become "cool" to fail--and I don't know when that shift in thought happened; several of my teacher friends in different schools have observed the same mentality from some of their kids.
While I agree with her that students today are very different than students were years ago, there are always sets of problems to encounter in education. We're dealing with kids who seem to need to be taught more than just content now; I find that I have to teach my students basic manners, too, because not all of them are getting that at home. In Middle School, I still have students who don't capitalize their own names and dont' know the difference between the types of "there/their/they're," but it's just something that I've started to accept as part of what I need to teach them. Yes, I think that parents and students, not just teachers, also should be held accountable to a students' failures or successes, which really seems to be what this teacher was saying. She's just frustrated with the educational system, as many teachers and parents are right now.
I guess that I'm really saying that more money, less teachers, and bigger class sizes will not fix the problems in education. If I knew how to fix education, I'd be living on my own private island with waterfalls that flow with Moscato. But should this teacher be punished for anonymously expressing her opinions and frustrations? I don't think so.
What do you think?
Re: Interesting article I found
I read a similar article about this situation a few days ago and generally agree with you that she should not have been suspended due to her blog.
I'm not sure that this is the entire story however. I'd like to know exactly how the student 'happened' upon the blog and knew it was Ms. Munroe's when she says she didn't use her full name in the blog. I keep a personal blog and generally don't share it with just anyone and if you were to Google my name, my blog would not appear. Actually, if you searched the name of my blog, it wouldn't show up. I know how to work simple privacy settings and I think this teacher should have been more careful. Even if she had nothing critical to say, she should have kept her blog completely private. And this being the age of technology, there's no excuse of "I didn't think anyone would find me!" Kids today are very computer-savvy and know just how to find someone on the Internet with a few simple clicks of a mouse. This is exactly why my aunt, who is a teacher, does not have a Facebook/MySpace/any social networking account. I am not against teachers having these online accounts by any means, but I think because of the nature of their jobs, teachers have to be more careful with what they share online.
With that said, I don't think what she said was bad enough to be suspended over. She didn't name any students specifically and it sounds like parents are more upset at being called out for raising 'lazy whiners' than over the blog itself. I also think that since basically everything in schools seems to be 'zero tolerance', the school didn't know what else to do than suspend her. If I were the principal, would have probably just told Ms. Munroe that students had brought the blog to my attention and that she would need to either shut the blog down or change the privacy settings.
Her lawyers will tout this as a free speech issue, but everyone knows that no one really has the complete right to free speech in this country. Especially with people constantly connected to the Internet, the lines of free speech are being blurred. Her court case will probably be the landmark case for this kind of issue.
Do the creep.
I totally agree with this. I also wonder how the student "happened" upon the blog and identified it as their teacher. Unless she used a class-specific example that the student happened to be a part of, I would find it difficult unless she had some sort of identifying factor on her blog. It will be interesting to see how this pans out considering I'm sure there are more teachers out there with similar blogs--maybe not calling their students the sorts of things she did--that criticize things happening in their school or education in general.
I once lost a job over something I wrote online. It was a similar situation, I blogged about a guy who was an a-hole at work. My boss found the blog by accident - I posted about a specific Polish meal a few posts before. He was searching a recipe online and found my blog. I did not have a picture and he would not have known it was me by looking at it, but in one other of my posts I wrote about a friend and used her nickname... he figured it out it's mine and once he got to the post about the a-hole, his protege... since he was worried about a lawsuit, he offered me a pretty good severance. Actually losing my job was motivating to me. It was limiting me and I needed a wake up call. But, since then, I write my frustrations in the old style journal.
Regarding this teacher's situation - I agree, she should not be suspended, definitely not fired. It's yet another cry out for help that the American education needs badly. But not only that - it's a cry out for help that the under-priviledged students need. Coming from Poland, with the purpose to find better opportunities here, in America, it's extremely disheartening to see so many young people deprived of the exact opportunities I came here to get.
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