Pa. teacher strikes nerve with 'lazy whiners' blog - Yahoo! News
This was a cautionary tale to be sure. Teachers are in a gray area when it comes to free speech both in and out of the classroom, but to me one of the central concerns I have has to do with general confidentiality. How identifiable is this teacher on her blog? How identifiable are the students about whom she complains? I would hazard a guess that many a teacher in my own school might agree with some of the "concerns" she expresses in her blog, but for reasons of confidentiality, professionalism, appropriateness, and self-preservation, it might not be the wisest idea to overshare on the internet.
Still, we teachers know that our behavior, ideas, dress, pedagogical style, personal lives, you name it are fodder for discussion not only on the sidelines of suburban soccer fields and parents' cocktail parties, but on sites like ratemyteacher.com, Facebook, Twitter, student blogs, comments to articles, choices news media makes regarding newsworthy stories as well as nearly any other outlet you can think of. Just this past winter break, I had a woman I didn't even know attack my profession, accuse me of hiding behind my union and suggest that I wasn't a "true capitalist" because I questioned her rationale for merit pay. I guess if I was a doctor, I would be getting requests for free medical consults and goodness knows what else.
Still, I would love to see an article about the sort of day-to-day that teachers live. Most of us are neither villains nor heroes exactly.
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