The Dangers of Students and Teachers Sharing the Same Social Space
In December, we shared news about a teacher who was fired for posting her picture to MySpace. The woman in the story, Stacy Snyder, is far from being the last individual this will ever happen to. The Washington Post wrote on Monday that teachers are doing this a lot more frequently and are not aware of the consequences of their actions. Embarrassingly enough, these Facebook profiles don’t really exude “teaching.” In fact, if anything at all, they give the absolute wrong impression about the individuals who we trust our education and future growth as successful adults with.
The article says:
“One Montgomery County [Maryland] 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 [Virginia] 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.’”
Yeah. Whoa is right. These are teachers whose professions are on the line — behaving mostly like many of us.
The teachers interviewed for the article often thought that their information could only be seen by those who they accepted as friends. But they didn’t read the fine print and they didn’t see that they need to control their privacy settings. Consequently, they have faced some of the most embarrassing moments of their lives recently as the public caught wind of their mischievous actions supposedly done when nobody else was watching.
The end result is that it can cost you your job, just like Stacy Snyder. The article goes on to say that a father of a 6-year old complained about one of his teachers’ profiles on MySpace and the teacher was actually fired. The images that caused her removal were likely photos exposing lingerie and naked women. The father was quoted as saying that “These Web sites are the bars and restaurants of our new era. It’s like running into your teacher in a restaurant and seeing them not act appropriately.”
Indeed it is.
As one teacher, who admitted sleeping with a hooker, said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”
And then she disabled her profile for all to see.
As students continually open their lives up for the public to read and learn, there are tremendous risks involved. While two stories involve teachers (whose lives may impact the students and may set bad examples for the kids as well), the issue is that after you graduate, your public information should be revisited. Jobs are at risk if your profile gets out to your current or future employers, even if you’re an intern. While Facebook is perceived as a very social network, there needs to be a level of professionalism to preach as well. Anyone could be watching and anyone could ruin your life. The control begins with you knowing how to establish privacy settings and then considering what is appropriate for the rest of the world to read.
