"When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web" by Ian Shapira.
An excerpt:
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.
Well, I am a twentysomething teacher. And I do love me some internets. Heh.
Well, let's take a look at myself... I won't dispute that one should not, in fact, smoke crack while pregnant, but you won't see me seducing a bottle of Cuervo, either. If you read my public profiles, you'll discover things like: I like Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Van Gogh and The X-Files and the famous African American choreographer, Alvin Ailey. Nothing incriminating there.
The problem is, where does a young teacher draw the line between enjoying her private life and allowing her job to take over her entire life? In this blog, I just posted an article about a 10-year-old rape victim giving birth, and then linked it to a pro-choice statement on my behalf. That is certainly more professional behavior than posting raunchy, sexual jokes, but I could easily have parents of students, coworkers, or employers who are staunchly anti-abortion and may find my statement to be offensive. In other words, my opinions on abortion rights are irrelevant to my job, so I don't express them at work. But by making these things public, what if someone holds me accountable at work for these things? I could see its relevance if, on my own time, I chose to bomb a fundamentalist church to make a statement, but a criminal act is a far cry from my freedom of speech, which, frankly, I'd like to remain intact. I don't want to feel stifled in my freedom to express myself, just because I'm a teacher (which would be especially ironic since I teach performing arts and a significant portion of my lessons revolve around self-expression).
Or is the real issue one of perception? The most inappropriate things that you'll find about me on the web are in comments posted by my non-teaching friends, or in pictures of me looking goofy. Note that I usually look goofy in pictures, regardless of whether I've been drinking. But is the problem that people might assume that I'm drunk, just based on looking goofy? Especially because there are pictures of me with a drink in hand (not that I've posted, but that friends have posted). But what the picture often doesn't reveal is that I only had two beers in four hours. And sure, I may be laughing and joking and making funny faces and having a good time, but what the picture doesn't reveal is that it was at a birthday party or a wedding and that I'm lucky if I get to go out once a month with my friends.
There is no perfect answer and my generation is the first of its kind - the first to stumble through the birth and developing omnipresence of the web. My generation has likely enjoyed more online freedom than any who follow ever will; we were teenagers and young college students during the heyday of the dot-com boom in an era when our parents were bewildered over this new email thing. We developed friendships and intricate social networks over the web, experienced the joys of anonymity, then emboldened ourselves as Friendster or Facebook or MySpace told us to post pictures and really be ourselves, publicly. But in many cases, we still behaved as if we were anonymous - until that public strip show came back to bite us in the proverbial ass when we lost job opportunities or were humiliated at work. And no, this doesn't just apply to teachers, except that the patrons and supervisors of our trade are particularly more discriminating, since our job is to influence the young, developing minds of children.
I think that the generation who follows - as the last remaining children who recall the days before the internet forage toward middle age and the first who, for years, were unaware that such a "dark ages" ever existed - will have learned from my generation's mistakes and be more guarded.
The real answer, unfortunately, lies in how much you want to risk and our trusty old friend, common sense. I'm taking some risks, yes, but I'm also utilizing common sense. If, for instance, I lost my job for blogging a personal pro-choice argument, which I never expressed in class, then I'd have a pretty damned good court case. For that matter, in this blog, I even defended the teacher who appeared on The Howard Stern Show in a bikini and made sexual jokes about her husband. But I never claimed that my point of view wasn't more liberal than the average joe, either. And because part of what makes me who I am is my far-left point of view, I'd feel deprived of life (not to mention, very fake) if I made a concerted effort to go through my many off-work hours, painting myself as a go-with-the-flow, blend-in-the-background kind of girl. But I won't be linking professional websites advertising my resume with personal social networking, nor will I prance around in lingerie, shrieking to the Calypso rhythms of teachers gone wild, either.
