Sometimes, decisions about who you “friend” on Facebook challenge a user’s judgment; “Should I add that one guy with funky teeth who creeped on me a year ago? What about an ex? Parents?”
The permutations are likely endless, but the aforementioned scenarios have few consequences.
However, if you are a high school teacher, the question, “Should I talk to and ‘friend’ my students?” should never, ever, be puzzling.
If you are a high school teacher, you should not be friends with current students, period. There is absolutely no basis for anyone 18 or under, who is still eating cheese fries in a cafeteria and asking people to dances, to become aware of your cyber comings and goings. Facebook is not scholarly, it is not professional, it’s not geared toward mentorship, and it’s neither an effective nor an appropriate medium to communicate with teenage students as a teacher. Your students might be cool with it, but other rational adults, including those who pay you, are not.
Unsurprisingly, high school teachers who have particularly misguided intentions to begin with speed up the process of being arrested through their tactful use of Facebook as a stage for indefensibly inappropriate behavior.
Take 37-year-old high school teacher Chadwin Reynolds from the Bronx, NY, whose court proceedings the NY Post covered in early October.
Reynolds was undoubtedly a top-notch instructor at a local arts academy. That is, until he “‘friended’ about a half-dozen female students and wrote creepy comments like, ‘This is sexy,’ under some of their Facebook photos, schools investigators found,” according to the Post.
Even at a hippie arts school in New York, this is still called sexual harassment and nasty as hell, Chadwin. Then there’s Laurie Hirsch, a 30-year-old Long Island high school faculty member, appearing in the Post’s same article for posting “a photo of her kissing an 18-year-old male former student on the lips, which sparked an investigation…and records revealed 2,700 phone contacts between the pair over a six-month period.”
Laurie: in the words of Antoine Dodson, “You are really dumb, for real.”
Was there never a point during your teacher education where they covered this? Did you miss the day where they discussed the pitfalls of announcing your relationships with students through the use of digital photos?
The tricky part of student-teacher extracurricular communication is that high school students often either initiate inappropriate friendships or in some other way appear to consent to them. Reynolds and Hirsch, for instance, are likely not psychopaths or monsters; they are misguided adults who need professional help and perspective. Working with high school kids likely bleeds over into a teacher’s perspective, potentially obscuring an adult sense of judgment.
That’s why other adults are there to remind them.
Time magazine reports: “School officials in Norton, Mass., having issued a ruling against online connections between teachers and current or former students. Worried about potential inappropriate Internet communications between teacher and pupil, the board made a plea to teachers to avoid social media relationships with students — or else.”
Go Massachusetts! This is the right idea: make it clear that teachers and students should not be Facebook friends, then weed out those who, for one reason or another, can’t comply. Facebook uses are multiplying daily, why not add to its versatility by using it as litmus test to protect teenagers, and screen the intentions of local teachers?
As technology grows, protective social norms need to evolve too, and enforcing professional social networking standards are an essential component of that evolution.
Send mug shots of other dumb teachers to anna.bethancourt@asu.edu
