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silveradeptA teacher was identified and connected with several blog posts containing negative comments about her students attitudes toward work and the education system, resulting in a suspension. (Original article available from Yahoo! News.) As the originals of the blog in question have been taken down, we'll have to do with cached materials. As a fairly good example of what normal writing is like in this case, on the subject of academic integrity, The trials and tribulations of cheating, honest, and how honor codes didn't really have their intended effect. Or perhaps the unfortunate reality that students have checked out of their lessons long before the end of the school year.
So the post in question might end up being this one, wherein the teach talks about the comments she would like to leave for her students on their report cards, and then the students talk back about how horrible she is and laugh at the prospects of her employment as the post is being circulated.
The responses to the posts that have been highlighted in the journalfen post have been rather varied, both in the comments to the originals and in the commentary on the linking posts. Some of them berate the tacher for not being better about guarding her identity on-line and making it easy to link her to her real identity. Others say that the teacher should have been removed for making such cruel statements about her students, and others believe the teach is over-reacting to how teenage students are these days and should just shrug it off. It's a wide variety of possibilities to take from this post, all of them with merit and fodder for excellent discussions about the teenage mind, teacher burnout, how much effort students, teachers, and parents need to be making to ensure their child gets an education, and other topics that have probably been covered here and elsewhere.
The sinister undercurrent in all of this, though, and where I want to focus, is something that I thinknicki grabs hold of it when mentioning the reasons that teachers are usually on complete lockdown and anonymity when talking about their work - because one stray cross-reference and suddenly there are upset parents everywhere and an administration that wants to put the fire out. She mentions, too, that bad days will happen with teachers, as with everyone else. The shining example of perfection that they want will occasionally crack or shatter in the heat. Teachers need space to be themselves, too.
Now, in the argument that bad days happen, an example like a professor resigning his post because he told a black student that slaves were always being lashed for being late to work doesn't mean the professor should be let off without consequences. Far from it - if this professor has a history of saying or writing that kind of material, dismissal should have beaten resignation to the punch. But a teacher letting off steam that ther students seem to have no interest in learning? That's something that a lot of us have said, either about our own students or someone else's. We post them to places like Customers Suck or to something like Oh No, They Didn't! or other sorts of places like that. Or we vent to co-workers about the dim bulbs in Class 3-A.
Which is where the pattern goes even deeper. From The Society of Librarians* Who Say Motherfucker, through Customers Suck, Not Always Right, and the intrepid personal blogs of many a person, being at least pseudonymous is a necessity when talking about the conditions of one's employment or the wide adn varied personalities of the people you encounter in that work. Because if you get linked, and the brass hears about it, you're out on your ass ninety-nine times out of one hundred, because they don't particularly care about your rights as an individual - when you talk about The Company, or the customers The Company wants to reach, because you're employed by The Company, it's as if The Company is talking, and The Company doesn't tolerate that. (This is, actually, the policy of my employers - if I talk about the profession, I do so as a representative of Them and I could potentially be disciplined or dismissed if I did so unprofessionally.) Or, the administration gets the angry comments of a hundred parents and is more interested in putting out the fire by squashing the thing that's making it than in paying any attention at all to what's being said and why.
In other words, the only way to get an honest opinion is to be anonymous/pseudonymous about it or to be so bulletproof that you can write under your actual name and not be fired for it. Leeway given as to whether your salvos are being published in professional publications, as well, where a certain amount of aggression and possible antagonism are permitted in the interests of either fostering healthy debate or creating the illusion of it. Even then, The Company probably has to approve your work before they'll let it go out, which means editors and censors. Whistleblowers will be punished, leakers dismissed, and anyone who says that it's not all sunshine and roses in any serious way without prior approval will be sacked. (Although not in such a transparent way - The Company is not stupid, after all.) For a country that enshrines the value of being able to speak freely about things, while having in place protections against slanderous, libelous, or Fire-in-a-crowded-theater kinds of speech, the proscriptions in place by Our Corporate Overlords run directly counter to that idea. So long as its true, it should be allowable. It may not be tactful, but it should be allowable.
I don't believe the teacher should have been suspended for saying what she did. I think the students, and any parents involved, also had every right to call her out for the hurt that those words caused. But I also think everyone involved has a responsibilty to figure out why those things were said and to see if there aren't any structural defects that contribute to outbursts and reprisals like this. The prison-like atmosphere of schools deters learning and interest, for example, and renders teachers little more than wardens with little power to discipline or educate, and gives students no incentive to participate in their own learning. That's a structural defect being ignored because it's unlikely that anyone but researchers will come back to these incidents and examine them more fully. Administration will feel happy when the fire's out, those affected will feel happy at a resolution they like, and everyone will believe the problem's solved, despite not having actually asked why this happened in the first place. (Those drawing parallels between this and the repeated claims that, say, anti-abortion doctor killers, shooters of elected officials, and domestic terrorists are always lone individuals acting in "isolated incidents", gold star to you.)
We need spaces to tell the truth about what we do and how we're treated. We need those spaces to be safe and retaliation-free. We're not anywhere close to achieving either of those things without pseudonimity as a requisite. This is a structural defect. How do we fix it?
So the post in question might end up being this one, wherein the teach talks about the comments she would like to leave for her students on their report cards, and then the students talk back about how horrible she is and laugh at the prospects of her employment as the post is being circulated.
The responses to the posts that have been highlighted in the journalfen post have been rather varied, both in the comments to the originals and in the commentary on the linking posts. Some of them berate the tacher for not being better about guarding her identity on-line and making it easy to link her to her real identity. Others say that the teacher should have been removed for making such cruel statements about her students, and others believe the teach is over-reacting to how teenage students are these days and should just shrug it off. It's a wide variety of possibilities to take from this post, all of them with merit and fodder for excellent discussions about the teenage mind, teacher burnout, how much effort students, teachers, and parents need to be making to ensure their child gets an education, and other topics that have probably been covered here and elsewhere.
The sinister undercurrent in all of this, though, and where I want to focus, is something that I think
nicki grabs hold of it when mentioning the reasons that teachers are usually on complete lockdown and anonymity when talking about their work - because one stray cross-reference and suddenly there are upset parents everywhere and an administration that wants to put the fire out. She mentions, too, that bad days will happen with teachers, as with everyone else. The shining example of perfection that they want will occasionally crack or shatter in the heat. Teachers need space to be themselves, too.Now, in the argument that bad days happen, an example like a professor resigning his post because he told a black student that slaves were always being lashed for being late to work doesn't mean the professor should be let off without consequences. Far from it - if this professor has a history of saying or writing that kind of material, dismissal should have beaten resignation to the punch. But a teacher letting off steam that ther students seem to have no interest in learning? That's something that a lot of us have said, either about our own students or someone else's. We post them to places like Customers Suck or to something like Oh No, They Didn't! or other sorts of places like that. Or we vent to co-workers about the dim bulbs in Class 3-A.
Which is where the pattern goes even deeper. From The Society of Librarians* Who Say Motherfucker, through Customers Suck, Not Always Right, and the intrepid personal blogs of many a person, being at least pseudonymous is a necessity when talking about the conditions of one's employment or the wide adn varied personalities of the people you encounter in that work. Because if you get linked, and the brass hears about it, you're out on your ass ninety-nine times out of one hundred, because they don't particularly care about your rights as an individual - when you talk about The Company, or the customers The Company wants to reach, because you're employed by The Company, it's as if The Company is talking, and The Company doesn't tolerate that. (This is, actually, the policy of my employers - if I talk about the profession, I do so as a representative of Them and I could potentially be disciplined or dismissed if I did so unprofessionally.) Or, the administration gets the angry comments of a hundred parents and is more interested in putting out the fire by squashing the thing that's making it than in paying any attention at all to what's being said and why.
In other words, the only way to get an honest opinion is to be anonymous/pseudonymous about it or to be so bulletproof that you can write under your actual name and not be fired for it. Leeway given as to whether your salvos are being published in professional publications, as well, where a certain amount of aggression and possible antagonism are permitted in the interests of either fostering healthy debate or creating the illusion of it. Even then, The Company probably has to approve your work before they'll let it go out, which means editors and censors. Whistleblowers will be punished, leakers dismissed, and anyone who says that it's not all sunshine and roses in any serious way without prior approval will be sacked. (Although not in such a transparent way - The Company is not stupid, after all.) For a country that enshrines the value of being able to speak freely about things, while having in place protections against slanderous, libelous, or Fire-in-a-crowded-theater kinds of speech, the proscriptions in place by Our Corporate Overlords run directly counter to that idea. So long as its true, it should be allowable. It may not be tactful, but it should be allowable.
I don't believe the teacher should have been suspended for saying what she did. I think the students, and any parents involved, also had every right to call her out for the hurt that those words caused. But I also think everyone involved has a responsibilty to figure out why those things were said and to see if there aren't any structural defects that contribute to outbursts and reprisals like this. The prison-like atmosphere of schools deters learning and interest, for example, and renders teachers little more than wardens with little power to discipline or educate, and gives students no incentive to participate in their own learning. That's a structural defect being ignored because it's unlikely that anyone but researchers will come back to these incidents and examine them more fully. Administration will feel happy when the fire's out, those affected will feel happy at a resolution they like, and everyone will believe the problem's solved, despite not having actually asked why this happened in the first place. (Those drawing parallels between this and the repeated claims that, say, anti-abortion doctor killers, shooters of elected officials, and domestic terrorists are always lone individuals acting in "isolated incidents", gold star to you.)
We need spaces to tell the truth about what we do and how we're treated. We need those spaces to be safe and retaliation-free. We're not anywhere close to achieving either of those things without pseudonimity as a requisite. This is a structural defect. How do we fix it?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 01:04 pm (UTC)The simple fact is that a scary number of students, especially teenagers, are drastically, even dangerously uninterested in education. Not all, certainly, but a large number. They view it as only of marginal relevance to them, and are simply unable or unwilling to comprehend the long-term arguments presented in its favour. They are quite happy to do as little as possible, to plagiarise without a second thought, and to treat the entire system with distaste and abuse. Teachers, the good ones anyway, know this, and are trapped in a deeply frustrating place: usually by the time they get the kids they are already disenfranchised with education, unruly, and lacking any respect or discipline; the parents are often useless and problems reported to them have no effect or follow-up*; they can't change their lessons to engage students more effectively because of pressure from the school or education board to adhere to specific topics, teaching methods, and textbooks or because they don't have the time, resources, or training; and they are stuck trying to teach kids - who treat them like shit and don't want to learn - how to pass exams (rather than actually educating them) so that they can keep their jobs.
But people don't want to hear about that sort of thing. It brings up all sorts of nasty things about the failure of parents to parent and instil respect, self-control, and discipline in their children; it highlights some of the fundamental problems with many educational systems (especially those concerned with simplistic measures of exam success based on pass rates) and teaching methods; and it challenges the idea that the children are all special wonderful snowflakes who can never be criticised or held accountable or it will give them complexes and destroy their self-esteem. It highlights that the system is deeply, badly broken, and people would rather stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and hum real loud than actually address the real problems (if they even admit there are any) and will react strongly to anyone who challenges their little bubble of self-delusion.
I don't know how to fix it, but this entire thing strikes me as someone shooting the messenger. She may have made comments that people deem 'inappropriate', but I strongly suspect that they had a fair amount of accuracy. Unfortunately, in the climate that exists at present, such words are not welcome. I'm not sure if there is a way to fully discuss these problems without anonymity right now, as there are too many entrenched interests who respond with aggression and suppression rather than introspection and analysis.
TW
* if the parent doesn't complain at the school for telling them that their wonderful little darling could possibly do anything wrong.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 03:49 pm (UTC)TW, all the things you've mentioned are frighteningly true - the system is broken, and the people who should be most involved in getting it fixed are often absent, allowing the system to continue and get even more broken. A situation like this is shooting the messenger, no question.
But because of those entrenched interests, all you get is the anonymous mass calling for "change", instead of people who can identify themselves and then work together to bring about that change with the teachers and administrators.
It's a two-fold question - how do we get people out in the open and safely able to point out what needs fixing, so that we can then address the problems and work toward fixing them?