Saturday, April 11, 2009

social networking websites; not so black & white

There are so many angles to cover, I'm not sure where to begin. I suppose I will start with the Testing Horace Mann article, because this resonated on many levels with me/my experiences.
Just as students should have freedom from the fear that they will be bullied/harassed by their peers or professors, the teachers/administration should also not have to worry about incessant harassment from their students. How can a teacher do a decent job in the classroom if s/he is always afraid of threats/repercussions/etc.?
My father taught middle school children in the towns of Dover and Sherborn, Massachuetts for over 30 years. This is a very privileged, white, affluent area, and although it was a public school, the parents were much like the ones of the Horace Mann community, in terms of how much power/influence they had over the way the school was run.
My dad had to endure parents getting overly-involved in even the most seemingly trivial matters, and often felt like he had little control over how he ran a classroom. If he handed out a detention or punishment of any kind, no matter how deserved or justified it was, he was at risk of being reprimanded or worse by his boss, as well as harassed by many parents. The majority of students knew that this was their reality to use to their advantage. So many of them knew how to play their cards right, and get away with misconduct/misbehavior of any kind. And this was before the days of Facebook/MySpace.
If students want to use Facebook, fine. There are so many benefits to belonging to social networking websites,...But to use it to verbally assault someone, (teacher or not), while using racial/sexist slurs, is just not acceptable.
This is just ONE recent example of how bullying/harassment can have devastating effects: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2400.html

This issue reminds me of when my sister was in high school, and there was a similar experience involving a teacher and local politician. When a history teacher discussed gay marriage in a social studies course, he was accused of being "one-sided" about the "debate." Kids were conversing with their parents about the subject, and when the parents discovered that this teacher was "promoting" gay marraige and appearing to be pro-gay rights, they argued that there should be a more balanced viewpoint brought to King Philip Regional High. They did this by asking a local politician, Scott Brown, to speak about the topic in KP's auditorium. This infuriated many students. Scott Brown is a well-known State Senator whom conservatives love, and liberals love to hate. Many students felt angry that their history teacher was being accused of "promoting" an issue that 1) he was not promoting and 2) in their view, should not even be up for debate. Discussing "balanced viewpoints" on gay marriage to these kids seemed like discussing "balanced viewpoints" on the legitimacy of slavery. There's simply no such thing.
So where did students go to feel that they could be heard? Facebook. They created a group that discussed how much they disliked him, and how they were angry they would have to listen to him speak. They attacked his character, his attempts to always push his daughter's "fame" (she, Ayla Brown, had appeared on American Idol recently), and his hypocrisy. Here was a man who was clearly homophobic, yet he had no problem admitting he had posed nude for magazines to make money in his youth. In the minds of these students, his moral compass was completely screwed up.
This apparently infuriated Scott Brown, whose daughter used the website and showed him the online group. He then proceeded to print out copies of comments students had left on the group forum, and went to give his speech at KP. Instead of discussing gay marriage, however, he decided to discuss the facebook group. The details of this story can be found here: http://massequality.org/news/news_story.php?id=463 In the end, the students were viciously attacked for their opinions and comments online, and were accused of committing the crime of "hate speech".... The way in which the students were attacked was incredibly inappropriate, and in the end, Scott Brown made himself look like a fool. But this raises some good questions about the gray areas of this debate. Where are the lines drawn between what students can say online, and what they cant? I feel that students should practice their freedom of speech on and offline, but when they are name-calling or bullying or hurting people for the sake of being verbally violent or "funny", and not criticizing specifically relevant subject matter, then it is a problem. Politicians, like other public officials, can be analyzed in a negative way by youth on or off the web. But should teachers be as publicly humiliated for the pure entertainment of teenagers on facebook? I'm not sure I agree there, but then again, I don't have all the answers.

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