I taught in a small, rural school division where students still called me “ma’am” as a sign of respect.  Each year, the community hosted a huge weekend festival that, over the years, had begun to attract thousands of people from all over the region.  I never attended but from the stories I heard, it was a somewhat raucous event with lots of drinking and revelry.

I worked on a team with several younger teachers who had grown up in the community.  The week before the event, the principal arrived at our team meeting to remind us that, as teachers, we had a certain standing in the community, and he expected us to act appropriately if we attended the festival.  In particular, he suggested that we should not spend too much time in the beer tent.

Well, the beer tent is now online, according to The Washington Post, and it is called Facebook.  Thanks to Tim over at Assorted Stuff for pointing me to the article on young teachers and their Facebook sites.  You probably don’t have to read the whole article.  Just the headline–When Young Teachers Go Wild On the Web–gives you the sense of the direction this article takes.

I have written several articles about social networking for the VEA News.  My goal in those articles was to encourage veteran educators to explore social networking as both a way for them to learn more about it and as a way for them to collaborate with colleagues.  It’s a tough job both because of the technology but also since social networking sites get such bad publicity.  So, a big thank you to the Post for adding some more negative press to combat.

I will forward the article to my pre-service teachers as a reminder of what they are getting themselves into as teachers.  Or, maybe I shouldn’t both.  Tim points out that many of these young teachers won’t last beyond 3 years anyway so why should I give them yet another reason to consider a different career right off the bat?

The article does ask a serious question: “Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?”  But I did laugh a little at the notion of standards for public officials.   ken Blackstone from Prince William helped out with a definition of those standards: “But as public employees, we all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach.”  Do we?  Or are these young teachers following in the footsteps of some of the great public officials like Eliot Spitzer?  His “public life” might have seemed above reproach until his not-so-above-reproach private life came into view.   And, I think in this case, these young teachers are living up to those standards:  it’s my life and I will get away with it until I get caught.

I think I’ll give my pre-service teachers the “grandmother” advice:  if you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, it probably shouldn’t be on your public Facebook page.  Pictures from your wild 21st birthday party are probably best circulated privately.  Not everything has to be shared with the world.   These are actually some pretty simple media literacy skills.  The girl who suggested that her work and social lives are separate clearly does not have a solid understanding of how the Internet works.  I would hope that if she is a good teacher (or since she’s young, has the potential to be a good teacher), school officials will be willing to work with her rather than just firing her.

I’m also going to continue to encourage my students to use those social networking skills for their own professional growth and, maybe even, for the growth of their students.  This semester, I asked my my pre-service teachers to join VSTE’s ning site.  It was a way to expose them to older teachers who had harnessed a “digital native” type technology for their own purposes.  I wanted to show them that social networking can be about your work life as well as your social life.  And, hopefully, to spark in them an idea for how they might use these technologies with their students, to break down the often oppressive walls of the classroom in ways that promote powerful, collaborative learning.