Teaching in the Facebook age, or why I’m glad I’m retired.
The Ontario College of Teachers recently issued an advisory report with “social media” recommendations, and the media have of course been keen to pick up the story.
The recommendation for teachers not to accept or initiate friend requests on Facebook (or follow on Twitter) isn’t all that surprising. For the longest time, I didn’t even publish my Twitter information here (although I never attempted to hide it) because I worried about the appropriateness of having political and other ideological views become a part of this work that I do for the homeschooling community.
But, I have former students who are some of my closest friends now. Tutoring and teaching has given me an extended family, and coincidentally, I have a large number of cousins who fall within the same age range as my students (some of whom I even tutored). I hang out with a cousin whose diapers I used to change and I have always enjoyed hanging out with my own aunts and uncles. Why is the generational gap between students and teachers supposed to create such a divide?
I honestly don’t know what I would decide if I were still working today re: engaging with students over Twitter (I don’t belong to Facebook because I don’t trust its privacy policies), but I’m very glad I never had to make that decision.
The bigger issue for me, though, is comments like the ones below posted on the CBC and Toronto Star websites in response to their articles. I just don’t think it demonstrates a great vision of education in general (emphasis mine):
Professionalism anyone? When I was in school my teacher was the LAST person I wanted to hang out with and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. I also did not want to hang out with my parents friends either. It was called sticking to your own age group.
Why would a teacher who is an adult want to interact socially with a student?
The student/teacher relationship is not one of friendship, it is one of authority and subordinate. This divide must be there for things to work.
NO KIDDING people employed as teachers should not be socializing with students inside or outside of the classroom – FOR ANY REASON. There is a teacher/student relationship and that is all. There is NO ‘friendship’ involved and ANY teacher that sees students as friends, OR tries to interact with them, or their families socially, should be investigated thoroughly and fired.
This is one of the basics of teaching kids: you need to be friendly but you are *not* their friend. It’s a one-sided relationship. Teachers have almost all the power, so it’s important to set boundaries. Their job is to be authority figures and role models, and they can’t do that while trying to get along with them as equals.
I expect nothing short of sainthood for my children’s teachers. If you are not one, then do NOT become a teacher. Do something else.
Teacher’s college tells us not to even be seen at an LCBO, bar, or any other place of “questionable moral character” during the weekend or off hours.
So in retrospect, one of the reasons I’m really glad I don’t teach/tutor anymore is that I don’t have to subscribe to the general public’s notions of what education, and especially the relationships between teachers and students, should be like.
All hope is not lost, though. One last comment, from a teacher:
I am a teacher. I have FB. I also have some former students as FB friends. I do not use FB to post pics of ‘drinking with buddies on the weekends’ nor do I think that any of the interactions I have had with students over FB have been inappropriate or in any way unprofessional. I enjoy seeing how they are doing in high school, and celebrating with them their big milestones hit (graduations, weddings, babies, etc). Just because they have left my classroom doesn’t mean I stop caring about them. Teachers, and students, are human.
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Comments
I agree. Very worrying comments from others. Confirms my view that school is more about authority than learning, too, and that a lot of other people want it to be that way.
Also, just saw this in my reader on the same subject. You might want to follow Shawn on Twitter, too. If more teachers were like him, I’d send my kid to school 
http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/?p=1820
(he’s @thinkthankthunk)
The teachers in high school that made the biggest impact on me were the ones who took the time to develop some sort of relationship with me outside of the classroom. This was before the days of facebook and twitter, of course, but they were the teachers who treated me more as an equal than as a subordinate, who took an interest in me as a person rather than just one more student filling a seat in their class.
As a homeschooling mom now, I can’t imagine life would be too easy for anyone in our family if there were strongly defined boundaries between the “authority figure” and the “subordinates”. Home just doesn’t work like that. It’s sad that so many seem to think school should.
I believe that all of society suffers when we all “stick to our own age groups”. We have so much to learn from people both older and younger than ourselves. One of my favourite things about homeschooling is the absence of age divisions. My son will have a birthday this weekend and the friends he has invited to celebrate with him are aged 4, 9, 11 and 26. I’m thankful he doesn’t feel the need to hang out and count as friends only those who are the same age as him.