Month: May 2011

You shouldn’t be teaching if you can’t figure out Facebook

It’s my opinion that if you can’t figure out how facebook works, you shouldn’t be teaching.

Since becoming a teacher, any headline about the profession catches my attention and it seems like every week I read another article about a teacher getting fired or put on probation for an inappropriate tweet, blog, or facebook posting. Out of curiosity I searched “teacher fired facebook” and got 3,490,000 hits. “HS teacher loses job over Facebook posting” “Teacher Fired After Candid Facebook Comments” “Teacher Sues after being fired for Facebook Pics” It goes on and on. One teacher took a picture of a student’s hair, posted it on facebook and added a comment making fun of the girl’s hairstyle. Ultimately the girl’s mother saw the photo and the teacher’s comment.

Even if I accept the fact that American culture seems to no longer have any problem with adults insulting and tearing down kids (see: the entire Internet v. Rebecca Black), I can’t accept any educated adult expecting tweets and blogs to be private. The whole point of twitter is to communicate with many people instantaneously. This is not the place to discuss hiring a hitman to take care of your students.

I’ve only been teaching for four months but that is more than enough time to understand every teacher has days when she needs to vent. Venting is healthy. Venting fosters sanity. Venting should NEVER be done on the Internet. Unless you are Bill Maher and people follow you on Twitter specifically for the insults you hurl in 140 characters, do not post rants about your students, their parents or your administration online. Talk to your partner over dinner. Talk to your friends over drinks. Write it in a diary and save it for the bestselling memoir you’ll write when you’ve retired. Don’t update your Facebook status.

I agree with commenters who think teachers are held to unfairly high standard. The Georgia teacher fired because of a picture of her drinking Guinness at the Guinness factory is an example. Teachers are human and should not be fired for being such. I’m just waiting for the moment my pregnant and gassy body lets one rip in front of an entire class of teenagers. I hope it doesn’t get me fired. The experience will be scarring enough as it is.

However, typing and uploading your darkest thoughts in a fit of frustration or getting a few laughs from buddies at the expense of a child is unprofessional at best. Exerting some self control is a defining characteristic of an adult. And don’t argue an expectation of privacy because honestly, if you think something defined by the term “network” is an intimate forum, you should not be teaching.

So I just realized I followed up a post on not judging other parents with one judging other teachers. Hmmm. Oh well. No one’s perfect. Gosh, it really is hard to keep opinions to yourself.

May 28, 2011
Live and Let Parent

This morning my husband was walking past the bookshelf and spotted a recent addition amongst the rainbow of spines. (Yes, he is that observant.) “Breastfeeding,” he murmured out loud, taking a closer look. He turned to me and said “Do you really need 200 pages on breastfeeding? Isn’t it pretty straightforward?” A few months ago I would have thought the same thing, but then I started reading pregnancy sites and the endless stream of personal anecdotes in the comment sections detailing difficulties with everything from breastfeeding to nose clearing. Now, I’m pretty sure 200 pages is not enough address all the ways breastfeeding can go wrong.

It’s complicated. I’m not just talking about breastfeeding. I’m talking about raising a baby. Last night, I spent an hour researching diaper creams. I’ve looked at swaddling blankets versus sleep sacks. Pacifiers before she’s one month old? What temperature for the bath water? Do visitors need to wash their hands before holding her or is hand sanitizer enough? If I give her peanut butter before she graduates from high school will she die of an allergic reaction? And these are only the questions about physical development. Never mind the ones about intellect and character.

As I develop an appreciation for how complicated raising a person is, I find myself becoming more and more tolerant of other parents. Recently Salon featured an interview with the creator of the website “Too Big for Strollers.” The name is literal. The site is a collection of photos of kids who are probably old enough to send text messages from their own cell phones being pushed around in strollers. From the tone of the site, its creator (clearly the Salon interviewer too) thinks putting a four-year-old in a stroller is what terrible parents do if they want to raise a lazy, entitled, and self-centered human being.

When I saw the pictures, I thought “Isn’t an older child in a stroller better than a lost child?”

The majority of pictures on the site seem to be taken in crowded amusements parks or cities, places where strapping in a kid perfectly old enough to walk but young enough to distractedly wander away is not a bad idea. Maybe overboard but not a terrible lapse in judgment.

I have also been in the presence of a hot, tired, and hungry kid. If they haven’t used this creature at Guantanamo, they’re missing a out on an extremely effective torture method not banned by the Geneva Convention. I have dreams of being the parent who looks at her child after the 80th complaint of tired legs and serenely says, “You are too big for a stroller,” but I know they’re just dreams. I’ll cave. I can only take so much whining and screaming. I have a breaking point. Be it a day out running errands or a 9 hour plane ride, I already know there will be circumstances in which I will cater to any demand as long as it keeps her quiet. And mommy sane.

Turns out the woman who created that site and the one who interviewed her are both childless! Figures. It’s so easy to think there’s a clear “right way” when you are not the one who has to do it. I’m a pretty critical person but I’m now trying to give other parents a break. As long as someone is feeding his child and not bathing it with bleach, I’ve got his back. At least I’m trying to, because parenting is complicated.

So to the Mom I passed on the street holding the hand of a 4 year old using a pacifier, I understand. Maybe it was the only way to get through your errands without constant screaming. So no judgment without context. That leopard print unitard, though? That’s just tacky.

UPDATE May 2015: It looks like Laura Miller, the creator of the tumbler site Too Big for Strollers, gave it up shortly after her interview in Salon. Apparently, there were A LOT of angry parents who didn’t like someone without children passing judgement on them. And on a personal note, I recently tried to get my 3 1/2 year-old daughter to start walking the five blocks to school. It lasted two weeks. Dang, that girl can put up a fight. She’ll overthrow a dictator someday. We compromised on a tricycle that I can take over and push if necessary. I’ll try the walking again on her 4th birthday.

May 25, 2011
One Day as a Teacher

Here’s what I do in my new role as teacher. I read the chapters of Great Expectations we’ll be covering, marking all difficult vocab that will probably need to be defined and difficult passages that will need to summarized as a class. Plan class on introducing Charles Dickens and Great Expectations. Find fun youtube clip on the life of Charles Dickens. Make adjustments to the supply and demand game that didn’t go well in class the day before. Make new material for tweaked supply and demand game. Correct and grade 15 essays on a personal response Aesop fables. Teach class for 3 hours.

That was this past Wednesday.

I realized two things after logging in to write a new post: 1) People link to my blog from pretty bizarre search terms and 2) I only wrote two posts for the entire month of April. Last November, I cranked out more than two posts a week. Still not anything close to the commitment of blogging all-stars, but it was still a big chunk of content for one month. Now, I have a job and a condition called pregnancy which robs me of the energy to do anything productive past 9pm. Unless your definition of productive is eating Belgian chocolate ice-cream and streaming the previous night’s Daily Show, in which case, I make my greatest contributions to society after 9pm.

Clearly, I’m going to have make a conscious commitment to maintaining Coconut Water. I don’t want it sitting out languishing in the Brazilian sun developing a film of bacteria and mosquito eggs. (Can mosquitoes lay eggs on coconut water? Probably, they’re basically invincible.) The end result of this pregnancy is a baby, which I’m told, will devour whatever remaining free time I have and possibly my will to shower and tolerate other human beings. The chances I’ll be getting back up to two posts a week are small.

Or maybe not. I will be on maternity leave for four months, and while breast feeding is supposed to beautiful, I haven’t heard anyone call it intellectually stimulating. I might desperately cranking out posts. In the long term though, next school year should be easier. I won’t be new to the material and spending hours planning every class. I’ll already have my youtube clip of Fozzy Bear reciting Robert Frost.

The really amazing about my daily schedule right now is that I only teach part-time. I’m in front of a class teaching 16 hours yet find myself working all day, every day. I think what I really need is one of those cushy full-time teaching jobs those pundits keep talking.

May 7, 2011