Teachers and students can’t be "friends"
August 2, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
I understand where Missouri is coming from with a ban on teachers consorting with students on social networking sites like Facebook. Essentially, teachers cannot “friend” students on Facebook, but they can set up a fan page, which students may “like” if they choose. (If you are a teacher who doesn’t know why I”m using friend and fan as verbs then you’ve got nothing to worry about.)
Thwarting inappropriate contact between students and teachers is the Show Me state’s goal. But two concerns: a broad-brush approach leads the public to mistakenly believe the problem has risen to a new level of urgency. It has not. It also cast aspersions on all teachers, rather than the few who engage in inappropriate behavior with students.
Some sympathy must be reserved for school districts because they can be held liable if it is proven they should’ve known about an inappropriate relationship or failed to protect a student from a predator.
So what are schools to do, hire a team of private eyes or encourage students to tell on each other? (I’ve written about education for nearly two decades and in most of these cases students seem to have known which teachers were crossing the line.) I’m also concerned about the length of time a teacher’s misconduct can go undetected. Here’s an extreme example: years ago I wrote about the Seattle Public Schools’ belated discovery of an inappropriate teacher-student relationship only after the student had graduated, married the teacher and was getting a divorce. In court documents the young woman acknowledged entering the relationship with her husband when she was in 8th grade and he was her teacher. Surprisingly, the teacher was still teaching when the discovery was made, albeit in another district. Credit Seattle school officials for going after him anyway.
One blogger’s fresh outrage on Huffpost tries to outline why the law is a bad idea. But the author gives short shrift to the value of boundaries between students and teachers, not just to prevent sexual misconduct, but to maintain teaching’s underlying integrity and authority. Parents can’t be friends with their children and I don’t think teachers can be friends with their students. That doesn’t eclipse being friendly. But that’s just me. What do you think?
