A thought and an exclamation...

The exclamation first:

I HATE WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER!

There. I said it. I'm done.

Thought: I just read a blog post on the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website about teachers using social networking sites to connect with their colleagues and students. As a young teacher who has been worried about having a Facebook profile, that was a little reassuring. After reading the blog, I also went and joined the NCTE group on Facebook. :) More to the point, though, I'm using Facebook to keep in touch with students who have graduated. However, I don't accept students as "friends" until after they've graduated. Facebook, for me, is a personal space, separate from school. It is a representation of my life as NOT a teacher, as a free-wheeling, social person. It's not like I post pictures of myself naked in a group orgy-animal sacrifice-drug haven environment. Heck, I don't even do any of those things, much less would I be brazen enough to post pictures in a public forum of all that. My point is, I feel like the moment I begin allowing current students as friends is the moment that I begin censoring myself to a degree that I'm not comfortable with outside the classroom. I need to be me.

As I think about this, it raises interesting ideas about what exactly, in a personal sense, we expect from teachers. The possibility of everyone's lives and personal traits being available for public critique online throws into sharp relief our assumptions about how teachers are supposed to behave--inside AND OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Is it safe to say that there's a mostly unspoken assumption that teachers are supposed to be morally superior or morally correct all of the time? Where does this come from? Can this change? Would our entire concept and construction of "teacher" be required to change in order to accept the fact that teachers aren't always pillars of morality in the community?

I don't know, but I'd love to know what you think. :) And I still hate Movie Maker.

Till next time...