Stories like this terrify me. Shouldn’t teachers be practitioners of their content? Shouldn’t an English teacher be expected to write and publish? A professor is. Is the purpose of high school to teach content and practice, or morals? Can’t we have both?
These stories make me wonder if teaching is worth the scrutiny. Sometimes I am a little jealous of people who don’t have to worry about every little word they put online. I worry that anything creative thing I pursue will have to be completely covert. Granted, writing erotica isn’t on my list of creative things I’d like to try, and I believe the internet is a wildly inappropriate venue for complaining about one’s students, but still. Teachers are held to an impossibly high moral standard. I’d like to be able to blog without being scared of the Ghost of Blogging Past knocking on my door years from now, getting me fired from a potential teaching job. It’s something I think of quite often, and possibly one of the reasons this blog is rather neglected. What can I put here? What should I avoid? Professors in the education department say I should be avoiding everything. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, all of it. I’d really love to figure out to do this — how to do it well, without giving a potential employer grounds for firing me someday.
I even went so far as to change the URL. I’m thinking about taking all images of my face off of here as well.
Thoughts? Recommendations?
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