When Teachers Talk Out of School
By JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
Published: June 3, 2011
[Teachers who have posted critical comments about students] have become minor Internet celebrities, lauded by their fans for exposing students’ insolent manners and desultory work habits. Their backers also say that teachers’ freedom of speech is imperiled when we penalize their out-of-school remarks.
But these defenders have it backward. The truly scary restrictions on teacher speech lie inside the schoolhouse walls, not beyond them. And by supporting teachers’ right to rant against students online, we devalue their status as professionals and actually make it harder to protect real academic freedom in the classroom.
...
All professionals restrict their own speech, after all, reflecting the special purposes and responsibilities of their occupations. A psychologist should not discuss his patients’ darkest secrets on a crowded train, which would violate the trust and confidence they have placed in him. A lawyer should not disparage her clients publicly, because her job is to represent them to the best of her ability.
And a teacher should not lob gratuitous barbs at her students, which contradicts her own professional duty: to teach the skills and habits of democracy. Yes, teachers have a responsibility to transmit the topics and principles of the prescribed curriculum. But they also need to teach democratic capacities — including reason, debate and tolerance — so our children learn to think on their own.
So there you have it folks, yes, we should have our freedom to speak academically in class. But heaven forbid we actually express a thought about academia outside of the classroom.
Anyone who knows psychologists, therapists, lawyers, and doctors personally knows that the confidentiality clause goes out the window so long as anonymity is applied faithfully.
ReplyDeleteAs it is on this website.
We at CM anonymize our students, our identities, our situations. I changed the genders, ages, specific problems, and particular wording of my students' gripes. I frequently wait 6 weeks to post about something and then write about how the event happened a year ago. By making it anonymous, it becomes rather like an advice column: possibly fake, but the advice becomes helpful in the abstract.
This article is outraged about something. But it's not at the "minor celebrities" who speak in the abstract about how entitled and lackluster their students are. There's something else sticking at the writer.
AM -you're right. It wasn't clear what the point of this article is in fact, except that the author was mad about something. That teachers can't still be fired for skipping church or smoking, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteThere are deep problems in the educational system; everyone knows that. But blaming the teachers for it is like - well, it's exactly like blaming the underclass your economic policies have created for being poor, and for all the problems they now have that come from being poor. And the blame-the-teacher rhetoric is coming from the same people who blame the poor.
Also, the next entitled little twerp I get who cut-and-pastes half his paper from Sparks Notes, without attribution, I am nailing to a wall. AND posting the paper where everyone can read and laugh at it. Democracy? This IS democracy. Let your peers know what a twerp you are.
ReplyDeleteJust for that, Mr. Zimmerman gets to see his Bimmer crushed, his office demolished, and me standing over him in my old uniform, service Tokarev pressed to his skull - "If you fuck up again, Tovarich Acadamician....the gun goes off."
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't clear what the point of this article is in fact, except that the author was mad about something. That teachers can't still be fired for skipping church or smoking, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, what Zimmerman is complaining about are non-anonymized complaints. He doesn't cite CM or RYS. He cites teachers who identified themselves, and thus their students. This contradicts @AM's note that the confidentiality clause goes out the window so long as anonymity is applied faithfully.
The teachers he cites are fools. Facebook is the opposite of anonymous. And Zimmerman doesn't know as much as he thinks he does if he thinks Facebook is the same as a blog post.
It seems like we're in for another round of scoldings for being human.
ReplyDeleteIf we're not all locked up as pre-criminal threats to society, that is.
I'm sorry, but while I know there are some teachers who "out" their bad students by name, is this really a widespread problem? If I am reading Zimmerman's example's properly, the teachers he cites also didn't use names. Why can;t a teacher, fully identified, publicly complain about his or her students generally? (Likewise with employees complaining about employers.)
ReplyDeletePersonally, I can't think of any scandals involving naming students in the past few years in my area. There was one big scandal (cited by Zimmerman), but that teacher never mentioned any names except her own. And she was still burned at the stake (so to speak).
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ReplyDelete@Monkey, Myth et al.
ReplyDeleteZ's argument seems pretty straightforward to me. It is a version of the old Fishian argument in two parts: There is no such thing as free speech, especially in the professions (and that is not such a bad thing); and it follows that professions have standards of speech and writing--plagiarism for example--that their members must respect or suffer the consequences. And so, the long and the short of it is that it is a norm of our particular profession that we don't talk shit about our students in public. And in this context FB is very much a public forum.
For what it is worth, I think he has a point, in the sense that the kinds of incidents he describes do, in fact, both devalue the profession in the eyes of the public and violate a set of norms about controlling speech that in many ways define all the "brainwork" professions. He also has a point that by getting outsiders riled up about these violations of the norms of professional rhetoric distracts everybody from much more serious instances of curtailing our professional speech where it matters the most: in the classroom and by extension in our writing.
That is what he's irked about, not some teacher saying her students are stoooopid..
And he's right, or CM would not be pseudonymous, and we'd all happily use our real names and institutional affiliations. But, while there is a certain amount of spleen vented here about students, there is also a lot of discussion of the profession in general, and other problems that have little to do with the snowflakes. There is also a strong undercurrent of satire, I'm looking at you Strelnikov, which makes this site quite different from a FB post or the like. So I doubt very much that Zimmerman would see CM as part of the problem he identifies.
"....or CM would not be pseudonymous, and we'd all happily use our real names and institutional affiliations."
ReplyDeleteWRONG; I would still be "Strelnikov" or any of a million other aliases and Internet handles I have used in the past. And Zimmerman still gets pistol-whipped because I say so.