Grammatista

This article was about a group of student athletes at a high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The pictures, on Facebook, depicted them drinking alcohol at a party. I think that this article is helpful for my cause, which is allowing students to use social networking sites and Blog type sites, for two reasons. Because these sites are deemed worthless by most parents and almost all school districts, students have no real positive feedback on them. If students were introduced to these kinds of sites as a positive tool, they would have known about the possible repercussions there are for placing pictures of that nature on the internet. It’s not that I’m condoning underage drinking by any means. I think that these sites are like anything with kids, as soon as it’s deemed “un-cool and dangerous” by their authorities they immediately feel the need to use it to its fullest negative capacity. If we were to allow students the freedom to explore Myspace/Facebook, while still giving them boundaries, I truly believe it could become a powerful educational tool.

The second and more serious argument is where does the right to privacy and first amendment come into play? One statement in this article I found interesting was: “School administrators and the district’s spokeswoman didn’t return phone calls, but students called in by their deans over the past two days said they were being reprimanded for the Facebook party photos, which administrators had printed out. It’s likely, they said, that other students among the 3,300 who attend Eden Prairie will be questioned throughout the week.”
I understand that during the hours that students are attending school they are the schools responsibility and as such lose most of their personal freedoms. But these instances were clearly not during those set hours, so how can a school take disciplinary action on students for off campus discretions? It seems odd that these administrators would search out these social networking sites at night, yet they banish them from the schools during the day. I find it to be hypocrisy. I know that I’m not going into teaching to be a watchdog over these kids’ lives. They already have someone for that, they’re called parents. I know that I would like to someday incorporate technology (Blogs, Social Networking, etc…) into my English classes and I don’t know what I’m going to say to my students when they ask me whether or not they can write what they truly want to write, without the fear of being disciplined.

By Star Tribune News

January 9, 2008

Full Article

The RSS reader that I set up through Google now has a couple subscriptions. I’ve subscribed to a blog search query about censorship in public schools. Two other news queries I subscribed to are “Myspace in schools” and “censorship in schools”. I chose these searches because I’m interested in the way schools today strive for students to become “self-motivated” learners and to be on the cutting edge of technology, yet when students put these two ideals together say in a Myspace or Facebook page we chastise and censure them. I am looking forward to learning about censorship in schools so that when I become a teacher I will be better apt to let my students express their ideas without the fear of punishment and censorship. I hope as the going-to-be teachers of today become the teachers of tomorrow we can eliminate this silly censorship.

I have a subscription to both the NY Times and Washington Post Education sections as well as BBC’s headlines. On a personal note I got subscriptions to Aljazeera and BBC both relating to the war. I have picked up a subscription to Real Clear Politics as well because I’ve found it to be helpful and interesting.

Welcome to Edublogs.org. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!