If Your District is Doing This, Convince Them to be the Adults

It’s at :51 in the video below that my disagreement with these local policies comes into sharp focus.

“I think it clarifies what an inappropriate student-teacher relationship is,” the interviewed teacher says, “and it identifies the means by which we have learned some of those relationships begin.”

That sound you hear is the intent missing the mark entirely.

It makes sense that a school district should want to protect students from inappropriate adults not because they are a school district, but because it is the job of the community to protect its youngest and most vulnerable from such influences.

Closing down all means of communication online doesn’t keep students safe, it makes them vulnerable or leaves them that way. I’ve always had online social networking connections with my students. Initially, in the days of myspace, I attempted keeping two accounts. One was the Mr. Chase who would accept student friend requests. The other was Zac who would accept the odd invite from college friends and people I was meeting in life.

Moving to Philadelphia (and Facebook), I collapsed them into one account. When it came down to it, Mr. Chase and Zac weren’t far apart and I found myself wanting to live by the standards I was hoping my students would adopt as our district attempted to terrify them into online sterility with threats of the immortality of their online selves.

Throughout all of that time, I’ve never once worried that I would be setting an improper example for students or calling my professionalism into question. In my online public life, I act as I do in my physical public life – someone who is charged with helping students decide whom they want to become and then being worth of that charge.

Moreover, this is how you break down communities. It is how you leave children unattended. It is how you miss cries for help and avoid bonds that can lead to lifelong mentoring and assistance.

Telling teachers they can have no contact in social spaces with students is not “clarifying inappropriate…relationships.” It is avoiding the conversation about what inappropriate relationships should look like, adding to the implicit accusations that teachers cannot be trusted outside the panopticon of school walls, and reducing the common social capital possible in online neighborhoods.

Instead, teachers must be given the tools and space to consider appropriate interactions and online content, helped to understand the proper channels when students share sensitive information online, and be trusted to be the same guides for digital citizenship that we should be expecting them to be for offline citizenship in our schools, communities and classrooms.

Things I Know 25 of 365: We need to ban more books

Every burned book enlightens the world.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We need to ban more books.

Let me be more specific.

You need to ban more books.

I don’t mean a small, intimate banning with just a timid teacher and an irate parent.

I need a top-level, principal, school board, superintendent, someone-call-the-press banning.

You see, the bigger the banning, the easier it is for me to get my students to read – that book.

When they’re finished with that book?

We celebrate the history of your banning brethren.

We’ve been keeping track.

“Yes, other books have been banned before.”

“Yes, there is a list.”

“Yes, they are in the library.”

“Yes, you may be excused to run down and check it out.”

Your banning is like an NC-17 rating daring my students to forge fake library cards and sneak into the pages of ideas undetected.

What’s more, it’s a bat signal of ignorance that lets me know I need to teach your child to ask. Ask everything.

My pedagogy forbids me from telling him what to think, but it demands that I ask him to think.

I hope someday I’ll write a banned book. I’ll join the ranks of Twain, Morrison, Orwell, Faulkner, Crutcher, Blume, Sacher, Huxley, London, King, Sallinger, Walker, Myers, Hemingway, Mitchell, Atwood, Rowling, Conrad, Sinclair, Lawrence, Silverstein, Wright, Hinton, Zindel, Hurston, Miller, Joyce, Lee, and so many more.

So, ban.

It keeps me in business.

Ban.

It helps me know who you are.

Ban.

It keeps them reading.

Ban.