Tuesday 26 May 2009

then they came for me; and there was no one left to tweet


I have to thank Mike & Alex for drawing my attention to this article on the BBC website. I hadn't heard about it before and, once you've taken a scan through it you'll understand why I found it a bit unnerving.

To paraphrase viciously, a young teacher in Scotland is being investigated because it was discovered that she had been updating her twitter page with messages, some of which referred to her classes and pupils.


The secondary teacher in Argyll and Bute is understood to have posted up to 38 updates a day on the Twitter site. One said: "Had S3 period 6 for last two years...don't know who least wants to do anything, them or me."

'The fool!' I thought when first I read about her. 'Every teacher knows that you can't publish information about pupils without explicit parental permission. She must be stupid to do that.' Except as I read through some examples of what she had actually written it began to dawn on me that she wasn't actually posting anything more revealing than I have here.


"The thought of having some of my S4 beyond exam time doesn't bear thinking about - for them as well as me I suspect."

In fact I imagine I have occasionally been a lot less anonymous in my musings than she has. She doesn't mention pupils by name, her comments seem fairly generalised and focus more on her than on the pupils she is teaching. So what is her crime? It gets worse for her:


Argyll and Bute Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog. However, the teacher in question has a blog on which she said she had been too busy using Twitter to update it recently.

For those who, like me, have remained immune to the lure of the tweet let me explain. Twitter is just a way to deliver mundane details of your life to many friends at once. Through Twitter you can develop followers who regularly check up on your feed. It's basically a way to make your stalkers feel more involved. I care nothing for Twitter. But blogging...

"Teachers are not allowed to have their own blogs." Um.

So, unlike the teacher in question - I don't tweet (or whatever it is) - I don't really see the appeal. But like the teacher in question, I do have a blog. Like the teacher in question, I occasionally mention anecdotes from my life as a teacher online. Like the teacher in question, I have been known to express dissatisfaction in life. Up to this point I have never been told that I was not allowed to do so. It seems if I were working in Argyll and Bute I would be breaching official guidelines.

And quite honestly that is ridiculous.

Now clearly I haven't read everything that this teacher posted. I'll be first in line to point and make disapproving facial expressions at her if she has been commenting on identifiable pupils. I will shake my head slowly if it turns out she has been bringing her school and its good name into disrepute. But if it's simply the case that she has been uploading her thoughts and feelings in a pointless, if slightly narcissistic webby kind of a way then what is she doing that it so different from all the twitter users in other professions? Exactly how has what she was doing impacted on the educational wellbeing of pupils in the Argyll area? How was it having any impact on anything until someone thought it necessary to bring it to the attention of the press? Absolutely ridiculous.

But it has had an impact on me. And that might be a good thing. It's been a wake up call about the comments I make. I need to take a lot more care when talking about school. I need to put more effort into making my comments more general and less personalised. I need to increase anonymity on many levels.
This annoys me.
When you work in education you soon find that your life revolves around a constrictive regime. You become bound up in targets and paperwork to the point that sometimes you need to poke a hole through which to breathe. We spend so long living by someone's rules that the idea of finding a place of our own where we can express our own expressions, where we can breathe in air that hasn't been passed through a committee process and risk assessment survey first.

Am I worried about what is happening to that teacher in Argyll? Yes. I really am. I would hate to think that other education authorities would feel the need to follow suit. If the situation arose where I was told that I shouldn't keep a blog then TOASNT would be gone quicker than... well, quicker than it went when I accidentally hit the delete button last year. How I hope it doesn't come to that. But from now on, in any effort to avoid names I will no longer mention Dave - he will now be 'the Welsh Castle Sketcher', Mike and Alex will become 'London's Bushmills Residents', Kylie - you are now 'the Sporadic Antipodean', Karen 'Florida's vg Bridget Jones', and Brazen Teacher (as if that isn't anonymous enough) will henceforth become 'Another Teacher at risk of being put under investigation because it seems we can't be trusted to update blogs without passing out sensitive information and ruining the lives of all those around us.'


Council officials were investigating whether she had put sensitive information on public display and whether it was during work hours.

"Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog." Wouldn't you love to live in a place where public workers aren't allowed to express personal opinion? You now have the choice of China or Argyll it seems.

10 comments:

Mike and Alex said...

Didn't mean to scare you... but then, it is pretty scary...

Mr C said...

It's absolutely terrifying. But surely they have no right to do anything about it. It's completely unenforceable.. Isn't it?... Is it?

This Brazen Teacher said...

It's an infringement on her freedom of speech rights, plain and simple. Unless the posts are derogatory, inflammatory, or damaging to someone's character (which in and of itself is a subjective judgment call) then it's an infringement on her rights as a human being. End of story. I hope she fights it til the bitter end.

Mr C said...

Hell yeah. And i know i'd say just that... in fact i may quote it if it was me in her position... and then my courage would fail and i'd take my slap on the wrist and hope everyone forgets all about it while i do my marking.

seanog182 said...

Nothing at all to do with the blog.

I've taken up screenwriting :D
You did a bit of it, right?

Mr C said...

you are? that's excellent. can't wait to read/see the results.

Anonymous said...

Some quotes taken from the Oban Times' article:

This week, one enraged parent told The Oban Times: ‘I know at least half the children she is commenting on. I am outraged that she describes children as hard work.

‘She is paid a lot of money to do her job and it is unbelievable that she sitting talking about them on a computer rather than teaching.’

Oban South and the Isles councillor Gordon Chalmers said: ‘I am outraged that a council employee is using council time and reporting on council business on the web.

‘I do not pay my council tax so that staff can waste time on these sites. People should be spending time with real people rather than with cyber friends. It is a drain on public resources. It is shocking.’

A council spokeswoman said this week: ‘Social network sites are blocked in all schools as policy. Any member of staff found to have breached council policy will face appropriate disciplinary action.

‘Teachers may request access to blogs which have an educational value.’



I especially like the outraged parents' "I'm outraged that she desribes children as hard work"

Is there a teacher out there who doesn't find it hard work? And if they don't are they really doing it right?

kylie said...

hi mr c,
sporadic antipodean, eh? now that i have an alias you will have to mention me :)
i dont think your argyll lass did anything too terrible but enough people have learned the hard way that you just dont tweet, blog or facebook about work. (didnt know facebook was a verb, did ya?)
there are too many power hungry super-cop types who just cant wait to make it a problem

great post
cheers
k

Mr C said...

Anonymous- Personally I quite liked the quote from the councillor who is disgusted that someone is wasting council time... ah politicians, full of little hypocrisies. But he's quite right. It's not as if people in any other sector ever get time to breathe. They start work at 4am and the first chance they get to inhale is their breathing break at 12:30.
And how dare someone publish council business. Of course the public shouldn't be allowed access to information about public bodies. Who knows what might happen if the great unwashed know how things really are... its a no brainer.


Sporadic Antipodean. Have I never mentioned you before? How strange. I get so few readers that I usually introduce them to each other and arrange dinner parties quite early on. You must have slipped through the net. I blame the time difference.


p.s. I hope no one looks at the time stamp on this comment and realises that I wrote it during lunch break - a lunch break in which i really should be filling in all the pointless paperwork the education board throw at me - I mean I am doing this on their time after all.

Anonymous said...

You scared me!!


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