In The News- Making Facebook Illegal for Teachers to Speak to Students.

I've heard about this recently while on vacation the last two weeks. It is becoming increasingly more and more common for teachers to not being allowed to  talk to past or current students on internet sites like Facebook. Where I live it is still allowed for students to friend and speak to thier students online. In fact, for some classes we need to be able to speak or friend our teachers. For example, the freshmen are suppose to do a book talk and one of the options is to make a facebook page for the book. So in order to see this page our teachers have us friend them or send them the link.

Anyways, in a recent Yahoo! artcile, a teacher sues Missouri because a new law makes it illegal for her to contact her kid online. According to Yahoo!:

The law, which has been nicknamed the Facebook law, prohibits teachers from having exclusive communications with students over non-work Internet sites. Students are defined as anyone under 18 who attend or used to attend the school where the teacher works.

But while this teacher and parent faces this delimia, not everyone seems to think that this new law is such a bad thing. This new law is suppose to fight teacher sexual harassment and abuse. And in a way, I agree with this law. I just read an article in Seventeen magazine about teachers who sexually harass their students.

One girl in the article said that at first the teacher was nice, and he listened to her when she was having a hard time at home. Eventually the messages and conversations went into the personal area. And while her mind screamed that this was bad, she ignored that voice and went over to the teacher's house.

Eventually the teacher turned out to be over protective and he would get angry a lot at her. One point the girl said, she had gotten a boyfriend and when the teacher found out, he wanted the girl's boyfriend to share her. The girl said no because she didn't want to cheat on her boyfriend. Later on, the girl became depressed and she told her parents about it. Her parents were mad at first, being parents, but then they sued the teacher for sexual harrassment. The teacher was fired, went to jail, and was labeled as a sex offender.

The news article also quotes one professor who says that being able to talk to studdents online isn't nessary to a student's education. And I can see the truth in that, it isn't all that important for teachers to be able to talk to students online. And although that makes sense, there's the issue that some students feel and trust their teachers to talk to them about important stuff.

For example, a student going through depression or abuse may feel more comfortable telling a teacher about it then a parents or some other adult figure. And this student may feel more comfortable telling the teacher online rather than offline because the student may not want to rish other people hearing about it. So if this student who is too shy to apporch a teacher about something important offline, now can't talk to the teacher online.

The other issue I see is that if you're going to make it illegal for a student to talk to a teacher online, then it should be illegal for a student to talk to a teacher over text messages or the phone. But if you do that, then how is a student to contact a teacher if they need homework help? Of course the student could talk to their friends about the assignment, but what if they're unsure too?

Read this article: Teacher sues state over "Facebook Law".

So what do you think about this issue? Should it be illegal for teachers to contact students privately online?

Sincerely,
Peony

In The News- Random Gossip and Why Teachers are Hypocrites.

First of all, we'll start with the random gossip that really isn't news but I thought that some of you may like to hear.

Rebecca Black, the infamous teenage singer who's Friday video gained fame across the world for being...the world's worst singing ever? Now, I'll admit I do not like her singing but I think that a lot of people went out of line by giving her death threats and other nasty things. Eventually, the video was taken off of youtube and we thought that we had seen the last of the teen. 

Apparently not. According to Yahoo! The singer has release a new music video called My Moment. While her voice is still awfully auto tuned and the music video isn't all that exciting, I'll give her some points for not giving up. And with this new music video, it has been announced that a new 5 song EP has been released onto Itunes today called Yes There's More!. 

Link to the Yahoo! Article: Rebecca Black New Music Video
Edit: The Music Video was taken off because it didn't work. If you'd like to see it, click the link to the Yahoo! Article.

In other subjects that is video related and I'm not considering news at all, Jerusha Hess (who apparently has cowritten things (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos) with her husband, and the famous Twilight author, Stephanie Meyer, are co-producing a movie called Austenland. 

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news of this film and described it in a bit more detail as follows:

[Austenland] centers on a single, thirtysomething woman with a secret obsession with Mr. Darcy — as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The obsession is ruining her love life because no real man can compare. When she decides to spend her life savings on a trip to an English resort catering to Jane Austen-crazed women, the woman’s fantasy of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman becomes more real than she could have imagined.

Link to the aritcle: Twilight Author to Co-Produce a Movie....

In the News
According to several reports 178 teachers and principals in Alabama have been caught in one of America's largest teaching scandals ever. For years everyone thought that everything was going great for the school districts grades kept on rising. But due to abnormal scores, investigators found that on standardized tests (yes this is why we shouldn't have them!) teachers would change their student's answers so that they would get better grades.

This, mind you, was not to help the students in any way, it was to save their own jobs. By getting higher test scores the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation would give them more funding. 
According to the Yahoo! Article:

One of the most troubling aspects of the Atlanta cheating scandal, says the report, is that the district repeatedly refused to properly investigate or take responsibility for the cheating. Moreover, the central office told some principals not to cooperate with investigators. In one case, an administrator instructed employees to tell investigators to "go to hell." When teachers tried to alert authorities, they were labeled "disgruntled." One principal opened an ethics investigation against a whistle-blower.

Because of the high stakes placed on these tests for teachers, these "educators" have resorted to cheating. Hypocrites! They tell us "don't cheat or you'll get a zero" yet they think it's perfectly okay to cheat themselves? How can we possibly trust them if they show us that we can't trust them.

Some of these high stakes include:

Ten states now use test scores as the main criterion in teacher evaluations. Other states reward high-scoring teachers with up to $25,000 bonuses – while low scores could result in principals losing their jobs or entire schools closing. Even as the number of scandals grows, experts say it remains fairly easy for teachers and principals to get away with ethical lapses.

In one report I read, teachers would get together on weekends or after school at each other's houses, drink coffee and eat while they would erase their students answers.  Much like some kinda of party. Why is this okay with you teachers? Why!

I think that this lady has a very good point:

"And that’s what ought to alarm us," adds Ms. Downey, "that these professionals ultimately felt their students could not even pass basic competency tests, despite targeted school improvement plans, proven reforms, and state-of-the-art teacher training."

True true. I find not only what the teachers did alarming, but insulting too. Kids are smarter than what you think. Just because there are those few who don't care, alot of us do care. And we'll do the best we can without your helping us cheat. And how did these teachers expect to get away with this? How I don't know, but something will have to be done about this so that this can never happen again.

In a recent report, the teachers and officials caught up in this scandal will be forced to resign this week or this will be forced to. So, yes teachers, there are punishments for cheating even with you too. I hope that every one of you feels ashamed of yourselves. And just think, you have now destroyed any hopes of getting another teaching job in this already bad economy.

You can read both news articles here and here.

So, what do you think about Rebecca Black's new songs, or Stephanie Meyer's new producer job? What about this teaching scandal?

Sincerely,
Peony