Shut up and Teach.

I just read an article in the NEA (National Education Association) Newsletter which I found rather disturbing. It drew me in via email with this tagline: What you post on MySpace and Facebook in your free time might just cost you your job. As a Facebook user and blogger, I was curious to see what the article had to say. For the most part, I am not concerned about writing and posting online. I generally think I edit myself appropriately and don't post anything explicit or inappropriate. Most of the teachers who were fired or disciplined for their activities online did not appear to do that. But this line was quite disturbing to me: But what about free speech? Don't school employees have the right, on their own time, to blog about their private lives without fear of losing their jobs? Probably not.

This feels like one more way we have unrealistic expectations for our teachers. No, it is not unrealistic to say that teachers need to have appropriate conduct in and out of the classroom. But to me, the fact that we don't care to pay our teachers a decent wage, yet we hold them to extreme expectations for continuing education, standards of excellence in their work, all with very little economic support or social respect, is simply unacceptable. Now we are going to take away their right to free speech, too?