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April 03, 2007
Anniversary of worst teaching moment in my life
Last year, I was at _________ school in Region ________. If you look back in the archives here and here, it gives you a sample of what it was like. The school was a nightmare, overflowing with seriously incompetent administration (the WORST principal and assistant principal I have ever seen), abandoned kids, and seriously unsafe hallways. Unfortunately, I was not an expert in how Google works, so when my principal was indicted for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his prior school, I gleefully linked to that article.
Silly, silly me. When anyone searched either the name of my school, the name of the principal, or the news article, my blog was the number one search hit. I just meant to point out that a man who treated a school, its teachers, and its students like a prison deserved to be sent to a prison.
My first hint that my blog had been discovered was a teacher asking me if he had been the subject of one of the entries. I felt a bit uneasy, as this blog is more than just education. It got better, though, as I got a call from an assistant principal from another school who was a friend of mine. She asked me if I knew of this blog called Glennalicious, as the head of our entire region had distributed a 50 page printout to EVERY ADMINISTRATOR of every school in the region. I'm glad my friend was on the phone, as I didn't want to let her see me shitting a giant brick right there in my classroom. I found out that my evil principal had googled his own name, found my blog, and had downloaded the entire thing to his desktop to use as evidence against me. I was actually doing a good job, but this man was evil. He wanted to fire the parent coordinator so he could have his mistress take the position, so he had him followed by a friend for a few days. He cornered me one time and threatened to 'hurt' me if I ever brought up the school's finances in front of any regional administrators again. He terrorized the school, and he was going to use my blog as a way to blackmail me or get me into trouble.
He was removed from the school, but the regional boss saw the text file on my principal's desktop and opened it. After reading it, he printed it up and distributed it without my knowledge. Apparently it was an object lesson to administrators that no matter what they think they've hidden, it usually wasn't easy to keep a secret.
I was terrified I was going to be an object lesson too. I called the union, where a union legal rep yelled at me, telling me that no teachers should ever write about their students, especially if the student was identifiable. I took the blog down, examined all of my old entries, and came to the conclusion that it wasn't identifiable, except for the last entry about my principal, which suddenly made the school itself identifiable. However, I never identified any specific students, so I counted it as a lesson learned. To this day I've been a bit more circumspect about my teaching experiences, but I'm sure that a few of my current students and possibly other teachers know about the blog.
As a teacher, I have the responsibility to always make the students' welfare my priority, and I do, every damn day. I work harder at this job than I ever did at any other job. On some days, that is enough. On other days, it's a drop in the bucket. That's why I'm glad I'm out of that old school and also why I'm glad I'm on vacation right now. Bless the children and all that, but just keep them away from me for about a week.
Posted by G at April 3, 2007 11:32 AM
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Comments
Enjoy your vacation!!
Posted by: Alan at April 3, 2007 11:43 AM
That's why I never talk about work on my blog, kitten.
Especially in this day and age when you never know whether your next employer will google you just to see if anything can be had.
Posted by: Stash at April 3, 2007 05:02 PM
See. Google IS the god of the internet.
Posted by: Doug at April 3, 2007 06:24 PM
The anonymity thing is something that I struggle with on a constant basis. On one hand, I don't think that what I write is untrue or malicious per se (except, maybe, for my anti-Texas agenda). Still, there are enough horror stories of bloggers being sacked it should make us all pause. That is one reason why I try to avoid having my blog "googlable" via my actual name.
Posted by: GayProf at April 4, 2007 01:13 PM
Spring Break Rules!
Posted by: Todd HellsKitchen at April 4, 2007 04:18 PM
Reading this entry absolutely FREAKED me out. I can't imagine living this controversy, which I'm sure was spread out over a number of days (at least.) Did you sleep even five minutes from the beginning to the end?
As I manager, I always seem to have a pretty big group of employees that freakin love me and an equally big group who want to kill me. Both groups love to Google me and I'm very much hoping that I'm anon enough this time around.
I hope you have a really good vacation. Being a great teacher is the hardest job I can imagine.
Posted by: Long Story Longer at April 4, 2007 09:06 PM
Ho. Lee. Shit. This whole entry makes my toes curl, and not in a good way. GACK.
I've adopted the habit of never using business names or people's names. I say "work" or "my boss"... if the names aren't there, Google won't find them.
Posted by: goblinbox at April 6, 2007 04:48 PM