Teach your teachers well

The one interesting bit in this Post-Dispatch article on the schooling of teachers on MySpace/website appropriateness has to do with youth. Emphasized:

With the popularity of social networking online growing among adults, at least two teachers unions have been advising their members to consider the content on these pages and their positions in the community. The message is especially pertinent for younger teachers fresh out of college, or those applying for jobs. They’ve used Facebook.com or MySpace.com to keep in touch with friends for years.

I’m surrounded every day by kids (not just relative to my own age, but actually young) for whom personal disclosure on the web is the norm. The level of social discretion (or judgment, to use a laden term) found in most older people likely seems stiff, stultifying, over-cautious. Little wonder some of them believe that being judged for how they portray themselves online is an intrusion into their personal lives.

There’s an axiom that says that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Our Gawker-ized age teaches us that you’re judged by everything you do, and if you open your life to the world (wide web), that just widens the pool of potential critics. That fact considerably predates the internet, of course, and is likely to outlast it. If young folks can learn that early, they can avoid some personal (and personnel) complications later.

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