Stunned. Seriously, a teacher can take to Twitter with her frustrations and keep her job.
I will admit, I am not a teacher and for many reasons, most of all, I seriously don’t have patience. Teachers are special people and people we value with our children’s lives for 9-months out of the year.
Teachers are people that will help mold our children’s future, they will inspire, empower and educate them through their journey of life.
Of course parents are a child’s primary caregiver, but their teacher is the next person that will spend the majority of time with our kid’s — we often hear from people how their third grade teacher or fifth grade teacher are people that inspired them to become what they are today.
So teaching is not a job to be taken with a grain of salt.
We all know teens are challenging – which obviously takes an even special type of person (teacher) to deal with these wonderful personalities, but if you accept a position as a high school teacher, understand that teenagers are your students.
In California, high school teacher Krista Arata Hodges took to Twitter to release her frustrations of dealing with her students.
One Tweet read in part, “Is it okay to say you want to stab some of your students?”
Seriously, even though we are hoping she was typing out of stress and frustration of the end of the school year, it is not okay to put this on social media!
Get a journal, buy a diary – heck – go have a glass of wine with a close friend – but stay off of the Internet!
Some of her students are coming to her defense. Okay, that’s great, but they are kids (and I am not saying they don’t count, but maturity is still a bit lacking). Do they understand the ramifications of what she just posted? Do they understand the level of accountability a teacher has – and this is not appropriate for any teacher in any grade – no matter what type of day you are having.
One student that had Ms. Hodge for history last year, Isabelle Valdes said: “She might have just had like a hard time expressing how she was feeling, and that was just the way it came out for her,” said Valdez. “Maybe just like in-the-moment anger, but I don’t think she necessarily mean to offend anyone or she meant it in any way as if she was going to do anything.”
This actually makes me question the society we live in for students to find this acceptable behavior when an adult in a teaching position acts this way.
Parents and others get it. A parent and a nurse, Lisa Roubineau said it best on ABC13: “As a teacher, I think that she should be held to a higher accountability than other people. I’m a nurse, and I can’t vent about my patients on Facebook, so she shouldn’t be able to vent about her students either.”
That’s correct. In many professions, we can’t post about our clients. In schools it isn’t any different.
Grown-ups are role models for our future leaders. No matter what you are doing, children are watching – offline and online.
Social media is not a venting machine. Facebook is not a diary.
In my opinion, this teacher may want to find another profession or possibly another grade level. Maybe another field in education that doesn’t deal with kids. Just an idea.
Shame on the school for keeping such a teacher employed when there are so many valuable people looking for jobs.
Loose keystrokes may land you in litigation someday.
