Daily-Ink & Pair-a-dimes un-post-ed

Yvonne, our Mandarin teacher, helping Katie with her Chinese homework - A song she will be singing with her class in a couple weeks.

Social media may be the new frontier of communication but not between teachers and students.

The Ontario College of Teachers says teachers should avoid connecting with their students on Facebook or Twitter.

They are also told to avoid contacting them on LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

The college issued an advisory to maintain professional boundaries, saying it's vital to the public trust.

It also says some members have groomed a student for sexual purposes, using electronic messages to win their confidence.

Dear Ontario College of Teachers,

I've read the article above, and you have one thing worthy to note in your statement: "The college issued an advisory to maintain professional boundaries, saying it's vital to the public trust."

However, as a professional, I thought that was self-evident.

Beyond that your statement is nothing less than counterproductive!

You see, by removing educated professionals from the pool of participants who can actually 'TEACH' students about appropriate social media use, you invite students to be influenced, and bullied, and taken advantage of by less scrupulous people... including your members who are less than professional and likely to avoid your advisory anyway.

What's vital to the public trust is that they trust teachers to be current and to teach students to communicate and relate to the current world they live in... or should we still be teaching students to use quill pens?

We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a 'good student.'

We train employees to deal with bosses in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to do. Figure out how to do exactly what they want, with the least amount of effort, and the last risk of failure and you are a 'good worker.'

Good enough is not good enough!

So many things about the structure of our schools today promote this... promote the next generation of worker bees who drone on and do 'what needs to be done' instead of 'what's possible'.

How do we UN-standardize our schools?

It starts with the smallest of points...
"A paragraph 'needs' to have 5 sentences."
... Which produces a class full of mediocre 5 sentence paragraphs.

To the biggest of points...
"I can't"
... Whether this is a response from a teacher or a student.

As Seth says at the end of his post: "The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss as teacher as taskmaster as limiter mindset..."

What are our students capable of if we foster their creativity and get tests and curriculum and scheduled blocks and 'busywork due the next day' out of the way?

How do we move beyond educators as taskmasters?

Good enough is not good enough!