So in the tiny island of Singapore, schools are starting to clamp down on student bloggers, namely those who “flame” their teachers online.
Youngsters rant. They have been doing it since the beginning of time. Sure, blogging now makes the information more publicly accessible and permanent, but the less heed you pay to it, the less permanent it is likely to be.
Back in the day I remember having an English teacher who wasn’t, how shall we say, very effective. The grades of the entire class was plummeting and resentment toward her and her teaching methods was growing. Feeling a need to say something, I wrote her a note in one of those journal entries we were supposed to pass up as homework. I had hoped that she’d take the feedback seriously.
She did. She took it so seriously the said journal entry made its way to the Principal’s office and the entire teaching staff. It was her hope that the rest of her peers would find it equally apalling that a student dared give her feedback on how she was affecting us. In the journal I had commended the disciplinary methods adopted by some teachers whom I named in the hope that she’d learn from what I described. These teachers came up to me, looking concerned but secretly pleased (you know the look), and said that I shouldn’t have said such things.
In the end all our grades suffered for it as the feedback was treated as a student’s disrespect of a teacher. I never had any problems with the language, but my assignments were constantly marked down, unfairly I felt, because of my bravado.
Granted, there are some very poisonous-tongued students out there. But teachers need to learn to be the bigger person. To give these young ones some space to rant, and perhaps take away whatever useful feedback they can glean from blogs.
Alternatively, you can always cane their sorry little behinds.
I personally think students must exercise responsibility in their blogs, which are public domain after all. We cannot have young people thinking they can shoot off their mouth irresponsibly (e.g. naming teachers, for a start) just because they can. (You can well imagine the consequences of breeding an entire new generation of XX-wannabes.)
By the way, I think the teachers should be spending their time planning more effective lessons and marking homework than reading students’ blogs.
Personally, I think students who blog about their teachers like that are very gutsy for doing it but also very stupid - that’s just asking for trouble that you don’t need, really, isn’t it. What happened to the old fashioned way of ranting in a private journal on good old fashioned pen and paper??
What you did as a youngster though, Lucian, I think was very brave! =)
i have another perspective(actually i got alot more), i think good teacher should be place in lousy class.
my english is not so good when i am studying, teacher should inspire me. they fail to change me to be better by education/inspiration. okay, it take two hands to clap.