Breeding and Writing: Does your choice of profession outweigh your rights?

Posted on by

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

I’ll make this brief.

I read two news stories today that piss me off as a professional, as a parent, and as a human being. Because you know what? I am all of those things at the same time.

Story one: Teacher gets fired for having a blog and sharing her opinions.

No, that’s really about it.

She vented about her life, moaned about her students’ indifference to education once in a while (though never by name), wished things were a little different in her place of employment (which she never shared the location of), and basically made jokes, exaggerating her troubles and stereotypical student personalities to the whole seven Google followers she had.

The blog is still live and well here and appears to have last been updated after her firing but before the inevitable media explosion.

Point one for the opposition; okay, yeah.  This is the Internet, lady. It’s dumb to think no one will ever figure you out, and I mean, hello, you used your first name and included a picture of your face. I’m not going to argue that her blogging topics were in good taste.

But still.

Story two: Teacher is forced to resign after posting pictures of her European vacation on her “Friends Only” profile in Facebook.

Why? She was holding a glass of wine.

Not topless. Not with a bong in her hand. Not with a headless fellow tourist mounted on the hood of her car.

Just smiling with some stemware, and now she’s unemployed. (The oh-so-questionable picture itself is here, if you want to peek.)

So here’s what everyone’s asking: does having a job in education preclude the right to random bitching that the rest of us enjoy on the Internet?

Note that I didn’t say, “Hey, were the blog posts and wine photos good and responsible ideas?” or “Would you want your child’s teacher to be a stripper on the side?”

But really, this seems like such a cut-and-dry First Amendment thing to me.

I like our First Amendment. I use it a lot. Besides, if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have awesome videos like this: