Wheat-dogg's World

The news had a couple of teaching-related items this past week worth commenting on.

Two Mississippi school districts have banned teachers from texting their students — to avoid any hanky-panky with the kids. Meanwhile, a small school district in Texas has decided to allow its teachers to pack heat while on the job — for protection from wacko students.

Sad, sad commentaries on the American educational system …

According to Associated Press and ABC News reports, the two Mississippi districts (Lamar County, southeast of Jackson, and Lauderdale County, east of Jackson) imposed the new restrictions on teachers following the convictions on sexual misconduct charges of two teachers from elsewhere in that fair state. School district attorneys made the recommendations, apparently.

While maybe well intentioned, it’s a stupid restriction. Texting, like dancing, does not necessarily lead to sex. Cracking down on teachers and students texting each other will not eliminate teacher-student liaisons. After all, that kind of “extra-curricular” activity happened long before Web 2.0 — or for that matter, the Bell telephone system — became a reality. Some teachers — myself included — use instant messaging for far more boring reasons, like communicating with students about homework — hardly ideal foreplay.

A related controversy involves teachers and social-networking sites. A CNN story suggests some legislators (gods forbid!) are also looking at preventing teachers and students from associating with each other on Facebook, MySpace and similar sites, for the same bass-ackwards reasons as the Mississippi texting bans.

Rather than trust teachers’ professional judgments, officials would rather make the wall between teachers and students even taller and more impenetrable. CNN quotes a teacher who said he uses his social-networking page to facilitate communication with his students about assignments, in essence an on-line extension of the classroom.

The ABC News story quotes a somewhat alarming statistic, that between 2001 and 2005 there were 2,570 educators charged with sexual misconduct, but it fails to put that number in context. According to the US Bureau of the Census, there are 6.8 million teachers in the United States. Of those, 2.6 million teach at the elementary and middle school level, and the rest teach pre-school, kindergarten, high school and postsecondary classes. So, let’s assume the 2,570 known sexual misconduct cases were evenly spread across each of the five years. On average then, during that period there were about 500 teachers caught fooling around with students nationwide. That’s 1 in every 13,600 teachers each year, or in others, little Susie and Billy are probably perfectly safe.

I would bet you that most of those cases did not involve texting or social-networking sites. Maybe electronic communication could have facilitated student-teacher liaisons, but pulling the plug would not have prevented them.

One of the hardest aspects of teaching is maintaining a proper social distance from your students. There is a wide range of acceptable teacher-student relationships, from the strict disciplinarian to the more easy-going, collegial kind. Some teachers fall off either end of the scale. Either they act like feudal lords, with complete control of their students’ minds, or they act like pals — overaged teenagers. Then there are the distinct few who either prey on students for sex or who allow themselves to get sucked into inappropriate relationships with their kids.

Those few are going to cross over the line with or without text messaging or the Web.

As for the Harrold, Texas, school board decision to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons … well, it’s Texas. They do things differently there. With the kind of bass-ackwards reasoning fostered by the National Rifle Association, the folks there want to prevent school shootings by arming their teachers.

The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff’s Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ‘sic ‘em’ to a dog,” Thweatt said in a story published Friday on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Web site.

“These shootings” refers to those cases where students entered schools with enough artillery to quell a small-scale border incursion in Afghanistan. Unless Harrold teachers are packing AK-47s or Uzis, I somehow doubt a pistol in a shoulder holster is going to slow down any determined student shooters, in the highly unlikely event one of them visits Harrold, Texas.

[Statistics, folks. How many school shootings in how many years? A few. How many schools with no shootings? Hundreds of thousands. Jeez, can't people count?]

So, here’s the moral of these two little developments in US education. It’s not appropriate to talk to your students on-line, but it’s perfectly OK to shoot them. Remember those bywords, teachers, as you start the new year.