As I've been living with my grandmother I've been subjected to listen to horrendous "news" broadcasts that are supposedly fair and balanced but it's actually Bill O'reilly and the other nitwits overpowering someone with even a decent point of view to the contrary. As much as I'd love to complain about how Fair and Ballanced and Fox News is simply not true, I am more concerned with what I've been hearing on it lately. Apparently the gonvernment thinks that it's their duty to stop all the kids and puppies from killing themselves just because some people made fun of them. Now let me say up front as I'm listening to Andrew W.K.'s Party Hard, the people I align myself will know I am with them.
I heard that some people are wanting to put the duty of searching through Social Network sites for "cyber bullying" onto the teachers of American schools.
My only thought was "Who is the moron who thought this was a good idea?" It is not the duty of the teachers to sift through the drama and stupid status updates of the common teenager. I myself update my status so many times without even really realizing it. So this is itself is a full time job, which last I checked they already have one of those that they are horrendously underpaid for. (Even moreso since at least locally they are now being paid by how well their students do something else I don't agree with.) It's just simply not the duty of the American teacher to sit at a computer and look for potentially "suicidal meanings" in the status updates. Or bullying for that matter. Here's a tip if teachers begin monitoring status updates they'll just move to the Message feature that can only be seen by selected people, I really have a problem with the relative Privacy a public citizen expects to have online. Sure people shouldn't go blabbing their secrets or telling too much but I also believe that it's not the duty of teachers to dig for the information to prevent suicides, this is why there is the Suicide Hotlines, or in the case of bullying the report feature which tells the person that if they believe they are in bodily harm to call your local Police.
I honestly have a problem with teachers on Facebook in general at least as "friends" I don't believe that our teachers need to read through our tons of crap and have a "relationship" of any sort with the students other than professional, If you have a favorite teacher it's fine to talk to them during school or after class, but lets be honest, we rarely like our teachers that much. There are pages where you don't need to be "friends" with the person persay called Groups, open one of those for school related things but a 30-40 year old male being listed as a friend on a 16 year old girl's Facebook will throw up so many red flags We'd look like China in about an hour. I have one of my old teachers on my Facebook, but my case was different I was around this same teacher for a good 7 or so years and she is actually a pretty cool person, I'll admit it's kinda strange having her on there when the rest of the people are old friends from school but nonetheless I added her to keep up with her after I graduated.
99% of these kids threatening suicide are just attention whores. The other 1% who actually do it probably would have done it whether or not the bully said anything at all, when a person is dead set on believing the world is a horrible place and it's not worth living in, there is hardly anything you can do to stop them.
I believe that the power of the teacher, School Board, Board of Education, and what have you should not intrude into the relative privacy of social networking sites their "power" over the lives of the students should pertain only to the place where they are employed, the school, and the like. If someone is getting bullied on the school grounds by all means stop it but really, bullying is so high up on the internet under the guise of Anonymous even if you found out the people who were doing it it'd never stop a full force onslaught of a group dedicated to making people miserible. The fact of the matters are Anonymous simply does not forgive and does not forget, and whether or not you care to admit it, Anonymous is inside us all, it is the darkest part of your soul an will arise when your mind believes the time is right. Teachers have enough crap to put up with these little bastards during work, and I've seen many teachers run out of a classroom crying because the students bullied even them. It is a tragedy when a life is taken prematurely but honestly, the options are already out there that if the Children wanted help it's just a few keystrokes away. If they refuse the help given who are any of you to force it on them? I've reported about a half dozen people for making death threats against me, granted they were pretty much all my Ex girlfriend, her boyfriend, and her parents because I told them all she was cheating because I totally hit that. But a lovely number nonetheless. The options are simple to access, it's simply not the duty of a teacher to deal with something that will go on in other forms, our teachers are already too busy, underpaid and stressed out enough without having to deal with the same stresses the teenagers they teach do, they already went through puberty.
If you want to get something done I suggest having a cop at the local station sit at the computer with a phone and recieve calls specifically for cyber bullying type crimes. The best you can do is report it and hope that someone does something about it, but making the teachers invade our privacy will simply make us lose trust in them even more. Leave it to the Police and FBI it is actually their job, don't put it onto someone else just because they aren't taking it seriously, I suggest making them take it more seriously. Hell, it doesn't take much knowledge to take a complaint, you might not even need real cops to do it.
I certainly do want the more serious cyberbullying where the bully tells the person that they're going to have bodily harm done to them, but honestly kids shouldn't be such pussies that someone telling them they stink they go right to killing themselves I think step one would be take a bath and if somehow that doesn't help, you may want to look into homeschooling if the bullying continues. But simply unless you either change the problem, or learn to not care our immature children are going to kill themselves. If someone is making fun of you because of a cosmetic issue, zits, smell, or clothes simply change it, if your fat, roll with it and make it your own or lose some weight, if they're making fun of you because of how you act either change it, or if you can't don't simply let the popularity monster take away your individuality, just don't care, Good people prefer wierder people over the same generic idiots anyway.
In summary I think putting extra resposibilties on teachers that are already put through hell as it is is just stupid when the options are already out there for people to ask for help, if they refuse to, that is their own mistake. Help the ones who ask for it and as bad as it sounds, cut the losses of the ones who didn't, if you don't ask for help no one will know to give it to you, and reading a Facebook post for something slightly "emo" and jumping the gun will just be annoying to all involved.
See ya next time.
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