Was the teacher who blogged about her students out of line?
By calling her students “lazy” and “annoying,” a teacher landed herself in hot water—and offers an important lesson on social media policies.
This week’s cautionary tale comes to us from Natalie Munroe, a 39-year-old teacher who was suspended from her job as a high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia after she posted an extremely unflattering blog post about her students.
In the post, she labeled her students as “disengaged, lazy whiners” and complained that they are “just generally annoying” and “disobedient, disrespectful oafs.”
In other words, she called them average teenagers.
The problem was, they were her average teenagers—the ones for whom she’s responsible for roughly 50 minutes a day. And if I’m a parent at this school, I don’t want my child hanging out with someone for an hour a day who holds him or her in such low esteem.
Still, Munroe didn’t use her full name or her identity in the blog. She didn’t use the school’s name and certainly not her students’ names. She wrote the post, presumably, on her own time and not on school grounds. Furthermore, the blog was posted more than a year ago.
So, why is she being punished?
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