Blogging About Students?

Last week, I found this article, which explains one teacher's experience with blogging. This article explains how a teacher referred to her students as being "lazy" and "whiney" and her frustrations with teaching these students. However, she never used her name, student's names, information about the school or any other personal information to her blog readers. About a year and a half after she started her blog, officials in her school district found out about the blog and suspended this teacher with pay. In the school's defense, they said that these topics were very inappropriate to write about on a public blog, even if she never used student's names. In the teacher's defense, she said that she just used the blog as a way to let out her frustrations and draw attention to the question of why today's youth is so lazy?


In my opinion, this teacher walked some fine lines when posting things about specific students on a public blog, even if no names were used. As an educator myself, I can understand these frustrations that this teacher was experiencing, and this was a way for her to get all of these frustrations out. But was it right to do it in the public eye? School officials still ended up finding out about this blog, even if she didn't use any identifiable factors when writing, but that didn't seem to stop administrators from displaying this issue on national news. (The article I found is on MSNBC.)


As a teacher, I do not think that I would ever do something like this because I think there are better and more effective ways to removing your frustrations, rather than blogging about it. I understand that there are going to be students that just do not have motivation to succeed in school, or lack the drive to complete an assignment or participate in class, but I think these issues should be brought up IN the classroom, not through a blog. Blogging can be an effective tool, but when you misuse it, there can be extreme consequences. The bottom line is that as a teacher, you are going to have great teaching days, and other days are going to be frustrating, but that is just what comes with the profession.


What do you think? Do you think this teacher acted inappropriately and crossed the line? Or do you think that students need "tough love" and these issues needed to be addressed?