Bullying of everyone

Testing Horace Mann Published Mar 30, 2008

(Just the beginning) Lengthy full article at: After a Facebook Scandal, Horace Mann Is Forced to Ask What Values It Should Teach -- New York Magazine


When students created Facebook pages that viciously attacked a teacher, and when their wealthy parents on the school’s board defended them, Horace Mann was forced to confront a series of questions: Is a Facebook page private, like a diary? Is big money distorting private-school education? And what values is a school supposed to teach?

Peter Sheehy, a history teacher at the Horace Mann School, sat in his bedroom, trolling the Internet. It was the fall of 2006, shortly after lunch on a Saturday afternoon. The school year had just begun. Not a good start, Sheehy thought. On Thursday, J.T. Della Femina, the newly elected student-body president and son of advertising magnate Jerry Della Femina, had brought a female club leader to tears at the opening high-school assembly when he introduced her at the podium as “the Queen of Mean.”

Now, in the hallways and in the school newspaper, students and teachers were fiercely debating the presence of sexism on campus. The students defended J.T.’s words even as the teachers deplored them.

MYSPACE, Sheehy typed into Google. He had never been on social-networking sites before, but he was troubled by the reaction to the assembly, and his worry triggered a thought. Not long ago, a student had told him that classmates were photographing a math teacher with their cell phones and posting the embarrassing pictures online. (Sheehy was chairman of the faculty-grievance committee.) Perhaps it was worth taking a look.

Logging on to MySpace proved too complicated, but then he recalled a faculty seminar he’d attended the previous spring, in which Adam Kenner, Horace Mann’s technology director, had demonstrated how to monitor student Facebook pages. All it took was a Horace Mann e-mail account, a false name, and a year of graduation. Following Kenner’s lead, he logged on to Facebook using middle names. Sheehy found no evidence of the photos but within a few minutes stumbled on something much worse.

The Web page for a Horace Mann Facebook group titled the “Men’s Issues Club” mocked a student organization on campus called the Women’s Issues Club. The 44 members of the parody club included children of both trustees and the legion of prominent names who send their children to Horace Mann, which sits in the top rung of private schools in New York. One club member referred to an English teacher as a “crazy ass bitch” and a French teacher as an “acid casualty.” Another boy boasted that he’s “the only person here who actually beats women when hes [sic] drunk. no joke,” while still another bragged that he had “banged” a teacher “in [the] music dept. bathroom” and “will get great college rec” for the accomplishment. The boys lamented Star Jones’s “fat and wrinkled ass,” “sex in the city,” and “feminism,” proclaiming, “WHERE DO THEY BELONG?!?!????!!! IN THE KITCHEN!! IN THE KITCHEN!!!” The club summed up its mission thus: “For too long men have not had a way to express themselves and their beliefs in society. Men need to have a voice, we aren’t meant to be seen and not heard. Let freedom ring, bitches.”

Shocked, Sheehy continued trolling. He then found a Facebook Web page for “McGuire Survivors 2006,” a student group dedicated to his colleague, Danielle McGuire, a 33-year-old history instructor with a liberal bent who had taught at Horace Mann for a year. The page’s profile picture was a grotesque illustration of the black slave Tituba, one of three women first accused in the Salem witch trials. Scrolling down the page, Sheehy again found trustee children behind the Website. Derogatory slogans about McGuire included “Official Minority Rights Officer and Head of Protection for Feminist Society” (McGuire is white) and “Representation of Oppressed ‘Indians’ of America.” The club called on prospective members to join if “you know what it is like to be a McGuireite; you have an entire volume of doodles in your history notebook; you have never done the reading; you are scared to enter history class for fear of brainwashing,” concluding ominously, “you don’t know if you will leave class alive.”

Horace Mann has always been a pressurized place, the junior division of New York’s elite. Parents of current students include former governor Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn, fashion designer Kenneth Cole, and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But the Internet has added a new kind of pressure. For Horace Mann, this new reality emerged in the winter of 2004, when an eighth-grader e-mailed a cell-phone video of herself masturbating and simulating fellatio on a Swiffer mop to a boy she liked, who in turn forwarded the clip to his friends. In short order—as these things inevitably do—the video popped up on Friendster for millions to view. “Swiffergate,” as the scandal became known, roiled the Horace Mann community.

Adam Kenner, who had taught in the school’s technology department for twenty years, began lecturing parents, students, and teachers on the risks of social networking. “Nothing online is private, not even if you are only sharing it with your best friend,” he said in one speech. “Don’t post anything online you wouldn’t want posted on a bulletin board in your school’s hallway.”

These Facebook pages, however, were something different. Kids have always ragged on an unpopular teacher or ridiculed an unfortunate classmate. But sites like Facebook and RateMyTeachers.com are changing the power dynamics of the community in an unpredictable way. It is as if students were standing outside the classroom window, taunting the teacher to her face. Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules or codes for how a school should address such issues. (Horace Mann, through its PR advisers Kekst and Company, declined to comment.)

But the questions provoked by the Web postings ran deeper than these. Who should make the rules? In the past, there had been at least a rough assumption that teachers were parental surrogates, authority figures who were charged with making decisions regarding education and discipline, and that the rules governing this kind of behavior were clearly the faculty’s to make. But the frenzy around college admissions is driving a private-school arms race, funded by wealthy parents who believe their contributions entitle them to substantial input in the running of the schools. Now, at times, teachers can seem merely like hired help. Horace Mann alumnus William Barr, the U.S. attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, believes that the school has become “too much of a business.” “The school needs and wants a lot of money,” he says, “so the influence of the business community becomes very strong. It’s a symbiotic relationship. But in the long run, the school loses something.”

The students were more aware than ever of where the real power resided. So when the Facebook situation was brought into the open, the teachers found themselves powerless to act, and the students did not passively wait to be disciplined.

I want to talk about this, but I have so much to say that I dont know where to start. I have written this post several different ways, and none of them seem to encompass it all. I think what I need is a conversation rather than an editorial. Its confusing for me because I do indeed encompass free speech and like students in particular to be aware of that right. However, if I knew my child treated others so callously I would address it with a brain beating lecture of which I have never seen, with arms in the air and hand wringing. Really, I dont know what I would do, but I would take immediate and ongoing action in favor of the bullied. If I were a student, I think I would expect to be chastised. Were I a teacher, I would leave right away. I used to subject myself to such bullying and attitude by the Big Dog, some of the exact vocab. This place was one of his breeding grounds. Although the article is about the inmorewaysthan1 treacherous school, it is really the broader issue of bullying/ individual rights that I am after, especially student:authority.

I dont usually copy and paste huge articles, so really, thanks for reading.

 

I am so glad that I am not a teenager today. It was tough enough 25 years ago.

And if my kids pull that kind of shit when they get older they will regret it dearly.

 

The "Men's Issues" club isn't probably the best example. There is a free speech and parody claim there.

Going after students or teachers is a bigger problem.

Now, the only way to really stop it from happening is explaining to the students, is that what you post on-line can be found and used by potential future employers. Although, the rich kids who have connections don't have to worry about that. Having other academic penalties (no spring break), would work in that case.

 

If a student doesnt respect a teacher, what is the teacher's job? How can they continue to teach effectively? The issue isnt just with 1 or 2 students once it is rampantly public. Its humiliating in all respects.

Ive changed my mind about walking away if I were the teacher. Instead, I would stay to make it a topic in the the classroom. I would walk though, if that didnt succussfully equal the playing field with humor and understanding of human interactions.

 

The problem with authority is that one cant just be authority without being able to prove they should be. That respect has to come down to usefulness, knowledge, understanding, compassion, and all that other human junk on the part of the authority.

If the school and parents were generally satisfied with the teachers performance professionally and thought her a good human being, they could have backed up their employee; the family could have been asked to leave the environment given their major dirsruption.

I am very skeptical of limiting speech.