Trust me, as much as being friends with parents may have its benefits, it is not a good idea:
Jill Schulman-Riemer has taught nursery through third grade, and is currently a private tutor and educational consultant in New York City. She says teachers and parents should keep their distance outside of the classroom, particularly online.
The trouble goes both ways, she warns. “Parents friending teachers and teachers friending parents can be a slippery slope. You put a lot of trust in your children’s teachers. We all need to stay in our professional roles with each other, and Facebook just isn’t a place for that.”
“Talk to them off line,” Schulman-Riemer advises. “Don’t use email or Facebook messenger. Try an actual face-to-face conversation. Explain that, of course, you’re always happy to talk to a parent about their child or anything school-related, but your policy is that you don’t friend parents on Facebook, and you prefer in-person conversations.”
Sure, friending your kid’s teacher may sound like a nice way to have a more personal connection with someone who’s an important part of your family’s daily life. But information on people’s Facebook pages can easily be misread or blown out of proportion. And while teachers recognize that they’re being judged on student performance and how they present themselves in the classroom, they shouldn’t be held accountable for old college pictures, or late-night comments posted on their timeline after someone’s bachelorette party.
If you go out and friend a teacher on Facebook, or accept their friend request, you do so at your own risk, says Carrie Mize, who’s been on both sides of the fence, as a parent of three young children, and a teacher of pre-school and elementary grades in Michigan, Virginia, and Connecticut.
“If you choose to open up the personal side of things, you have to understand that it’s their personal life and you may see things you don’t like,” She says. “A teacher’s Facebook page doesn’t have anything to do with your child. The teacher doesn’t have their teacher hat on, and if you see something inappropriate, you just have to let it go.”
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Click on the link to read Facebook and Child Exploitation
Topical Teaching 
Insensitive ‘Parent Bashers’ Take Aim at Grieving Colorado Parents
July 22, 2012It is absolutely disgusting to criticise the judgement of the Colorado parents who took their children to the midnight screening of the new Batman movie. How dare they even broach the topic of whether or not children should be up at that time. This is none of their business!
These grieving parents don’t need any more guilt on top of what they are already going through:
Facebook and Twitter have been blowing up the social boards with tweets and posts on the horrific event that took place Friday morning. The social media world is swirling with comments on the children that were at the midnight screening of WB’s The Dark Knight Rises.
Although most have agreed that this massacre could have happened during normal daylight hours as it did at midnight, it does bring to light parental judgments overall. Questions as to why parents would take their children to see a movie at the wee hours of the night, have arisen.
Many others have argued that now is not the time to discuss this issue. But to mimic CNN’s Pierce Morgan: now is the perfect time to expose this because it was due long before yesterday.
Wrong! Now is not the time to be discussing such issues. This topic should never be addressed. It’s time for people to mind their own business!
Click on the link to read Explaining the Colorado Movie Theater Shooting to Children
Click on the link to read The Unexpected Rewards of Parenting
Click on the link to read Study Reveals Children Aren’t Selfish After All
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