One of the negatives to Facebooking (I love slang verbs) is the discovery of your students' private lives. I've loved being a teacher, and I have just adored so many of my students - I love their innocence, their eagerness to learn, and especially their enjoyment of the simplest of joys. Now that I'm no longer teaching, I accept former students as friends on Facebook, and it's depressing to see their profiles and their efforts to seem so adult, interesting, and unique.
I had a really happy childhood in so many ways. I grew up largely in the country, building hay forts in a barn a few hundred yards away from our house, riding bikes down dirt roads to country stores, and climbing a persimmon tree behind our home. We certainly never had a computer when I was a child; I didn't have access to the "www" world - actually, it didn't really even exist. I guess what I mean is that I never had a reason to grow up any faster than Nature allowed.
It distresses me intensely to see my former students in semi-provocative, jaded poses, writing incomprehensibly fragmented updates on their Facebook walls. How sad that they don't have the wisdom of experience to see the value in their childhood and adolescence. I can only hope my children have a happy childhood, free from the burdens and pressures of the internet age. There's time for all that later.
1 comment:
I agree with you one hundred percent. I too am interested to peruse their profiles once in a while and am often surprised at some of the things they post, say, and are apparently doing. It's a whole different world from when we were growing up.
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