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[PA Comic] Monday, February 4, 2013 - A Teachable Moment
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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What the fuck. Fuck you, Gabe.
My dad teaches maths, and that picture is... disconcertingly accurate. Apart from the context, luckily.
More likely a soap dispenser, panel appears to depict a bathroom mirror self-shot.
Please respect this person's right to privacy.
Please refrain from re-posting their picture in this thread.
What now?
Edit: Aha. I didn't realize this was a specific incident! I'd assumed this was just making fun of the rash of teachers getting caught making bad decisions lately, slammed against social media in general.
That said, there's not much right to privacy when the person in question is tweeting the pictures of themselves, thereby deliberately making them public. :P
For those who shouldn't google at work (and maybe you shouldn't), if I've found the right story: A 23 year old math teacher apparently did quite a bit of posting pictures of herself in various states of undress "twerking" for the camera. Obviously this was discovered.
It's been going on long enough at this point that it will be going on forever: The rate that people are learning is lower than the rate that they are making new people.
Sorry, maybe "right to privacy" isn't the correct term.
I'm just critical of the media mindset of "someone has unintentionally exposed their private life in a publicly accessible forum, let's broadcast every last shred of their information to the rest of the world."
I'm not really convinced that her ability to teach would be impaired by her occasionally smoking weed or taking titillating selfies in her private time, but she'll probably lose her job over this just because of the media shit storm now associated with her name.
A noble thought with regards to one's own sense of morality. But also, attempting to shut the gate after the horse has not only bolted, but the horse's owner has pretty much burned down the entire barn in a desperate bid for attention.
I haven't been following the situation, what does this refer to?
Much like practicing safe sex, Some people will never learn or care. I suspect that those that care have already learned, but what puzzles me is how there is still an overlap between "those that don't care" and "educators." My teacher friends won't let themselves be photographed holding a drink, let alone half naked talking about bringing drugs to school.
I suppose I might be wrong, but if posting racy photos of yourself in the public domain along with confessions of breaking drug law, isn't a bid for attention, the only other explanation I can think of is some kind of planned career suicide.
Perhaps she has a teaching addiction and this was the only way she saw to stay on the wagon.
I can only do this trick once, kids...
Nude pictures and the drug equivalent of having a few glasses of wine is so far down my list of moral outrages that I really don't have a problem with it if someone does them in their own time.
As far as I'm concerned the only real problem here is "not sufficiently protecting your online identity from your need for real-life privacy", which seems to be an increasingly common lapse in judgement these days.
On any given event, it doesn't bother me. It's been made pretty clear, however, that it's not something you should do, because it inevitably results in scandal. Therefore it's not so much that the individual committed this largely non-starter of an offense, it's that she displayed a clear lack of judgement by not foreseeing the scandal that would come of it.
And have your opinion on drug use as you want, there are plenty of them. It's still a crime, so at the least someone smart wouldn't be documenting it for others.
Between friends sharing things accidentally, services sharing things you didn't think they were sharing, and other stuff, people who aren't tech-savvy can easily make a silly mistake and then have their entire life ruined. Like, honestly, if this woman's dream was to be a teacher, she's fucked. And even if she doesn't have her heart set on being a teacher, she's still kind of fucked. Nobody deserves to have anything bad happen to them for accidentally posting pictures of themselves doing something perfectly acceptable.
If these are on twitter then it's even more understandable how it might have been on accident. The difference between a private message and something that billions of people can see is like, one letter, right? And twitter doesn't ask you to confirm or anything, it just tweets it, right?
Not going to take the time to track down where the story's from, it probably is, seeing as only two states have legalized non-medicinal weed and I think both still have some serious restrictions.
Posting nudes of oneself on the internet doing something illegal, private or not, is fucking stupid. You can have an opinion on whether any single activity is acceptable to you, but overall, the act of taking pictures of yourself doing these things and then putting them on the internet, which has been proven to be, by its very nature, inherently public, is fucking stupid. People get to make mistakes, but these are monumental mistakes to make.
That isn't to say that it's not possible to feel pity for the woman. She just made some incredibly dumb mistakes, and I think all things considered, I'd rather teachers be smarter than that.