Grownups Of This World, Just Get Off Facebook Already

The Washington Post dives deep into the subject of teachers with slutty Facebook pages today, and it is not pretty. We meet Erin Jane Webster, who displays photos brandishing tequila and middle fingers and downloaded the "Bumper Stickers" application and added one that says "you're a retard, but i love you" — particularly unfortunate because she teaches, you know...and Rich Davila, a real estate company director who, having a surplus of time as real estate people do these days, searches one of this daughter's substitute teachers on MySpace, why exactly they leave to the imagination, and finds topless photos that eventually result in the teacher's dismissal. And finally we meet Bree Melton, an eighth-grade teacher whose MySpace page describes her job at Robert Frost Middle School as "rocking out with some deaf kids. it. is. AWESOME."

In an interview, Melton said: "Is my Facebook profile open? I definitely thought I closed [the page] to people. . . . I am absolutely being sarcastic. I don't [use] sign [language] myself, and I am learning so much about it. I was being completely candid. It's awesome working with them."

And therein, I'm pretty sure, lies the central problem here: sarcastic? Or "candid" and truthful? Surely you understand that it is worthy as the custodian of the national "is our children learning" agenda to understand that you can't be both at once, except to the extent that you sort of can, in modern society, as I think a Simpsons episode or a David Foster Wallace essay pointed out one time, but at any rate the end result of all this ambiguity is a vacuum, a total absence of meaning, and in the absence of meaning people tend to cling to things that have no meaning, like URLs containing the photographic evidence of time spent binge drinking in the company of other binge drinkers, when really, they are grownups now and they should stop acting like retards and get the fuck off Facebook.

(And yes, I say this as someone with a Facebook page chronicling my own adventures in alcohol abuse. It's and part of the "brand," drinking and contradicting myself, hating others only to remind myself how I hate myself, being at once sarcastic and candid, etc. but seriously, I was never on there before Nick Denton made me; apparently, like the collapse of intellect, it is good for page views or something.)

When Young Teachers Go Wild On The Web [Washington Post]

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