Recently, a local news channel ran a "gotcha" segment about Phoenix teachers and their myspace pages, so I checked it out on Youtube.  Combining scary-movie-music (some kind of a minor chord) and images of blurred out flesh, the newscasters announced that that they had found many obscene, lude and innapropriate pictures on myspace and facebook.  One camera man chased a teacher through the parking lot, demanding an explanation for a sexually explicit profile song which also included a few F-bombs. 

I felt sick in viewing the newscast. Why isn't the news running stories about the great things teachers are doing?  All over our city, teachers work extra hours grading papers, running service programs, coaching sports, tutoring children, donating their time to charity, counseling students and creating the best possible learning experience possible.  My second thought is that we need to have a right to privacy.  They should have a newscast exposing all the mistakes reporters and newscasters have made over the course of their lives.  In all honesty, at our worst moments, we have all done something worse than listening to a lude song.  Most have done worse than lifting up a shirt on camera. 

There is another side of me, though, that feels less sympathetic.  I have a myspace and if someone saw it, they would hear a decent song, see pictures of me with my family and read blogs about politics, religion and philosophy.  In all honesty, it's a pretty lame myspace profile.  What were teachers thinking in posting nudy shots of themselves?  It's more than poor judgement.  It's a bad moral decision. 

I realize that people with bad personal morals can do well publicly.  Martin Luther King Jr. had personal moral failures.  So did Gandhi.  I personally believe Clinton was a good president, but I would never trust him around a female college student.  General Grant and Winston Churchill were both drunks.  If a president can be a moral failure, can't a teacher?

The short answer is "no."  Though perfection should not be a requirement, teaching is a vocation, a calling of sorts.  There is no start and end to being a teacher.  It's a lifestyle. Whether teachers acknowledge it, they have moral authority in the lives of their students.  On a daily basis, they teach students right from wrong (which, I admit, can be tough in a post-modern context).  If teachers help inspire students to live well, but fail to live what they teach, they are hypocrites. 

Here's the rub: We're all hypocrites.  I tell students that racism is wrong, yet there is still lingering racism within me.  I tell students to tell the truth and not to cheat, yet I take way too many shortcuts on administrative paperwork.  I get frustrated when students arrive a minute late, yet I was five minutes late to the last school leadership meeting. 

That leaves me both ambivalent and uncertain.  To what extent should a teacher live well? At what point does a teacher's moral failings become an issue?  Should teachers be fired for stupid things they do in their personal life?  To what extent are teachers entitled to a private life?

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