Teaching in the 21st Century

Being a teacher in the 21st century is awesome! There's a ton of technology at my fingertips. I can use Google for finding already-made lessons or lesson supplements, and for all the images I need for teaching vocabulary. It's really excellent, and Google makes my life a zillion times easier.

There are, of course, downsides to all this modern technology. We are dealing with students who not only have shorter attention spans--because they expect to be constantly entertained--but also have an obsessive compulsion to be on their phone while watching a movie and listening to music, so why can't they be texting their best friend, updating Instagram, and learning in my classroom, all simultaneously? I mean, really, multi-tasking at it's finest, right?

And while that's frustrating, I can deal with that. I can take away phones after too many warnings. I can try to come up with exciting games to review material and video clips or songs to aide in the learning process. I can incorporate as much technology as possible. What I can't do is help what they do at home. I'm not talking about cyber-bullying, although that does break my heart. I'm talking about how my students have decided they need to know every detail of my personal life and some make it their mission to find out every detail. In a world of modern technology, anonymity is no longer an easy thing. I'm pretty open with my students. I'll tell them how many siblings I have, where I'm from, where I went to school, and how old I am. But I have to draw the line somewhere. But when I try to draw the line, they take that as a personal challenge to find me on every social media site online. It makes me want to delete all of my social media accounts--but then we're back to that age-old argument for so many different topics: They shouldn't control my life! When it comes to online profiles, whatever the site, I'm pretty safe and set all my privacy settings pretty high. I leave it public enough where real friends/family can find me, but try to make it private enough where the unwanted can't find me. But these kids are smart. They know their technology and know how to search for whatever they're looking for. I know how to, too, but I never thought I'd spend an afternoon googling myself and searching for all the places they might find me that I've forgotten about (like the Twitter account I had that I thought I'd deleted long ago, but of course, they promptly found it at the beginning of the year.)

Again, I'm okay with sharing basic information with them, as long as they ask me personally, but things get creepy and uncomfortable, when they come into class retorting that they found something of me online or they discovered my family members online. I can't protect my family from their creepiness, nor should I have too, right? I'm not a wild person or someone with a bad past, so there's nothing damaging to find on me, but it's just an extremely unwelcome violation of privacy. And I can't do anything about it. I can't take their home computers or cell phones when they aren't in my classroom. I hope that telling them I would contact their parents if it continued deterred the behavior for now...I guess I know I'm not cut out for the life of a celebrity.

On the bright side: Ten school days left!