On Cell Phones, YouTube, and Bad Teachers

Now, this story particularly interests me because it deals with a number of things I care about: education, my hometown, getting in shit for posting things online, and YouTube. If you don't want to read the whole story, a little background... at a school in the Outaouais (sp?) which is the Quebec side of Ottawa, one kid baited their teacher into snapping at them while another recording the whole incident on a cell phone, where it was later posted to YouTube. The teacher is now on stress leave, both kids were suspended indefinitely, and the school board in question had the clips removed from YouTube.

Now, I think that recording and posting clips of an incompetent teacher is a rather smart way to take them down. And not only that, I think these teachers need to be taken down. I've had far too many bad instructors that quite frankly, I wished I could get the word out on. What happened here, in principle, was no different than what takes place on sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com, only hyper-sensationalized for mass consumption. A teacher screaming at their students on video, instantly embeddable on your blog, myspace, livejournal, or what have you... speaks louder than the typed word ever could.

However, the entire incident was planned, set up, and staged by the students, and that's where the morality of the thing becomes cloudy. Obviously no one told this teacher they were being filmed, and certainly the reactions caught on camera weren't rehearsed. As much as I believe in public disclosure and accountability for these sorts of things, it's all too easy to set someone up to take a fall, and that's what this reeks of. I've seen teachers flip out. I've seen students get pretty damn shaken and wish they had the opportunity to strike back. And now, more than ever, that opportunity is available. But with it comes the responsibility to engage in fair reporting.

Now, let's draw a really easy and recent comparison where people were on camera, being finessed into revealing less than ideal sides of themselves, with the filmmakers intending to release the stuff for mass conumption... but where the victims had full knowledge they were being filmed. I'm talking, of course, about Borat. The movie's funny as hell, but there's some really unsettling moments when people say some really prejudiced and horrible things, and they knew full well that this was video intended for public consumption. At least we can suss out that the intent of Borat was to entertain, and not to brutally shame these not-so-innocent people(although pending lawsuits seem to suggest otherwise).

So how do the two correlate? Teachers, every day, go in front of their students and perform to the best of their ability, and god bless them for it. But just because we, as society, appreciate the hell out of them, doesn't make them immune to criticism. Staging a takedown of a teacher with the intent to destroy their reputation is wrong, no doubt about it. And what these kids in Quebec did was wrong. However, I propose that the wrongness of their actions were not in the actions themselves, but in the intent, the setup, the provocation. Bad teachers always reveal themselves, and it is students' opportunity to get the word out about them. New technologies make that easier than ever. But with the opportunity to do the right thing brings with it the responsibility to do it the right way.