Every teacher wants to be the cool guy, the Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poet's-Society friend to students, but a court case from Connecticut offers a lesson to teachers-in-training: be careful when you buddy up to students online. While sites like MySpace make it easy to engage in casual contact with students, they also make it easy for the contact to cross professional red lines.

Jeffrey Spanierman's teaching contract was not renewed after teaching English for several years at a high school in Ansonia, Connecticut, and he sued the school district over his release. The case began several years ago when Spanierman created a MySpace page under the name "Mr. Spiderman" and began friending students. When a guidance counselor eventually came across the page, she found that Spanierman had posted a ten-year old picture of himself on the page. In addition, the counselor saw "pictures of naked men with what she considered 'inappropriate comments' underneath them."

But just as disturbing were the "very peer-to-peer like" conversations that Spanierman had with students—and we're not talking about file-swapping. Court documents seen by Ars show that Spanierman talked to his students this way:

Spanierman: "Repko and Ashley sittin in a tree. K I S S I N G. 1st comes love then comes marriage. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL" Student: "dont be jealous cuase you cant get any lol :)" Spanierman: "What makes you think I want any? I'm not jealous. I just like to have fun and goof on you guys. If you don't like it. Kiss my brass! LMAO"

(The judge notes in a footnote to his ruling that "spelling and grammatical rules are not always closely followed in such casual or informal online exchanges, and that oftentimes certain phrases are abbreviated or expressed in a form of shorthand [e.g., 'LOL' can mean 'laughing out loud,' and 'LMAO' can mean 'laughing my ass off'].")



Don't be this guy

The question is whether this type of behavior crosses a professional line. When Spanierman was approached about the page, he took it down... and then proceeded to put it back up under the name Apollo68. This move sealed his fate, and his contract was not renewed after the new page was discovered (students had complained about some of the content and tone).

So what happened to freedom of speech? Freedom of association? Are teachers no longer to have MySpace pages? Should they avoid friending students?

The judge addressed some of these legal questions, noting that Spanierman did not have tenure and was not fired, ruling out wrongful termination issues. He also could not sue on free speech grounds because most of his content was simply casual (in some cases very casual) speech. The only "protected" speech on his MySpace page, the content of which might possibly get him into trouble, was a poem about the Iraq war that Spanierman. It opens thusly:

The damage is done. No Where [sic] to run.

The sand and sun aren’t any fun.

They rain down all day in the fields where soldiers lay [sic].

Their firearms held tightly.

Their steps fall lightly.

They watch for the enemy.

A man, woman or child they see.

He could be any of the three.

In houses they go hoping bombs won’t explode.

For war of revenge that has no end.

Et cetera. This is Vogon-level poetry, the sort of stuff that led the judge to write, "Leaving aside the question of whether one could call this bit of poetastery an 'elegant articulation' of the current conflict in Iraq, the court concludes that, construing all ambiguities in favor of the Plaintiff, the poem could constitute a political statement."

However, because the content of the poem had nothing to do with his contract nonrenewal, the judge noted that free speech issues don't actually apply. The case is one in which the school district was "reasonable" to expect "a teacher with supervisory authority over students, to maintain a professional, respectful association with those students. This does not mean that the Plaintiff could not be friendly or humorous; however, upon review of the record, it appears that the Plaintiff would communicate with students as if he were their peer, not their teacher."

Such issues predate MySpace, but student/teacher interactions generally took place in the school setting, with teachers dressed as teachers and surrounded by the symbols of their authority. Forging social networks with one's own students and communicating with them over the Internet at all hours, in school and at home, certainly make it easier to be less formal. And when the age gap between student and teacher isn't more than a few years, slipping into the kind of talk seen above isn't difficult to imagine.

Over at PBS' Mediashift, lawyer Jeffrey Neuburger had some astute comments on the case, noting that the "easy familiarity" of sites like MySpace, "in the view of the school district, drew Spanierman over the line between acceptable discourse and inappropriate communications. The severity of the punishment may also reflect an institutional discomfort with a new means of student-teacher communication that is outside the channels customarily controlled by the school district."

Be that as it may, the judge gave the school broad discretion to make judgments about whether such contacts were disruptive to the learning environment. Spanierman's suit was tossed, though the case does lead us to wonder what student/teacher interaction will look like a decade from now.