KIDS’ CRASS ACT
Turning vid lessons into dirty Web posts
Mischievous city schoolkids are manipulating and posting clips of their teachers’ remote-learning lessons on social media, leaving some educators wary of video classes, several sources told The Post.
“There are a lot of us who aren’t comfortable with it,” a Bronx middleschool teacher said. “You never know where your face is going to end up right now.”
An eighth-grade instructor at the Bronx school warned colleagues that kids — especially in upper grades — were posting lesson footage on sites like Snapchat and adding profane captions or inappropriate filters.
“There are risks right now that most people aren’t even aware of,” the teacher said.
The scattered provision of live video teaching has been a source of controversy locally and nationally ever since schools closed due to the coronavirus crisis.
Some parents have complained about a lack of meaningful communication with teachers, while others have lauded staffers for preserving some normality during remote learning.
The city teachers union has told members they are under no obligation to conduct live teaching, even if principals insist on it.
While some have opted to do so, parents claim others are limiting their effort to posting assignments. Some teachers limit their online lessons to audio communication to avoid any involuntary appearances online, sources said.
Others said that they are uneasy exposing their personal living spaces to students and that already blurred social-demarcation lines are being erased altogether during the crisis.
“Teaching is a stressful job,” said a middle-school staffer in BedfordStuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“Before you could go home and separate yourself from it. But now, even your apartment is a classroom.”
With teachers and students regularly texting and e-mailing each other, the source said informal communication is changing the way kids view authority. “They interact with us now the same way they do their friends,” said a Harlem middleschool teacher.
The Bed-Stuy staffer said teachers are routinely monitored online by their students.
“They see us on Twitter, on Instagram,” she said. “The student/teacher relationship has totally changed, especially in the last five years or so.”
A Bronx staffer said her students routinely scroll through dating apps like Tinder to see if they can spot their instructors and their profiles.
Some city teachers are even balking at interacting with their students over their personal cellphone out of privacy concerns.
Many block their numbers or use encrypted messaging apps to correspond.
“There are things teachers have to worry about in 2020 that would have been pretty hard to imagine not too long ago,” the Bronx educator said.