Student gets busted with porn on his blog

May 16, 2007

2 months ago I posted a video on my teaching blog, with accompanying comprehension and opinion questions as an assignment. It’s a video about binlan girls, which I thought would generate the kind of discussion I only dream of from my 8th graders. It was a moderate success.
A few days ago I recieved an email from the producer of the video.

As the producer of this video, I would be interested to hear a summary of the comments on the issue from your students. Feel free to drop me a line …

So I did. I sent him the links to all the grade 8 class blogs, which have the links to all the students. the following morning, I recieved this:

Actually, even though not well thought out, I still find their comments interesting, because it does somehow reflect the attitudes of at least the people around them - they obviously hear the adults comment on the topic from time to time. My favorite however, is this one:

4. DO you think binlan beauties are ok? Why or why not?
I think binlan beauties are not ok because they are easy to have a cold.

(And you might want to tell [name withheld] off for posting porn on his blog.)

Porn? From one of my students? Embarassing, predictable and…true. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Frankly, I am surprised that it took this long. This is the 3rd year our grade 8 classes attempt to maintain a blog, and with the exception 2 or 3 boys who use innapropriate language in their blog title, it’s all been clean, if not entirely barren. Of course I had to do something about it. I went to our office and showed the offending post to the coordinator and the man in charge of discipline. They both laughed, which I thought was innapropriate. In any case, I asked to be included in the conversation with the counselor. They said they had no time to handle it that day. I told them I would keep it quiet until we could all find a time to meet.

They called the counselor down to the office 3 minutes after I left.

The fiasco that ensued to bring disciplinary measures against the offending student left me depressed and frustrated. The following morning, I had the class with said student. He did not show up and I was told he was having a talk with his counselor. He came in 10 minutes later with a note that said:

We have concluded, with the help of the Computer Center, that he could not have posted the porn himself as the time of the post is 5:30 pm on Monday, a time when all the students are in class. Please remove the porn and tell him to get a new password.

It was difficult to contain myself at that point. I did manage to only yell at one person…
The student hadn’t bothered changing the default time zone (California), thus the strange time. Had they bothered to look at the other posts, they would have seen that all of them also have a Monday afternoon timestamp. The fact that an outsider had discovered it, causing me embarrassment and loss of face, was not even addressed. The counselor didn’t know this, neither did the student. The student tried to claim his innocence with me, but he got sweaty and teary eyed when I gently told him how I found out about his pornographic post. In the end, after I did my kicking a screaming number, the case was handled in a suitable fashion. But, as I wrote to one of the administrators (who is mercifully accustomed to my rants):
“I feel invested in my students’ education and it saddens me deeply that I am working in an environment where my concerns, guidance and opinions on matters that could potentially affect a student in a meaningful way are marginalized. There is no attempt to include the foreign teacher, to include me, where “serious matters” are concerned. I am tired. It does my self-confidence and self-esteem a great deal of harm sometimes.”
When I called my wife that morning and told her of the details (without mentioning why I was so upset, she said

“Don’t be angry. They don’t see you as a real teacher anyway and you can’t change that.”

It was hard to hear it from her. Those of you that know her, know that she is a very positive person, ususally immune to the effects of my Nostradamus Complex. I can’t say that I always feel that I and the other foreign teachers on our staff  are assessed that way. I also don’t think everyone (Taiwanese) in the administration or faculty thinks this, but on this particular day I felt it quite strongly. To be fair, my school is much better in this department than the other ones I have worked at, and they have proven to be very flexible and open-minded in pedagogical matters. (Caveat: None of the grades generated by the foreign teachers actually “count”, even though students spend up to 14 hours a week with a laowai.) Not one to stay quiet, I made it known that i felt dissed and the key players (excluding the student) have apologized to me. I feel ok about it today.
But you know, its now wednesday afternoon, 2 days after all this came to light, and the post is still up there!

Posted in commentary, rant, taiwan, teaching