Breaking All The Rules

 I'm going to break the first rule: I'm going to talk about fight club.

Then I'm going to break the second rule: I'm going to continue to talk about fight club. 

I'm going to continue to break rules one and two until something changes.

And don't think that somewhere down deep inside the anarchic piece of me that reveled in the novel and the film of that name isn't completely at odds with me about this decision, but I'm talking about fourth graders here. 

Nine and ten year old boys who arranged an afterschool rumble in the bathroom for the expressed purpose of recording and streaming it to their nine and ten year old audience. That anarchic piece was shouted down immediately when my common sense teacher brain kicked in. Safety was my first concern. Right after that came this question: "What do you suppose gave them idea?"

It would be easy enough to toss a blanket over social media and be done with it. Then again, it says right there on the Tik-Tok website that you must be thirteen years or older to have an account. Isn't someone at home monitoring their child's use of their space age telecommunications apparatus? It would be disturbing enough if the boys had arranged a bout in the bathroom over some perceived slight or lunchroom transgression, but the added level of broadcasting it for the prurient interests of a group that would most certainly reach beyond our school walls made it much worse. 

In my mind. 

The mind that had been occupied at the time that this was all going down by a meeting about posting pictures and videos of our students online and trying to discern exactly what tack to take when deciding which kids and whose faces we were allowed to put on Al Gore's Internet for everyone to see. The school district has recently moved to an "opt-out" policy where at the beginning of the year parents are asked to check a box only if they objected to having their children's image put out there for all to see. Everywhere. All the time. 

I can guarantee the same parents who flipped on past that box on the questionnaire are the same ones who don't bother to check on their children's tech use. The outrage I felt as an educator and a parent was not mirrored by the reactions of the parents of the boys involved. None of them had the words "victimless crime" at hand, but that was the overriding expression of their concern. Kids, after all, will be kids. 

I heard that little voice in my head start to speak up, but I told it to shut up and go back to 1999.