Slander? Sedition?

Hmmm.... such familiar terms to bloggers nowadays.... especially for those poor JC sods who wrote one too many wrong things on their blogs.....

I must confess, my sympathies go out to those students. For voicing out what was probably in the minds of dozens of their peers, they were unlucky [and dumb] enough to put it on their blogs and get themselves in, as we say, a whole pile of crap.

But are we going too far here?

I understand that what the students did was possibly slander. I understand that had they been older, they might have found themselves in serious trouble.

But as students? Writing about their teachers? Er....... Isn't that the norm amongst most students?

Like, who hasn't said slanderous things about their teachers and discussed seditious acts among their peers before? I remember when I was in school, as a student, the whole school was aflame about a married female teacher and a [much younger] single male teacher who were constantly [we thought] seen in each others' company. The rumours flamed when the married teacher didn't appear in school for a week, and we all decided that she must have been kicked out of the school for unsavoury behaviour.

Now that I'm older, of course, I know that she must have been in course all that while. Duh.

So granted, students saying very unsavoury things about their teachers is a natural course of events. And if you're the source of homework, tests, and evil of all evils, exams, it becomes a for-granted part of your job that students WILL complain about you, insult you, and generally declare you the source of all living and undead evil on this earth.

If you, as a teacher, think they shouldn't be this way, or that they don't, then I think you're being terribly naive.

Now if we take this to be a natural behavior, the next question is, is the punishment appropriate to the crime? Is suing them really going to solve anything?

What was hurt here? The teachers' professional reputation? C'mon, who's going to take a few angry lines in a blog seriously? As bad as they are, I don't think there are much people who would believe in them so sincerely that they would seriously think the teacher was [insert choice accusation here].

And what do the students learn here? "Say anything bad about teacher and he will sue you." What does this say about our ability to take criticism? What does this tell the student?

And most importantly: What does this do to the teacher-student relationship?

I wonder how the rest of the students in that JC is going to regard that teacher in the future, since now the message seems to be "cross me and I sue!" More importantly, I wonder whether they will ever trust and respect him again.