Pushing The EduBlogging Envelope

Both Joanne Jacobs and Alexander Russo are covering the story of an un-named Chicago area teacher who blogged ranted about his students, co-workers, and just about anything and anyone else that swam into view his crosshairs:

Typing rambling screeds in an anonymous blog he called "Fast Times at Regnef High," a Fenger High School teacher unleashed his frustration over the chaos he saw around him.

He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.

He took swipes at his colleagues, too--"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."

In his blog, the teacher did not identify himself or his students, the exact name of his school or the city where he taught. But like most bloggers, he wanted an audience, so he wrote in his blog that he had leaked news of his site to a few co-workers. Soon enough, the 30-year-old teacher's name was the talk of the school.

This week, after returning from spring break, the students read how they were depicted and flamed the blog with profane threats and righteous indignation toward the teacher.

By following this link: Fast Times at Regnef High, (Regnef is Fenger spelled backwards) one can see what appears to be several posts that have been archived and then republished, probably by a student. (Disc- It's entirely possible that these posts may have been altered from the originals.)

The earlier posts were written as though the school building was doing the talking. The latter posts were more conventional in that they were written from the teacher's point of view.

Read the posts for yourself. In me, they produced feelings of anger, sympathy, and even a sense of loss and missed opportunities. ---------------------------See our latest education-related entries right here.