The Polliwog Journal

There’s a flaw in me as a teacher. I should be skating away on thin ice into my retirement years, but I don’t. I continue to develop new units in an attempt to make school meaningful and relevant for students. I know! What am I thinking? But I just can’t help myself.

I recently created a unit for my juniors called Writing Letters That Matter, for which teams of students research a political issue that they care about and write a letter to one of their national or state representatives. It’s a neat little unit and it meets all kinds of standards (not that I care that much about standards, but you know).

And because I like to integrate web resources, I have all kinds of links embedded into the unit plans. So it was with this in mind that I thought, “Oh, cool,” this morning as I listened to the story about Street Team ‘08 on NPR. Street Team is an initiative of MTV that gets college students across the nation to cover local issues as “citizen journalists” and blog, podcast, etc. about their experiences. The hope is that these embedded “journalists” can both explore political issues important to young people and also generate disscussions via Web 2.0 tools. Eventually they hope to get young people to care enough to vote.

Earlier in the year, I had hoped, in a class Blog, to show my English 11 students that bloggers are becoming truly democratic voices and this Street Team concept only reinforces that. This all sounds great, right?

Here’s the bad part. Today, when I got to school, I tried to get to the Street Team ‘08 site, but it was blocked due to its content: digital music, etc. And this is the story of the year: block, block, block;  federal law prohibits . . . .  I feel like all I hear this year is “no” or “we can’t.”

I still do not fully comprehend the vast paranoia about kids and the Internet. I know there are predators out there. I know that serious and dangerous situations have occurred.  But I also know that if we blind our kids and muffle their ears and refuse to teach them how to be citizens of the Internet world, they will be at a far greater risk than they would be than if we were brave enough as a nation to acknowledge that our kids are digital kids anyway who will find all kinds of ways around our blocks (ever meet a kid who has defied his parents’ ultimatum?) and will be in that world whether we like it or not. We would be wise to teach them how to navigate safely. And some of us like that world, the Internet world, fraught with danger as it is.

Is the real world not also fraught with danger? How many of us, as parents, actually fulfill our “promise” to lock our kids up until they’re 21. Of course we don’t. It’s silly.

In the same way it is silly to restrict Internet access in schools and thereby restrict teachers’ ability to teach their students.

Democracy is best when people engage with other people in discussion about who we are as a people and what is best for us and who will best lead us. The truth is that many of these discussions happen online these days.

Juniors are primarily 17-year-0lds who are on the cusp of full citizenship, ready in only a year to vote. How can I explain to them how important it is to write letters to their representatives when those same representatives do not respect their right to know? With all the new laws, are we protecting our children or are we muting their voices?