Carly McKinney, a 10th grade math teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, has been placed on administrative leave after a local news station found half-naked pics, photos of the 23-year-old smoking pot and inappropriate Tweets under the handle @CarlyCrunkBear on the internet. Even though pot is legal for personal use in the state of Colorado, the school is investigating whether McKinney brought pot on campus. Lamely, McKinney is claiming that her Twitter account was a parody that her friend was tweeting from and that she never brought drugs onto the school’s campus. Huh?
Whether she brought pot on campus or not seems irrelevant to me. This girl has to be the dumbest, most arrogant person to accept a teaching job. I’m sorry, I’m going to go off here. There’s no way she didn’t consider that these tweets and pictures, parody or not, might have ended up being seen by students or administration. I used to teach high school and the very first rule is that your social media profile must remain totally separate from your professional life. At the school where I worked, faculty weren’t even allowed to have a Facebook account (this was before you could make them private). It was against school policy for me to connect with any of my students on any form of social media. I get it. Because teenager’s identities aren’t quite formed yet, they are extremely impressionable. They don’t understand appropriate boundaries so grey areas are confusing to them. It’s no surprise that many of her students are taking to social media to back McKinney. They look up to their “young, cool” teachers and want to be friends with them. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to make the relationship clear. The power is all in the teachers’ hands. Any blurring of those boundaries — as these photos and tweets do — is a violation of power on the part of the teacher.
I don’t care what this girl’s excuse was, and I don’t care that McKinney’s 23 and probably really immature. The moment you become a teacher, you’ve made a choice to prioritize your students over posting your dumb social media business. Click through to see some of the idiotic things McKinney posted online.
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