Teacher Suspensions/Firings Due to Facebook postings.

What would happen if "a math teacher pronounced that they were deeply religious on a social networking site." Well I've been looking for the answer to that for 45 minutes. This is what I have found if you are interested in reading about this issue further.

In that time, I could not find any mention of anything except these stories:
A lot of these are cached so the links are a bit long.

• They would actually NOT be fired in this case:

Here are a few who were fired for their religious views but not for what you asked about

• This guy was fired for giving religion pamphlets out in class.
• He burnt crosses in a students arms

      "Science is wrong," Mr. Freshwater was reported as saying, "because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin, and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner."  Mr Freshwater is a science teacher

• And this one- both involved what is to be considered assault though so I don't think that's what you meant.

Now there are plenty of teachers suspended/fired for NOT being religious enough: I found the following in about 5 minutes, the above took the other 40 minutes to find.

• This one  was suspended for being a woman teaching Sunday school.

• This one for being an atheist.

• For not teaching intelligent design

• This one suspended for assigning an article about homosexuality in the animal kingdom to his students.

• This one suspended for being a liberal and atheist:

• This teacher was suspended because she objected on facebook to the Christian students leaving a bible on her desk and and a card that said Merry Christmas with Christ underlined.

• Peter Panse was suspended from his teaching job for apparently recommending that some of his advanced students consider taking figure drawing courses that included Nude figure drawings.

• This teacher was suspended for posing in a bikini on facebook:

• This teacher had a pic of her aiming a gun at the camera on her FB page:

• This one is a teacher who allowed crosses to be made in shop class, but not a wiccan alter-

• Another bikini suspension:

• For having a glass of wine in their hand on a facebook page

• And of course the original story that lead to all this

Those Evil Power Texting Tweens and How they stole American Idol.

     Browsing through one of the thousands of articles about the Idol finale last night, I came across one that was entitled Seven Reasons Why Lee DeWyze Won American Idol. Like many of the articles and comments I had come across on the web, the number one reason Lee won was the tween power texting vote.
According to the writer, when Lee sang Hallelujah, those younger viewers identified it as the song from the television series My So Called Life, and Everybody Hurts from The OC and implied it’s familiarity led them to power text.

    This was dissonance to me. A wrong chord.  With the exception of repeats, My So Called Life has not been on the air since 1995 I did not remember Hallelujah  being played in the OC, in fact I think Imogene Heap is more representative of The OC than Leonard Cohen. It had been so long – wait, it had been so long since the OC was on. It ran from 2003-2007.  Now tweens are 10-12, roughly speaking-the years between childhood and adulthood is how it’s repeatedly defined.  The OC aired when today’s tweens were 3-8.
Somehow, I don’t think many of them were watching The OC in between episodes of Sponge Bob.

    That led me to wonder, who exactly was voting for Lee? Was it really 10-12 year olds power texting as so many people kept commenting? Well, how would you find this out? First you need to look at who watches Idol in general. According to the demographics, 89% of the viewing audience is Caucasian. 61% Female. 2% of the audience is under 12. 2%. Well that kinda blows that whole tween theory right out of the water. The largest Idol demo is a white woman who is college educated and between the ages of 35-49. The next largest is the 19-34 group. 60% have no children yet.

    Not only are tweens not watching idols, but only 11% of its viewers are under 18. This is backed up if you look at social media.

    Idol Stats  measures the mentions of the contestants on twitter and other social media with a constant stream of data. They do this 24/7 throughout the week. This is not a measurement of bloggers, or editorial article writers, but of the fans. Lee carried two thirds of the trend and 66% of those mentions were positive. They have a small chat window that streams the data they are mining on the page so you can see exactly where they are taking their numbers from.

    What Not to Sing  includes the bloggers and music writers, who were overwhelmingly pro Crystal, and the commenters on those sites, but according to them,  the sample they get is from the writers and commentators on an article and they only use a tiny, tiny fraction for sampling. From their FAQ:
“How many different opinions go into each rating?
Never fewer than 200, and usually 300 or more.”
   
    When an Idol is a trending topic on Twitter, they can get at least 300 comments in 2 minutes– all from different users. There is also a psychological ramification when reading comments on a page that leans one way or another-most people comment when they agree with the commentator. This has been termed “The Drudge Effect” because when the website Drudgereport.com posts a link to a story, it will almost immediately attract a group mentality in the comments section-everyone basically saying the same thing agreeing with the tone of the piece written. This is the major problem with What Not to Sing. Although they claim not to pull comments from “fan sites”, Writers like EW’s Micheal Slezak ends up being like a fan site because he gives very strong opinions on his favorites, so once you know how Slezak feels about a contestant, you will go back there looking for validation of what you are feeling.

    Twitter has an amazing immediacy to it so that people will post what they are feeling more than what someone else is feeling. An example of this is readily seen on a Saturday night. Saturday Night Live is almost always a trending topic within a few minutes of going live. If you read the tweets they can be either very positive or very negative, and they are immediate reflections on what people are feeling in the moment. For instance, when Tina Fey was hosting SNL she did a Faux commercial about having a man shaped brownie as a companion. Within 30 seconds of the ad airing, it was a trending topic and overwhelmingly people thought it was funny.  While a sheep mentality can take over when a topic trends for a long time, with people basically just retweeting to keep the topic up, (see Justin Bieber), it is very clear in the first hour of a topic to get a good sense of what hundreds of thousands of people are thinking.

    The interesting thing about Idol Stats is their graph, you can see a very steady incline for Lee Dewyze with an enormous peak right before and after the final 3 show. Yes, I said before. The week of May 9th shows a huge upward momentum for Lee. He started this trek up after Sinatra and it grew steadily over movie week and peaked with the final 3.
    Compare this to Crystal who had a bumpier ride– a few weeks were higher than average and then she would fall but overall, she was not significantly higher than Lee throughout the season which backs up the number Ryan Seacrest gave in the finale-of a 2% difference in the votes going into the last vote and her highest peak was a month before final 3 night and that peak was a fraction of Lee’s highest point.

    Taking all this information into consideration, we can look at those Youtube,  Facebook and Twitter profiles of the people who are pro Lee compared to the people who are Pro Crystal.

    Lets grab some Youtube profiles. I am not going to mention names, but pulling a random’s profile up and looking at their favorite videos can reveal a little bit about that person.
Crystal:
Random positive commenter 1 – Tom Petty, Alex Chilton, Styx, Radiohead, Incubus.
2  Angry Video Game Nerd, Aquateen hunger force, Bert and Ernie Gangsta Rap, Star Wars Kid.
3: Velvet Revolver, Vicky Beeching, Seether, Crystal Bowersox
4: Michael Savage, Michael Savage, Michael Savage, Horseland.
5: Rascal Flats, Lou Bega, Didi, Bloopers for laughing.

Lee:
1:  David Cook, Michael Johns, Wisconsin, Lee Dewyze, montage for her son’s birthday.
2.  Green Day, Lee Dewyze x 3 dif videos
3.  David Archuluta, Daughtry, David Cook, Taylor Swift
4. Adam Lambert, Muse, Daughtry, Kris Allen, Megan Fox is a hot Bitch.
5.  Justin Timberlake,  Beyonce, Rhianna, Lee Dewyze


    What that says to me is that Crystal fans have a much broader choice in favorites, they like different kinds of music in general, but in looking at about 50 of her very, pro Crystal commentators across 5 videos, they are not Idol Nerds. It was rare to find any idols in their lists and more often than not, Crystal herself was not in their list.

Lee, on the other hand had definite Idol fans. People that know the show, know you have to vote a lot to make a difference. It was hard NOT to find someone who was obviously voting for lee and who did not have at least one idol favorite in their package.

Moving on to Facebook and Twitter, I looked at the commentators who left positive comments within the last 24 hours. You can look at them on the fan page yourself on Facebook and will probably come up with the same consensus.  I looked at about 200 fans per idol.

Crystal Fans:  Mostly women although there were postings by men but I did not see many men under 40.  Lots and lots of retired and older people, and by older I mean graduated from college in the 70s. Almost all of her fans are American or Canadian.  Musical interests are again very diverse American musicians who are not typically played on the radio except on classic rock stations.

Lee Fans:  Hugely diverse group, the first thing that stood out was how many fans he had who were not American. This is really evident on Twitter as well, in fact many of the tweets are in other languages and I had to get a translator site to make sure they were positive. The guys who commented were almost all young. The women were right in the Idol demos– almost all of them were over 18 and under 45 IE. lots of young mothers and college students. Their musical interest include bands that are currently heard on the radio (Dave Matthews, Train, 3 doors down, Daughtry) Many of them include Idol as their favorite show and have Idols in their list of musicians they liked.

Now anyone can go and find 10 people in any of these lists that do not fall into these profiles, but there is an big difference in the fan base and you can easily see multiple examples of the above profiles.

Here is what becomes clear on average when looking at everything combined:

Lee has more fans. While Crystal has more Youtube hits by a large margin, the people who have chosen an idol and put it in their profile, liked one of the contestants and favorited a video were generally pro Lee.


     2.  Tweens are not represented in either fans base. They simply are not there.
While it may be that they are not allowed to go to Youtube, have Facebook profiles or get on Twitter, if that is the case it’s hard to believe that, looking at the demographics, they vote like mad on the show. An 11 year old who cannot get online, probably does not have unlimited texting.  Her mother probably does.

   3.  Idol regulars chose Lee. This is pretty clear, too. If someone put American Idol as a favorite television show in their profile, they almost always were a Lee fan as well as a fan of a former idol.

   4. People who comment on articles that are slanted towards a contestant, even slightly will usually comment about the slant of the article. If the article is pro Lee, lots of commentators were agreeing, if the article was pro Crystal, lots of commentators were pissed at Lee.  This is not the case with Twitter or polls. Polls that are conducted on sites that favor Crystal were usually pro crystal, but generally polls that were conducted on neutral sites like Dial Idol were usually pro lee, sometimes only by 4% points or less, sometimes much larger.

5. Momentum is HUGE.  It cannot be understated. If you go into the final 4 with momentum rising, you are much more likely to win and a final 4 and final 3 great performance is much more likely to propel you to a win than the final 2 performance.  No matter how great someone was during the entire season, if they wait til the last moment to have their best night, its too late.

6.  Tone is more important that Tune. Because you can now get studio versions of the itunes singles, sometimes while voting is still going on– and because Itunes is heavily promoted, even if you cannot sing consistently well live, if you sound good on those studio versions, you will get fans.


   7. Lee’s win is not the end of American Idol. It is still the number one show, and while the ratings have dropped this year, they have not dropped nearly as much as they did between season’s 6 and 7 and season’s 7 and 8 according to Billboard Magazine.

    The reason Idol numbers were down this year was because total television viewership has fallen off and because of Kate Gosselin. Almost all analysts claim that it was Kate that drew viewers who love train wreck TV to Dancing With The Stars. They ended up staying for a while after she was booted, but the DWTS Finale show was actually its lowest rated finale ever.

     The fact that Idol’s demographics voted for Lee and that Lee voters were regular Idol watchers, you could actually argue that a Crystal win would have hurt Idol more. Not because she was less talented, but because the core idol viewer did not vote for her as much. If Idol is “owned” by the 18-45 white females, and they are the ones the sponsors are paying a hefty fee to reach, (Idol earns an average of $623,000 for a 30-second commercial, compared to Dancing with the stars  gets just under $200,000  ) Idol will always, always cater to them. This is a business. They want to make money. If they change the formula to allow less votes– AT&T loses money and won’t want to pay the +20 million dollars as a sponsor. Idol does not want to cater to the AARP crowd. Sponsors pay the most money for that 18-49 target. If you lose that, you lose your sponsors. They are currently number one and while some changes will be coming next year,  they will not mess too much with their goose that lays the golden eggs.

    The biggest question that was directed at Fox at this years ad pre-sales, was not “What if you have weak contestants?” It was “What about Simon?”  Simon leaving is the one thing that could kill Idol, not a poorly chosen contestant pool. Idol brings in the viewers early in the city auditions because they want to see Simon be mean as much as they want to see good singers. While almost everyone says that this year was the worst contestant pool ever, number one is still number one.

Three Facebook Privacy Issue Scenarios

Before we get into these possible scenarios, please be aware that anything, and I mean anything, that you have posted on your Facebook is the property of Facebook while you use the site. This includes any writing you have posted, any photo, any status note.  Read the TOS. 
 Consider protesting this by NOT logging in on June 6. If you do not want to delete or deactivate your account, don't, but on June 6, do NOT log in. This will cause a significant  loss of income to FB if enough people do it and they WILL have to make changes if their users demand it. Remember-YOU Are the consumer and YOU are the product they are using to make billions of dollars a year. 

Lisa works as a nurse in a hospital in the neonatal unit. She volunteers as a grief counselor for those who are mourning their newborns. She uses Facebook as a way to keep in touch with some of the parents she has helped through a really difficult time. They share prayers and she often uses biblical quotes to try and ease the pain of these parents. If they have a need to rant one day, even years later, when they are having a bad day-they can do it to her via Facebook.
     Her family is also on Facebook. One of her brothers is not as devout as she is. A quote is put on her brothers wall one day by one of his friends, something that, at the moment, Lisa finds appropriate. She hits LIKE. She doesn't realize that by hitting LIKE on a post from someone she doesn't even know will put that post in her cache, forever.
         Her brother is not as devout as she is. His circle of friends includes some that follow a prominent atheist. Two years later, one of her extra needy families is angry and looking for someone to blame for their loss. They are not getting what they need at the moment and personalize their rage to Lisa. They do a search on her, find the quote. The quote itself is innocent, but because if was written by Prominent Atheist, they use this as a weapon and go to the supervisor. She is asked to no longer volunteer because of the upset. Lisa deactivates her Facebook. The hospital, owned by the Catholic church, is also informed of what is posted on her Facebook page. They begin to do an extensive search. Even though she has deactivated her page,  they find things, not written by her, but written by other people, like her brother, that advocate a pro-choice stance. They let her know they do not believe this is appropraite.
Lisa is not out-rightly fired, but within a few months, a couple of her shifts are cut. She does not receive the merit raise she usually receives. The hospital claims they are in a budget crunch. Eventually she has to leave the job she has had for 18 years because she is simply not getting enough hours. She is unsure if this will happen again in the future, because she thinks her Facebook page is no longer visible. Until she deletes it from the system, it will always come up in a search, but even after she deletes it, the things she has written on other active subscribers walls remain there.

Kathy has been on Facebook for a 1 month. Her friends list is just her sister and her sister's children and a couple of people from work. Politically, she is an independent with left leanings. She goes to several news sites a day to read the different viewpoints and thier slants including CNN, FOX, Huffington Post etc  She comes across an article on Huffington that leads to some questions she would like Sarah Palin to respond to. She wants to post the questions on Sarah Palin's Facebook. In order to do that, she has to JOIN the page. She Joins the page, posts the questions, provides a link, and in a few minutes she is inundated by people who see the origin of the article and immediately dismiss the question because of its source. She realizes this was not the place to ask this question, and leaves the Facebook group. A few days later, she notices ads have begun to pop up on the side of her Facebook page for Ann Coulter and other right wing pundits and politicians. She ignores them. She eventually deactivates her account because she doesn't really want to see her nieces drinking beer in their bikini and her sister is never on anyway.
     Months later, when the next election cycle begins she starts receiving a larger than average amount of flyers in mail from the Right. She begins getting emails by the dozens. Soon she is getting phone calls from them every day. National, local, statewide politicians who assume, because she joined the Sarah Palin page for 2 hours one day that she is a supporter. A yard sign is placed in her yard-she doesn't remember requesting one, but she wakes up one morning and it's there.

Maggie has been on Facebook since the beginning, she was a Junior in High school when she joined and is now a junior in College. She loves Facebook. She has heard about the privacy issues but she feels strongly that she has said nothing on Facebook that she would not say anywhere else, and so she has no fear of any backlash. She has heard stories about people getting fired and even arrested for posting their personal photos and information online. She knows better than to post photos of her with beer in hand or half dressed. She has no issue with her political leanings being out there, she is who she is. She would not want to work for a company that would not allow her to be herself anyway.
      Maggie is currently sending out applications to grad school. She is a writer and hopes to get into her first choice, but understands it's a long shot. It's around this time that she and her boyfriend begin to argue over where their future is headed and eventually she breaks up with him. He is not happy. The first thing she does is remove him from her Facebook.
      The problem arises when some of her 897 friends are also his 942 friends. For about two weeks, some of the friends that were really only his friends start making disparaging remarks on her wall about a writing project that she had done. It was one of the projects sent out with her MFA applications and her boyfriend knows this. They begin quoting it and telling her that her ex wants particular portions removed, since it was actually his writing. She is appalled. It's completely untrue, the only thing her ex ever did was proof read a few times. They also target random lyrics from songs she enjoys that she has posted, some of them when she was still in high school and they are not attributed to the songwriter. They have gone back and pulled these years old quotes and accuse her of copyright infringement.
         Meanwhile, those prospective universities have been looking at her Facebook and the rejection letters are piling in. She has to delete 20-30 comments a day, posted at all hours just to try to keep her Facebook wall clean of these accusations. When she removes one of her ex's friends from her page, another pops up with accusations of plagiarism. Not only is her first school choice out, but her second, third...fifteenth choice are out too. All of the rejection letters are standard issue. None of the schools have said outright that Facebook is the reason she has been rejected.

There are thousands of scenarios like this on Facebook and a number of other internet sites. The issue is not just about personal information being exposed, but about every word you have written. Facebook is a particular problem because of the friends of friends network-you can delete your account, but if you ever posted anything on someone else's wall, that will show up until they delete their own FB account.

Protest this on June 6 by NOT logging in.

Finals week.

It is finals week for Mandy-she just finished up a few hours ago. This means our reading has been scarce. Should pick up this weekend and we will post soon.

Margaret Atwood- True Trash

And so I begin, sitting on the couch I start reading the first story in Wilderness Tips and I realize this will be harder than I thought. The story is so incredibly rich-by the 16th page, I feel as if I have eaten too much dark chocolate- the really rich chocolate- not Hershey's but the  Lindt bittersweet bar  the one with the white and gold wrapper. The first time I ever had this particular chocolate was when I bought one from the Tivoli snack bar to watch during a movie. I don't remember the movie, but I still remember that candy bar. This story is like that, rife with sensory images that fill you like a home-style buffet.
       It is also hard to read in this setting-Charlie is splashing water and "singing" in the bathroom. Mandy and Peter are on computers here in the living room and David, next to me on the couch gives off his husband odor and is watching Ace Ventura. I try to block it out and this story makes it easy, but then David begins giggling (a rarity for him) and I have to look up. There it is, the image of someone's head sticking out of, is that a Rhino's ass? Yes, apparently it is. /groan.
     It's too windy to take the book outside, and too bright. The neighbors are in their back yard doing backyard things, its one of the few nice weekend days we have had this year, so motorcycles and bikes are present, lawns are being mowed. No, outside will not work. If I go into the bedroom, I am likely to fall asleep- I have become my mother that way. When I was younger I could stay up all night reading, but now, there is a Pavlovian reaction to laying down-eyelids burden me and I typically give up the weight.
   This is not an actual review of the story, of course. Just my own set up for the plot of the discussion when I finish and have had a chance to let the sugar rush fall to where I can tell you what I think feel. Right now, the story has made me mute with awe and I immediately understand why it was included. Great writing makes writers want to write. And so I just did.

Ads on this site

We will have ads on this site in the near future and the money received, if any, will go to purchasing books on the list that are not available at the city or university library. We will put a list up every now and then for books we are looking for and if you have a copy and care to donate it, we would love for you to send it postage due. We can return it when we finish.
We will also put a donate button on for paypal. Please don't be offended by this, all books in good condition will be donated to the Cedar Falls Public Library when we are finished. (Unless we really, really love it and want to keep it under our pillow for eternal inspiration.)

Mandy and Mom start the MFA reading list.

Today, Mandy and I went to the local library to begin the borrowing of some of the books on the massive reading list we are going to complete.
Actually, that is inaccurate as the list will never be completely complete.
This blog is designed as a reading journal, for the two of us to share our thoughts on books that are on what most MFA programs consider THE ESSENTIAL LIST.
Rather than a dry, academic review we hope to offer insight and debate on what makes these books interesting other than the fact that someone decided they were important and generations have followed suit.
We both are currently second semester Juniors majoring in English, However while Mandy is currently attending UNI, I stopped attending a few years ago and have yet to go back and finish my B.A. We are both writers, and Mandy will be applying to several MFA-Creative Writing programs next year- with the hopes of getting into the Iowa Writers Workshop.

We will try hard to refrain from snarkyness. It's really easy to fall into the internet trap of verbal bullying by condemning something that you dislike or do not understand, but nothing is universally disliked and to completely insult something that someone else may love is offensive and ignorant.

So, we hope you will follow us and help us by adding your own thoughts and suggestions. You can go ahead and be mean if you want, we won't edit the comments unless they violate a tort (i.e. libelous comments).
The list is pretty big, but will start with covering this: Gotham Writers' Workshop Reading List

This week, Mandy will be reading Sherman Alexie-The Toughest Indian in the World

She has been an Alexie fan since reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
 in 11th grade Honors American Lit.

I will start with Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood.

Have you read these? Let us know what stories you liked best.