Social Networking

In this blog I have writen some facts about social networking sites. It is up to you to refute these facts or agree with them if you like.

Social networking sites entice people to spend more time online and less time interacting face-to-face. The sites offer many time wasting activities that supplant more productive activities. Teens spend an average of nine hours per week on social networking sites.

Teens growing up with these sites may not be aware that the information they post is public and that photos and text can be retrieved even after deletion. Consequences from over-sharing personal information include vulnerability to sexual or financial predators and lost job opportunities from employers finding embarrassing photos or comments.

Social networking sites make cyberbullying, a type of bullying that occurs online, easier and more public than bullying through other online activities such as email and instant messaging.

Social networking sites were created to make money, not to improve peoples' lives. These websites use networks of online friends to accumulate data about people for the purpose of selling advertising. The sites place cookies on the users' computers, gather information, and track interests to show personalized ads. These advertising practices may constitute an invasion of privacy.

Why You Think I Am Not Funny.

I have been accused during my years of teaching of not laughing a lot. I have even been accused of being too serious or not being funny. To this I usually respond with a "hmm" while making a straight face like the emoticon to the right. I have sat and thought about this on a number of occasions because the revelation that I am not funny is not one that I hear often from my peers. In fact it is quite the opposite. I have been told by people around me that I am quite hilarious and have also been told to take many things more seriously. So I was puzzled. Which of the two was it. Am I utterly unfunny or am I hilarious. In searching for the truth I have come to a startling conclusion, an epiphany if you will. I am as my peers have judged me. I am utterly hilarious. I have evidence to back this up by random posters on my wife's facebook page. So how is it then that my students sometimes find my to be too serious. I have come to the conclusion that they are not funny. Not that they are too serious mind you, but they are not at all funny to me. I have come up with a hypothesis called the underdeveloped sense of humor. My sense of humor derives from knowing things about thing. A quip about a phrase or a reference to a past experience can have me smiling or even laughing. My sense of humor has developed with my knowledge. I know why the phrase "He eats less than Ghandi" is humorous. My students on the other hand have an underdeveloped sense of humor. They do not know or have past experiences enough to create their humor from collected human knowledge. Therefore; my students have mistaken their inability to understand my sense of humor with me being too serious and have confused my non-funniness with their own. My students underdeveloped humor makes them revert to other forms of comedies. Mostly stink jokes or worse confusing being rude to being funny, which is sometimes the case. That is why they call that type of humor sophomoric. Because it lacks refinement that some older students and some adults have developed.

Cell Phones in School.

I do not feel that it is necessary for students to carry cell phones during school hours. I feel it should be discouraged and any student caught carrying a cell phone should meet a stricter punishment than simply getting the phone taken away. Reasons why I believe this.

One - The student has reasonable access to communication tools and does not need to provide their own.

Second - Students are so good at texting today that they are able to do it without looking at the keyboard. This is a problem because while they are skilled at texting without looking they are not as skilled at texting while listening to a lecture or an assignment.

Third - I may be going out on a limb. I feel that texting has hurt students ability to write. Grammatically students are struggling to OMG proportions and it is not something that we should LOL about.

Fourth - Rude and disrespectful behavior. It is a difficult task to ask a number of students to learn something. It is even more difficult to get all students to learn and monitor phone use. Not to mention that it is disrespectful to the teacher and to the students who are trying to get something out of class.


I am not against phone use in general. I believe that students who are lucky enough to be give a phone should have a right to use that phone. I am only for students practicing a phone etiquette and keeping them out as distractions to a learning environment.

I believe that the only way to make this happen is to impose stricter penalties for those who are caught with phones because right now the confiscation technique is not working.