Choice Blog

Neil Patrick: Social media adds to teacher's burden

Overworked teachers are now facing an added burden as they are now reachable by parents through social media. I'd guess most of the messages they receive are constructive, pleas from mums and dads trying to give their children the best that school can offer. Some are less pleasant, however, expressing outrage and anger about some injustice or other.

Disturbing as this must be for teachers, it;s far less upsetting than what was known in my boyhood as "going up to school".

As a pupil in a pretty rough secondary school, there were times when we heard mutterings about parents being ushered out of the headmaster's office, or some poor teacher being confronted by the beefy form of a fuming father telling him to "lay off our lad," or similar.

What was even more common, back then, though, were instances of parents, hearing form their offspring of some supposed injustice inflicted by teachers, saying: "I'm sure you must have deserved it."