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Missouri High School Principal Resigns After Posing As Student On Facebook
longacre writes "Suzy Harriston wanted to be friends on Facebook. The profile said she was from Clayton [Missouri] and had more than 300 friends, many of them from Clayton High School. No one seemed to question who Harriston was. That is, until the night of April 5, when a 2011 grad and former Clayton quarterback posted a public accusation. '"Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal," wrote Chase Haslett.' Suzy Harriston quickly disappeared from Facebook, and Louise Losos, the principal, subsequently took a leave of absence, and then resigned."
I know for a fact that stuff like this happened in my old high school in Missouri, but we didn't ever 100% prove it. Whenever the principal would find something that someone had posted on Facebook during school and punish them during the same day, it was pretty obvious.
She put the "Pal" i n principal!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Slow news day eh timothy?
...so calm down.
Could you at least read the summary, if not the article? The principal is Louise Losos, a woman.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I can't prove it, but students in my HS seemed to be punished almost *immediately* from certain FB postings, even postings made during school hours from cell phones, etc.
Either they had someone monitoring FB full time (doubtful), or there was a "trap" account disguised as a student that people friended by default believing the account was associated with a student at the school.
I would say this one is still an okay story to put on Slashdot compared to some of the other constantly anti-Apple stories ( really, have we all come to a consensus Apple is evil and others are not? and I am not an Apple fan either ) and the anti-TSA stuff (how many stories do we need of that? We all are in agreement about that one for sure). Why is this particular story interesting? IMHO , how bad is faking your identity online ? I mean did she solicit students for sex ? or was it just to know the current vibe among? Did she just wanna be a cool principal by knowing what goes on among her students ? I briefly read the above article about the whole PE teacher thing. I dont know. Has no one used a fake name in real life ever? Does Facebook have a policy that you cannot lie about your age to underage kids ? I think it raises some interesting questions about online identities. I mean what if she was friends with some kid in the school and she got that kid to give her the username/password of their fb account (hypothetically speaking) and just looked at all her friends profiles and walls etc. Wouldn't that be similar to this?
When I was on Facebook, I didn't friend anyone unless I actually *knew* the person. If you friend someone on Facebook just because they friended you and you want a really big number of friends, well... the joke is probably on you.
I'm not sure who or what the persons are who do this, but as someone with around 300 Facebook friends, I've received at least 5 friend requests from dummy profiles (fake name, fake profile pic, awfully "sterile" personal info) with an oddly high number of mutual friends. I doubt it was any of our teachers as they use their real profiles and friended us if they wished to, including our principal. Could it be some sort of a bot for harvesting personal information that would otherwise be inaccessible to non-friends, or just a stalker from within my/my friends' social circle who's trying to remain anonyous?
If "Suzy Harriston" was indeed a fake profile created by Losos, then she violated a recent Missouri law which went into effect this year which bans teachers from friending students. What's worse, the school district seems to be covering up any attempt to find out if that's the reason why she resigned.
if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
It actually makes sense to use "them" in this case, because the gender is, in fact, not known. All that is known is the "gender" of the nom de plume, which is inherently suspect. The gender of the author is unknown, thus a gender-neutral pronoun is appropriate.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
It grates badly enough on old ears to hear "they" and "them" be used for singular
Only if you're a moron. The practice dates back to at least Chaucer, presumably earlier since it's unlikely he invented it. 'They' has been the gender neutral singular since Middle English. It's a lot older than you are, so I can only conclude that it grates on your ears because you never read any proper literature in the English language (like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or George Bernard Shaw). The idea that it shouldn't be the gender neutral singular is a fabrication of 19th century assholes. Don't be like them.
Ms. Bock did more than just puff up a story - there was the fact-checking of school records to see if there was such a student, as well as a search of public records for ANYONE with that name. That's more than what passes for "reporting" on Faux News.
She also put it into the greater context of the on-going school board problems.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
...to accept a friend request from someone they've never heard of? Is this why all the kids have 600 FB friends despite their actually pretty limited social circles?
Everything different grates on someone's old ears; forgive me, but I don't really care. If your only objection to something is no more than a vague distaste, you should at least keep your opinion to yourself and not try forcing it on others. Either have a good reason to dislike something or stay out of it.
I haven't heard a single substantive argument for barring singular "they" and "them"--calling their use "incorrect" or "ungrammatical" is not sufficient. On the other hand, there are a number of good reasons to allow this usage: it fills a genuinely useful niche in language, it avoids the subtly sexist gender-neutral "he", and most English speakers use it in everyday life already.
Informative grammar Nerd crushes grammar Nazi like a grape, win-win!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well given a teacher at a school in X area likely taught most adults in X area it hardly seems fair to forbid teachers from entering into relationships with adults that happen to have been taught by them at some point. Such limitations would severely limit the pool of available partners.
Perhaps in my naivety I'm too quick to discard the possibility that they had really married people that were still students at the time and that this somehow wasn't common knowledge. My apologies if this is the case.
Hi, posting AC 'cuz im lazy.
I went to school with this woman, her older sister was in my class and IIRC they both went to Harvard. My point in saying that is that I'd always had the impression that these were smart ladies. Certainly older sister is, I believe she is a scientist of some sort now. I really don't keep up with people from high school.
We went to a public high school in a nice part of St. Louis, Louise went back after college and taught there for 8 years apparently.
If you google her name you will see her LinkedIn page pop up. You can see she has an extensive background getting her degrees, including a Ph.D.
She is plenty smart to know better than to spy on the students. If she just had to know what was going on in her school, she should have actually taken the time to get to know people and talk to them. To me this is only common sense.
No telling what happened to that in her 25 years of education/work since she left high school. People change, but I dont see where it is right to spy on kids on Facebook. As a matter of fact, I find it rather nosy and a bit creepy.
Clayton, Mo. is a wealthy city just immediately west of the city of St. Louis itself, so they will do everything to cover this one up and pretend it never happened.
Why do you feel it needs fighting? I really don't think it's critically important to communicate gender with every use of a pronoun.
I'm not just an old curmudgeon who resists changes because they're changes. When they make the language more precise, I'm all for them. But when a change makes the language less precise, I will fight it.
I think fighting "singular they" is important because it isn't just using a gender neutral singular, but a plural. This causes ambiguity and misunderstandings.
Let me give an example:
"The gang members were restless and their leader was high on drugs."
Whether the next sentence is "Later that afternoon, he killed Mrs. Jones" or "Later that afternoon, they killed Mrs. Jones" makes a big difference.
We don't have a "proper" gender-neutral singular pronoun, so we use "they" and "them" instead.
We have several. We can use "it" about children and animals, even when the gender is known. Then there is "one", which admittedly has a limited use, but it still is not use nearly as often as it could be, and at least the plurality isn't in doubt.
And "he/him" does double duty as both the male pronoun and the unspecified gender pronoun. No, it's not perfect, and I wish we had a common gender pronoun, but it's still better than using a word that's even more burdened: What we don't have in English are gender specific pronouns for plural. "They/them" does triple duty already. Don't overburden it with singular too. It isn't equipped for the job.
That the reflective pronoun for "human" is "he" isn't sexism, any more than the reflective pronoun for the Swedish "människa" (human) is "hon" (she).