As is usual this time of year, I’m dealing with a trying student.  Yesterday, as a cathartic measure, I prepared a post in which I collated our email exchange since the beginning of the semester.  If you are not me, this exchange is no doubt extremely entertaining.  (If you are me, you spent most of yesterday meditating because it’s the only thing that prevented you from wrecking stuff and cursing constantly.)

However, this morning, I’m finding myself reluctant to publish it.

When this blog was being read by only a handful of friends and colleagues and the occasional visitor, I felt fine about posting stories about students, including almost word-for-word dialogue and emails.  I was taking plenty of steps to protect my students’ privacy, including the following:

• My real name doesn’t appear anywhere on this blog, and I’ve taken strict measures to prevent my real name and my blogonym from being connected to each other anywhere on the internet.
• I never mention the name of my college.
• I change all names and identifying features of any students I mention.
• Although plenty of my friends and colleagues know that I’m the blog’s author, it’s highly unlikely that they would recognize students in any of my stories.  My college is large – even if we’re teaching the same person at the same time, there’s usually no way for a teacher to know that this person is the one I’m referring to in a post.
• The only people who are likely to recognize a student in a post are a) the student him/herself, or b) other students in the class, if the post describes an event that happens in the classroom.  For this reason, I’ve tried very  hard not to let my students know that I keep this blog, and so far, I think I’ve been successful.  There have been times that it would have been valuable for me to share it with them, but I never have.

Given all of the above, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this matter.  Is it okay for a teacher to tell true, detailed stories about interactions with students if no one is likely to ever know who the students are?  What about publishing emails from students – are these confidential?  (I believe the law concerning letters is that the recipient is the owner.  Is this true for emails?)  Is there a difference between reproducing a brief email and a long exchange?

As this blog gains more exposure, I’ve been trying to be more prudent.  But telling true stories is helpful to me, and seems to be helpful to readers as well.  I miss it.

What’s a teacher blogger to do?

Image by Richard Dudley