I'm a member of NEA, the National Education Association, and they send me a monthly magazine called NEA Today. This month's issue has an article called "The Whole World (Wide Web) is Watching," and it's about the possibility of losing your job because of what you post online - on your MySpace, Facebook, blog, personal website, whatever.
One of my college professors warned us about MySpace and similar sites - as a teacher, you really shouldn't have one, unless it's totally private, because students can and will find it and exploit the content if it's made available to them, and it can get you in trouble if you're posting pictures of yourself and other content that is inappropriate.
But along with MySpace, etc., the article also mentioned a band director who was fired because of his blog, which included "musings about sex, drugs, and depression" and an English teacher who lost her job after "composing and posting sexually explicit poetry" on her site. The latter especially made me think of fanfic and the sexually explicit material some of us write and post in our stories.
We think of fanfic as a harmless hobby, in most cases one that is personal and maybe even private to us - I know that I would never let my family read any of my fanfics, and my "real life" friends don't even know I write. But what if a colleague or a boss or, in the case of teachers, a student or parent somehow stumbled onto them?
Reading this article made me really glad I don't write under my own name. When I started posting my fanfics online, I was like 14, and I made up a pen name mostly to keep my friends from finding out, since they were Bsb fans at the time and I had kinda turned them on to fanfic. I was also just leary about weirdos online getting my personal info. I could never have thought ahead eight years to when I was a teacher... truthfully, I probably never thought I'd still be writing Backstreet Boys fanfic in my twenties LOL. But now I'm doubly glad I made that decision.
So a warning for those who do write under their own names... just be careful what you post that can be traced back to your name. I've heard that a lot of employers Google their employees' or potential employees' names, or look for them on MySpace, etc. You probably don't want your name to come up attached to some NC-17 story you wrote any more than you want them finding drunken, half-naked pictures of you on MySpace. Pen names are a good thing.
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Topic: Warning for teachers and other professionals... (Read 7781 times)