Jamestown ES

[Anonymous]

My final comment is this: labeling input "useful" is like labeling oneself "classy." It suffices for the reader to conclude it, and is not likely a statement of fact if you have to append the label yourself.

Hopefully, with your feeble and failed attempts at bullying and silencing, not to mention the juvenile resort to profanity, you are not representative of the parent population chez Jamestown, but time will tell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My final comment is this: labeling input "useful" is like labeling oneself "classy." It suffices for the reader to conclude it, and is not likely a statement of fact if you have to append the label yourself.

Hopefully, with your feeble and failed attempts at bullying and silencing, not to mention the juvenile resort to profanity, you are not representative of the parent population chez Jamestown, but time will tell.

*Sigh*. You appear to be more miffed at being called out for doing something that can be toxic to a school environment and (gasp!) that the PP has used profanity than moved by the valid point that the PP made in objecting to solicitation of reviews of individual teachers.

It matters not whether the PP is a Jamestown teacher or a Jamestown parent or a teacher or parent of any particular school in Arlington or elsewhere. The point is more universal than that. Online anonymous reviews of teachers are toxic to a school community. If you are engaging in solicitation of such reviews at your child's school, you are hurting your child's school community. Stop it.

Negative comments on the internet live forever and can haunt a teacher forever, destroying morale and making a teacher distrust all of the parents of her children. It's like walking into a dark room and getting punched in the face, then turning the lights on and seeing everyone smiling at you. You have no idea where the punch came from, so you have to distrust everyone.

Positive reviews online can also have a detrimental effect. If a teacher is praised online for something that she is doing that she learned from another teacher, she can feel briefly gratified by the compliment but may then feel embarrassed or guilty that the other teacher is not credited for the idea or practice. When teachers start competing for such online kudos, they are less likely to share their good ideas with each other. They begin to feel resentful of other teachers who cater more toward parent approval and less toward collaboration or what's best for the kids. In a profession where teachers are not rewarded by sources of external motivation such as quarterly bonuses, being perceived as the best teacher on a team or knowing that parents are requesting you as a teacher can be very seductive and appealing, but it can also distract a teacher from what is most important, what is best for kids.

Either way, no good comes of anonymous online reviews. The information that one parent can receive about one good teacher over another is not necessarily accurate, but even if it were accurate, it is not worth the overall very detrimental cost to a teaching team.

[Anonymous]

Not the OP, but I get his/her point about the profanity. File it under the heading of "civil discourse." If posters aren't able to communicate at a level beyond the jr. high playground exchanges, they shouldn't be expecting people to stick around for the lecture.

It also appears that other posters saw the OP's request as valid, and thus responded to the extent they felt comfortable. So the objections, while noted, were one person's opinion, not fact, and not more or less valid than the OP's question. Life would be a lot less dramatic in these chat rooms if posters exercised the level of self control they do in real life ... Unfortunately, DCUM is often anonymity run amok.