Boundaries Aren't Based on Good Intentions — They Exist Because We Need Them

Let's talk about the boundary issues at stake in the case of the young male teacher who had students take his hair down toward the end of the school day and recently got fired.

I just watched the original video in which he livestreamed this happening and watched his reaction video in which he's reading.

supportive notes from students after he got fired.

And I think there are some things that go beyond the individual that we need to talk about to understand why exactly this happened the way it did.

See, when it comes to student welfare, when it comes to student privacy, when it comes to all the things that we're responsible for safeguarding as educators, All of those concerns trump our individual intentions, right?

And he talks a lot in his post-firing video about how his intentions are so good.

And I don't have any reason not to believe that, but we don't make boundaries in education based on individual intentions.

And it might be helpful, especially for young attractive people, to think not of themselves, but like picture a creepy person who looks very different from themselves.

Like picture maybe like a George Costanza person doing the same thing and ask yourself like would i be comfortable with my kid in that situation or would i assume that something inappropriate was going on because it doesn't matter we can't know what the individual's intentions are hopefully they're good statistically we know that that is not always the case so we have things that are put in place that I call procedural safety.

You know, we talked about procedural safety in terms of student discipline, where we can't prevent bad things from happening, but we can respond in predictable ways.

And when it comes to behaviors from educators that might be problematic, we're not sure, we act as if we're prepared for the worst, right?

Like we put procedures in place, we put boundaries in place so that we don't get into a situation where we made the wrong judgment call about a person's intentions.

Because again, we can't know someone's intentions.

So we have to just imagine how something would look not to the people who like us the most, to people who know our intentions and think positively about us, we have to think about the least charitable kind of worst case interpretations of our behavior.

And I think that's why the district in this case was put in a position of being judged by, you know, external stakeholders who are not sympathetic, maybe, you know, people, maybe anonymous people on the internet, frankly, But there was this perception that the district had not done enough to safeguard students.

And I like the British term safeguarding.

We don't have a quite comparable term in the United States for putting procedures in place to make sure that we're never in a situation where we have to depend on an individual just doing the right thing and us having to trust them.

We just have to not be in this situation where students are touching teachers, where students are being live streamed, regardless of the individual's intentions, As public school districts or educators in any capacity, we can't be in a position where we're doing those things because we cannot guarantee students' procedural safety there.

And this could be part of something nefarious that's happening.

We don't know.

We can't know.

We don't have any reason to suspect.

But because that is a possibility, we simply don't do that type of thing.

And I think seeing the teacher's response and kind of shock at this, it's clear to me that he thought that he would be judged based on his intentions.

And that's not how this works in the profession.

That's not how this kind of thing has to be judged.

We have to be prepared for something that is not the best to happen.

So when strangers see a video of you calling middle school girls out of class and having them touch your head and take your hair down and have it be live streamed, like you have to know that some of them are not going to assume the best about you.

And I think that's kind of where this situation went wrong.

But there's a lot to it.

Let me know what you think.