she feels compelled to come across as a bimbo instead of intelligent

I don't know how to begin with that part. She thinks she's just expressing herself honestly. But she isn't. She expressing what she thinks is sexy and edgy to other people. However, most of the equally dumbass-sounding friends on her wall have been congratulating her on her last academic success. So they all seem to know that she's bright, academically.

I'm speaking for myself. I wouldn't want my teen journals (god, can't yet bear to read them) or interactions public when I applied for college. Nor most of the angst of the years leading up to getting my first job. Hell, I wish I'd kept the next decade more private. I won't retract any of it, I'll own up, but. I left a lot more out than I see my teen sharing.

Allyson, I am having clarity issues. Wanting to put up a front of edginess based on sex and drugs is something I see way too often with my students, so I guess I meant the bimbo comment as what I see with them.

It kills me that I'll have NHS students and AP students, mostly girls, trying to create an image of rampant sexuality and drug abuse as a way to take the "stink" of academic achievement off of them.

And I am sure I was guilty of it too in high school: look! I can be a valedictorian AND promiscuous! But now it always makes me sad.

I am VERY GLAD that social media wasn't around in college. Not because I think I would have been posting pictures of me flashing my tits, but I certainly did a lot of crazy, illegal shit BITD, and there were sometimes a lot of people around.

Camera phones, Twitter, FB...shudder.

And Kat, I get your point. I really do. But I was teaching at a school with a huge gang population, not wanna-bes, but the real deal, and students would show me their MySpace page -- do you want to see my dog or my new baby sister? Sure, yes! -- and they would log in, and their profile pic is them and a bunch of kids I recognize, standing around with Bacardi bottles,, blunts and AK's and handguns.

This is NOT every student, I know, but it was still...worrisome, in so many way.

After happening twice, I was like, sorry, you can show me a camera phone shot of your dog or sister, but you can't show me shit on MySpace, because I am a mandated reporter, and plus, I don't want that shit on my teacher computer.

This was when MySpace was the thing.

But, sara, would you have made your journals public at the time? Probably not. I think expectations around privacy are mutable and we are currently in the process of changing.

Also interesting data.... I did the synthesis project with a group of kids primarily from wealthy-ish westside high schools and uniformly that group said, Sure you can judge people based on what's online so it's okay for institutions to do it. My current students with less social capital all find it appalling that institutions would use public forum info to make decisions.

There's an interesting class difference there.

Did college have a chilling effect on that? It did for me.

Oh, yeah, Kat.

What that says about the importance of keeping up appearances, upholding your position, keeping things on lockdown in a certain financial bracket...

I keep calling her my niece, she's my cousin.

I do this to my two younger boy cousins. They're younger than me. They seem like nephews, not cousins.

I am so glad I wasn't on the internet as a teen. So much drama and angst and ~~drama~~.

My cousin's father is functionally illiterate (this is not an exaggeration, he's severely dyslexic and has never read an actual book) and her mother has drifted in and out of rehab for most of K's life. She's in a lower working class demo, in a pretty poor area. There are no books in her house that don't belong to her, and never have been.

She succeeds academically in spite of it all. But the life stuff? It's making my heart hurt. And I hope it gets better when she goes to college and experiences life with different humans who don't value anti-intellectualism.

Erin, I'm not saying that what they are posting is appropriate or that I want to see it (and because I'm mean and intolerant of stupid teacher, no one ever wants to show me pictures of their dog, or their latest ultrasound or the baby they had last summer). It's just that I think fears of what college officers might think about what's online are grossly overrated.