"'Another gem'" UPDATED

Do your teach (at any level)? Do your friends teach? If so, half of your Facebook feed probably consists of anecdotes from class, cute snippets of kids' assignments, and examples of the more entitled emails sent by college students. The students in question are rarely (never, in my experience) named or readily identifiable, but it always struck me as iffy to share this type of info at all. On the one hand, the stories can be comforting to fellow teachers, the threads useful forums for advice, and yes, all of it can be immensely entertaining. On the other, students will find it. If you're in the class, certainly if you're the kid in question, you'll know.

So my inclination had always been to keep this sort of thing (and anything even quasi-confidential - I don't understand or trust the privacy settings, making me something of a paranoid curmudgeon, but anyway) offline. And then official policy in my department became that one could not share such stuff on Facebook, which struck me as reasonable. Everyone's qualms are different (and mine, given my feelings on parental overshare, are probably higher than most), so it's best if institutions have a policy.

On that note: An admissions officer at Penn just lost her job, seemingly over having made fun of parts of applicants' essays on Facebook. It's unclear what Penn's policy/her division's policy was on this, but it seems like the employee may not have seen these excerpts as breaching confidentiality, if the kids' names were not provided, and if the kids were not really identifiable. As much as I see this as problematic, it's not obvious everyone would (again, given the ample Facebook-newsfeed evidence), so yes, there need to be policies, clear ones, because common sense doesn't cover it.

UPDATE

And now, the second Facebook professional overshare of the day, this one also, strangely, related to circumcision. Lest you think discussion of male genitalia and its surgical modification is some facet of our modern TMI society, let me just say that a lot of the 19th C material I've had to go through for my dissertation involves matter-of-fact references to men getting circumcised, or references to them being or not being thus. To be circumcised (in this context) meant to be Jewish; when a non-Jewish man became Jewish, what would have to happen was not necessarily just alluded to.