Controversial opinion maybe but I think it should be illegal or at least a fireble offense for teachers, especially in elementary schools/kindergartens/daycares, to record their students to post videos on their personal tiktoks or youtube channels or whatever. It's horrible how so much of the world has been turned into content by people who either don't understand or don't care about things like privacy and safety, but I do think it's pretty evil for people to take advantage of the children under their care to make content off of them.
Teachers posting videos of themselves getting the classroom ready or talking about things like lack of funding in classrooms or the ways children are left behind or neglected by the system or even just talking about their daily routine as a teacher? Cool, a great way to show the realities of teaching and start discussions about the issues in the school system.
Teachers making videos during class, recording the kids, or talking about personal information regarding their students, coworkers, or the families of students, often without consent? Genuinely what the fuck is wrong with society.
To people in my notes: this is a new enough issue that whether it's a fireable offense is still left up to individual school districts and in a lot of cases, teachers who get fired for it are usually fired because of other social media policies or because of more explicitly inappropriate behavior with students, not just for posting their students on social media without consent.
If you see a teacher making tiktoks/instagram reels/youtube videos/etc with their students' faces and/or names, especially very young kids who would absolutely not be able to give informed consent, please report them to the school district's HR or the school board if possible. It can seem like an extreme reaction, but these are children being exposed to millions of strangers online, either without their knowledge or without a full understanding of what that means, by an adult who should be protecting them instead of exploiting them for views.
And frankly, most of the high school teachers who post videos with their students throw up A LOT of red flags with their behaviors. Even if the students consent to the videos, the way they and the teachers interact and the way the teachers behave in general tend to be very worrying.
I swear I remember when the telly would come to our school or youth clubs or whatever and we would get strict instructions to not look at the camera, and to always put our back to it - then when whatever the segment was (Local news doing something about failing schools, fluff piece about kids learning obscure old skills) it would feature loads of footage that gave you a sense of the place and the number of kids, but it would all be just backs-of-heads, massed voices that no individual could be picked out of, shots of just legs or just hands etc.
We should have kept that standard.
