A School Administrator Corrected a Student's Spelling on Twitter. She Was Fired.
Feelings over facts.
It would be difficult to find a better example of everything that's wrong with education in America: a Maryland public school fired the woman who ran its Twitter account because she corrected a student's spelling.
The student, "Nathan," tweeted "Close school tammarow PLEASE" at Frederick County Public Schools. Katie Nash, the district's social media director, replied "but then how would you learn to spell 'tomorrow'? :)" from the FCPS account.
District officials were not pleased. First, they instructed Nash to stop tweeting. Then they called her into a meeting and abruptly fired her, according to The Frederick News-Post:
As a new employee, I think I sort of would have expected that there would have been some counseling or some suggestions on how to improve," she said.
Nash said there was never a conversation about what the tone of the account was to be.
"Any social media manager is looking for increasing engagement, and that's sort of the expected parameter," she said. "I think a conversation about how we engage with students would have been completely appropriate and I would have welcomed that."
To summarize: an educational institution fired an employee for using creative means to educate a student via a medium the student might actually understand.
Nathan was not offended by Nash's tweet, by the way—although it shouldn't have mattered if he was. You're never too young to learn that Twitter is public, and that tomorrow is spelled t-o-m-o-r-r-o-w.
If there's a better example of the triumph of feelings over facts in modern education, I have yet to see it.
