The “right distance” on social networks between teachers and students

This article is published in number 18 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 3, 2022

There is a rule and there are exceptions, Bertolt Brecht warned in a well-known drama. Recently, the National Association of Headmasters of Lazio proposed to regulate communications between teachers, students and parents by limiting the use of social networks and WhatsApp. The PNA proposal causes discussion, because in the school the rules are important, but the exceptions are often even more so.
The most obvious exception in recent years has been the pandemic, which has forced us to rethink practices established for decades in a matter of days. Physical distance has inaugurated new forms of communication and, especially in the first months of the lockdown, any means have been good to meet with one’s pupils, to dig a crack in the silence of dialogue. In those dramatic days, chats, videoconferences and groups became a place for sharing and sharing
exchange, in short: the continuation of the class by other means.

And then there is the rule, which suggests to us – rightly, in my opinion – that the relationships between those who teach and those who learn should be limited to what happens in the classroom, to “public” communication,
not private. But what can be the rule in a world increasingly dominated by the syntax of
short and immediate message, from the grammar of the gray check and the blue check, of the “view but do not answer”? If it is true that the medium is the message, as McLuhan already theorized
in the 1960s, it is right that communications between teachers, students and parents should also respond to
logic of constant availability, of the informal abbreviation, of the emoticon? Or is it necessary that they follow other more official and codified paths? In other words, use
of a means of communication created to chat with friends (but today more and more cleared through customs also in the workplace) does not risk confusing the plans of dialogue and relationships? Thanks to WhatsApp, the step between a “hello teacher” and a “tvb” followed by countless hearts is short. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it can generate misunderstandings on the level of
relationship between students and teachers that is not (only) emotional, but “professional”. \

As a teacher, I was hired to get my pupils to learn things,
not to pet them and give them advice as a friend, because the relationship between teacher and pupils
it is necessarily asymmetrical, unequal, unbalanced. And the teacher’s task is also to teach how to use words and communication codes in the right context, and to understand when and with whom to relate with messages and hearts. Personally, since I have been
when I became a teacher, I gave myself the rule of not accepting friend requests on my social profiles from my students and, before Covid, I had never given my phone number, except for emergency communications. But how do you know what an emergency is? A student who writes to you because he is in a difficult time? An anxious parent asking for explanations for a bad grade? The heartfelt request by the class to postpone the Latin test? Here, once the rule is established, exceptions arise immediately, and then perhaps the only rule to follow is that of the “right distance” between us professors and our students and their families. That distance that leaves everyone his role and his task. Nothing personal, in short.

Viola Ardone, teaches Latin and Italian in high school. For Einaudi you published the case
editorial The train of children (2019) and Oliva Denaro (2021).

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