TOP 10 RULES
The rules are divided into “do’s” and “don’ts.” Here are the 1st 3
NETIQUETTE DO’S:
1. USE APPROPRIATE PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE: Avoid smiley faces and other “social” symbols (save them for Facebook), Web jargon, unfamiliar abbreviations, and any offensive language, such as sarcasm, profanity, vulgarity, and sexual innuendo. Your writing should be that of a professional, not a buddy on a social network. If Google detects your use of “blue material,” your Website, blog, or other network may be demoted in the search engine ranks. This rule also applies to jokes.
2. USE PROPER GRAMMAR AND SPELLING: Chek adn thowroughlee pruf-reed alll mesags. Use SPELCHEK! Don’t hurry to hit the send button. This applies when you e-mail, tweet, text, blog, face, goog, wik, or some other 3–5 letter communication. Although, we are all our own worst proofreaders, try to let your message sit for a while, at least a minute or 2, but a day is best. Seeing it again totally cold often makes the errors jump off the screen. Wait for this jumping. Your writing ability and the care with which you produce any written product will be reflected in your messages and blogs. Your communications also reflect on the institution that hired you. Send only your best work into cyberspace. Anything less may come back to bite YOU in your butt-tocks.
3. BE HONEST AND TRUTHFUL: Don’t even think about it. If you lie or even streeetch the truth in what you communicate, especially your online profiles on your Website, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks that display your credentials, your career will hang in the balance. Be truthful in everything you say. Professional credibility is almost impossible to regain once it’s lost. Who will believe you?
If you use humor in your writing, as I do frequently, make sure your readers know you’re joking. Most professors and students, in particular, interpret everything they read seriously, unless they are familiar with the source as a jokester. Also, be careful with the types of humor you use. Self-effacing jokes are usually the safest.
This list continues in my next blog with 3 more do’s related to copyright, signature lines, and timely responses. Stay tuned.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
THE 7 HABITS
This series has addressed the following categories of offensive material:
1. PUT-DOWNS
2. SARCASM
3. RIDICULE
4. SEXUAL CONTENT AND INNUENDO
5. PROFANITY
6. VULGARITY
7. SENSITIVE PERSONAL ISSUES AND TRAGEDIES
There’s been a lot of reaction to these topics on the LinkedIn higher education groups. Since most professionals do not systematically consider these categories and the consequences of offending people in their daily conduct in the classroom or workplace, I hope that some of the content, examples, and guidelines in my blogs and the healthy discussion of these topics will generate some thought on WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE.
The consequences of disregarding my OFFENSIVE ALERT can be devastating to your students and your co-workers. Remember: This is all about them, not you.
If you are serious about making this work, you need to consider a pre-emptive strike to set standards everyone can accept before you or your students offend someone.
SHOULD YOU MIRANDIZE YOUR STUDENTS OR CO-WORKERS?
This blog level one head conjures up the mental image of a Shawshankian line-up of our students or co-workers facing a wall, with their hands up and feet spread, as they’re read their rights on what offensive content is out-of-bounds in the classroom or workplace. While some you may be drooling at the idea of executing such a sweep, I don’t recommend it for two reasons:
1. It may be difficult to find a clear wall long enough without pictures of dead past deans or college presidents on it.
2. That’s probably not the best approach to get these people to buy in to these rules of behavior or conduct for their learning or work environment.
The final blog in this series will proffer specific guidelines for executing a pre-emptive strike against offensive material in your classroom and workplace. It’s almost over.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
What better way to start off the week on Easter Monday then blog on profanity and vulgarity with a sarcastic rhetorical question? Talk about blogger’s license! Instead of an Easter Egg Hunt, we’re going on an Expletive Hunt. However, before we start bleeping out bad words, there is one additional bad news thought I want to add on the previous sexually explicit topic.
SEXUAL CONTENT AND INNUENDO (Addendum)
One addition to my previous blog is sexting, a combination of “sex” and “texting,” I think. Downloading and texting sexually explicit material from the Internet at large, YouTube, and personal videos in class or in the workplace presents another new set of problems. If it’s out there to abuse, the technology enables evil minds to find it and disseminate it. Stop it before it starts if it’s within your power to do so.
PROFANITY
You hear expletives just about everywhere. What the “&!%#” is going on? It’s pervasive in our culture and workplace. There are no boundaries or profanity ceiling. In water-cooler jokes and conversations with students and colleagues, usually their first or second sentence or fragment will set the profanity tone for the dialogue, hopefully not the barrage of filthy, Tarantino-type language. (NOTE: Quinton Tarantino’s Motto—“No Profanity Left Behind.”)
EXAMPLES: This "blue material" appears in all forms of media. What used to be considered the language of police officers, soldiers, athletes, and stand-up comedians is now used regularly by most comedians, foulmouthed TV cops and perpetrators (Law & Order: SVU, CSI: NY, NCIS, The Closer, Reno 911!), lawyers (The Good Wife), doctors (House, Grey’s Anatomy), and school kids (South Park). Movies rated PG-13 and worse are larded with gratuitous profanity. YouTube videos run the gamut.
LEVEL OF DISCOURSE: This coarsening of media in our culture suggests that nothing is sacrosanct. However, despite the increasing frequency of profane language around us, its use in the classroom is unnecessary and inappropriate. It cannot be bleeped out of your lecture or conversation with students. Whenever it occurs, its crudity debases the level of discourse and the “discourser.”
Please consider what you say and how you say it. Your students are always listening. Be creative in your use of our language and stretch your vocabulary, and, maybe even, encourage your students to do the same. Consider the plethora of unusual words you can use to express your elation or discontent. Don’t stoop to the lowest common denominator.
Next up is vulgarity. We’re coming to the end of this series on offensive humor and media. WHEW!
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
SEXUAL CONTENT AND INNUENDO
Sometimes our thoughts just travel down this road naturally. That’s what evil minds do. For many of you, these naughty trips may be more frequent than for others. They can be stimulated by the bombardment of media that permeates so much of what we see, hear, and do or over-advertised medications you may be taking. Our students are exposed to these same stimuli.
MEDIA BOMBARDMENT: This topic is the core of many stand-up routines by comedians who appear on HBO, Showtime specials, and Comedy Central. It is also the primary vehicle for many popular TV shows, such as Desperate Housewives, Private Practice, Cougar Town, Nip & Tuck, and Reno 911!, the syndicated Boston Legal and Sex and the City, a large proportion of R rated movies, and a bazillion YouTube videos.
CLASSROOM BOUNDARIES: Regardless of the gender composition of your class, sexual humor is out of bounds. Be sensitive to sexual comments and innuendo in the music and video clips you select to illustrate various types of content. It is up to you to place blocks on sexually-based material in any jokes, references, or media.
Try not to even think about it as you are lecturing. Move rapidly over anything suggestive. Students’ comments on what you say can get out of control very quickly. They take their cues from the way you handle everything in class, especially edgy issues. (Note: These guidelines do not apply in the same way to those of you who teach courses on human or rodent sexuality. You have even more problems to address.)
As the beloved Sgt. Phil Esterhaus of the classic TV series Hill Street Blues said every morning at the end of his precinct briefing of his police officers: “Let’s be careful out there!”
WORKPLACE BOUNDARIES: Read my letters: S E X U A L H A R A S S M E N T!! If adulterous, evil political, sports, and entertainment celebrities are your role models, get clinical help. Unless you want to be reprimanded, fired, sued, shot, or worse, don’t even think about it in jest with co-workers in your department—at meetings, at retreats, in training, in the elevator, at the water-cooler, in the storage closet, or in business travel or conferences. (ALERT: If you're not sure how to get in BIG trouble in these venues, watch reruns of Boston Legal.)
My next blog moves into the “locker room,” so to speak, with the use of profanity and vulgarity in the classroom and workplace. I know this is a topic near and dear to the hearts of a few of you who may see nothing wrong with that language on the job. You can dig your tongues in, but please remember that this blog material is not about you or me; it’s about your students and co-workers and the effects it can have on their learning and productivity, respectively. At least, think about it.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
IMPACT ON STUDENTS (continued)
My previous blog listed 6 possible negative effects of offending any student in your class. So what’s the impact?
DISCONNECT: Does the word disconnect come to mind? It should. It's the paragraph head. Those emotional effects can squash a student’s motivation and spirit. More importantly, a single offensive comment can irreparably damage your relationships with those offended students. If collaborative learning activities are an integral part of your teaching repertoire, that collaboration could be uncomfortable or impossible based on the offensive remarks you made to any student. That student may intentionally avoid you to minimize the chance of confrontation. This is an individual issue in each offense because what is offensive to one student may not be offensive to other students.
CONNECT: The aforementioned negative effects of offensive media content are exactly the opposite of the positive effects to accrue from many of the uses of media in the first place. One primary purpose of humor, music, and videos is to improve relationships and connections by leveraging content and media to which students can relate. For example, nonoffensive humor and media content can break down barriers, relax, open up, and reduce stress, tension, and anxiety to foster connections between you and your students. It can grab and maintain the students’ attention and ability to focus or refocus on a particular point.
BEST TEACHERS: Furthermore, consider the characteristics of the “best teachers.” Use of offensive material is inconsistent with some of the affective character attributes of effective teachers, such as sensitivity, caring, understanding, compassion, and approachability.
MAJOR CATEGORIES OF OFFENSIVE CONTENT
In the humor research literature, joke types usually fit the following themes: superiority, aggression, hostility, malice, derision, cruelty, disparagement, stupidity, sex, and ethnic put-downs. Is there anything positive or nonoffensive in that list? I don’t think so.
The problem is that these themes are also prominent in music, movies, music videos, YouTube, and other media products that we could potentially use in our classroom as teaching tools. For example, some music, videos, and comedy with big name performers carry warning labels of “Adult Content.” These media have become increasing risqué by attacking and maligning the police, women, and political and “establishment” figures and issues. They are also chock full of obscenities, profanities, vulgarity, and other crude and explicit language.
I’ve identified seven major categories of offensive content: (1) put-downs, (2) sarcasm, (3) ridicule, (4) profanity, (5) vulgarity, (6) sexual content and innuendo, and (7) sensitive personal experiences. This material appears in jokes, music lyrics, and video content.
My future blogs will address those 7 categories.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
