Another Facebooking: June Siple Is The Most Recent To Be Dooced

Yet another person is fired for expressing unpopular or impolitic opinions: a high school teacher who was not looking forward to coming back to work in the fall, and said so on hre facebook page.

H.S. Teacher Loses Job Over Facebook Posting

On her Facebook page, (June) Siple called the residents of Cohasset “arrogant and snobby,” and said that she is “so not looking forward to another year at Cohasset schools.”

As the high school supervisor for math and science, Siple was making more than $92,000 a year.”

I think that’s pretty ungrateful, taking that much of the town budget going into the schools, filling up the position, teaching kids when her heart wasn’t in to it,” said resident Sam Green.

In a telephone interview, Siple said she is not apologizing for her comments, but that she is sorry that they went public. She said she was referring to the political situation in the school, which she called “very stressful,” and she said she thought she was only blowing off steam with friends in private.

But back in February, when Siple got sick, she wrote on her page, “Now I remember why I stopped teaching kids. They are all germ bags.”

Siple said her Facebook friends knew it was a joke.

People are so two-faced. Does everyone who is damning Siple believe that they themselves have never made a disparaging remark about work, their customers, or boss? No, obviously not. So the only issue is whether it is made in a private or public forum: not the actual feeling involved.

Once again, people are mistaking morality with etiquette, putting appearances before realities.

Where is it written that you can’t publicly complain about your job? Do we have to pretend that everything is sunshine and flowers?

Radical transparency does not mean that people are invited to share the good things going on in some business or wing of government: it means that we should be free to see into organizations and understand what is truly going on in them.

Tax payers have a right to know what is really going on the schools they pay to support, but that shouldn’t mean that everyone should be mumbling bland platitudes. If a senior teacher like Siple is not looking forward to work the reaction should not be to kill her, but instead to open up what is going on in the school and the relations between kids, teachers, administrators, and parents.

However in our hothouse, accusatory, and reactionary realm of social discourse, anyone like Siple — who expresses discontent with the current system — is burned at the stake, and all the folks with the torches and nooses pat each other on the back and consider themselves good citizens.

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