Might want to just go ahead and take “retard” out of your lexicon entirely, people.

First I posted this Washington Post article to my shared items thing. It’s about young teachers in the DC area whose facebook profiles (and other online things) included questionable content. It’s worth a read, but here’s a highlight:

Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional, but some parts suggest the author is in the throes of sorority rush.

Under a “Work Info” heading, the page reads, “Employer: Prince William County Schools. Location: Parkside Middle School Language Arts Teacher.” The section lists where she attended college (Radford ‘07) and high school (Osbourn Park High ‘03).

But the page features multiple “bumper stickers,” including one that uses a crude acronym for attractive mothers and another that says: “you’re a retard, but i love you.”

Teensy problem: Webster teaches students with emotional and learning disabilities. In an interview, she acknowledged her use of “retard” could be misconstrued. The word, generally considered offensive, circulates among some young people as acceptable derogatory slang.

“My best friend, she always calls me that because I say ditzy things,” Webster said. “My best friend and I would never go around calling people that. All of my [students] have emotional disorders or learning disabilities. . . . I love them.”

Anyway, my friend Lauren emailed me:

I think the answer is if you want a job in this day and age, you need to clean up your personal BUT PUBLIC profiles. I don’t think it’s that crazy to ask of someone. Yeah you might be 22 and “young” but you’re also asking to be part of the “adult” world. I mean when I applied to grad school I made my friendster profile private and I don’t keep a myspace or facebook page. And I have to accept that when I am on the job market or up for tenure, anything they can google about me becomes acceptable grounds for my evaluation. I guess the slippery slope is when you put something public that you don’t see anything wrong with, but the examples the article gave were clearly stupid!

And then I replied:

Yeah, some of those examples were egregious—might not want to call people “retards” when you work with the developmentally challenged! But there are real issues here, too—people our age put so much stuff online and if we ever become important, it’ll all come out. I don’t think I’ve posted anything that’s a big deal, but I’m sure some of it is objectionable. It’ll be weird once everybody in the public eye has this problem, we’ll have to revise our views of what constitutes “problematic material.”

Now I’m going to post this exchange, and it will become part of your permanent online file!

And that’s the story of how I spent 20 minutes I should have been spending writing a paper.

Edit: I just reread this and I hope it doesn’t seem like the point of this post is to make fun of Ms. Webster and the other examples in the article. I just think this issue–the effect of the public/private barrier getting blurred (or erased)–is important, and getting more important every day.