Despite my best efforts not to indict you personally, you’ve made this whole issue about a personal choice you’ve made for yourself and your family, despite my repeated assurances that nothing you or I do in our homes has any bearing on this matter.

The point which eludes you, the point which I’ve repeated so often that I’m bored with it is that, yes, you can talk about a medium you don’t personally engage but it’s difficult — nigh impossible — to have any meaningful discussion about moderation & discernment (to speak nothing about more proactive approaches to television) if, in the back of your head, all you’d really like to see is the extermination of the medium. Essentially, this comes down to the underlying motivations for your lifestyle choice and not the lifestyle choice itself.

You’ve tried to squeeze my argument into that box (”Dan thinks I’m a bad teacher because my family and I don’t watch t.v.”) because it’s easier to play the martyr than engage a tricky issue that pre-dates both your career and my birth (the predisposition of teachers towards books and away from t.v., when moderation and discernment are essential for interacting with both).

After every comment you’ve left me, I’ve tracked back here, opened your “All About Me” page, and become alarmed all over again that this intellectually inflexible position, that these digressive, dismissive, and snide posts, come not just from a teacher, but from a principal.

Yours has not been a proud moment for blogging. But what’s utterly great and completely poignant about this situation is, just as there are edifying & unedifying blogs on the Internet, so there are unedifying & edifying books, songs, movies, speech, and t.v. These empty vessels are what we make of them. As teachers, we’ve been graanted more control over that process than the average citizen. That’s really special. That’s not a privilige I’ll ever take lightly.

The entire time I was reading this post I kept thinking about the issue of teaching kids that drugs are bad (even if we have never tried them ourselves) as a parallel to what you were saying here. I was happy to see that you made that connection at the end of your post.

I haven’t been following this whole line of dialogue across the blogs, but I did read this post with great interest and I do agree with you. Your personal lifestyle choices should not determine your quality as a professional. If that were the case, then our field would be sorely lacking in “highly qualified professionals”.

Stephanie

I believe that each person has a right to decide as a parent what is best for their own child. I think that listening to different sides of a debate doesn’t mean you have to go out at watch adult movies (your blog wouldn’t take the other word) to talk about the ill effects of it, that is ludicrous.

However, listening means listening to differing points of view, without giving up one’s right to have an opinion. You’ve listened and have your opinion — I’d rather have people with opinions and directions for their family than people who abdicate their parenting to the boob toob — that is not parenting at all.

So, I guess I’m not sure that the quote from my blog is correctly applied. Listening to viewpoints and immersion are two different things.