I am a bit obsessed with Booktube. Booktube, for those of you who have not fallen into the black hole and love reading, is a subcategory of Youtube wherein the primary content of the Youtubers videos is, you guessed it, books.

If you are interested in how videos are made entirely about books, here is an interesting one to get you started. Plus, Ariel is top notch as far as Booktube goes.

As I’ve been watching these videos lately, a few have made me think “hm. Maybe this a thing that I could do.” This is completely ludicrous due to the fact that nothing sounds more painful to me than making a video of myself talking, but that fact aside, my immediate second thought is, “but I’m a teacher.”

Which… sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds ridiculous. But is it really?

We are told from day 1 of entering the teacher education program, and now at least weekly in standard life, that you need to be careful what you put online. Many teacher education programs go so far as to tell you to not have online profiles at all.

You can find a slew of posts about what teachers should or should not do online. Like this one that gives dos and don’ts of social media use for educators, or this one that outlines all of the potential horrors that could befall you.

But nothing is so easy as “don’t have a profile” in the 21st century. Could you take that route? Sure. But the drawbacks of choosing this are too many to name and unrealistic if you want to interact with the modern world.

A Booktuber that I used to watch avidly went through a bit of a debacle last year after her students (she’s a librarian) found her account. Now everything is on private: her Goodreads account, her Youtube Channel, her twitter. Everything. Admittedly, she was living her life realistically on these channels. She used curse words, and talked about books she read that had adult content in them.

I can understand why students stumbling upon this content would be of some concern, but where do we draw the line?

Is our obligation to keep our profiles private? Is it to decide what social media platforms  to make available to students and which are on as heavy of lockdown as the website provides? The somewhat unspoken agreement of the profession is that once you’re a teacher, you’re a teacher 24/7, so does this mean that I should refrain from using curse words in anything I post ever, even on private accounts, in the off chance that a student were to come across it? I don’t know the answer. I don’t know that anyone has an answer that is clearly and definitively The Way To Do Things.

I do not actually want to make a Youtube channel. But what if I did?