A couple of days ago I mentioned here that a mother was reluctant to send back to her local authority a questionnaire which they had asked her to complete. I gave no details of the list which this was on, let alone the woman's name. However, it appears that she feels upset by my use of her case here. Other members of the list are now expressing annoyance that I have taken a private message and spread the contents around. Wendy Crickard, a former teacher, had this to say;
' What a pathetic creep it is - perhaps 'Get a life' is the appropriate advice
to him or is it that he can't get a friend anywhere? WendyC'
Strong words indeed! But wait a minute. Wendy Crickard, where have we heard this name before? Oh yes, that's right. Back in October 2009, after I have been chucked off the HE-UK list and almost forgotten about it, she posted there explaining that she was meeting an MP and wished to show her details of a private message which I had sent to the list. Up until this point, I rather assumed that messages which people posted on HE-UK were private and should not be quoted or shown to others. I had certainly not done so myself. Here is what Wendy Crickard said on October 7th 2009;
'Does anyone have copy of the email to this site in which S.W. boasted of
misrepresenting himself in order to further his journalistic career? I’ll
happily wave it at Linda Waltho on Friday. WendyC'
A number of those on the list helped by producing other messages of mine for her to take to Linda Waltho MP and show her. Not one person said anything at all about these messages being private. The impression one gained was that this behaviour by Wendy Crickard was absolutely fine and acceptable. From that time, I have not been at all fussed about the privacy of messages on that particular list. It was Wendy Crickard's actions and the enthusiastic response of others on the list which rid me of any inhibitions which I might otherwise have felt about this. For her now to start complaining about anybody passing on details of a post from the HE-UK list is really a bit rich!
It is odd, incidentally, that converts to a cause are always more extreme in their support than those who have been supporters of that cause all their lives. One notices this with Catholic converts and others who join religions or political parties in later life. I suppose that Wendy, having spent all those years as a teacher, now feels that she must be more gung ho than other home educators in order to demonstrate her changed allegiance. It is an interesting psychological point.
A good third of the home educators I know, including myself, are ex or current teachers. I've not noticed such a phenomenon. Only one of those is such an extreme case. Far more 'extremist' HE'ers were never teachers.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you are implying that "ex-teacher converts" are the extremists or just "late converts"....but Ithink I would agree with the poster above - we have loads of ex-teachers in our local group but although they may enthusiastic converts, I am pretty sure they aren't "extreme" in their views at all - they tend to be fairly structured and conventional!
ReplyDeleteAh, perhaps it is only with those who have been heads then. It is quite true that there are many ex-teachers who now educate their own children.
ReplyDeleteYou are such a misogynist, did mummy reject you or not give you enough hugs when you were small?
ReplyDeleteAny chance of a response to my reply to your previous blog post, Simon?
ReplyDeleteSimon wrote,
ReplyDelete"For her now to start complaining about anybody passing on details of a post from the HE-UK list is really a bit rich!"
I don't think Wendy is complaining about people passing on details of a HE-UK list post. If you read the message that you quote in full, she is complaining that you are a pathetic creep who has no friends. Quite a different complaint!
' If you read the message that you quote in full, she is complaining that you are a pathetic creep who has no friends. Quite a different complaint!'
ReplyDeleteTrue, but she is basing this observation on the fact that I have mentioned a private post made by Ness on HE-UK in this blog. I was pointing out that when somebody intitiates a course of action, and as far as I know Wendy was the first person on the HE-UK list to start publicising messages from this prvate list to third parties, it is hardly possible to criticise somebody else for following suit. In other words, if she thinks that I am a pathetic creep because I mentioned Ness's post outside the HE-UK list, then she is surely also a pathetic creep for having done the same thing herself. It is the old thing about people in glass houses!
She probably doesn't think you are a pathetic creep for that reason then, but just welcomed the excuse to make her views clear when you were being discussed.
ReplyDelete'She probably doesn't think you are a pathetic creep for that reason then, but just welcomed the excuse to make her views clear when you were being discussed.'
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't know about this; I have never met her. But Ness Moore was annoyed that I had used one of her posts as the basis for a blogpost and it was in this context that Wendy Crickard described me as a 'pathetic creep'. It seems reasonable to suppose that she was referring to my action in taking a post from a private list and using it in this way. As I say, breathtaking hypocrisy on her part. When she began spreading my old posts to MPs and others, she made no secret of what she was doing. The fact that nobody on the list, including Mike Fortune-Wood the list owner, objected, did rather suggest that this sort of thing was acceptable. I cannot really understand why people are now objecting to my doing the same thing.
"I gave no details of the list which this was on, let alone the woman's name."
ReplyDeleteAhhhh, so you decided to rectify this by disclosing the name of both the list and the person.
I gave no details of the list which this was on, let alone the woman's name."
ReplyDeleteAhhhh, so you decided to rectify this by disclosing the name of both the list and the person. '
You have clearly never headr of the Streisand Effect.....
Au contraire. However, I wonder if you have perhaps heard of Privacy and Copyright?
ReplyDelete'Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteAu contraire. However, I wonder if you have perhaps heard of Privacy and Copyright?'
Well yes, but what has that to do with anything?
Emails are an example of literary works which are protected by copyright.
ReplyDeletePrivacy should speak for itself, you have taken both peoples names and email messages from a Private list and published them on a Public blog.