FIRST PERSON

Let's Just Be Friends

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By JULIA GOODE

I'm getting dangerously close to feeling old — well, maybe not old, but definitely not young. When I began my teaching career, I wasn't that much older than my law-school students. But the gap widens with each passing year, and I am definitely minding.

I've heard other professors express the same sentiment. You tell a joke in class about an event that seems as if it happened last week — the Iran-contra hearings or the O.J. Simpson trial — and you get blank stares in return. You quote from movies you are certain everyone has seen, and, sure enough, no one in the classroom has. You end up feeling about as cool as an eight-track tape deck and as old as the hills.

So when I noticed that my sisters-in-law, who are in their early 30s as compared with my late 30s, had created pages on Facebook, I was determined not to be left behind. I had read in a newspaper article (online, of course) that really cool young people didn't e-mail one another anymore, they "facebooked." I didn't know what that meant, but I was ready to advance to the next instant-communications level.

I threw up a fairly simple profile page, complete with a picture of me and my youngest child ("See, I'm not really old and fat; I'm merely postpartum and sleep-deprived!"). I filled out the basic information — where I work, where I went to school, where I live, and marital status. I declined to spend the next 20 hours of my life providing information on my favorite books, TV shows, movies, political leanings, and quotes, and I didn't add any plug-in games, quizzes, or surveys.

I may be technologically advanced for my age, but I do have a real job that takes up some of my time.

Once my profile was live, I invited my sisters-in-law to be my Facebook "friends." They graciously accepted and congratulated me on being so technologically savvy. They wrote messages on my "wall" to the effect of "Welcome to the 21st century." I felt very hip.

But then something quite unexpected happened. My students found me.

At first, just a few asked me to be Facebook "friends." When their friends saw that they were friends with me, then those friends asked me to be their Facebook friends, too. Soon I was "facebooking" with half my class.

I am neither ignorant nor risk seeking, so my Facebook persona quickly emerged as an online representation of my classroom persona. My status updates ("Julia is [fill in the blank].") reflected what was going on in my classroom or in the life of the law school. When students wrote on my "wall," I wrote back with the same tone, language, and substance as I would if I were responding to an e-mail message from them or a question in the hall. Conscious of my audience, I didn't add family photo books or political campaign slogans.

I was comfortable with my appearance in this new arena. I thought of Facebook as nothing more than an interactive office door. I was wrong.

First came the realization that, although I was a mere professor on Facebook, my students were much more than students there. When they looked at my profile, they saw basically the same version of me that they would see if they looked around my office or sat next to me at lunch. But when I looked at their profiles, I saw everything about their lives. And it was fun.

I noticed that they liked to make fun of their professors. I cracked up at their spot on parodies of my colleagues' mannerisms and figures of speech, and was flattered to see that my own eccentricities were sufficiently interesting to become fodder for their parodies.

I also noticed how tightknit my students were as a group. They talked about going to parties and meeting for lunch, and they seemed to be really great friends. They posted pictures from student events and videos of themselves dancing. I remembered the great study group I had when I was a student in law school and how I thrived on spending 12 hours a day with such clever, witty people, all of us trying to survive the same law-school traumas.

I was glad to see that my students had each other to keep them afloat while legal education tried their souls. During finals, they wrote words of encouragement on one another's Facebook walls and issued self-deprecating angst reports in their status lines. I began to enjoy reading their status updates as if I were watching a real-time, legal version of Grey's Anatomy, only with characters I knew who were a lot more lovable than the ones on the show.

Facebook is like a giant reality show. I unwittingly became privy to the ups and downs in my students' relationships, job hunts, and vacation plans. I could see which television programs they watched and which movies they liked. I tried not to look that often, but occasionally a student would see me in the hall and yell, "Hey, look at my new pictures on Facebook! I've got a funny picture of Professor Z at the awards banquet." Yes, and several pictures of you dancing with another person in our class, I notice.

Students began using Facebook instead of e-mail to communicate with me. When the dean announced this past spring that I had been promoted and approved for tenure, my students wrote on my wall to show their support.

So maybe I was receiving too much information about their private lives. But I thought the additional insights would only help me guide students and be a better mentor.

But then I turned in my grades for the spring semester, and the reality show we were all starring in got to that uncomfortable, tense point at which you want to leave the room or change the channel. Students who did well in the course used Facebook to "message" me to say how much they loved the class. Students who received low grades changed their status lines to reflect their disappointment.

This was the side of grading that I never had to see. I normally turn in grades in December or May, and by the time I see students again, the next semester has started, and they have moved past the grades they received in the previous term. Maybe a handful of students drop by to look at their exams and ask why they received a B+ instead of an A-. But most of the students who earn low grades from me never cross my path again; only rarely do any of them register for another of my classes.

But this semester, in Facebook land, I was seeing their elation and disappointment in real time. The students also seemed to know that I was there in cyberspace, and that knowledge added to their discomfort. They may have been been tempted to use Facebook as a way to tell their peers about how completely unfair my exam was and how much of a witch I am.

That is not only their right but a rite of passage. Venting frustration by taking it out on the professor is cathartic and can be healthy — if not taken to obsessive extremes. With the magic of Facebook, disappointed students should be able to write on one another's walls: "Professor Goode is such a tool!" "What do you expect from such a freak of a professor?" "That class was such a waste!" Instead, knowing I might be watching, my students censored themselves and used code phrases: "I am having such a bad day." "I am here if you want to chat!" Our Facebook friendship seemed to rob them of the ability to cope online.

I hope they were able to remember how us old folks had to grieve over grades. We just got everyone together in the same bricks-and-mortar room and kvetched about the professor, school, and life in general, usually accompanied by lots of fattening foods (among other things).

So I am reminded that just because I'm Facebook friends with twentysomethings, I'm still the old crone that has to hand out a few less-than-average grades to some of them twice a year. In a matter of weeks, the crisis will pass, and life on Facebook will return to normal. I'll just be the professorial friend who posts something funny on her interactive office door every once in a while.

Julia Goode is the pseudonym of a soon-to-be full professor of law at a large university in the Midwest. For an archive of previous Balancing Act columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act