Inappropriate Use Digital Media

At the beginning of this school year, I found out that most of the girls in my class were part of a joint Whatsapp group.  Sadly, not every girl was in this group, and this caused them to feel left out.  Additionally, one day several of them came in laughing.  Apparently they had created a meme of me, their teacher, and shared it with each other. While they assured me it was "a nice one," I have my doubts.  I'll obviously never see the meme, and thankfully my self worth is not built on what my students think of me.  However, I can see how young girls and boys could be really damaged if this had happened to them.

I just realized I forgot to mention what could be done differently.  
In the instance when I heard about the meme created about me, I should have used it as an opportunity to talk with the girls about how that can make others feel.  We also could have discussed how to show respect to one another and to authority figures!

The point here is that students make these memes all the time, and though they said that yours was a "nice" one, most that I deal with are not. Many times I have had to chase down the maker of a meme or a story and have it removed, parents called, mediation. The frustrating part is that the feeling can never be removed, and there have been many times when we haven't had any success in getting it removed.

Even more unfortunate is that usually the parents see nothing wrong with what their children have done.