Thank you for a wonderful, well written article. Nurses are rarely acknowledged for all the good they do, and that is a shame. Keep up the good work you are doing in Ordinary Hospital, your patients are lucky to have someone who cares so deeply for them.

I'm a teacher, and rarely are we presented as we really are on TV, either. On the fictional shows, teachers all wear low cut blouses and unrealistically high heeled shoes, on the news we all seduce our students. ;) Sadly, a lot of people aren't ever going to know or care what folks in our professions do on a day to day basis, but it's okay, because WE know we're doing good work, and the people we work closest with - your patients and my students - know that what we do makes a difference.

As for the negative letters, I'd ignore 'em. I think if we baked some of these angry folk a big ole plate of chocolate chip cookies, they'd gripe and moan because they weren't oatmeal raisin, or vice versa. Some folks just like to be miserable, and they can't help but try to bring the rest of us down with them.

You do good work, Ms. Tisdale. You get a gold star from this teacher.

I did a little reading, and I found the following article from a paper in Pennsylvania, where Millersville is located.

http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/203653

According to this article, she did not lose her degree and potential for licensure due to the picture posted, she was sited for being unprofessional because she encouraged her high school aged students to visit and interact with her myspace page, even after she was asked to stop. That borders on unprofessional, imho. I'm a teacher, and I know there is a very fine line we need to walk when we interact with our students. Lots of news stories circulate about teachers who allegedly step waaaay over that line, and like it or not we're in a profession that's under very close scrutiny by a whole slew of outsiders. We're allowed to be human, sure, but if this student teacher wanted to keep her personal and professional lives seperate, she needed to do the same.

It's a big news story, so I'm sure there is hyperbole on both sides, but I do think it's beginning to look like maybe the student teacher wasn't quite as maligned as the first news stories implied.