In tenth grade, I attended Franklin High School in Franklin, TN, a town outside of Nashville. At the time it was pretty "red" meaning lots of future farmers and burnouts. I hear it's completely different now, but back then (1986), it was not uncommon for word to travel that a fight was going to happen between kid A and kid B in the local gas station parking lot. Like sheep, we would all show up to watch what would unfold. This is classic high school stuff -- remember Three O'Clock High?

Times have changed -- but teens haven't. These types of fights between teens or even brawls between groups of kids from different schools still happen occasionally, they are just being broadcast on sites like MySpace. Media Life Magazine recently ran a short item that illustrates this phenomenon:

"MySpace has made it easier for people to connect online, but that's not always a good thing. Twelve students at Edwardsville High School in Illinois were expelled on Monday after taking part in a fight that school officials say was set up on the popular social networking site. Nobody was hurt in the fight, which was about who had been invited to a party, but the 11 girls and one boy who participated are done for the year, and the three seniors involved won't be able to take part in graduation ceremonies come spring. There had been bad blood among the students involved for some time, causing seven of them to sign an agreement on Nov. 6 to stop disrespecting each other. But two days later, plans for the brawl were made by way of messages on MySpace, and the throw-down took place the next day in the school's commons area."

Sometimes, a fight will actually start online with harsh words or cyberbullying and escalate into physical confrontation. In Totally Wired, I wrote about one case where this happened with teens from rival high schools.

"According to a New York Times article, online threats happening over IM between students at the Gillispie School in San Diego and the nearby Muirlands School escalated when 30 students from Muirlands showed up at Gillispie ready for a fight. They were carrying skateboards over their heads and yelling out the screen name of one of the boys they had been IMing with online."

I don't think banning access to MySpace at school is going to stop these types of situations from happening, but knowing about it, letting your teens and students know that you know this stuff goes on, and talking to them about what the right thing to do is if they do see that a fight is being planned (where someone will get hurt) is a good step towards being an internet literate teacher or parent.