Mrs. Newark's personal blog, Betsy's Page, frequently describes the goings-on in her classroom, and she links her personal blog to her school site and vice-versa. In addition, Mrs. Newmark's political opinions are mirrored in her online teaching materials (note that – as of September 1, 2007 – her overview of media bias focuses on just one political ideology). Readers of her blog might legitimately speculate on the degree to which her blog's charged political rhetoric finds its way into her classroom.

In Mrs. Newmark's blog article entitled "More political bias in the college classroom", she relates how a former student of hers sent her an e-mail describing incidents of liberal political bias, which the student observed in their first few days of college. In relating one of the student's incidents, Newmark quotes the student as sardonically saying, "I know how you love Nazi references." This comment will ring a chord of recognition among long-time readers of Mrs. Newmark's blog, who know that, in her blog articles, Mrs. Newmark disassociates right-wing conservative policies from fascist and Nazi labeling. Which is to say that, indeed, we can surmise that the opinions expressed by Mrs. Newmark in her blog make their way into her classroom.

The irony of all this being that Mrs. Newmark excoriates the political bias in college presentations by citing the observations of a high-school student who learned from her... Not that that, by the asymmetries of conservative logic, can be seen as anything but a plus. In Mrs. Newmark's world, the problem isn't the bias but the divergence from conservative cant.

UPDATE, Monday, November 12, 2007: (1) Newmark no longer links her school site to her personal blog.

(2) Newmark's overview of media bias now includes information on both liberal and conservative bias (albeit including 60% more citations in support of the argument that the media suffers from liberal bias). Furthermore, the cap-stone exercise of her unit, "The Media", requires students to write an essay on the topic, "The Media has a liberal bias". Newmark's online teaching materials leave no doubt where her opinion of media bias lies. That reality belies Newmark's assertion (found in her original blog article) that:

I teach about politics every day in my classes and I constantly work to balance every anecdote about one party with one about the other and to seek to have the kids be the ones who are expressing their own political opinions, not me.

For another example of Newmark's disinclination to present information in a neutral and/or faithful manner, see my blog article, Personal preferences and the responsibility to teach. For insight into Newmark's partisan appraisal of the bias disseminated by Fox News, see my blog article, Fox News calls Senator Kennedy an enemy of the state.