"Friending" Your Students

I enjoyed this article because it tackled an issue that I still am unsure about. I lean more towards the no side; as in, a teacher should not friend request or accept friend requests from students. While I think the quote about "a lot of flirting" happening on Facebook is silly and kind of extreme, I agree with the commenter who said he accepted the friend requests until he started later seeing his college bound students doing keg stands. It sounds bad to say that accepting friend requests leads to too much responsibility, but essentially that is sort of what it does. As a teacher, you are already a mandated reporter. So if you see your 14 year old student talking way more sexually to another student than he or she should be, are you going to report that, or just pretend it doesn't exist? Right now, my current mind set is that I wouldn't accept the requests, but if some teachers want to, they should go for it.