Theft

by Teacher
(Canada)

You need to stop stealing student work. If they are not old enough to include their first and last names, then you are stealing from children.

My students try to access all of the necessary information to document the source with author, publisher and other pertinent information, but these details are not accessible here. I will warn everyone I know to stay away from your website.

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by: Editorial Team

Dear Teacher,

Thank you for this note and our apologies for the late response (we've only just seen it).

We almost never include the names of young children for their own protection. For the same reason, we do not include photos of children, although they frequently submit them with their poetry. At most, we usually just initialize their names.

In fact, when we do receive a poem without any name attached, we do not publish it. We are the ones who choose to remove the names.

Most young children are not old enough to understand the potential dangers surrounding the internet. It is more important to us that we protect their privacy than any other considerations (even against accusations of stealing intellectual property).

This is something that we take very seriously. For this reason we also read all comments submitted to the website, rather than leaving them go up automatically. We have had cases where young teens have tried to contact one another by leaving their contact details in the comments. We do not publish these. We think you can understand why. While it is likely (because we are familiar with their poetry submissions) that they are all children, you never really know who is behind an email address.

We might add that you have chosen to submit an anonymous comment to protect your own privacy. We would have been more than happy to have exchanged thoughts via email. Criticism is always welcome and it often improves our website experience.

All the works on our website have been submitted by the authors.

We are also very proud to work with a number of schools, providing a safe place for students to submit their poetry. Before we do publish poems by students, we always ask the teachers if they would like us to show the names of the students, or keep them anonymous.

As a matter of policy, we keep this website family friendly, and thus we do not publish some very good pieces if in our judgement they are intended for a mature audience.

If you would like to re-set the relationship, we would be thrilled to publish the poetry of your students. We would even award them a certificate as we do with the other schools.

Thank you again for your concern. Of course we understand your position. We hope you now have a better understanding of our own.

Your comments are very much appreciated.

The Editors
My Word Wizard

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