On an edgy Friday night, as I prepared to plan lessons and update my data, I created an e-card stating, "I became a teacher so that kids can pass standardized tests," said no teacher ever. I tweeted it out with the hashtag #SaidNoTeacherEver. I added another, writing, "I wish a politician with no classroom experience would just come in and tell me how to teach #saidnoteacherever"
Soon, others joined me and eventually it started to trend. It became a humorous place for advocating against the things that strip away teacher professionalism.
A few hours into it, students began to add their voice. As the students "stole" the hashtag, I first felt upset, embarressed, even betrayed. They were being uncreative, repeating the same ideas without using an RT. They were being crude, making references to teachers having sex with students. They weren't following our edu-etiquette that I've grown used to.
Then I listened.
I re-read the crude posts again. When the initial shock wore off, I began to see myself in those tweets. I was that crude. I was that rude in high school. And the danger in social media, in the ticker tape of conversation left behind, is that the digital footprint (or digital tattoo) doesn't let kids make mistakes. If future employers want to make judgmental statements about what a seventeen-year-old writes as he's still trying to figure out the best way to use innuendo, maybe we shouldn't be lecturing kids but questioning the policies of transnational corporations.
I thought about my own kids and what they will write someday. I thought about myself and the lack of complexity in being able to speak my voice in a world where social media was almost non-existent. It had me thinking, too, that I often talk up "student voice" as something that is deep and profound. I only tell the stories of the brilliance that defies stereotypes of youth. But what do I do with the streams of information that confirm these stereotypes? What about the student voices where they are acting like sixteen year olds trying to figure out how to use humor?
I noticed, too, that the teachers in the social media echo chamber do not represent many of the teachers in our public schools. I kept reading tweets like, "No homework today," or "Maybe you should enjoy the holidays rather than do my classwork," and I cringed. I wanted to fight back saying, "Not all teachers are like this. Some of us don't give homework."
Eventually, the crude tweets wore off and the tone shifted. That's when I saw the pain. I saw tweets like, "I won't think any different of you now that I know that you're gay" and "I won't ask what you did to bring on the bullying." Another read, "Amanda, I noticed when you were gone for ten days and took the time to ask why." I saw tweets that reminded me just how painful the system can be and how rare it was in my own experience to have a teacher who saw me as a person.
I left with this lingering sense of the power of teachers to be either the protagonist or antagonist in a student's story.
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I guess that is what we are really about isn't it? We can choose to talk about wanting our world to be about our students, but we have to act on those words to really make a difference.
I really wish that I had seen the tweets you found later, all I saw were the simple stereotypes that were endlessly repeated. When I tried to engage one random student the reaction I received showed me that he didn't realize his tweets were being read outside of his chosen community and that it seemed to shake him up. I wonder what he things now of the teacher he thought was "stalking" his tweets?
Well, I'm sure we've all been accused of violating students' rights and destroying students' voices at one point or another, but I think that one of the lessons here is that it's an illustration of how we're trying to show students that yes, they have freedom of speech and they have a voice but they need to learn that there's a responsibility in that and an awareness that comes with that as well.
Funny thing-- students seem shocked when I mention Facebook or Twitter in passing. You know, the typical teenage attitude that they're the only people ever to have discovered social media (nothing new, btw -- they're also the only people to ever have discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll)
This year, I experimented with following a student on Twitter, and she followed me. I will not "friend" students on FB or other sites, but because Twitter is so public, I figured why not?
It was pretty interesting. I ended up unfollowing her because she retweeted so much-- even tweets with the N-word and other obscenities. I just didn't want them in my feed, even though I'm not so very prudish by nature and a few of my posts float in the grey area of professional appropriateness. She didn't take it personally, but she did realize that I can go check in on her anytime I want to now because I know her alias. And I see other students in her feed as well. Made her think a bit.
Boy, the end of your blog entry here really shook me up. I think that overall, open forums like Twitter are a good thing to present us with the realities of our students' lives, experiences and perceptions of school. Reality can be hard to take sometimes, especially when mine is different than yours. But that's where the conversation starts, right?