I'm a small fry in the grand scheme of things here, but I have a few thoughts that are probably better thought out here than by trying to cram things in on twitter. The first thing I'll note is that I have a predisposition to dislike platitudes. I think I may have blown a job chance a few years ago by responding to the questions of a panel interviewing me with the phrase "I'd be glad to answer with specifics, but I'm not very good at meaningless platitudes." I prefer to be authentic, I hate prepackaged lessons, I'm not much for vision statements, and while I love a good quote, I'm really not a fan of things that reek of shiny happy people syndrome.
The problem with the inspirational quotes crowd is two fold in my mind; first of all, that the quotes seem to be pretty much their only contribution in most cases. There is rarely dialogue or any engagement with teachers, at least to my knowledge, and I have no problem being proven wrong. Second, it just does not reflect the nature of education and teaching.... Schools and the problems in them are messy, complicated and as the past 40 or so years or reform have showed, silver bullets don't work.
Don't get me wrong, I want my admins and the teachers around me to be optimistic, but at the same time, I want folks around me in the struggle to recognize that things are hard, that there will be struggle and that no amount of smiles can overcome the difficulties that our kids face.
To be clear, the happy quoters aren't saying that, I want to believe that they want to encourage teachers, knowing that the work is hard and that at various points during the year, teachers are worn down. I think that the quoters also care about kids, one of the prominent ones around our area is a former student of mine and a great human being in all ways, and I've heard nothing but amazing things of his time as a teacher.
But one of the issues with the quoters is just that...most of them aren't teachers. They are admins and consultants, rarely classroom teachers. And yet their influence is widespread. The thing that really upset me about Dr. Tarte's comment is that he accuses teachers who dissented with the original tweet a "mob" spreading "poison".
This is the real problem...not the positive quotes...most of the time, I can laugh them off, and since I'm a lot less confrontational than some people might think, I rarely say much about them. Heck, once in a great while, they do what they are intended and boost me up. Not often, but occasionally, and that is I'm sure what is intended. They aren't going to get me all of the time, or even most of the time because of my pragmatic leaning to smirky view of things. But the irony here is that one quote tweeter (71.5K followers) is defending another (37.3k followers) against a bunch of teachers with a far smaller influence (16.8k followers). And most of the teachers that I connect with have a far, far smaller influence, maybe a few hundred followers, and in many cases, those are probably half students. Who leads the mob in that case?
For the record, I follow all of these gentlemen, I follow a lot of different folks, because I don't want to be in a bubble or an echo chamber, I want to hear folks that disagree with me, who occasionally make me angry and push me into thinking in different ways. And that, as a final thing is what bothers me the most about this who dust up. Everything is a dichotomy, one way or the other. I've written before how much the "good teacher" thing drives me bonkers. Part of this is just twitter, it's not easy to get across meaningful thoughts in 280 characters. Which of course leads to platitudes...I get that limitation, I really do, and I suspect the influencers do as well...it's hard to state both cases.
But with great power (or influence) comes some responsibility to really think out what you tweet. Heck, I will confess that I miss the days when almost no one in my district or school followed me on Twitter, I was a bit more free with what I said...and then, as more students started to follow me, I became even more circumspect. And if you are pushed back against, maybe engage a little, at least if influencing teachers is your real goal, which again, I truly believe that it is for Steele and Tarte. And do so in a way that isn't defensive, but shows that you really want to discuss things. They don't have any obligation to do this, I want to be clear that isn't what I mean.
For the record, in the thread by Dr. Tarte, I saw a lot of responses on both sides, most pretty mild at best, and might note that a lot of the support was from folks who were not teachers, but from other speakers and publishers. I hope they note that...
In closing, I'd like to say that I really appreciate that Mr. Steele did respond to folks in Dr. Tarte's thread. The whole thing is definitely overblown, but I appreciate his engagement and willingness to clarify, again, he doesn't have to, but I think it shows the real heart.
