Celebrate This Week: Provoking Dialogue and Debate

I've been reeling since I heard (and saw) the news of the student in South Carolina who was thrown from her desk and the classroom by a student resource officer. I've tried to stay on the DL about my feelings regarding race on Facebook, at least with regard to initiating conversations in my own space. I've remained comfortably silent because I didn't want to get into the social media equivalent of a screaming match with friends and family who hold differing viewpoints than mine and might suddenly find myself with contentious feelings both from and about me.

But that's a coward's way of thinking.

And my One Little Word this year is Brave.

So I need to be brave and have these hard conversations and pose difficult questions, otherwise I'm not being a positive agent for change. My blog's title IS Use Your Outside Voice, after all. I'm a hypocrite if I don't speak up for my own beliefs.

So I posted something provocative on Facebook about what happened at Spring Valley High in South Carolina and sure enough, it raised some ire. But it was also done in a mostly respectful and productive way despite the differing and sometimes heated viewpoints.

In the end though, we need to welcome that kind of dialogue and debate. If our social media spaces are just echo chambers of our own views and we unfriend everyone who disagrees with us, then that is going to be a rude awakening for you when you leave the comfort of your electronic devices and have to interact with real people in the real world who believe and behave differently than you.

I want us to talk ABOUT these things. We can't do that if we're talking AT each other or we're afraid to speak up because we fear confrontation so we just unfriend people who don't agree with our way of thinking. So as long as it stays respectful, I'm going to keep talking about tough topics and posing hard questions. And we can all stay friends... even when we disagree sometimes.

Celebrate This Week was established by Ruth Ayres

One of my all-time favorite Twitter encounters

If you're a teacher and you're not on Twitter, here's a good reason why you should be. Because you'd miss out on nuggets of wisdom and humor like this:

Students and social media: let's get our heads out of the sand

Yesterday was one of those days as a teacher when I'm reminded that I couldn't care less if my students can rattle off the 8 parts of speech or the 6 traits of writing after they leave my class, but instead have I helped them on their journey through life.

After reading and writing about it on Tuesday, yesterday we actually sat down and discussed our article of the week, which was:
One bad tweet can be costly to a student athlete


From this article, we talked and thought about:

•  the fairness of judging people based on their social media presence.  
• whether there are currently posts on their social media accounts right now that could result in a lost opportunity such as college admission, scholarship, or future job.
• what your social media postings as a whole (rather than just scrutinizing individual posts) say about you as a person -- and not just what you think it says about you as a person, but also what others could perceive about you.
• how adults admonish every generation in some way. Social media is this generation's way of adults shaking their heads and saying "kids these days." 
• because social media opens our lives to public scrutiny, unfortunately, mistakes in this day and age can often have bigger consequences
• how adults should not be forbidding kids from social media activity or ignoring the fact that they're using it (taking the ostrich approach if you will), but rather should be a model of good digital citizenship.
• how it's not just kids making mistakes on social media.
• that the adults in the article had some good policies and made some good points, but there are a few places where they are being extremely judgmental, and even crotchety. One of my students even used the phrase "Get off my lawn" in discussion, which I thought was pretty hilarious and rather insightful.
• whether what you do on social media is "right" or "wrong," as it says in the end of the article, "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences." 

I'm hoping there will be lots of conversations with friends and dinner table discussions after yesterday's class. I also hope that more teachers will choose to have discussions with their students about these issues rather than just give them lectures and tell them cautionary tales. Let's be proactive rather than reactive. We're all navigating this brave new world together. Let's swim alongside them at a tranquil beach rather than throw them in a roiling, shark-infested ocean to fend for themselves.

Kids are smart. They know what's up. At the same time, they're also impulsive and learning to manage their emotions. We were that way too as adolescents. We just had the benefit of not being that way for all the world to see. Let's give them some compassion and empathy rather than our disapproval and judgy shakes of the head. 

Thinking about my role with students and social media

Katerine Sokolowski's recent blog post about world colliding as a parent and teacher continues to get me to think about my role in helping students navigate this brave new world of social media.

Most teachers did not grow up with social media and so our initial reaction has been to steer clear. Don't friend students. Don't put yourself "out there" for students to find us. That advice, in a way, has been somewhat faulty. Kids often make mistakes - it's a part of growing up. When we were growing up those mistakes were just mistakes. We'd dust ourselves off, maybe get grounded, and that was that. Today mistakes are made public and permanent by the things they post online and we're letting kids function in the Wild West without a sheriff. Bottom line: We need to be role models of good digital citizenship so our students don't lose out on college admissions opportunities, possible jobs, or even their future freedom if something they post on social media could possibly incriminate them. But what this post really helped me to see is that we shouldn't just be lecturing to students about this. We should also be living it.

Many of my students follow me on Instagram. I could have chosen the moment when students started following me to panic and set my account to private. But in the end, I decided that this was an opportunity for me as their teacher to show them what it is to be a good digital citizen. So my students follow me, and as a result, I pander to that audience. I post book recommendations, I share with them my reading life, and I also give them a glimpse into my daily life as well: posting pictures of favorite recipes I've made, my journey with buying my new piano last year, and pictures of my dogs. As a result, I think it has helped get students to trust me more. To see that I'm just a regular person who does regular things. If they were looking for something scandalous by following me, they ain't gonna find it here. So they came for the scandal but stayed for regular old boring Mrs. Shaum (well, some of them stayed. I think some of them un-followed me after they realized they weren't going to find anything gossip-worthy on my Instagram feed).