Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance is just a fun term to say.  Try it.  Say it out loud right now.  What does it mean?

According to Wikipedia, it is "the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values."

According to Dictionary.com, it is "anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like."

To teach is to live your life filled with contradiction.  Each and every day, you are given confusing and contradictory messages by students, parents, administrations, brain research, and the community.  Some examples:

- Research shows homework to be either critical, damaging, or irrelevant - depending on which study you read.
- Adolescents should sleep later, but high schools start earlier than elementary schools.  - Students want hands on learning, but they want you to tell them what they should have learned from their lab so they can write the report.  
- Parents want their child to have hands on learning but then complain when their kids have projects.
- Parents complain if their child has too many assignments.  If their average is too low, however, they will request extra work.
- A parent who was also a board member once told me that I was keeping his son/daughter off the honor roll.  In the next sentence, he told me that we weren't challenging our students enough.
- We keep adding to the curriculum because of new skills that need to be learned.  We don't want to take the old things out of the curriculum.  No one wants to add days to the school year or hours to the day.
- I teach 8th grade.  Several years ago, a parent who called a meeting about their child's grade told me that 8th grade "doesn't matter anyway."  
- When one student makes an 85 on a test, I jump up and down and e-mail them to celebrate.  When a different student makes the same grade, I brace myself for the tears that will surely be cried at my desk.   
- I am in a one to one laptop school, but the research says we should limit our screen time.
- Don't make your classes to hard, but make sure they are fully prepared for college. 
- Every study of learning says that you should connect all new knowledge to previous knowledge, but Common Core says that is unfair to those who haven't had the opportunity to experience things that would give them prior knowledge.
- We are told daily to differentiate instruction, but we assess them with standardized tests. 

There are more examples.  If you are a teacher, you can think of more.  There are probably some that are specific to your grade or subject.  They actually come up every single day.  For sixteen years, I have held multiple contradictory ideas in my head as I teach.  No wonder I am so tired at the end of the day.  According to the definitions above, I should be suffering from an anxiety disorder.   

Now, I am going to go observe another teacher in order to tell them what they are doing well but not to evaluate their performance.