Human at the Other End

There are a few posts that I have saved for summer so that no student or parent will read and think I am referring to them because of something that happened earlier in the week.  These are topics that may have been inspired by specific events but that have them valuable to sharing generally, not just as a vent for a specific event.  This is one of those posts.

Your keyboard does not have feelings.  It is made of plastic and wires that exist at room temperature.  If you hit the keys a little harder, it doesn't respond with a cry of pain or recoil in fear.  It can't read your message and tell you that you are being a little harsh.  Your keyboard dutifully reflects whatever you have typed into it.

Your keyboard doesn't feel the words you type, but the person at the other end of your e-mail, tweet, or post does.  Our culture has become desensitized to the impact of the written word.  You can blame this on a myriad of things.  E-mail was probably the first thing to separate us from our words; handwritten letters were often thought through more carefully as you felt the words more profoundly when you were writing them.  The over-sharing that came with social media has probably played a role as we now consider tact to be a sign of falseness; if we don't share absolutely everything, we aren't being real somehow.  I personally hold the smart phone most responsible because it has removed even the slightest amount of lag time between the thought in our brain and the send button.  There are probably more factors as cultural change rarely results from one thing. 

Whatever the cause, the result is a sort of verbal ADHD based on whatever feeling we have at the instant we have it.  If you child comes home upset about something that happened at school, you fire off your first thought to the person you immediately hold responsible.  You don't take the time to think through the idea that your response to a hurting child is to hurt someone else's child.  You don't see the expression on the face of your target like you would if you were actually talking to them.  If you did, you might not say the second or third sentence because you would realize your first sentence had already had its impact. 

I began my teaching career when e-mail was first being used as a method of communication with the teacher.  At that point, most people still treated it with the formality of letter writing.  You got a lot of context and explanation.  This is no longer the case.  We have shortened our e-mails to the length of a couple of tweets; and because of that, we have removed any of the softening words that we previously included.  What has not changed is that there is a still a human receiving your message.

You may have to address difficult issues with your child's teacher.  You may have to do it by e-mail because circumstances don't allow for a drop by.  You may to do it relatively quickly, depending on the situation.  Just remember that you never have to do it so quickly that you don't think one thought: "There's a human at the other end of this keyboard."