Teachers - Stop Beating Each Other Up

This is going to be a short post because there is not much nuance to what I want to say.  It is sad and disheartening to see what teachers are doing to each other online during the return to school.

In March, when the shutdowns began, EduTwitter was kind of a lovely place to be.  They were sharing best practices, showing tech hacks, and encouraging each other that we could do this.  Of course, we were also getting a lot of love from the public as parents realized that teaching their child was kind of a hard job.  About two weeks in, I had to make conscious efforts to limit my time reading teacher posts because they had turned dark.  They were frustrated with their admins and district leaders, feeling that expectations were changing weekly or daily; and while I was sad for them (because my administrators were super supportive and helpful), I was disappointed at the lack of professionalism and often wondered how they were keeping their jobs.

August is very much NOT March.  The whiplash caused by the change in public support is unnerving.  We went from heroes to villains during the summer.  The very same people who were praising teachers in March for their adaptability now have expectations of their kids' teachers that simply cannot be met by human beings as though June and July was enough time to reinvent their practice even while not knowing if they would need to.  Even my beloved Ken Jennings took a soft jab in a joke where he said it was called remote learning because of the remote chance his kids would learn anything.  I wasn't offended by Ken's joke, but it is illustrative of the changing attitude about what teachers are doing.

But, this post is not about the public.  It's not about parents.  It's not even about the teachers who criticize their administrations.  It's about those teachers who insist on beating up other teachers on Twitter.  

- A teacher had posted her rules for her online students, and a swarm of teachers descended on her because she didn't want them to eat while she was teaching them.  This isn't a choice I would have made, but they don't know why she made it a rule.  Perhaps, she has, like others, developed misophonia during the pandemic and the sound of chewing will be distracting.  Perhaps seeing the kids eat will be distracting to her in-person students who cannot eat in the classroom.  
- Some teachers are assigning homework during this time, and they are being responded to with all caps, hand-clap-emoji-filled tweets, telling them that they don't care about their students.  

- While absolutely no one knows what the best way to do hybrid learning is, there are many who will attack the way you have decided to navigate it in your classroom.  Worse, when someone tries to explain their choice, they are accused of toxic positivity and told they are buck-passing cowards for not standing up to their admins and districts.  (I saw this happen yesterday to a poor woman who is just doing the best she can.)

What bothers me about all of this is that none of these attacking teachers seem to care about context.  What's right in an elementary school reading class is not even close to what is right in a high school math class.  What's wrong to expect of a special needs 5th-grader may be perfectly fine to expect of a junior in an AP class.  What is feasible for a private one to one school in the Research Triangle is not even possible for a rural public school in West Virginia.  Context has always mattered, but this situation makes it matter more than ever.  

Teachers are all doing the best we can right now.  Some may appear more confident than others, but we all know that we are not delivering the ideal that we would like to be.  While you are doing the best you can, it is fundamentally cruel to be mean to someone else who is also doing the best they can.  Would you allow your students to do that?  Twitter shouldn't turn us into Heathers.  We're teachers, and everything we publically do sends a message to our students.  Tearing other teachers apart because they carry out their practice differently than you do models intolerant, hateful, bullying behavior to your students.  

You have to stop.  You just have to.