Yo, Miss! (No. 35)

On Being "Public" as a Public School Teacher

As a teacher and as someone who keeps my social media public, I TRY to post with the intention of making sure every kid feels safe in my classroom if they were to stumble upon my social media.

I started thinking about this even more this week when David C. Banks, the Chancellor of New York City Department of Education, sent out an email urging New York City public school educators to keep their personal political beliefs out of the classroom. He also wrote: “When speech and action — even on one’s personal time — undermines the mission or core functions of NYCPS, we will review and take appropriate action on a case-by-case basis.”

It might come as a surprise to you, but I mostly agree with this policy. Students should feel safe in school. Teachers should not impose their own political beliefs on their students in their classrooms. I try my best to do this when teaching. I think most teachers do this as well.

I elaborated on this in a recent interview with Brian Ives, for Beasley Media Group:

“There’s this misconception that teachers are coming in with an ‘agenda.’ I’m not. I just want kids to learn and be interested in the world, in current events, in history. There’s this misconception that teachers are coming in to ‘indoctrinate.’ People who think that way don’t want teachers talking about anything that might be divisive or uncomfortable. But if you understand that teachers are not coming in with an agenda, then you should be encouraging teachers to have these difficult talks about these difficult, complex  subjects.”

In terms of my online presence, I have been interrogating what I post in a different way lately. It is a delicate balance of distinguishing between exercising my freedom of speech when I am not on the clock while also trying not to post anything that might affect my overall classroom environment. Admittedly, it is not AS complicated to achieve this goal as a New York City teacher. However, it gets more fraught if you teach in a place with extreme educational gag orders and book bans in schools. In that case, teachers are in a even more difficult position of choosing between their paychecks and their ability to speak out about topics that are important to them.

I might miss the mark sometimes in terms of making sure that what I post online does not interfere with my classroom. I am human after all and still trying to figure this out since I am more public online than your average teacher.

However, I wanted to share my thoughts about what I see many people, both young people and adults, struggling with online right now.

Social media currently functions like a slot machine. Quick hits of happiness, anger, jealousy, FOMO (fear of missing out) over and over until you give your phone a rest. It forces us into silos: this or that. And, yes, sometimes there is a clear wrong and right. It’s obvious to most people. However, social media sometimes forces people to feel like they need to choose sides in who is suffering the most and then we carry it with us into non-online spaces. That’s dangerous and sometimes deadly. We can cry for the innocent Palestinians getting killed, we can cry for the people killed on 10/7, we can want both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace, we can call Hamas a terrorist organization & also condemn the Netanyahu government in Israel without meaning we are not for the freedom & peace of both Israeli AND Palestinian people.

You can fight for what you think is right but be careful not to turn your fight for justice into a rallying cry for hate crimes against human beings just trying to live their lives. It is already hard to achieve when passions get the best of us. However, social media is designed to not just let our passions get the best of us, but then it is set up in away where these emotions can easily get weaponized into more clicks and hits. Even so, we can’t let them transfer into violence against our fellow humans.

It is one thing to fire off a mean comment, but when it turns into assault on the streets, we are no better than what we are trying to stop.