Many new to social media, marvel how easy it is for people to share with an audience, get answers back, and make connections. The problem is they see the power in that, and want to be able to create that right away. I often get questions like, “how do you know all of those hashtags?”, or “how do you know that person is interested in problem based learning?” Honestly, the more you are willing to learn, the more you often know.
The “behind the scenes” of those connections and understanding took a lot of time and nurturing. In the world of education, where we want our students to do deep learning we often want quick fixes ourselves. If we go to a conference and get something for “Monday”, are we going to just use this for now, or long term. Doing something well takes time.
Just like reading and writing, which too many educators comes natural, at some point in our lives, we were not able to do these things. But someone showed us why these things are essential, and we wanted to know more. Teaching grade 1, teachers are not expecting kids to read “The Great Gatsby” by the end of the year; they know it takes incremental steps to not only become more literate, but also more fluent. In our world today, many adults are going back to the point where they are struggling with literacy again, which I think is a good thing. It puts us back into the mindset of what a learner goes through, which we should understand deeply if we are to be successful teachers. Otherwise the smartest people would always be the best teachers. Simply holding knowledge does not make you a great teacher, and I have always looked at struggling while learning to be a benefit to teachers, not a disadvantage.
So for the educator new to Twitter or any other social media, don’t worry that you don’t “get everything” right now. No one knows everything, and we are all on different paths in our learning. Don’t compare yourself to someone else, just make sure you are moving forward.
But to the educators that are pretty savvy with this stuff and think everyone should be “connected”, just remember that at some point, you (including myself) were not able to do many of those things that you are currently advocating for so strongly. We can get on people and dismiss them for sharing those blog posts about how “Twitter changed everything” for them in the last month and say how tired we are of the same conversation, or we can celebrate that others are trying to get better. I choose the latter.
Patience is a virtue in any type of learning, and if you are someone moving forward along that continuum, you are doing something good. If you are struggling, that is good. Your kids go through it every day. We just need to remember to both be patient with ourselves and have patience for others while people are learning, because in all cases, we are trying to do something better. We do it for kids so we need to do it for each other.
“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” Friedrich Nietzsche
