Category: TIK365

Things I Know 145 of 365: I don’t yell in anger

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

– Cynthia Ozick

I’ve yelled at students before. I’ve yelled, but never in anger. In anger, I’ve left the room. In anger, I’ve asked another teacher to watch my room while I walk to the water fountain to cool down and rehydrate to avoid yelling.

I’ve been angry at my students, but I’ve not acted in anger.

It’s been close a few times.

A few days ago, Debbie Schinker sent me a link to this open letter from a community college professor Jaime O’Neill, to his students of the past semester.

They, the students, didn’t measure up to expectations, and their professor, after completing his final semester, let them know – publicly.

I’ve read the piece a few times now, and I can’t tell whether or not O’Neill was yelling.

I never find it pleasant or productive to guilt-trip students. But if just one of you reads these words and decides to take your education a bit more seriously, it was worth writing them.

I don’t doubt the experience was difficult and frustrating. Students now and students 40 years ago, likely register as different. Then again, I’d imagine O’Neill now and O’Neill 40 years ago are fairly different.

I want to criticize O’Neill, to write sentence after sentence taking him to task for publicly and unabashedly taking his students to task.

The thing that keeps me from doing that, though, is the same thing I wish had key O’Neill from writing.

I don’t know him.

I know only what he chose to reveal in his writing. The rest I would be inferring.

The same is true of O’Neill’s final class of students. He knew only what they shared with him, and most of that was in their writing.

I cannot make a full-throated critique of O’Neill because I haven’t taken the time to question him, to engage him, to draw out his interests and let the conversation build in the way I hope he did with his students.

I won’t be criticizing O’Neill because to do so would be to use a public forum to assert some sort of power in the communication dynamic. Anything I’d hope to accomplish would be undermined by the fact that a message I meant for an individual was posted for anyone to see. That would be unfair, it wouldn’t put us on equal footing. The medium would be impersonal, while I’d be sending a message meant to have personal meaning.

An open letter would be a passive aggressive thing to do. If my goal was trying to educate someone like O’Neill or push his thinking, an open letter or public posting of my thinking would probably be something I’d be doing out of anger.

And I know acting out of anger when trying to create change can feel cathartic in the moment, but often be damaging to the change I’m trying to create.

As a teacher, I wouldn’t want to do that to my students.

I’m sure O’Neill agrees.

Things I Know 144 of 365: I learn by teaching

When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case.

– Donald Schön

As of tomorrow, SLA will have been host for two weeks to 5 pre-service teachers from Millersville University. They’re part of a larger cohort taking part in an urban seminar built around the idea of providing experience in urban classrooms to pre-service teachers who would otherwise not have such exposure.

I’ve been happy to have them.

No part of that has come from any excitement over providing these students with a taste of the urban teaching experience. Sadly, SLA isn’t the average urban school.

Instead, my excitement has come from the thoughtfulness in my own practice inspired by, in some small way, being responsible for helping future teachers learn their craft.

I gave Spencer, the student assigned to my classes, room to teach a lesson to my G11 classes today.

He did well.

As we were processing the lesson, I talked to him about having students share their thinking with the person sitting next to them and then sharing out what they heard with the whole class.

I explained it helps encourage active listening, takes off the pressure of having to say something original on the spot and builds their summarization skills.

As I was talking, it occurred to me that I had done the exact opposite during the first period when I randomly called on students to answer questions or offer their thinking on a text.

“Let me explain why I didn’t do any of what I just suggested with the earlier class today.”

In an average day with just my students and I in the classroom, I probably would have taken the advice I’d just given Spencer when working with the G11 classes and employed the random calling method with the senior class, thinking nothing of the disparity of the two approaches.

Held up to the mirror of attempting to explain my pedagogy and practice to someone I was attempting to help prepare for a teaching career, understanding my rationale became suddenly important.

The concepts with which we were dealing in the senior classes have been the topic of our learning and inquiry for the past month or so. By this point, any question should be met with a confident and thorough response. What I was doing was meant as a quick formative assessment to help me decide if they were ready for the next step.

The ideas with which Spencer was asking the G11 students to play were newer, fresher and unanticipated. Giving the students time to think about their understandings and perceptions around the issues would have insured a deeper and more thoughtful conversation.

It didn’t take me long to realize my reasoning. I wasn’t even making excuses. Those were truly the reasons I’d suggested approaching the classes differently.

Because Spencer was there and because I very earnestly want to help him and the others of his cohort meet with as much success as possible when they enter their student teaching experiences and eventual classrooms, it was incumbent for me to pull my thinking apart and explain it.

And aside from all the teaching of pedagogy, being mindful of someone observing my classroom and teaching from a place of curiosity has made me a sharper teacher over these past two weeks.

I’m going to miss Spencer and the others next week. They’ve helped me be a better version of Mr. Chase.

Things I Know 143 of 365: I failed Tuesday

Do or do not. There is no try.

– Master Yoda

I failed Tuesday.

Standing in front of a few hundred people, I failed.

As the setup to what I wanted as a teacher from “21st Century School Design” I had turned to what I knew – students.

Namely, I want school design to imagine places that inspire students to wonder and create.

To set the tone, I’d prepared the brief video below from my student Thea. She created it as her product for the Building History project.

I gave it a great introduction – explaining the project and the fact Thea chose to create a product I could have been absolutely no help on.

The last words before clicking play were probably something like, “It’s pretty amazing.”

Nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. The sound accompanying the video was playing. Something was happening. If you watch the video, though, I think you’ll agree the sound wasn’t the most impressive bit.

I stopped the music.

“You’ve just seen me fail.”

Laughter from the audience.

“I knew I was going to fail at some point up here, I’m glad it happened so early.”

I meant it.

Walking up on the stage, I knew I’d packed music, photos, links and more into my presentation and that any of it could have failed. I’d created the possibility of failure as well as a space in my head where I would be fine with that failure.

The failure was actually more to the point of what I wanted to illustrate. I want school design to create spaces where both teachers and students are willing to try new things without the fear of failure.

Thea had been told to choose whatever medium she thought best for presenting her project. Both Diana and I told each of the students we wouldn’t be mandating a specific tool and wanted the students to have free reign.

We worked as diligently as we knew how to create a space where students knew we’d help them back up if something new they tried kicked them on their butts.

I left the high possibility of failure in Tuesday’s presentation because I worry teachers aren’t given that same space to play and learn.

It’s all well and good for the students to be lifelong learners, but it’s nothing we’d necessarily want for ourselves.

Even in the instances where teachers are ready to play with ideas and try new things, they often haven’t had the spaces prepared for them by colleagues and administrators that would give the experience the chance to progress from failure to learning.

If we’re programming students to play school and not simply play, its because we’ve done the same for generations of teachers.

If you want classroom where students are challenged to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and wizards of the ingenious, then we must create schools where teachers are trusted and expected to do the same.

Patrick Larkin wrote the other day that he wants his faculty to be willing to relinquish more control as they head toward a 1:1 laptop program. While I think Larkin is on the right track, many of the other principals and district leaders I’ve heard say this never take the question any deeper.

If they want teachers to relinquish control and stop fearing failure, are they also willing to relinquish control and remove some of the stressors leading to their teachers’ fears?

I made a conscious decision as I took the stage Tuesday that I would be fine with whatever failures came my way.

I was able to make that decision because I’ve had a string of principals who supported my instinct to play and a family who was offering their support long before that.

If we want our teachers to give students room to play, we must give our teachers that same room.

Things I Know 142 of 365: We can draw everyone into the conversation

I’m always up for a conversation. So long as it’s with someone else (and sometimes even with myself), a good conversation leads to me learning more.

And I really like learning.

Standing up to start my section of the keynote for the Ohio School Facilities Commission’s 21st Century School Design Symposium 2.0 today, I presented the audience with a slide devoid of title or name.

It read simply:

What do you want to know?

In the next line, I invited audience members to text their questions to the phone number on the screen or send a message to my twitter account.

The original plan was to follow the questions up later in the presentation and open my Google Voice account. Call it keynote formative assessment.

Due to some login issues, I wasn’t able to access my account while I was still on stage.

That was for the better.

Once I returned to my seat, I opened Google Voice and found several questions waiting.

“How do you run professional development to prepare SLA teachers for project-based teaching?”

“What do you use to clean your dry erase tables?”

“Any how-to tips for working with an odd BOE?”

In my 30 minutes, I hadn’t the time to speak directly and in a detailed way to the concerns each of the questions raised. If I’d attempted to do so, I would have missed the mark of what I was asked to speak about.

Still, each question shows at least the basics of curiosity surrounding the ideas that had been presented.

The texters were inquiring.

Any question worth asking is worth answering.

The same thing happens in my classroom. In fact, I’d wager the same thing happens in every classroom. Class discussion begins or the teacher asks what questions the students have, and the few noble souls pipe up.

Most of the time, it’s the same people. On particularly excellent days, other voices enter the mix.

Today, Google Voice helped me collect some of the voices and questions that would have gone unheard and unasked in class conversation. It was the tool for today, but it isn’t the only tool.

From time to time, when having a full class conversation around a text, I explain that my goal is to hear from all voices in the classroom. I explain the value I place on a plurality of ideas and that I’m genuinely curious as to what each student has to say.

When I asked today’s audience to share what they wanted to know, I was also genuinely curious.

In class conversations, I’ll often require students who don’t speak up in the physical spaces to share their thoughts (either a new idea or a reaction to a peer) on the class discussion board on MOODLE.

Those message board strands bear out some deeply thoughtful conversation.

That conversation is epically helpful to me as I attempt to understand each of the students in my charge and how they view the world.

Sometimes, I’ll jump in on the discussion board conversations. Other times, I’ll send a private e-mail in response.

Today, I sent a response to each text message I received. I might never hear from any of them again. I get that.

Still, when we’re banning and working to verbally diminish the power of new conduits of conversation in education, maybe it will serve as a reminder of the tools we have to draw more students of all kinds into the fray.

Things I Know 141 of 365: The message about the medium matters

Whoever said that things have to be useful?

– Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO

NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller wasted space in his own paper last week.

In his column for the Times Magazine, Keller wrote a piece titled, “The Twitter Trap.”

I don’t take issue with Keller’s dislike of Twitter. My mom doesn’t like Twitter either, but she and I get along fine.

Keller wasted space in allotting column inches to an argument that’s been had since the service’s launch in March 2006.

Technology’s depleting our ability to remember, you say?

Social media is curtailing “real rapport and real conversation,” you contend?

Excellent, you’re ready for 2007.

I’ve seen several speakers recently bash twitter and then be rewarded with full applause.

“This guy’s onto something,” they cheer, “We’re all stupider because of Twitter!”

Then someone makes a joke wittily tying in the word twits.

It’s not that Twitter’s making us less thoughtful that’s worrisome to me, it’s that it’s allowing us to make the less thoughtful arguments.

Knocking Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook is easy.

Writing for the most important paper in the country should mean you don’t get to make the easy argument. It should mean you swing for the fences every time.

Keller’s argument would have been fine as his Facebook status or as a post on his blog.

From the column in the magazine, though, I was hoping for a meditation on the fact that many people learned of Osama bin Laden’s death via Twitter before the Times website could publish the story. Working through a reasoned argument why deep, long-form journalism remains relevant and important in an age when people like Andy Carvin are harnessing Twitter to cull immediate reports from the ground during the middle eastern revolutions would have engaged me as a reader.

To use his pulpit to make a case that’s nearly half a decade old, strikes me as easy. More troubling still, making the easy argument, Keller’s not trying to do anything with his writing. He should be.

Writing that attempts to inspire, change and challenge – now that’s fit to print.

Things I Know 140 of 365: We’re doing some great work

In response to a post I wrote a few days ago, Debbie and Mark left comments with a similar sentiment. They claimed my classroom and/or SLA as flukes of education. I hear and read this pretty frequently about any teacher or school making exciting change or doing better things to help kids and teachers.

How many exceptions does it take to change the rule?

Anytime someone claims a classroom or school as the exception they then cite another school or teacher as proof things are bad in the educational mainstream. While progressive pedagogy has yet to read critical mass, I don’t know that naming the handful of schools or teachers into which a person has come into contact as evidence of failure rules out optimism either.

Taking off the table the rest of the faculty of SLA, I can match any “failing” educator you’ve got with one who’s doing amazing things for kids.

Think of 5.

Go ahead.

Ready?

Meenoo Rami teaches kids English here in Philly and incorporates collaboration and student choice in all sorts of ways. Not content to settle for the regular schedule of professional development, Meenoo is co-founder of #ENGCHAT and a teacher-consultant for the Philadelphia Writing Project.

Meredith Stewart makes me think more deeply about what I do every time I interact with her. A teacher of middle and high school students in North Carolina, Meredith is certainly top-notch. Her recent posts about having her students teach their peers shows a commitment to building reflective student practice that could serve as a model for teachers at any level. Howard Rheingold summed up Meredith nicely:

She is willing to experiment with new tools, understands that facilitating student collaborative learning and fostering in each student a sense of individual agency as a learner, not technology for the sake of technology, are the important goals for technology-augmented classrooms.

Mirroring Meredith’s reflective practice, George Couros is a fine example of what learning as a principal can look like. His writing on teaching and learning works to push his own understanding of the topic as well as the understandings of his readers. You want to learn with George the way teachers want their students to learn with them.

Scott Bailey teaches students in juvenile halls in California. More than many teachers I know, Scott could excuse himself from the idea of progressive practice, citing the difficulties of building authentic learning experiences given the restrictions of working with adjudicated youth. Instead, Scott engages his students in public writing that helps them to work through whatever brought them to juvenile hall while giving them voice in the outside world. On days when I think my job is difficult, I read the work of Scott’s kids.

Sefakor Amaa is a force of nature. Teaching in the Dallas-Forth Worth, Sefakor once explained her choice to buy a home in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods of her school district. “It’s where my kids live,” she said, “I want them to see that I am there, and understand where they are coming from.” No teacher martyr, Sefakor teaches agency, empowerment and self-worth by constantly monitoring them for her students through her own words and actions.

I’ve hundreds more.

I’ve been looking for them over the last few years. That’s the thing, we have to be looking for them. You see, only a fraction of the great teachers are telling their stories. Only a handful are blogging and tweeting. The rest are doing what we came here to do – helping our students be the best versions of themselves.

Things I Know 139 of 365: We don’t work in the mailroom

There is absolutely no indication this is a problem beyond the mailroom.

– Phil Budahn

I don’t see myself as working at the bottom of the education hierarchy.

In his weekly media address, President Obama said, “We need to encourage this kind of change all across America. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – not from the top down, but from the bottom up.”

See what happened there?

In attempting to build up the teaching profession, the President admitted teachers work in the equivalent of the mailroom of the educational industrial complex.

We don’t, but it’s subtle turns of phrase like that which continue to make it acceptable for politicians, commentators and anyone in general to talk about teachers as if they were the least important pieces of a student’s life. Often, this is a breath or two after they’ve admitted teachers are the most influential factors in teaching and learning.

“From the bottom up,” is one of those frequent idiomatic turns of phrase thrown in as filler or a linguistic bridge to get from one point to the next.

It draws much less attention than “Teachers are facilitators of learning,” or “We must focus on 21st-century skills.” Those rhetorical lightening rods draw the attention of anyone with an opinion on education while “From the bottom up,” or “From those on the front lines of education,” merit little notice in the educational thunderstorm.

This is how we keep teachers in their place. This is how we continue to scratch away the polish of the profession.

“From the bottom up,” implies the President wants to put a suggestion box in the break room and give a coffee mug to any teacher whose suggestion makes it to implementation.

At this point in a conversation, my students would claim I’m reading too much into President Obama’s remarks. Perhaps I am.

Consider, though, the effects if he reversed his language to paint a different mental picture – one that sat educators as the experts at the top of the system and recognized the role of government to provide a foundation of support.

“We need to support expertise of educators all across America. Washington needs to support reforms driven by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – from the top down.”

It would shift the paradigm. It would acknowledge that educators serve the needs of our students and that Washington serves at the pleasure of its electorate.

The first step toward the adoption of this language will begin with parents, principals and teachers and their rejection of the notion that they operate at diminished capacity simply because that is what they have been told.

We must engage in self-advocacy as we would want our students to do.

If we continue to agree with the linguistically constructed hierarchy, we will never be models of change to our students.

Things I Know 138 of 365: English 101 ain’t got nothing on us

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

– Langston Hughes

The ENG 101 syllabus of one of my former students states the following:

Students who pass the course will be able to do the following:

  • Use appropriate rhetorical development (such as analysis, comparison/contrast, interpretation and argument) to respond to the central ideas of an assigned text
  • Paraphrase sentences and short passages from reading texts
  • Analyze a written assignment
  • Develop essays of varying length and complexity that incorporate ideas from texts
  • Use a variety of sentence patterns, indicating a generally mature style
  • Evaluate effectiveness of their own writing via feedback from professor, peers and self to produce a rigorous revision
  • Use vocabulary that conveys meaning accurately and appropriately for a college student

Fantastic.

Awesome.

Super-sweet.

The thing is, I send my students out of my classroom with those skills. I send them out of the classroom with more than those skills.

As we fast-approach the end of the school year, my senior students are practicing their ability to analyze texts at their linguistic, semantic, structural and cultural levels and then apply various schools of literary criticism to find deeper meaning.

To their future professors, I say, challenge them.

We have been. It’s fun; trust me.

I’ve read plenty of articles denouncing the abhorrent linguistic skills with which college freshmen enter their university experiences.

Get over it.

Perhaps the problem lies not in the skills of the students but in the work they are being asked to complete.

On this same syllabus, the workload of the course is outlined:

In this class, you will write and revise 5 full-length essays plus write an in-class essay for a final exam. These will range in length from 3 pages (early essays) and gradually lengthen to 5 pages (last take-home essay).

My favorite implication in the above is the idea that an essay of 5 pages in length is somehow superior in content than an essay of 3 pages in length. I love the COSTCO approach to writing in bulk. It’s an excellent lesson to teach our students that more writing equals better writing.

Of particular note is the fact that the learning described in this syllabus will bore students to tears. Many high school teachers have gotten the memo that technology and 21st-century learning open up the ability for our students to learn and produce artifacts of their learning in varied and complex ways. And, we’re doing it while sticking to the content of yesterday as well. My G11 students will have written 12 analytical essays by the end of the year. Each of those papers will have centered around a thesis statement that is unique, inciteful and debatable – not to mention self-created.

Professors should also know they’re working and revising on google docs with peer feedback, building a portfolio of work on which they reflect at the end of each quarter. Their writing process is transparent, collaborative and authentic.

When the syllabus states, “Essays must be submitted to me in paper form (not email)…” I want to email the professor asking, “Why?” I reconsider, remembering this professor’s aversion to such correspondence.

My argument is simply this, whomever is designing the curriculum and pedagogy for the nation’s ENG 101 courses, know that we’ve been bringing our A-game for the last four years, and we’re sending you students who will be expecting the same from you.

Things I Know 137 of 365: Conversations are excellent professional development

Change that eminates from teachers lasts until they find a better way.

– Roland Barthes

Continuing to tie up the year during SLA’s weekly professional development meetings, it was my Professional Learning Community’s turn to present what we learned during our independent study in the first semester.

My very small learning community consisted of Mark, a math teacher, and me. That’s it. Just two of us.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t love learning with Mark in the first semester.

What began as a plan to find new tools and writings to bring to each meeting shifted into something more directly applicable – conversation.

Each time we met, Mark and I shared what we were doing in our classes and brainstormed ways in which technology could transform students’ learning into something more engaging, authentic and differentiated.

As Mark admitted, I’ve a bit more proficiency with tech and learning. Often, our conversations consisted of me learning about the math concepts he was teaching his students and then throwing out whatever ideas came to mind.

Because I realized math is Mark’s domain of understanding and had no qualms admitting my deficiencies in its instruction, I didn’t hold back my ideas, nor did I take offense when Mark dismissed an idea as impractical.

Had I paired up with another humanities teacher, my ideas might not have flowed so freely, and any negation might not have been so freely accepted.

When it came time to plan our presentation to the entire faculty, we experienced a moment of pseudo-panic. Had we been collecting and cataloging tools and articles throughout the semester as we planned, we would have been set. Read this, now try this, now plan a sample lesson, now share, now critique in small groups. It’s the unsweetened cereal of professional development.

When it came time for today’s presentation, we decided to share not only what we learned about the tools, but what we learned about process as well.

For us, learning had been social, collegial and immediate.

In the first five minutes, we gave an overview of our process.

Next, I asked each faculty member to think about where they would rate their comfort with technology in learning on a scale of 1-10.

“Now, use your fingers to show your number. Without talking, line up from highest to lowest.”

They did.

From their, we broke the line in half. The highest end of each half was paired with the highest end of the other half and they were broken into couples.

Then, down to business.

Laptops in tow, the lower numbers in each pair explained what they’re doing in their classrooms through the end of the year. The higher numbers listened, asked questions and then started brainstorming ideas on how tech could be better leveraged to help with learning.

Mark and I milled about the room.

At each table I stopped, a conversation similar to the conversations Mark and I had throughout the first semester was taking place.

After a few minutes, we paused, asked people to share what was going well and then gave a few more minute either to continue on their topics of discussion or to let those who had been brainstorming share what was going on in their classrooms.

For the finish, I asked the group what they noticed about the past 25 minutes that stood out to them:

  • People were working cross-disciplinarily. With one or two exceptions, each couple was made up of teachers from different disciplines.
  • People were talking one-on-one about their practice.
  • People were talking about things that could immediately affect classroom practice rather than living in the hypothetical.

We also talked about what could be done to continue this kind of conversation and collaboration. The thing that stuck the most was the idea of moving outside people’s normal routine to seek out the feedback of our peers.

That’s the key of it. In a structured, focused way, we asked people to move outside the routine of talking to those in their disciplines or the routine of curriculum design and have a one-on-one conversation about improving how they teach.

That should be the routine.

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Things I Know 136 of 365: Forget Facebook; I’m keeping me real

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

– Walt Whitman

Steve Cheney recently posted on Facebook’s effects on personal authenticity. Because Facebook is everywhere, despite check-ins and the like, those on Facebook are essentially nowhere. Not the real people.

I read the article with one of my G11 classes. The responses were mixed.

One student commented he wasn’t worried about Facebook hindering his sense of self, “My Facebook page says I like naked skydiving, Satan worship and smoking crack.” Certainly, this student and the one student in the class who admitted to not having a Facebook page are safe from what Cheney points out as Facebook’s attempt to tie people to one identity across the web.

Another student commented on the trouble of his Facebook status interrupting his real life. In a moment of impulse he posted some misogynistic lyrics to a song he was listening to as his status without citing them.

Moments later, his aunt started commenting and criticizing what he was saying about women. Not long after, his aunt told the student’s mother and she jumped in to the commenting fray. Three-quarters of the way into the story, I yelled, “Oh, yeah!”

The student shot me a questioning look. “I remember watching that happen on my feed,” I explained.

I had, in fact, seen the initial status update. I was ready to comment when I saw his aunt’s reply. From there, I sat back and watched as this student’s teachable moment played out very publicly online.

While the whole thing was no more than a virtual version of eavesdropping as a child is disciplined in a department store, I’m troubled by something else dressed up as innocuous but is potentially more menacing.

Considering the online purchase of a sweatshirt a few weeks ago, I noticed the option to “Like” the sweatshirt at the bottom of the picture along with an encouraging, “Be the first of your friends to like this.”

Facebook was open in none of my browser tabs, but there it was, lurking as I shopped, collecting more and more data on where I’ve been looking around the Internet.

Thing is, if I like that sweatshirt, I’ll send the link to a friend or two with the message, “What do you think?” That’s it.

Facebook wants me to like it in front of 807 of my closest and most tacitly connected friends.

It’s a hoodie.

No one should be subjected to that kind of information about my life.

Not only does Facebook want to spread my business, it wants to use me as a tool of the man. If any of my friends should happen upon this same hoodie in their own browsing, Facebook also wants to use my “Like” as peer pressure to encourage any of those 807 a little closer to buying the shirt as well.

Cheney remains optimistic on the chances of our humanity winning out over the full adoption of Facebook-rooted inauthentic identities:

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

While there are moments my online spaces have allotted me the capabilities to make smaller, stylized connections to various groups, Facebook and its ilk are not the spaces in which to do that. They never were.

If I wouldn’t reveal it to a stranger at a dinner party, it’s not meant for Facebook.