I read a post on Facebook in which someone made some pretty pointed remarks about their child’s teacher. I put myself in both the parent’s and the teacher’s shoes to try and understand the situation. As a parent, I’ve experienced the frustration of not completely understanding monologue communication from school. As a teacher, I imagined how hurt I would be if someone went to a social networking site to blast my mistakes (I do make them daily) or especially a misunderstanding that I didn’t have the chance to correct. It dawned on me how similar this rhetoric is to the “virtual bullying” that we are now learning to teach about in schools, where bullies resort to defamation and hurting victims, I have to imagine that teacher was not on the “friend” list of that parent, so it was a one-sided assault.
On the side of the parent, bullying or pain was probably not the intention at all. We live in an age of online discourse. If a restaurant, a movie, a song, an emotion, a blog…any human interaction is terrible or great we publicly flaunt or flog it. Maybe we sometimes forget that there is a human on the other side of that interaction. From this, I have decided to make it a point to use the communal “WE”, so that anything I may observe, experience, or evaluate includes me as an active participant, not a critic-sans-solutions.
I think the person who wrote this post is a well-balanced and caring person. If people were truly able to stop and consider the “human” before we react to anything, I think there might be a little less bullying and a lot more understanding! Thanks Mr. Sutterlin!
Yes, and unfortunately we all succomb to being “human” by reacting sometimes before we pause. There’s room for all of us to learn everytime. I suppose even a 50% “pause-to-think rate” would solve a lot of world problems. Thanks for jumping in Michael, come read again!