DL 264

Toxic Positivity

Published: October 17, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 264. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

• Toxic Positivity Hurts Educators: Stop treating teachers like babysitters all year then sending Starbucks gift cards one week—pay and support them
• Parental Burnout Is Real: Occurs when distance between ideal and possible lived reality becomes too much to bear
• Zuckerberg Learned Politics: His moves protect Facebook from antitrust scrutiny, privacy criticism, and misinformation blame
• Twitter's Disinformation Struggle: Networks are existential threat to US election integrity
• Students Need Genuine Connection: Small moments when teachers connect individually are what hungry students need

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate and issue 264.

Thanks for showing up this week. I appreciate you.

This week I worked on the following:

• Be the Documentarian of Your Life - Document your thinking online to lead to new inspiration.
• Protect Your Center - The challenges and opportunities as we struggle with an internal vs external locus of control.
• The Doorway Effect - Do not let your shadow walk you. You are not a slave of the past.
• Writing For Yourself - Do you write for yourself—or for others?
• Work Like a Maker, Not a Manager - Schedule and protect time for creativity and building.

📺 Watch

The Difficulty of Knowing Yourself

The School of Life channel on the challenges of understanding your own minds. We've spent decades on the earth before we've grasped even very basic things about who we are and how we function.

It's not for nothing that the Ancient Greeks felt philosophy had only one command: Know yourself!

📚 Read

The Challenges of Toxic Positivity for Educators

This story hit close to home this week. When people ask what I do, I usually don't dig into my research or development. To keep things simple, I suggest that I teach teachers. This usually derails the discussion.

As I help prepare teachers for the field—and support them while they are there—I try and pay attention to the challenges present in/out of the classroom.

This post discusses the challenges of toxic positivity and the need to support educators. This post was quickly, and emotionally, shared by many of my peers.

As a society, we need to make a decision about the value of educators in our systems. Stop treating teachers like babysitters the whole year, and then sending them a Starbucks gift card one week a year. Pay teachers. Support teachers. Treat teachers like the professionals they are.

How Burnout Became the Norm for American Parents

Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear. That's true of the workplace, and that's true of parenting.

The common denominator among millennials is that we've been inculcated with the idea that failure—like our failure to find secure employment, or save enough money to buy a house, or stave off an avalanche of medical debt—can be chalked up to simply not trying hard enough.

How Mark Zuckerberg Learned Politics

For more than a decade, Mark Zuckerberg could care less about politics as Facebook became a global force.

His recent political moves are part of an effort to protect his company from pressures that range from antitrust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic to criticism of its privacy practices and of its role in disseminating misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The truth of the matter is that Facebook throttles traffic and amplifies some voices while silencing others. The algorithms that manipulate human behaviors are largely unintelligible for regular users.

Read more in this thread from Clara Jeffery. But at least Zuckerberg indicated this week that the social network would update the algorithm to ban Holocaust denial statements. So—there's that.

Twitter's Problems with Anti-Disinformation

We've talked quite a bit about the misinformation war underway around the globe. This has kicked into high gear as we inch closer to the 2020 US Elections.

Doug Belshaw breaks down the problems as Twitter seeks to deal with disinformation on their network. As Belshaw notes—these networks are an existential threat to the US election.

A Simple Technique for Affecting Belonging

Students are hungry for what English teacher Dave Stuart calls moments of genuine connection, small instances when teachers connect individually with a student.

Students need to be respected, seen, and heard. Moving direct instruction online may allow time for more of these connections in class.

🔨 Do

Set Up an Awesome Video Conferencing Hub

Some great guidance from Ben Kuhn on how to set up an awesome video conferencing hub.

Thanks to Doug Belshaw for sharing this in his excellent Thought Shrapnel newsletter.

🤔 Consider

If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that.

Charles Bukowski

Bukowski's all-or-nothing wisdom frames an issue about the exhaustion of half-measures—toxic positivity that papers over real problems, burnout that comes from trying to bridge impossible gaps, platforms that tweak algorithms instead of fixing systems. Sometimes going all the way means demanding real change.

🔗 Navigation

Previous: DL 263 • Next: DL 265 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

• Pedagogy — Toxic positivity, teacher support, student belonging
• Digital Wellbeing — Parental burnout, knowing yourself, locus of control
• Media Literacy — Twitter disinformation, Zuckerberg politics, algorithm manipulation
• Platform Accountability — Facebook Holocaust denial policy, unintelligible algorithms
• Philosophy — Bukowski on commitment, Ancient Greek self-knowledge