"Good Teachers....."

Twitter can be a great professional learning tool. I log on at least once a day and browse through the tweets from educators and organizations that I follow and usually click on to two or three articles, blogs or other resources to read. I also love having a peek into other educators' classrooms and administrators' schools and the student learning that they share. Other people post short tweets meant to be inspirational.

Yesterday, the responses to one of these inspirational types of Twitter posts caught me by surprise. Danny Steele, who often posts these types of Tweets posted:

Good teachers will spend some time this summer thinking about how they can improve their lessons next year. That’s just what they do.

— Danny Steele (@SteeleThoughts) May 25, 2018

Which lead to a lengthy response:

The rest of us crap teachers will use summer to rest and take a break without feeling guilty about not thinking about work. That's just what we do. https://t.co/llVbSvNBV5

— Doug Robertson (@TheWeirdTeacher) May 28, 2018

Usually I avoid 'twitter drama' but this response thread intrigued me. I don't imagine it's what Mr. Steele intended but when you say 'good teachers do.....' are you thereby creating another set of 'bad teachers' who don't do whatever you've described? That's certainly how some teachers interpreted his words. In this case, he stated that they spend 'some' time thinking about how they can improve their lessons, not that they spend every moment of their summer thinking about work. And certainly lots of teacher do think about how to improve their lessons but they also take time to focus on their family, their health and all the things that may have put on the back burner during the school year. From a self-reg perspective, the end of the school year is a time of incredible stress. Teachers are frantically trying to 'cover' the remaining curriculum expectations, wrap up year end events, prepare final report cards, all while wondering what their assignment for next year will be. What subject will be they be teaching? Will they be at the same school or will they be transferred due to enrolment changes or other factors? Who will be in their class? Do they upgrade qualifications? Apply for a new position? Seek some additional responsibilities? And some teachers are doing this while teaching in stifling hot classrooms since many of our school buildings are old and unairconditioned. Our words have the power. We must choose them wisely.