Most of us know, in our heads, how social media can skew day to day life. We talk about this in relation to how our kids need to understand that life isn’t always as perfect as social media might portray. Instagram has filters. Snapchat has a great camera. You can choose to only post about the amazing things happening in your life on Facebook. No matter what you read or see, it can seem like other people have it all together, are prettier/more handsome than us, more successful, happier…and then we look at our lives and ask ourselves what we are doing wrong or question why we are so unlucky even when we know in our heads that social media is like this.
It’s not much different in our professional lives. We read blogs where people say amazing things and have incredible ideas and we tell ourselves we will never be able to think big thoughts like that. Or we get on Pinterest and try to recreate a bulletin board and even if we can pull it off and it’s not an epic fail, we still wonder why we couldn’t have been the one to come up with the idea in the first place. It’s this Catch-22 of utilizing social media for sharing ideas which in turn can make people feel like they’re not living up to the perfection that other people are putting out there-forgetting that it’s not always truly perfection being lived.
I’ve been thinking about this lately in regards to my writing and how it often revolves around teacher engagement and how I want people to love their jobs. I talk about how if you are engaged you love what you do, and I wonder what kind of perfect system I’ve been describing. If I’ve given anyone the impression that loving your job and being engaged means that you’re always happy with everything you do. Of course, things always become a little clearer when you begin to realize that you might be wrong and there is a disconnect between what you say and what you experience or believe and subsequently, a need for deep reflection.
I had a really bad week this past week. It was one of those weeks where I worked my tail off but the only thing I accomplished was putting out a few fires from what seemed to be an inferno popping up. I accomplished nothing on my task list. And this is coming from someone who believes whole-heartedly in procedures and being proactive in order to avoid the fires in the first place. I was unhappy every day I came home from work because I still had my task list waiting for me but was too exhausted to even look at it. I had several what am I even doing this for moments. I saw other administrators posting videos out on social media and their blogs about how amazing their beginning of the year was and I was incredibly happy for them and disgusted with myself. I started to think…am I disengaged again? Burnt out? How did this happen?
But I don’t believe that loving your job and being engaged in your profession means you don’t have challenges. It doesn’t mean that there are parts you don’t like. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have bad days or weeks. It means that at the end of everything, do you still believe that this is what you were meant to do? Are the parts that you love the things that drive you forward? When you see a student, do you still think, “Oh yeah, they’re why I’m here.”
I want educators to continue to post on social media and I want them to continue to write on their blogs because that inspiration and those ideas are what I need. It’s my responsibility to remember that I’m not trying to live up to someone else’s ideas and standards, but instead trying to be the best version of myself I can with my experiences, my story, and my strengths. And I may have irritating weeks but that is also just being real. We can all still love our jobs without loving every moment we are there, and it doesn’t make us less of an educator to have a bad week as long as we wake up on Monday morning knowing that it’s a new week where something amazing could happen.
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