I'm catching up on my MTBoS reading after the holiday rush and the post-holiday sluggishness. Today I read
Michael Pershan's
Year in Review blog post, in which he referred back to
a sort of self-reflection from October which I unfortunately missed at that time. If you like Michael's writing, which I do, it's all thought-provoking and engaging, but there's
one comment I wanted to highlight and write about:
I don't especially know Michael, but I can vouch for him on this: both that he practices what he preaches, and that it made a big difference to me, a 49-year-old white woman who can be a little gun-shy about male-dominated professional spaces. I joined Twitter and started this blog this past summer. I haven't been blogging or even tweeting much lately, but I am fully intending to pick up the pace more in 2015, especially over the summer.
The fact that I have been and will be tweeting and blogging instead of just lurking or wandering away is due more to Michael than any other single individual, and it is from just what he said here: he noticed me, paid attention to what I said, engaged in conversation with me online, was one of my first followers, and recommended others to follow me. This kind of welcome, from him and others in the MTBoS, and the active, lively, respectful conversations among women and men of diverse ages and teaching roles, kept me on Twitter at a time when I easily could have felt there was not much of a place for a 48-year-old woman in this new(ish) space whose most famous citizen (at least to me) was a young white guy. If we want to hear from all kinds of teachers, we should make sure they know they're not tweeting into a vacuum, and the best way to do that is to respond somehow.
One conversation from my first few weeks on Twitter stands out in my memory, enough that I just went back and dug it up to make sure I had it right. It was about one of Michael's
posts on feedback. I commented there and, I think, tweeted something early on and was included among the names in the tweets for a few rounds. My name got dropped after a bit, which didn't bother me, but I kept reading the conversation because it was interesting. Then all of a sudden this happened:
I was stunned, in a good way, but I don't think I answered either of those remarks (till now, obviously) because I had no idea what to say. I felt like I didn't understand Twitter culture enough (I still am not quite sure of the etiquette of barging into threads when your name's not on the list, though I do it now anyway); I felt they had nothing to apologize for about dropping me and didn't know how to say that and appreciate the thought at the same time; I worried anything I would say in response would sound patronizing (wow, you're a young white guy and you're aware of sexism? gold star for you!). All of those things are still true, but I'm going ahead and saying something now because it made a big difference to me that they
noticed and cared that including me would change it from an all-male conversation.
Within a few weeks, I had found plenty of women and men on Twitter to follow (and others to read frequently even if I didn't follow them), some of them followed me too, and I was hooked. I've been cautious about following too many accounts for fear of getting swamped, but after reflecting on my own experiences, I'm going to try harder next year to seek out and follow teachers who I wish I could hear more from, not just wait till their accounts are full of interesting posts... which might never happen if they are tweeting into the void.
