Teaching, Stereotypes, and the Technological World My Students Are Growing Up In

Open any social media app and you are bound to encounter critiques of education and educators. I don't mind critiques, I happen to have a lot of my own, but I do mind when those critiques are based on stereotypes that can be easily disproved. Teachers only work ten months out of the year. Teachers only work about seven hours a day. Teachers are overpaid for the months they work. Anyone can be a teacher. I could go on, but these are some of the more glaring stereotypes I encounter often. 

I do not think that these stereotypes necessarily come from malice. I simply think it comes from a complete misunderstanding of what teachers do day-to-day and year-to-year in the classroom. 

I've worked in special education long enough to know that the gap between perception and reality is wide. People imagine a teacher standing at a board, giving instructions, going home at three. They don't picture the IEP meetings, the documentation, the parent calls, the hour I spent last Thursday trying to figure out why a student who was doing fine last week suddenly isn't. They don't see the way I lie awake sometimes thinking about a kid who I can tell is carrying something heavy but won't say what it is. None of that is visible. None of it is what people picture when they hear "teacher."

Whether or not I choose to engage with others about stereotypes depends on my relationship to them. If it is friends or family, I explain the realities of what modern educators face in their profession. Outside of that, I ignore the noise at this stage in my life and career. If I've learned one thing, arguing with or attempting to debate others on social platforms is a losing proposition, so I opt to ignore.

Social media can be a both a blessing and a curse. In some ways, I think it's genuinely helped. Teachers do have a platform now in a way we never used to. I've seen posts go around that show real classroom moments, the creativity, the chaos, the care, and they shift something for people who read them. There's something powerful about a teacher being able to say, in their own words and to a wide audience: this is what the work actually looks like.

But I'd be lying if I said it's made things better. Social media is also where I've watched educators get torn apart over a clip with no context. Where one difficult moment in a classroom becomes the comment section's opportunity to write off an entire profession. And there's this other thing it does that's harder to name, it creates this image of the perfect teacher. Organized. Creative. Cheerful. Classroom walls that look like a magazine spread. And real teachers, who have hard days and messy rooms and lessons that completely fall apart, can start to feel like they're doing something wrong. That's its own kind of damage.

What I think about most, though, is my students and what it actually means to be growing up inside all of this.

It is common to have students struggle to stay awake in class because they have been scrolling their social media accounts all night. My school has had situations in the past couple of years where students are following TikTok trends and vandalizing school property all in the pursuit of clicks and likes. I have listened to and read work by Jonathan Haidt where he sheds light on the impact of social media to youths. There is a lot of be concerned about.

I do think about it a lot. These students are breathing inside something that never fully turns off, and we're still sometimes acting like we can teach around it. Like if we just get the lesson right, the rest doesn't matter. It does.

The academic piece is challenging enough on its own. I notice how hard it is for some of my students to stay with something that doesn't immediately resolve. Reading a longer text. Sitting with a problem that doesn't have a quick answer. Writing multiple drafts of something. These things require a kind of patience that has to be built deliberately now, because almost everything else in their day is designed to move fast and give instant feedback. I don't think my students are less capable. I think they need me to be more intentional about helping them build that stamina.

But the deeper work, the social-emotional piece, is where I feel the weight of it most. My students are surrounded by comparison all day long. Bodies, friendships, popularity, success. All of it is visible, all of it is ranked, all of it is available the moment they pick up their phone. For students who are already navigating learning differences, social challenges, or difficult home situations, that environment is a lot to carry into a classroom.

What I keep coming back to is this: I can't teach as if their online lives are separate from their school lives. They're not. They never are. And part of my job, part of what it means to actually show up for these kids, is helping them learn how to exist in that world with some sense of themselves intact. How to slow down. How to question what they're seeing. How to treat people on a screen the way they'd want to be treated in the room. How to know that their worth doesn't live in a number of likes or follower count.

I don't have a clean conclusion to any of this. Teaching never really offers those. What I have is another week ahead of me, a caseload I care about, and a clearer sense that the work, all of it, the visible parts and the invisible ones still matters. Even when it's exhausting. Even when I'm still trying to figure out the right thing to say when someone wants to insert an erroneous stereotype.

Maybe especially then.