Last year I constructed lists of thousands of science teachers, math teachers, education technologists, and administrators on Twitter using supervised machine learning.
As Twitter spirals deeper into a cesspool I don't believe most educators want to be associated with the place anymore. Personally, I still have my account, I still post every so often, but only to complain to big companies who don't seem to listen to any other form of communication.
I miss the prior era of the internet, where you found a forum that was specific to an interest. On social media it so often feels like you have to try to represent your entire persona rather than simply engage with the discussions that interest you. I post something about how slope is going and right underneath it is someone going "Why is everyone silent about the atrocities in _______" or "my nephew lost his job and needs $25000 for surgery" and it just feels strange to keep talking about slope.
I am on a couple of slacks and discords for specific interests (NBA basketball, politics) and those are much, much healthier places for the sort of creativity and dialogue that you and I pine for. I hope we can get back to something like that.
The professional development organization I collaborate with works with teachers in a large metropolitan area. They have been around for almost 20 years now. Every year, as a part of their evaluation, they do end-of-year interviews with the teachers (all secondary math teachers). The head of the organization told me that this has been the worst year yet for teacher morale. The 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years were the crisis years, and this year (2022-23), there was a lot of "back to normal" talk. Pacing guides and high stakes assessments were back, as if students hadn't had two years of disrupted schooling. I think it has taken a TON of creative energy to navigate these past few years. My own conversations with teachers bear this out.
I do think that there has been a bit of exiting or moving to new roles too. Of the six teachers I featured in my book MOTIVATED, only 2 are still in the classroom. (That is a very limited data point, I realize, but it reflects other attrition data I have been seeing.)
Clay Shirky popularized a concept called "cognitive surplus" which I think, for whatever reason, a bunch of us had back when. But now it seems pretty clear teachers are operating under a net cognitive deficit. Not enough cognitive resources for what they're asked to do to say nothing about anything left over for online community.
I am reading a twitter eulogy by journalists who "grew up" there in the same way we grew up on Twitter: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/08/twitter-demise-journalists-eulogy-threads-app-elon-musk One compared it to the worldly cosmopolitan bar, a-la the movie "Cabaret," taken over by brownshirts. When one has to participate and especially manage communities at that level of existential threat, yes, it does sap cognitive energy. Historically, when a pattern like that escalates, people who remain productive disperse into smaller groups with higher operations security (so to speak). As you said, we are spending time with trusted people doing projects together.
One model I've been following for social media is Archive of Our Own and their research and development foundation Organization for Transformative Works. It was formed in response to LiveJournal fiasco, and is run by a board of volunteers - by and for participants. Their models of software development, governance, and publication are worth studying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Transformative_Works
Agreed, "back to normal" shouldn't have been all that was before the pandemic. It is also sad to hear that teachers you featured in your book, four of them quit. I didn't read your book (yet), but hey were probably worth featuring, and now they are out. So sad.
As for myself, I am considering to morph into something else than regular maths teacher. Having been awarded a "Let Me Tell You" certificate last year, as I have been pointing out problems and come up with suggestions, I think I am tired of fighting the fight outside the class.
In the Australian secondary school staffroom where I'm currently working as a pre-service maths teacher, I hear comments from experienced teachers to the effect that they all went above and beyond during COVID, but continue to be worse off due to poor salaries plus excessive admin/bureaucracy. Even recent well publicised teacher pay rises apparently leave them worse off due to other benefits being taken away plus the impact of inflation. Also, student behaviour issues have apparently increased significantly post COVID, leaving several teachers I've observed stressed and burned out. There also seem to be a lot of non-maths teachers covering maths classes, due to the shortage of qualified maths teachers, which seems to add to their stress since they don't know the content.
I loved twitter back in the day. I loved ddmeyer, samjshah, misscalul8, Fouss just to name a few. I learned so much from all of them and loved helping misscalcul8 in her first years of teaching. I too have noticed the great decline in activity. You used to post a question and get 5 responses in 5 minutes. Now you are whistling in the dark. The baby tweeters have flown the nest! There must be another nest somewhere. But were Dan? Where?
It’s so interesting that you chose this topic. It has been on my mind too! I had just started to embrace Twitter (a late adopter) and was super excited to join and contribute to the math conversation. It was really fun, super informative and a great way to connect. For a short while. Then, once the change at the top happened, I felt compelled to pull away.
I, too, wonder if much of the conversation is happening on the now corporate Slack channels of the companies you mentioned. During the pandemic, I was lucky to be part of a vibrant and creative Slack channel. It was the community we could not get by walking outdoors and entering a school. We would jump on, ask questions, hypothesize, conjecture about progressions, discuss standards and applications within the curriculum. However, even that has gone too. At least from my experience, it had been squelched for the sake of “efficiency” and “read the handbook”. I am craving this conversation and have text chains and friends, yet long for the creativity and ideas spurred by a larger and by nature more diverse voice. I for one, am going to revisit Facebook and the group channels.
I was wondering something similar. My inquiry started when I posted my newsletter on Redshirting for Kindergarten. My newsletter is in the Parenting section on substack so I reached into the education section to find authors to share it with. I was surprised how few teacher or school administer centered newsletters letters were on substack.
I started using LinkedIn frequently since last December, and it is my new "Facebook" now. And I met valuable educators there who create content and share ideas. I think more and more educators sign up to LI, and one of the reasons could be what Twitter turned into.
I think some of the energy is still there, but being poured into private channels. I'd bet that Amplify's slack is buzzing. Likewise for virtual meetings between those "content creators". I wonder if it also has to do partly with the Pareto Principle (80/20). And if you peel off a significant portion of the 20% of the Ts who were contributing 80% of the stuff, I imagine it makes a big difference. But of course, Twitter, it's apps, and it's leadership suck terribly right now.
Even if my guesses are close, this still doesn't explain where the teachers in their first 10 years are. Not twitter, not actively at least.
I wonder if, over time, social media users have generally transformed their use of SM. At one time, users casually created content without much premeditation or curation. Since then, users have seen a lot of personalities suffer because of content they’ve created. I wonder if seeing negative ramifications of creating casual content has led more users to be consumers of content instead of creators of content. It’s not friendly out here. I wonder if people are muting themselves and just watching, instead of engaging “cameras on” and “unmuted.”
I think there's something here, at least for me. I'm much less inclined to just go nuts on a topic than I used to be. Maybe that's a function of age or maturity or having more to lose but I suspect part of it is that social media is no longer a gallery of wackos hanging around trying to amuse and impress each other. Posting has become serious business.
Here was my comment from that post, ala Dan Anderson's comment: "I think it’s generally true that a lot of conversations are happening on Slacks or within teams instead of in public right now, and that this is because some of the most interesting online presences from the first/second generation of MTBoS-ers are working for Desmos, IM, writing for Stenhouse, etc."
Twitter is indeed dead to many Americans after its near catastrophic takeover by billionaire and global idiot Elon Musk. But you are right, Dan Meyer... All that energy is out there swirling in the minds of teachers eager to engage, eager to share, and eager to grow as professionals. Social media platforms as a whole are in their awkward adolescent phase and are trying new formats and abandoning old ones with lightening speed. Eventually, the dust will settle, and there will be one or a core few platforms where all this energy will reconverge and enlighten us all again. But between now and then, we search and seek it out on Instagram, Fb, Twitter (I am in the abandoned-Twitter camp), TikTok (I never went there and won't probably) and.... here on substack via good old email. Maybe email will have a vinyl-style comeback for those of us nauseated by the evil algorithms of modern day social media! I dunno. But hooray for Substack and platforms like it, for the time being.
No idea but I'm certainly in the generational change cohort. Not that I was ever particularly active on Twitter.
Speaking of generations, here's a hypothesis. Twitter was where teacher millennials shared their ideas. In addition to generational change, we are now at the phase of our careers where we are done-ish with figuring out teaching (false but you get the idea...creative juices belong more to the young).
So it's not that teacher Twitter has gone elsewhere. It's more you just need to ask the younguns where they are posing their big questions. And it's very possible given the great resignation and pandemic that the new cohort has new expectations around teaching.
Apologies for the many oversimplifications here. And I'm assuredly wrong about something. You are much more in touch with more teachers than I.
I am much older than GenZers…. And after the pandemic, I have found my needs for work life balance have totally shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I love working and it may be a bit of a toxic relationship between me and work, lol. After experiencing teaching and education differently, these past three years, I have not been able to get my head around returning to the school building full time. I am an early ed teacher, K-5. We don’t have planning breaks, and I swear my body has thanked me for not returning to the physical stressors of the building. I say this as a person who loved it. My ideal…Part time in the building with more than full time outside the building. It seems like, if we want to entice people to join the ranks of teaching we must do it better. Maybe job sharing? Co- teaching classrooms? Full year school, with extended breaks throughout the year? Any ideas??
i do think gen z has different expectations around work/life balance than we gen x'ers and y'all millenials... i see it in my doc students and my own kids
I learn something new from my #iteachphysics peers all the time. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t screenshot something for my “try this” folder. I have, however, pulled back on my own twitter posting & am currently in private mode mostly due to the trolls. My block game is good, though, and I hope to fully engaged again by the end of the summer.
Perhaps STEM teachers, being both 1) fact/data/evidence-based decision-makers as well as perhaps 2) caring about things like equity and social justice, don't like the cess pool of bigoted, racist intolerance that Twitter is becoming (thanks to Elon Musk) and are looking for alternatives.
As Twitter spirals deeper into a cesspool I don't believe most educators want to be associated with the place anymore. Personally, I still have my account, I still post every so often, but only to complain to big companies who don't seem to listen to any other form of communication.
I miss the prior era of the internet, where you found a forum that was specific to an interest. On social media it so often feels like you have to try to represent your entire persona rather than simply engage with the discussions that interest you. I post something about how slope is going and right underneath it is someone going "Why is everyone silent about the atrocities in _______" or "my nephew lost his job and needs $25000 for surgery" and it just feels strange to keep talking about slope.
I am on a couple of slacks and discords for specific interests (NBA basketball, politics) and those are much, much healthier places for the sort of creativity and dialogue that you and I pine for. I hope we can get back to something like that.
The professional development organization I collaborate with works with teachers in a large metropolitan area. They have been around for almost 20 years now. Every year, as a part of their evaluation, they do end-of-year interviews with the teachers (all secondary math teachers). The head of the organization told me that this has been the worst year yet for teacher morale. The 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years were the crisis years, and this year (2022-23), there was a lot of "back to normal" talk. Pacing guides and high stakes assessments were back, as if students hadn't had two years of disrupted schooling. I think it has taken a TON of creative energy to navigate these past few years. My own conversations with teachers bear this out.
I do think that there has been a bit of exiting or moving to new roles too. Of the six teachers I featured in my book MOTIVATED, only 2 are still in the classroom. (That is a very limited data point, I realize, but it reflects other attrition data I have been seeing.)
Clay Shirky popularized a concept called "cognitive surplus" which I think, for whatever reason, a bunch of us had back when. But now it seems pretty clear teachers are operating under a net cognitive deficit. Not enough cognitive resources for what they're asked to do to say nothing about anything left over for online community.
I am reading a twitter eulogy by journalists who "grew up" there in the same way we grew up on Twitter: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/08/twitter-demise-journalists-eulogy-threads-app-elon-musk One compared it to the worldly cosmopolitan bar, a-la the movie "Cabaret," taken over by brownshirts. When one has to participate and especially manage communities at that level of existential threat, yes, it does sap cognitive energy. Historically, when a pattern like that escalates, people who remain productive disperse into smaller groups with higher operations security (so to speak). As you said, we are spending time with trusted people doing projects together.
One model I've been following for social media is Archive of Our Own and their research and development foundation Organization for Transformative Works. It was formed in response to LiveJournal fiasco, and is run by a board of volunteers - by and for participants. Their models of software development, governance, and publication are worth studying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Transformative_Works
oh crud. i need to change my user name -- the first substack i subscribed to was my daughter's so my username is "Mom." this is Ilana Horn.
Agreed, "back to normal" shouldn't have been all that was before the pandemic. It is also sad to hear that teachers you featured in your book, four of them quit. I didn't read your book (yet), but hey were probably worth featuring, and now they are out. So sad.
As for myself, I am considering to morph into something else than regular maths teacher. Having been awarded a "Let Me Tell You" certificate last year, as I have been pointing out problems and come up with suggestions, I think I am tired of fighting the fight outside the class.
In the Australian secondary school staffroom where I'm currently working as a pre-service maths teacher, I hear comments from experienced teachers to the effect that they all went above and beyond during COVID, but continue to be worse off due to poor salaries plus excessive admin/bureaucracy. Even recent well publicised teacher pay rises apparently leave them worse off due to other benefits being taken away plus the impact of inflation. Also, student behaviour issues have apparently increased significantly post COVID, leaving several teachers I've observed stressed and burned out. There also seem to be a lot of non-maths teachers covering maths classes, due to the shortage of qualified maths teachers, which seems to add to their stress since they don't know the content.
I loved twitter back in the day. I loved ddmeyer, samjshah, misscalul8, Fouss just to name a few. I learned so much from all of them and loved helping misscalcul8 in her first years of teaching. I too have noticed the great decline in activity. You used to post a question and get 5 responses in 5 minutes. Now you are whistling in the dark. The baby tweeters have flown the nest! There must be another nest somewhere. But were Dan? Where?
It’s so interesting that you chose this topic. It has been on my mind too! I had just started to embrace Twitter (a late adopter) and was super excited to join and contribute to the math conversation. It was really fun, super informative and a great way to connect. For a short while. Then, once the change at the top happened, I felt compelled to pull away.
I, too, wonder if much of the conversation is happening on the now corporate Slack channels of the companies you mentioned. During the pandemic, I was lucky to be part of a vibrant and creative Slack channel. It was the community we could not get by walking outdoors and entering a school. We would jump on, ask questions, hypothesize, conjecture about progressions, discuss standards and applications within the curriculum. However, even that has gone too. At least from my experience, it had been squelched for the sake of “efficiency” and “read the handbook”. I am craving this conversation and have text chains and friends, yet long for the creativity and ideas spurred by a larger and by nature more diverse voice. I for one, am going to revisit Facebook and the group channels.
I was wondering something similar. My inquiry started when I posted my newsletter on Redshirting for Kindergarten. My newsletter is in the Parenting section on substack so I reached into the education section to find authors to share it with. I was surprised how few teacher or school administer centered newsletters letters were on substack.
I started using LinkedIn frequently since last December, and it is my new "Facebook" now. And I met valuable educators there who create content and share ideas. I think more and more educators sign up to LI, and one of the reasons could be what Twitter turned into.
I have reached out to connect in other ways. But there is no denying the loss on so many levels since the oligarch runs the feed.
I think some of the energy is still there, but being poured into private channels. I'd bet that Amplify's slack is buzzing. Likewise for virtual meetings between those "content creators". I wonder if it also has to do partly with the Pareto Principle (80/20). And if you peel off a significant portion of the 20% of the Ts who were contributing 80% of the stuff, I imagine it makes a big difference. But of course, Twitter, it's apps, and it's leadership suck terribly right now.
Even if my guesses are close, this still doesn't explain where the teachers in their first 10 years are. Not twitter, not actively at least.
I wonder if, over time, social media users have generally transformed their use of SM. At one time, users casually created content without much premeditation or curation. Since then, users have seen a lot of personalities suffer because of content they’ve created. I wonder if seeing negative ramifications of creating casual content has led more users to be consumers of content instead of creators of content. It’s not friendly out here. I wonder if people are muting themselves and just watching, instead of engaging “cameras on” and “unmuted.”
I think there's something here, at least for me. I'm much less inclined to just go nuts on a topic than I used to be. Maybe that's a function of age or maturity or having more to lose but I suspect part of it is that social media is no longer a gallery of wackos hanging around trying to amuse and impress each other. Posting has become serious business.
Haven't we been talking about this for years? It's a good moment to go back and read Sam Shah's reflections from 2018: https://samjshah.com/2018/07/29/the-state-of-the-2018-mtbos-to-me/
Here was my comment from that post, ala Dan Anderson's comment: "I think it’s generally true that a lot of conversations are happening on Slacks or within teams instead of in public right now, and that this is because some of the most interesting online presences from the first/second generation of MTBoS-ers are working for Desmos, IM, writing for Stenhouse, etc."
Twitter is indeed dead to many Americans after its near catastrophic takeover by billionaire and global idiot Elon Musk. But you are right, Dan Meyer... All that energy is out there swirling in the minds of teachers eager to engage, eager to share, and eager to grow as professionals. Social media platforms as a whole are in their awkward adolescent phase and are trying new formats and abandoning old ones with lightening speed. Eventually, the dust will settle, and there will be one or a core few platforms where all this energy will reconverge and enlighten us all again. But between now and then, we search and seek it out on Instagram, Fb, Twitter (I am in the abandoned-Twitter camp), TikTok (I never went there and won't probably) and.... here on substack via good old email. Maybe email will have a vinyl-style comeback for those of us nauseated by the evil algorithms of modern day social media! I dunno. But hooray for Substack and platforms like it, for the time being.
No idea but I'm certainly in the generational change cohort. Not that I was ever particularly active on Twitter.
Speaking of generations, here's a hypothesis. Twitter was where teacher millennials shared their ideas. In addition to generational change, we are now at the phase of our careers where we are done-ish with figuring out teaching (false but you get the idea...creative juices belong more to the young).
So it's not that teacher Twitter has gone elsewhere. It's more you just need to ask the younguns where they are posing their big questions. And it's very possible given the great resignation and pandemic that the new cohort has new expectations around teaching.
Apologies for the many oversimplifications here. And I'm assuredly wrong about something. You are much more in touch with more teachers than I.
-jeff pierce
LV Jeff out here winning the "subjecting himself to Dan's writing the longest award."
I am much older than GenZers…. And after the pandemic, I have found my needs for work life balance have totally shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I love working and it may be a bit of a toxic relationship between me and work, lol. After experiencing teaching and education differently, these past three years, I have not been able to get my head around returning to the school building full time. I am an early ed teacher, K-5. We don’t have planning breaks, and I swear my body has thanked me for not returning to the physical stressors of the building. I say this as a person who loved it. My ideal…Part time in the building with more than full time outside the building. It seems like, if we want to entice people to join the ranks of teaching we must do it better. Maybe job sharing? Co- teaching classrooms? Full year school, with extended breaks throughout the year? Any ideas??
I’ve been thinking about this so much. How can we do job sharing or teaching per trimester?
i do think gen z has different expectations around work/life balance than we gen x'ers and y'all millenials... i see it in my doc students and my own kids
Good stuff as ever, Sir.
I learn something new from my #iteachphysics peers all the time. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t screenshot something for my “try this” folder. I have, however, pulled back on my own twitter posting & am currently in private mode mostly due to the trolls. My block game is good, though, and I hope to fully engaged again by the end of the summer.
Peace!
VJN
Perhaps STEM teachers, being both 1) fact/data/evidence-based decision-makers as well as perhaps 2) caring about things like equity and social justice, don't like the cess pool of bigoted, racist intolerance that Twitter is becoming (thanks to Elon Musk) and are looking for alternatives.
I could just no longer support Twitter once it changed hands and all the shenanigans began. We do need a new platform.