Experiences with Educational Subreddits Part 2

          Thank you to all of my ever so patient loyal readers who have waited with bated breath for the second part of my experience with educational subreddits narrative! ^[1] As I stated in part 1, I had planned on using this second week to focus on two larger subreddits, r/teaching and r/Teachers as well as a small discipline specific subreddit, r/ELAteachers.

            For the most part, my findings stayed the same. A lot of the posts I came across in r/teaching and r/teachers had to do with venting and/or resignation. I did not delve too much into the comments on these posts because I preferred focusing on other posts/aspects of the subreddits so I cannot say whether the responses continued to feed into the negativity even as they validated the poster’s feelings or not. ^[2] I also continued to enjoy the general discussion posts, ^[3] although some of them were less intellectually intriguing and more genuinely surprising. For instance, there was this post where a teacher asks if anyone was asked to, and/or did, work during their parental leave because they have had “MULTIPLE people from my school ask me questions like, “Are you going to Zoom in to watch some of the classes with the sub?” and “How involved do you plan to be in your classes during your leave?”” To me, especially having recently seen my sister take her maternal leave, it was mind-boggling that anyone would a) think it was ok to ask that of them and b) think that the teacher actually would. Thankfully, the comments that I read were all of the same mind as me and supported the poster in saying no and/or fighting against any administrators who try to force their hand.

            Another post that similarly baffled me was this one. A PE teacher got tested for COVID-19 because their wife started showing symptoms over the fall break and thus cannot go to work until they get results, which was certainly the right move for them to make in my mind. However, HR was calling them confused about how to move forward because it wasn’t the teacher who had the symptoms. The poster was checking in with the r/Teachers subreddit community to see if they were in the wrong for both getting tested and for thinking that they should stay home. While there is a difference between showing symptoms and being near someone who has symptoms but no diagnosis, I was definitely in favor of the PE teacher because they have to go into school and interact with people every day. It is better to be safe than sorry, especially in a potentially fatal pandemic, and I was confused that their HR and/or administration wouldn’t agree with that sentiment. Once again, the comments I read agreed with the poster (and thereby me) which I appreciated seeing.

            Furthermore, I once again enjoyed commenting on some posts. Unfortunately, this time the answers I got to my comments either didn’t completely make sense or they were nonexistent. In one post, linked here and pictured below, I provided a suggestion to a teacher struggling to come up with engaging ways to teach a play in online learning. If the mysterious reader happens to be a classmate or my professor, you might notice that I suggested one my own CT learning activities. ^[4] Unfortunately, neither the OP nor any other redditor replied to my comment. 

The other time I commented, again linked here and pictured below, the OP replied, but their answer didn’t seem to actually answer my first question nor did they answer the second question I had that asked if the opinion they posted was pandemic-specific or not. The idea that students don’t need to read a novel per quarter is an interesting one and I’m not sure, even after reading a bunch of the comments, what my own opinions are. 

However, there were a few new insights I discovered. I actually found a couple of posts that were positive about teaching during the pandemic or teaching overall. Perhaps I was bound to find some positivity given that I was looking for a longer range of time or it was something about last week, but regardless of the reason it was nice to see. This post was specifically about celebrating distance learning, although looking back on it, the OP was a bit too glib about the fact that some students weren’t learning and/or weren’t motivated to try in this environment. Giving it a little bit more of a think, there were some posts labeled as success that I saw over the first week but for some reason the ones I saw the second week, like the one above, stuck more in my mind haha. There was also a kind post written by a student asking if the teachers on the subreddit had any advice on how students can help teachers ease their load since they seemed openly stressed but the OP has since deleted it for some reason. I’m linking it here because you can still view the comments if you’re interested—and one commenter noted that it’s not the students job to make the adult teacher feel better which was a very smart point but I thought the OP’s intentions were sweet.

             Wow, not sure how my post got this long already, but we’re on the final stretch of our educational subreddits journey. On the last few days of the assigned time with Reddit I decided to check out the chats. I had known of the chat function all along, but I figured they wouldn’t be very interesting and/or helpful in comparison to the actual posts. I’m not sure why I decided to open one up but when I did, I found that on r/Teachers, the biggest subreddit I was following, there were multiple chats grouped by topic and on the two smaller ones, people used it to pose questions. ^[5]

           Here is a picture of the various r/Teachers subreddits:

      

            In the r/ELAteachers chat I decided to pose a question of my own, which you can below. Alas, no one has responded. ;~;

            I didn’t quite feel up to posing that question in the r/Teachers main chat room for reasons now undecipherable to me, and before I could post it in the r/teaching chat room I found that someone else had asked a question I could actually help them with. I responded, they actually replied, and we had a relatively real time, as well as very pleasant, conversation that afternoon. As I’m sure my professor recalls, I even asked him if he had any additional suggestions to my fellow redditor and student. Below are snapshots of the conversation.

            Thus ends my official foray into educational subreddits! Depending on my energy I might also write a post about another general discussion post I found on the place of a teacher’s politics in the classroom.  

 

 ^[1] I know that even if my “loyal readers” existed this wouldn’t exactly be the post they wait so anxiously for, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

 ^[2] Perhaps I should have? If you have any opinions on the matter, let me know.\

 ^[3] Here is an interesting post about students doing, or not as it were, work in the pandemic, and while there are only five comments I felt they brought up intriguing points. I’m putting this in a footnote rather than the main body of the post because I don’t have anything worthwhile to add to the discussion. If you do end up looking at it, and feel so inclined, please let me know your thoughts.

 ^[4] I suppose even I’m not immune to the plague of Twitter—the temptation of self-promotion. While Bret Staudt Willet, who I mention in my last class as an expert on educators using social media and spoke to my class, mentioned that Reddit seems to be free of the overly self-promotional aspect of Twitter, I found one redditor repeatedly post what I assume to be their own YouTube channel videos on r/ELAteachers. Towards the end of my second week I also noted that on r/teaching is getting infused with their own self-promoter, but with a blog.

 ^[5] I’m sure some might users wrote in the chat to do things besides asking questions, but I didn’t look too deeply into it so I can’t say what those other reasons might be.