My Twitter Safe Space has been Violated

I only take advantage of two social media outlets, Facebook and Twitter.  They are very different spaces for me and have their own unique ecosystem.  My Facebook friends are people that I actually know and have had some type of speaking relationship with.  I'm very choosy with these people.  I use Twitter as a place to connect with educators and admins as well as fellow baseball card collectors.  My Facebook feed is full of those who like drama and fights (which leads to unfollows and hides) and my Twitter feed is peaceful and full of people that love to lead and teach.  I finally had drama in my Twitter world and I did not like it one bit.

I saw a Tweet a couple of nights ago that resonated with me so I liked it and replied.  It was supportive and innocent and I felt good about it.

After a few likes and some new followers, I began to see these replies and it shocked me.  This is new territory so I had to read them twice.  Both of these folks are teachers and were calling out another teacher for refusing to bias her civics students towards one party over the other.  Or, that any position is always a political position.  Neither of these folks truly understand the struggle of the social studies teacher these days.

I had an angry parent call me about some comments made in their child's history class.  He alleged that the teacher told the students that the KKK was founded by people that would be considered Democrats and that now their membership is mostly made up of conservative extremists.

The parent said he had no problem with the first part of this statement and Democrats did start the KKK.  He was upset that the teacher claimed that mostly conservative extremists are members now.  He was obviously a Trump  conservative based on the comments he made towards me personally and the HIS-story that he was providing.  Somewhere in my politeness I managed not to tell him his child's teacher was correct and he was wrong, although it was tempting.

While left leaning Twitter users like the ones above have an unrealistic view of civics education, the real trouble for teachers is that the poor logic and ideology comes from home and we have to try to steer it to the middle of the road just to be able to teach the content.  This is difficult and unfair to expect of us.  Maybe if I would have become a math teacher, I would not have to worry about parents polluting my content. Sarcasm obviously inserted.  Find me a math teacher that hasn't heard the phrase, "That's not how I learned it in school."

I was a new teacher 21 years ago and this was a problem then.  I had a student tell me that Catholics were not Christians.  When I asked her why she thought that way, she told me her dad told her that.  As the years have passed on, we are seeing a huge movement towards people taking political ideology to the extreme and teaching young kids the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties is no longer a simple task.  

While I agree with the commenters that we hold the key to setting these things right, the landscape makes it nearly impossible.  We have a large portion of families (especially after COVID) that believe that schools are the government and because the government is stupid, we cannot tell them what to do.  This makes teaching civics very difficult not to mention enforcing general school policies.  Not long ago I had a parent contact a state legislator to talk to me about her daughter's lunch detention.  Yes, I said lunch detention and yes, I said state legislator.

So for anyone who thinks they have great ideas for teaching civics and government, stop violating my safe Twitter space and write a book or something.  Write a curriculum.  Get your hands dirty, because the people that have doing this for years have their hands full and we could use the help.