Amid deep social and political divisions, educators must resolve to find common ground.
January 1, 2022 By Chase Mielke
“I feel like I just lost my brother,” I said to my wife one night.
She and I shared a long, painful silence.
The brother I thought I knew evaporated with one text message: A message about presidential overthrows. About government conspiracies. About how this world I was living as an educator—with COVID-19 cases and protecting against illness and school mask mandates—was a lie.
He believed I was a sheep, indoctrinated by fake science and fake news.
I’ll spare you the finer details of the text (though you probably could guess the gist of it), but what shattered in me that night was the feeling that my own brother and I shared the same reality.
It’s a feeling so many of us educators have experienced over the last two years: A feeling that common ground has severed into opposing cliffs. Harsh double bell curves careening off the scale. It’s as though we live in the same world but see different realities.
But I know too much about false dichotomies to put much stock in them. Good vs. bad. Us vs. them. Right vs. wrong. I know that we all employ countless cognitive distortions and biases that don’t serve us well. I even know that, in thinking I am less biased than others—than my brother—I have a bias blind spot.
What if the feeling that my brother and I don’t share a common reality is, in itself, a cognitive distortion?
I can’t downplay that this year has created real changes and challenges to life in and beyond the classroom. I’ve lived them as part of a two-teacher household navigating COVID-19 closures with two kids. I’ve felt it in the halls and walls of my school as students, teachers, and leaders describe the “new normal” and the burnout they’re navigating. And I’ve felt it in my gut — in the silence my wife and I shared — as I mourned the loss of my brother.
But he wasn’t actually dead, and he was still my brother.
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