How do I communicate online?

How do I communicate online? Well…..I try not to on social media. After being “disagreed with” many times on social media (and being upset a lot by the inaccuracies of people sharing “information”), I try to stick with “Happy Birthdays” and “a smiley face”.

As a principal, and I’m sure in many other professions, words are twisted often. If a post was about me or had inaccurate information, I’d call the person who posted the information the next day, and say that I saw what they posted and that I’d like to just clarify anything they had questions about, so that in the future, they could just feel free to personally call me and get the actual facts if they were going to post. Funny enough, just making that call was very effective! I rarely had to do that after about two or three times. Word got around that they would get a phone call!

Emailing my boss and teachers was usually fine, but be careful what you say because things in emails can be misconstrued as well. Twisted too! In schools, your emails can be viewed by the public if a person makes a public records request, or if a person is digging to find something. So, never write an email when you are emotionally spent for the day. Write it the next morning and think about how you phrase things. For instance, if you had just come back in from outside, do not say that you grabbed the child’s hand to keep him from running in front of a truck. You see, this would be twisted into “you grabbed” him. I’m serious! You can just have saved the child’s life, and this email, in which you relayed the information to your boss, will become “evidence” that you hurt a child. This was another reason I retired. Things were just nuts with parental entitlement and did not make sense. I was hit, bitten, spat on, kicked, and head butted during my time as a principal. I am too old to keep up with this now. I loved my job 90 % of the time. It was that ten percent that occupied lots of my time counseling, disciplining, writing reports, and making phone calls home. I’ll take my college students now and appreciate them. They are “adults”, right?

Later