real tweet hours:
I don't feel impostor syndrome but I feel something close to it when I read about how educators need to show empathy toward students when they "don't get the easy stuff". The bulk of academic work surround this issue focuses on social capital.

It's the idea that the reason it's easy for Teacher A is because they had parents reading to them, (comparatively) early access to tech, and had parents giving them time and help on their school work that allowed them to excel early.

So the lit says that if you have those advantages or if you don't suffer from mental illnesses or disabilities you should imagine what it would be like to suffer from them and then act accordingly, coupled with advice on what it is like to have to be a learner w/ those problems.

But I didn't have those advantages. I grew up poor, neglected and with comparatively late tech access. I'm diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder and a host of problems like bipolar eating disorders that come from it.

I also didn't develop slower, I developed much quicker. This is probably because I had nothing better to do as a young child than walk to the library as a lone 8 year old and play rpg and tactical video games that developed my writing and comprehension skills.

The reason this makes me feel bad is two-fold.
1. It makes me feel like a liar. The amount of writing I've done in and out of classrooms about this stuff where people insist I had advantages I'm not owning up to. Like I'm a white guy. That gives me a shit ton of advantages.

Doesn't do a good job of explaining why I excelled when a bunch of other poor white boys didn't. It gets even more confusing considering my brother also excelled despite the fact that we were not pushed and lived in a home that I think should probably have got us fostered.

Naturalistic intelligence is bullshit, so it ain't that either.

2. It causes me to err on the side that the answer to this dilemma, that teachers need more empathy, can be better remedied by first directing to tools to teach students without requiring understanding

of a situation that doesn't coincide with the average data most of the time. If educators aren't supposed to assume averages, then ought and should we use assumed averages to link our empathy to?

I think that's a big question and overall is way more complicated then this twitter thread makes it seems. Empathy and tools for helping learners whose location you don't understand aren't mutually exclusive.
What does empathy mean in the context of educator-student relation?

What do the tools look like? How do you dispel myths and distortions around concepts like learning styles and poor learners that've become ingrained in the field?
How do you create a unified heuristic of discovery for teachers about their students without defaulting to averages?

The reason I chose education as my field over poli sci, history, phil and comms (among a lot of reasons) is primarily because the field is the most workable. You get to theorize about teaching and education then put it into practice. But there's always a looming fear

that the people I work with, or that the majority of them, don't really care to improve how they teach or improve the tools and methods that taught them. They just want to consume the knowledge and then apply it, but never improve it or work it or question it.

I think most people in their field would say this but; I find that uniquely bad in education when our job is to teach people, and ultimately the job of an educator is to teach people how to learn in a given field and subject. If you don't think about what you're taught critically

can you assume you're teaching your students to do the same?