Hurting Your Fellow Teacher's Brains

Whenever I am on twitter I try to find interesting articles, cool websites, or people who have great blogs to add to my rss feed. Then there's the blogs I already have filling my rss. They routinely provide bits of information, applications worth checking, or other people to read and/or follow on twitter.

Then there are the things I have added to my Delicious account that I want to read. Of course it doesn't stop there, on Tuesday night, when I get the time, there's Edchat on twitter to participate in. Periodically there are education related conferences with live streams to watch or audio to listen to. Oh, and lest I forget, podcasts that I subscribe to.

What this all means is that I am surrounded by lots of information related to my profession. And, since we should never stop learning new things (right?), I end up going through these things 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What that means for my fellow teachers is that if I find something interesting and it's Saturday afternoon, I'm going to send it out. If it's Sunday morning at 7AM, I'm going to send it out. And, if it's Christmas Eve, I'm going to ...well, you get the picture.

The reaction to my sharing isn't always "gee, thanks I can't wait to read/try/upload this." And, I used to be offended that there weren't more positive; even effusive, comments about my generosity. Finally someone pointed out to me that not all teachers have the time to check out these things I send. In fact, some teachers get a bit overwhelmed by adding things to their list of things to do on their weekends or days off. It's not that they are angry with me; it's more like their brains hurt from all of the extra information.

So when you see something new and cool that you want to share with your coworkers, remember to pause for a moment. What is the current state of affairs at your school? What kind of stressful things might be going on in your friends' lives? Is that person you are adding to the address line even interested in what you are sending? Your brain will be less stressed if you take the time to make sure you are not over stressing their brains. Now, let me share this one thing with you...

PHOTO FROM UCUMARI Flickr Creative Commons