Teaching in Real Life vs. Instagram

Alternatively titled: Just because you don’t have 100K followers and aren’t a star at Teach Your Heart Out or Get Your Teach On with a bustling Teachers Pay Teachers account, doesn’t mean you aren’t a good teacher.

I started my style Instagram account (@teachinginlilly) in March 2016 because I wanted a way to share my love of fashion with other people who were as passionate as I am. My personal Instagram, filled with photos of my friends & family, just didn’t feel like the place to do that.

For about two years, I kept my Instagram about fashion, but then something amazing happened in the spring of last year: I discovered Teachergram. That ever growing corner of Instagram filled with teachers who had thousands of followers, side businesses, classrooms worthy of Pinterest, and lessons where they transformed themselves into characters.

I felt inspired to make my Instagram a place where I could post about both my love of teaching and my love of fashion.

But, I also felt, for the first time in over a decade of teaching, inadequate.

I found myself wondering if my lessons were boring. Should I be dressing up as characters? Should I have a blingy microphone? Did I need to start attending conferences? Would I need to spend thousands transforming my classroom?

After spending far too much questioning my own teaching practices, I realized something I had somehow forgotten: I knew was a great teacher.

I am, by nature, not an out-going person. This introvert puts her all into teaching every day, and sometimes I am so drained by the time I get home at night that I can’t even really form sentences (luckily, my introverted husband, who is also a teacher, is the same way, so we are perfectly content to sit next to each other and not speak at all, haha). It is not possible for me to be an authentic teacher and to also emulate many of the teaching practices that are pervasive on Instagram. But that doesn’t make me a bad teacher.

I will never sing for my students. I will never be super loud. I won’t dress up as the characters we are reading about. I won’t stand on stages or tables. I won’t spend thousands of my own dollars on flexible seating and bright white organization. I can’t spend hours creating the perfect game for my kids.

But I will be the best teacher I can be for them. I will make my lessons engaging, relevant, interesting, and meaningful. I will make sure that they are learning skills they need for life, not just to pass a test. I will use the resources my school and donors provide to create a classroom environment that is bright and functional for my students. And I will do my absolute best to be an authentic teacher who shows compassion & love to each and every student.

Finally, I will remember that Instagram is a curated snapshot of teaching. No teacher is going to post about the nitty gritty days. The ones where you are giving a quiz or have to give a practice state assessment. Just like with anything on social media, popular teachers are showing you (generally speaking) the best. I have “best” days too. Every day might not be the most groundbreaking lesson ever, but I certainly have those lessons in my repertoire that the kids are still talking about years later.

To the teachers that are able to do things like transform their classrooms, I applaud you. You have a set of skills and a will that I just don’t have. But, that is the beauty of teaching, isn’t it? We are all different, just like our students. The most memorable teachers are the ones that stick with you long after you leave their classrooms. Not because of how much money they spent or how popular they were on social media, but because they were themselves.

So whatever kind of teacher you are, go out there and be the best version of that. Strive every day to grow and learn. And be yourself. As they say, you can’t be anyone else.