The Information Diet

It’s funny that a central theme in The Information Diet was people looking for affirmations of their beliefs, and then I felt so relieved to hear Dr. Hathaway say “sometimes it’s necessary for students to just hear someone say ‘Here’s how you do it!’” and “not everything you teach is going to directly be an authentic problem.” I shouldn’t feel that relief, but I did! It’s nice to know that I don’t have to be searching for authentic activities when I teach the background building stuff. (To be clear, I will search for those authentic opportunities, but you know what I’m saying).

I did enjoy reading The Information Diet. Media perspective and how it shapes us is something I, along with the rest of the country, has been thinking about non-stop since the election. Everyone is claiming everyone else has a bias and they are the only neutral one so listen to them. But really, who is neutral anymore? If anyone looks hard enough, they can craft a “this isn’t neutral” argument about any piece of writing. Because of this, the book suggests instead of always seeking neutral, seek diversity. And I think that’s fair--as long as you’re open minded. Many people won’t even consider reading an “other side” article because they think it’s full of fiction and accusations. And many people who do read an other side article only do it with hopes of gathering evidence to accuse that side of writing fiction and accusations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but our media has never gotten to this messed up place before, and I really don’t know what can fix it. I think pretty often about how we’ll read about this time period in history books someday.

Positives of seeking diversity, though, are that you get to form your own opinions and yay that’s exactly what we want our students to do!!! How great does this sound--present students with several reading-level-appropriate texts about the same topic and they get to figure out what’s fact, what’s fiction, what’s opinion, and what’s somewhere in the middle (makes me wish I still taught literacy! And with sites like newsela, it’s totally possible). But here’s the problem I’m running into. Students come with such strong “beliefs” (students think they’re beliefs, but they’re actually opinions) from home, but don’t come with the background that supports the beliefs (which means our students are like those people we hate to read on Facebook!) But this makes kids take in the main message, but don’t hear or understand the details. I think a reasonable role I can take in this is to help them understand the details that support whatever opinion they have. BUT the current political and world situations are so complicated, so layered, so multifaceted, it’s nearly impossible to get them to understand the details. Sites like newsela are perfect for letting kids know “hey this happened yesterday” but because the writing is on a student level, it’s incredibly oversimplified, and therefore not specific enough to convey that there are two (or more) sides to every story. When the election was fresh last year, my students were entirely anti-Trump and, reasonably, feared for what might happen to their families. But they would walk in and say “Trump is going to murder all of us!” and that’s when I realized how easy it is to misinterpret the news as a child. I wanted them to understand facts--he’s not going to kill you, he wants to limit immigration and enforce deportation on those who immigrated illegally. But in explaining the facts they a) accused me of being a Trump supporter, b) didn’t want to accept what I was saying, they preferred their version, and c) said, “That’s not what my mom said!” We need media literate students so they don’t grow up to feed their own children misinterpretations of the news! Maybe I say that because I can’t stand non-factual Facebook rants.

SO what I’m taking back to my classroom this week:

--actively seeking student news sources that include first-hand accounts and not just retellings (gotta get information from the source!).

--teaching students, through my own searching and news-consuming actions, that not everything they read is reliable. What kind of statements should put up a red flag for them? And what should they do if they read something that’s red flag?

--(For myself) I have to do a better job of keeping up with the news. It’s not at all appropriate to not participate because I don’t always know what my opinions are or what I make of certain situations. I have to participate in order to figure it out.