Teachers aren’t supposed to be negative, right?
But why is it sometimes an objectively positive statement that feels like a sucker punch to your soul?
Why have you been in a bad mood for hours just because somebody said, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care?”
What Is Toxic Positivity?
For our purposes here, we’ll define toxic positivity as a comment that on its face seems positive, and yet it gets under your skin in a way that negatively affects your mood.
Sometimes you’re not sure why! But there’s probably a reason.
Here are a few reasons why something positive you’ve heard recently might have gotten under your skin.
Reason #1 Some Positive-Sounding Statements are Loaded with Moral Baggage
One of the ways toxic positivity shows up in the teaching world is through statements that have moral baggage attached to them.
A quick test: If a statement forces you into a situation where a natural human reaction makes you seem evil, it’s worth a second look.
Recently on LinkedIn, I saw a quote that said “What if we saw ‘attention seeking behavior’ as ‘connection seeking behavior?'” (I don’t think this quote was attributed to anyone in particular, but in any case, I’m not calling out the specific person who posted it so much as the basic idea of this. Also, this quote had racked up hundreds of thousands of likes, so whoever posted it is probably doing fine.)
Here’s my issue with this quote.
Attention seeking behavior is probably already a gentle way of describing a kid misbehaving in your class. Maybe even being a total a-hole.
The term “attention seeking behavior” describes behaviors that, in a classroom where a teacher is actually trying to teach, can be pretty frustrating.
Now, this LinkedIn quote calls for teachers to be even more charitable toward that behavior by calling it “connection seeking behavior.”
In some cases, this is fine.
If a quote like this makes you more understanding and better able to connect with your students, then it’s not toxic.
In these cases, the positivity is a useful re-frame.
After all, there probably is something to the idea that attention seeking behavior may be a way of seeking connection.
That kid who’s misbehaving in your class very well could be in need of a little extra love.
When Moral Baggage Becomes Toxic
The way that morally-loaded positivity becomes toxic is if it sends you into what I would call The Guilt, Shame, Anger Spiral.
If you are already irritated at something a kid is doing that, yes, okay? Could be classified as attention seeking! Or connection seeking! But now, on top of your initial irritation, you’ve read this quote and you’re wondering why you can’t experience the Anonymous Fart Sound Contest currently happening in your class as a bid for connection.
Why can’t you provide that connection instead of being this judgmental person who can’t rise to the challenge of what a child needs from you?
If that actually makes you more likely to overreact and lose it on your students, that particular positive quote is toxic to you.
Reason #2: It Might Just be a Guilt Trip
Another thing that can make positivity toxic is if it’s really just a guilt trip.
If you’re overwhelmed by your teaching job already and someone tells you, “Well, failure’s not an option because these students’ futures are in your hands,” that’s not a helpful statement.
Don’t get me wrong, failure is not the most attractive option! And it’s certainly not what you came here to do.
But it is possible to fail as a teacher, and one of the ways that you can fail as a teacher is by just refusing to acknowledge that teacher time and energy are finite resources.
Affirmations like Failure is not an option! really don’t help if you’re a teacher trying to plan your week.
This issue comes up more than you might think, because no one really wants to go on record as saying, “If you have three hours of legit energy that you can spend on planning, grading, or other teaching responsibilities, here’s what you should spend it on…and here’s what you should NOT spend it on.”
It’s really hard to get someone to say the second part of that out loud, because everything in teaching is important! Because teaching is important.
But someone is not giving you real advice if they can’t admit that there are trade-offs to spending two hours on one thing. There is always another thing that you’re not spending that two hours on.
And this problem will not be solved by caring about students more.
Teachers time, energy, and emotional bandwidth are three of the most finite resources in education.
My courses, which are collectively called The Maintain and Stay Sane Program for Teachers, are meant to help teachers make real decisions about how they want to spend those resources.
The overall goal of these courses is to help you get closer to the teacher you imagined being when you chose the profession.
At the very least, they can help you get to a place where you’re focusing on teaching as a job you’re trying to get better at, rather than running on the fumes of how much you’re supposed to care about kids or how important you believe your job is.
Reason #3: You’re Dealing with a One-Upper
Sometimes, you may just be around an educator who can’t wait to let you know what a superstar they are.
They can’t wait to let you know that they’ve already thought of all your best ideas.
They can’t wait to let you know that whatever is happening in their classroom is either a compare and contrast situation with how bad your classroom is, or maybe just a little bit better than the best thing that you’re doing.
This is annoying even on a good day. If things aren’t going well in your classroom, it can send you into a Compare and Despair Tailspin.
So it’s also important to remember that everything you’re hearing may not be completely true.
There are teachers who are great teachers and there are teachers who are vocal about being great teachers. Sometimes those are the same teachers, but sometimes they’re not.
I found this out this summer between my first and second year of teaching. An acquaintance of mine, another first-year teacher who worked at another school, was always talking about how great things were going in his classroom.
I would come home from these discussions with a physical stomachache. If he was doing all these wonderful things in his first year, why were things in my classroom so bad?
Over the summer between my first and second year of teaching, I asked if I could observe his summer school class. Maybe I could learn a thing or two.
The main thing I learned while watching that summer school class was that this guy wasn’t an amazing teacher. In fact, he wasn’t even doing a better job of teaching than I was.
Don’t get me wrong; he wasn’t a horrible teacher.
But I don’t think I was a horrible teacher. I was just extremely hard on myself, and this guy was just extremely confident in interpreting his teaching style and describing it to others.
This guy didn’t keep teaching for long; he went on to have a great career in a field that requires active self-promotion.
Which is okay, I guess!
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that self-promotion is a skill, and have learned to appreciate that there’s nothing wrong with putting a positive spin on your work as long as you’re not doing it at someone else’s expense.
As long as you’re not taking credit for someone else’s work, or as long as your chicken soup for the soul stories are not actually a direct sucker punch to someone else’s soul, you’re probably okay.
In fact, expressing a little bit of confidence is probably helpful to your career.
(And it was generous of this guy to let me sit in on his summer school class. He could have said no.)
So if someone else’s extreme positive spin on how great things are going for them is just too much for you right now, do your best to step away from it. People are going to say what they’re going to say.
Sometimes it’s just on you to manage toxic positivity from the listening end.
Reason #4: Some Statements that Seem Like Encouragement are Actually Thought-Terminating Clichés
The final way that a seemingly-positive statement can be toxic, is if it’s what’s known as a Thought-Terminating Cliché.
The term “thought-terminating cliche” was originally coined by a psychiatrist named Robert J. Lifton to describe the brainwashing that happened in 1960s communist China.
When you see this term on the internet now, it’s often talking about gaslighting in relationships, or the language of cults.
A thought-terminating cliche is something that sounds positive but is really just meant to shut down your critical thinking on a topic. And it’s meant to shut down your critical thinking in a very specific way, which is by letting you know that if being part of a specific group is important to you–or if thinking of yourself as a certain type of person is important to you—you should stop asking so many questions.
Now how does this apply to teaching? Well, if you’re a teacher, you probably do have certain values that are important to you.
For example: you would hate to be someone who is going to shut down a kid that really is really just looking for connection!
Be skeptical of a statement that you cannot possibly disagree with without positioning yourself as a kind of person that you don’t want to be.
It’s not true that you always have to be more understanding of students than you’re being in the moment. You might actually be too understanding right now, and that’s why kids are misbehaving in your class.
It’s hard to know.
It’s like telling someone what direction to turn their thermostat in; You have to know if they’re hot or cold in the first place.
It’s also worth acknowledging that it may not be possible for a teacher to provide enough connection to students to keep them from misbehaving.
There are lots of different reasons kids “seek attention” in class.
A Word of Caution Before You Search for Toxic Positivity in Your Own Teaching Life
Even as I write about what bothers me about this positive statement on LinkedIn, I can feel myself steering in the direction of complaining. Complaining feels great sometimes!
Acknowledging that a positive affirmation is unrealistic can be a huge relief.
But steering too hard in this direction can lead you into an emotional hole that is hard to climb out of.
That would be toxic negativity.