Lit Think Core Values: Honesty
It's how we approach our individual work here as podcasters
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
We started with diversity, an ideal that empowers a variety of stories. Sarah shared that authenticity guarantees each of us gets to tell our whole story, not just part. She also emphasized that relevance matters if our students are going to effectively learn what we are trying to teach them.
This week, we’re looking at Lit Think Core Value 4: Honesty. What exactly does that mean to us?
Why Honesty
We get the word “honesty” first from “honor,” a Latin word that originally spoke of a person’s dignity and reputation. But at Lit Think, we think honesty has a lot more to do with internal work than external perception.
It’s part of why we cut back on how many podcast episodes we produce every month. It’s why Sarah and I started a blog that each of us could contribute to in our own time.
And as we looked at building our list of values as the Lit Think team, we worked hard to make sure each of our choices built on the other. You have to be honest with yourself first to be truly authentic, which makes for the diverse media we’ve all come to crave and love.
What We Mean by Honesty
When Sarah and I say we are honest, it first starts with knowing our individual limits. Lit Think is fully a labor of love, something we work on in between the hours of our full-time jobs, time with family, and of course all the media we’re consuming.
Honesty gives us permission to say we can’t get something done by the original deadline we set. It also allows us to be vulnerable to our listeners as our own stories intersect with the media we choose. And ultimately, we hope this model offers the same opportunities for our audience members as well.
The other part of honesty connects to the media we feature. Sarah and I have come to value stories that highlight this same self-work in the development of their characters. We crave the media that doesn’t sugarcoat difficult truths, the content that challenges us to look both internally at ourselves and reach out to others as we all admit we’re imperfect people.
How We Live It
If you want to see how we’ve started conversations around honesty, check out some of these past podcast episodes:
Little Words, Giant Dreams (Matilda the Musical, 2022)
Learning from Pandora (Avatar, 2009)
Learning Through the Window (Dear Evan Hansen, 2021)
Schooling Our Stereotypes (Abbott Elementary, 2021-present)
More Resources
Want to check out other makers who believe in the important work of honesty? Here are my top 3 resources:
Ashley Bible of Building Book Love gets it. I love her resources on SEL in ELA classrooms.
Brene Brown’s latest podcast Unlocking Us includes so many important soundbites about living and loving ourselves first.
Pádraig Ó Tuama’s podcast Poetry Unbound features so many poems that can begin hard internal and external reflection. One of my favorites is “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance,” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
John Green’s podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed is a favorite of Sarah’s and mine. But if you haven’t listened to his episode on Auld Lang Syne, you need to do it NOW.
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