My apologies for being late with this post: it’s Fall Break, which should mean that I have extra time to do all the blog posts I want, but actually means that every other project I have been putting off for lack of time and energy are all clamoring for my time and attention; and I never got to the point of even deciding what the topic should be this week.

My apologies, as well, for not having a definite topic this week: because today, when I decided that I needed to take time and make a post, since I want to keep going with what I’ve been doing and also respect my audience by being consistent with posts, if not entirely on time (I will try to do better next week), even today, I can’t decide which of the topics I plan to write about is the right one today. Because all I can think about is: teeth.

Yup. Teeth. See, I had to go to the dentist this morning. One of the items I have been putting off is a crown I need; I went and got the first appointment for that done this morning — which means I had one of my teeth ground down to about half its height, and then topped up with a temporary crown; I’ll have the real one put on in about three weeks.

I hate going to the dentist. That’s one reason why I’ve been putting it off. Another is insurance: my maximum benefit for the year, on the dental insurance plan I have (You know, the one I can afford), is $1000, and since I had five fillings last year, that took up most of my benefit. Since this crown is itself almost $1000, my dentist and I wanted to wait until August 1, when my dental benefit renews for the next calendar year. Then I put it off until Fall Break so I wouldn’t have to miss class.

And I suppose I’ll be doing that for the next two years, as well, because I actually need three crowns. And as my insurance benefit renews on August 1st, which is also when school starts, I will twice more have to wait until October to get the crown done if I don’t want to miss school; because Fall Break is the first vacation of the year. And my next two, at least, will include more grinding down of my teeth.

That’s why I hate going to the dentist. It’s actually not a terrible experience: my current dentist is an introvert, so she doesn’t try to chat too much while I have four different instruments in my mouth; she has pretty good music in her office; and most importantly, this doctor is lightning fast. Appointments take half as long with her as they have with all of my previous dentists. Which I love.

But you see, I have absolute shit for teeth. Both of my parents have weak teeth, judging from the number of crowns and bridges and root canals they have had between them; my mom also has crooked teeth, which meant I got to have braces for two and a half years, too. (My brother had it worse, though. He had to have oral surgery when he was 8 or 9 to try to resolve his tooth issues. And then braces for him, for longer than I had them. Also, my wife got braces when she was an adult, and what would have taken a year or two if she’d had them at 12 took five years. FIVE YEARS. With braces. As a grown woman. That sucked a lot. Though she did win the Best Hygiene award from her orthodontist every single time she went, because she was the only patient that orthodontist had who actually flossed her teeth. With braces on. For five years. Take that, ya friggin tweens.) And then I took those weak teeth I inherited, and neglected them completely for the first two decades of my life. I brushed my teeth, and my mother made me go to regular dental visits and have fluoride treatments; but I never flossed voluntarily. And then around 17 or 18, I started drinking ungodly amounts of coffee with impossible amounts of sugar in each cup, and also smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, both of which degraded the enamel on my teeth. Which meant, when I went to the dentist while I was in college, for the first time after moving out of my mom’s house, I had 16 cavities: between every one of my molars.

That’s why you floss, kids.

Ever since then, every single time I go to the dentist, they discover a new cavity, or an old filling that has degraded, or a tooth that has had too many fillings and now needs to become a crown — which is the story with my current triple crown, which will make a total of 5 in my mouth. I also had three of my wisdom teeth removed, two with oral surgeries which featured the doctor shattering my teeth with a chisel while I was under anesthetic.

That’s why I hate going to the dentist. Because it never ends. My teeth never get better or healthier: there is always more damage, always more decay. Today while the dentist was filling a different tooth (There’s so much work that needs to get done that they always throw in an extra procedure or two) she commented on how all of my teeth have chips in them. Fucking chips. She made some joke about how I need to stop eating rocks, which was funny and all, but what that tells me is that my teeth are literally just crumbling into dust, inside my mouth: because I do not, in fact, eat rocks. Or crunch bones to make my bread. Or even eat terribly hard nuts, or raw seeds, or chew ice cubes, or open beer bottles with my teeth. I don’t do anything mean to my teeth. I just brush ’em twice a day, floss every night, and use a waterpick to clean out the pockets in my gums.

Oh yeah — I have shitty gums, too, did I mention? Thanks, Dad.

(I’m not actually bitter about my bad tooth genes: my parents have all of my problems and more. I have bad gums, exacerbated by the smoking, and that means I’ve had to have deep cleanings called “root planing”; but my father had a lovely procedure called “flap surgery” in which the doctor cut his gums away from his teeth in order to clean out all the gunk that had collected in the pockets around his teeth, and then sewed his gums back together.)

And I will say that my gums are the one area where I have seen genuine improvement in my mouth health: since I started being much more careful and regular with my tooth care, and since I started using the waterpick, my gums have actually gotten better; my dentist doesn’t even comment on them any more.

But otherwise, I am all too aware that nothing about my teeth is going to get better. They are going to continue to decay and crumble, necessitating ever more invasive, complex, and expensive procedures, until at last they fall out and I can finally just get dentures. (And yes, I know that having dentures will not make things better because they have their own problems. I’m just looking forward to pulling my teeth out of my mouth and cussing at them. Like they deserve.)

I am also aware that the expenses are not going to get less, either: because in this country, where mouth bones are not considered part of one’s overall health, despite every medical professional being clear that oral health is incredibly important to overall health, and where the heinous and horrifying health care hellscape has made it obscenely expensive to get any treatment at all, even while insurance companies continuously dump increased costs onto consumers (Just as one small example: as I said, I need to delay two of my crowns because my annual insurance maximum is $1000; when I got all those cavities in college, my father, whose insurance I was still covered by, ended up paying extra because the sheer number of fillings ran over his annual insurance maximum for dependents — which was $1000. That was 27 years ago. Good to know that dental care is not any more expensive now than it was then, huh? At least not for the insurance companies. I’m sure my premiums are also exactly the same as what my dad paid in 1995.), the out-of-pocket costs of any care are prohibitive, and are rapidly approaching obscene; and that’s not even talking about extraordinary procedures. Just regular checkups, cleanings, X-rays, and fillings.

Last, I am aware that the harm I did to my teeth when I was young is at least part of the reason for the problems I have now: because one of the insidious things about teeth is that they seem stronger than they are, and you don’t realize the damage being done to them until it is too late. And once that damage is done, it’s never going away.

(Are you ready for the turn, where I actually get to the point?)

And that is really why I’m writing about my teeth today: because all of that is essentially the same as the situation in education: you don’t notice the damage being done until it is too late, and then that damage causes problems for the rest of one’s life. Fixing that damage is obscenely expensive: as is simply maintaining the basic level of care, at least in this country and this economic system. And though we don’t always talk about it, the essential health of the education system is vital to the overall health of the country.

Phew. Let’s chew on that for a while.

(Though not too hard: I don’t want to break my new temporary crown.)

I mean it. The damage starts young, and the bad habits we created years ago are not offset by the good ones. Just as my pretty-consistent brushing, dental visits, and even fluoride treatments did not prevent my lack of flossing, and the toxins I put into my mouth, from causing tooth decay: so the excellent teaching of dedicated professionals in the early grades do not offset the harm that is done by a focus on standardized testing, on achieving high grades, and away from reading and inquiry learning. That harm is real, and even if we don’t see the damage that is being done for years or even decades, the ground lost can never be recovered, not even if we fix all our bad habits.

That’s not to say the children who go through this current (partly) toxic education system are doomed: many of my teeth are strong and healthy. And again, while my teeth are never going to get better, my gums did; who’s to say that some remedies won’t actually have a positive effect, even on those who suffered the worst? Let’s be clear that there is a limit to this analogy: I know a number of students who overcame early learning deficits and educational damage to become excellent scholars, and complete and well-rounded people. Even if my teeth never fully heal, people genuinely can.

But. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming: and the first fact increases the severity of the second. It’s expensive for individuals to try to make up the ground that they’ve lost, because they have to try to scramble up the hill while still running forward as fast as they can, as we all do, all the time; my wife and I were just talking about how our income has gone up this year — just in time for the increases in cost-of-living to eat up the increases in our income. If we had to, simultaneously, try to re-educate ourselves to make up for the learning deficits inflicted on us in our youth? We could do it, but it would cost us heavily in time and money, and even more in determination and energy. We might just give up and let ourselves stay less educated.

I could just give up the dental care and let my teeth fall out at their own rate. After all, some are healthy, so I could probably keep chewing for a good long while, on my few remaining teeth.

Because solving the problems caused by a lack of good education, or an excess of bad education, are expensive, it means they have to wait until later, because adults who want to improve their education can’t stop the rest of their lives and go back to elementary school. In some cases, the damage is irretrievable, because the habits of mind and the connections and pathways through the brain are set in place, and in some cases literally can’t be changed. Really, the problems caused by poor early education are expensive to solve even immediately after the damage was done: students in middle school who try to catch up on learning losses from elementary school are doing twice the work, and often with less preparation and less support; and that means there has to be that much more time and energy spent by those students and those who try to support them. Like I said: the expense of trying to retroactively fix old problems increases the time that it takes to accomplish any kind of remedy.

(To be clear: middle school students and high school students who suffer learning “loss” are only suffering losses because we insist that they continue forward even while they are trying to climb up. if we’d just fucking relax on keeping everyone running to the same finish line at the same time, it would be easier for people to fill in the gaps in their learning and get to the finish, even if it took longer. Also, students in school do get support; it’s just not enough because their needs are greater if they have learning gaps from bad elementary education. My teeth will never get healthier, but students can learn everything they were not given the opportunity to learn; there is a limit to the analogy.)

And, of course, just as the insurance companies are leeching off of the dentists’ and patients’ needs, and thus making the problem even worse (by increasing costs, which means people have to put off care, which exacerbates the issues with their teeth, which means the eventual remedy will be even more expensive and even less effective), there are people who take advantage of the problems in education, rather than trying to solve those problems, and who profit thereby, and make those problems even worse: predominantly politicians, but also the entire pedagogical industry, which peddles professional development and takes money from schools that would be better spent on the obvious and necessary solutions: equitable access to quality teaching and educational resources starting at pre-K. We would never have to spend a dollar teaching me how to focus on mastery of standards in high school if we would just spend that same dollar reducing first grade class sizes and making sure all elementary school kids have the resources they need to succeed before they ever get to me.

But we don’t put in the time and effort necessary to solve the problems in early education. So we create for ourselves greater problems in secondary and tertiary education. Which are more expensive to try to fix, and more time-consuming, because they are now more intractable. And when those solutions don’t work, we create for ourselves further problems among the citizens of this country: because we end up with tens of millions of people who don’t believe science. Who don’t understand how this democracy works, and why it needs to be protected. Who can’t empathize with other people, because they never tried to walk in someone else’s shoes, and don’t understand why it is like killing a mockingbird.

Screw it. We should just remove all the natural people and replace them with artificial ones. Dentures, if you will.

Then at least we can curse at them as they deserve.