Category Education and Teaching

This Is Not Off Topic

Dusty Leave a comment

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?)

I told you this wasn’t off topic.

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.

Watch This

Dusty Leave a comment
(Actual footage of me trying to keep up with grading.)

I work a lot.

My work day runs from 7:45 to 4:20; just about an 8-hour day if I got a half hour for lunch. I don’t, of course; my lunchtime is spent supervising and often talking to students, or else grading and planning. I do sometimes manage about 20-30 minutes for eating and something mindless like scrolling through social media or playing Minesweeper; but as there are almost always students in the room while I’m doing it, it isn’t duty-free: I would still need to intervene if one of them punched another, or if they said something that required action on my part, like “I’m going to cheat on my math test next period” or “I’m going to blow up the school” or “Clearly trickle-down economics are the key to prosperity, and also donuts taste terrible.”

And of course, my work day doesn’t actually end at 4:20. (No comments, please, about how the administration at my school decided to let teachers go PRECISELY at the Smoking Hour; it’s a coincidence of scheduling, not evidence that one of the superintendents is Snoop Dogg. Though that would be badass. “Hell yeah, you can teach that CRT shit, yo. Load them lil homies up wit dat GANGSTA truth, fo shizzle! CRT from tha LBC, and the D-O-Double-G!“) I commute, which certainly should be considered part of the work day; that adds an hour or so total. But even without that, I frequently have meetings and so on which run past 4:20; 5:00 is more accurate at least two days a week. Most teachers go home every night and plan for the next day; I’ve been teaching my classes long enough that I don’t need to do that any more — but I do work on the weekends, every week, for between four and eight hours; sometimes more. It’s the only way I can keep up with the essays I have to assign, and the kind of feedback I want to give on my students’ writing. I also read extensively for my classes: finding new material, refreshing my memory of old material, and so on; all told, my work week is closer to 50 hours than 40, and often beyond that mark.

This is not intended to complain — though I will certainly use this, as all of my fellow teachers do, to rebut the absurd claims of those who hate education and educators and argue that teaching is an easy job because we have summers off: even apart from the truth about teachers in summer time, which is that we are still working on planning and researching and completing professional development, and often working our second jobs required to make ends meet; when teachers work approximately 50 hours a week during the 36-38 week school year, those extra ten hours every week add up to almost 400 extra hours, which is — yup, just about ten weeks of a regular 40-hour-a-week job. Or the length of summer.

But no: my point with this summation of my work schedule is this: if I work something like 50 hours a week, for the 38 weeks of my school year — why is my performance evaluation based on one or two formal observations, which total less than two hours’ worth of watching me teach?

The observation and evaluation system in education is well-known among teachers and students, and pretty roundly derided as a ridiculous means of assessing a teacher’s ability or worth. First, the criteria for success are unbelievable: my school uses the Charlotte Danielson method. Here it is.

Seems reasonable, right?

Most formal observations are planned and scheduled, which means, as we all could guess and teachers talk about frequently, that we just trot out the dog-and-pony show for the administrators. (By the way: has anyone ever actually seen a dog and pony show? If you haven’t, watch this. The video quality is pretty choppy and annoying, but the dogs and the pony are very cute.) Stories abound of teachers who feed their students the correct answers to questions before the observation so the students can give all the right answers while the administrators are watching; my favorite is the urban legend of the teacher (Which I know has been actually imitated more than once, but I suspect the original story is apocryphal) who told the students that, when the teacher asked a question, if they knew the answer, they should raise their right hand, and if they didn’t know, they should raise their left; that way the teacher could pick from a sea of raised hands, and every time, the student would give the right answer. Genius.

Whether that clever story is apocryphal or not, the dog-and-pony show definitely is not: I’ve done it myself several times. My very first observation, I tried to work out a complicated group work system called “jigsaw” groups, to show off that I did indeed know how to run a group lesson; unfortunately, several students were absent that day (Maybe because they didn’t want to perform for the admin?) and that screwed up my groups, so the whole lesson bombed; that taught me the folly of trying too hard for an evaluator’s observation. But at my current school, when my administrators had observed me half a dozen times, always telling me I needed more group work and universal student participation — suggesting, every single time, that I both call on students (which I refuse to do, having been a dreamy introvert and therefore understanding how terrible it is to be snapped out of a reverie to suddenly have to admit you don’t know the answer, and frankly I’d rather let them daydream and miss part of the lesson) and use exit tickets (which I don’t refuse to do, but — my God, what a pain in the ass those things are) — I did indeed create a group lesson specifically for the next observation, and ran it when the admin came even though it was out of sequence with what the class was working on every other day that week. And I got my most glowing review to date. And then the next day I went right back to what I had been teaching before the interruption of an observation.

So beyond question, the system of scheduled formal observations does not give good information about what a teacher’s classroom is like on a day-to-day basis. But it’s more than that: even surprise observations, which I’ve had every year for the last eight years I’ve been at my current school, and will have again within the next month or so when observation season starts, don’t give the observers a good idea of what the classroom is like every day: because on a normal day, there aren’t a handful of school administrators looking uncomfortable in student desks during the class. Does anyone imagine that students are unaware of administrators in the room? When these are the people who most frequently enforce school discipline, and impose consequences on the students who break the rules? And there they are, just staring at the students?

Let me ask it this way: when you see a cop car driving down the road near you, do you slow down and make sure you don’t pick up your phone for any reason? Me too. And so with students while an administrator is observing the class: it’s called the Hawthorne Effect, after a study of productivity in a factory called the Hawthorne Works. When management changed conditions for the workers, productivity improved every time, even when the change was to go back to the former conditions. Because the workers knew: when something changed, the bosses were watching. So they worked harder, for a short period of time. I can never get a class to behave nearly as well as any class being observed. Though at the same time, the discussions that are the standard operating procedure in my literature classes are much more stilted and uncomfortable, because normally I and the students both crack jokes all the time, and go off on tangents into different subjects that I or they or both find interesting; none of that stuff happens during an observation — which means the observers get to see precisely what they want, which is an orderly, focused classroom; and not what my class actually is, which is an environment where a whole group of people can feel comfortable sharing ideas and discussing literature.

But even without that, formal observation is a terrible system: because it’s just not enough time. I work hard to ignore the observers when they come in. I actively make jokes and go off on tangents (I didn’t always, please note, but I am now one of the more senior and one of the more respected teachers at my school, and there’s little chance that I’m ever getting fired, and no chance that I’ll ever get fired for incompetence or irreverence during an observation; for God’s sake, I dress up like a pirate every Halloween and teach my classes in my Hector-Barbossa-like pirate accent. Irreverence is a given. Also, I am a highly competent English teacher.) and encourage students who do the same. So while observed lessons are better behaved, still, the discussion actually isn’t all that different; it does in fact give a pretty good view of my regular class, if still an unusually well-behaved one. But the other problem remains: the observers are only seeing one class, on one day. They’re not seeing the procession of students through my room. They’re not seeing how different it is to have a class in the morning versus the afternoon, to have one on a Monday versus a Friday, versus the last day before a vacation, versus a test day, or the day before a test day. They’re not seeing the same class when THAT ONE KID is present, or if they are, they don’t see what a difference it makes when THAT ONE KID is absent. And of course, they’re not seeing the work: they don’t read the essays, don’t look at the quickwrites or the annotations or the graphic organizers. They don’t read the emails apologizing for that bad day I had the other day, Mr. Humphrey, but I promise I’ll do better. They don’t read the emails from parents asking for some leniency because they had a family emergency and their child hasn’t been able to sleep for a week.

They don’t know what I do as a teacher. They can’t see what I do in just a single hour. They can’t see what I do unless they watch ALL of what I do; and of course they can’t do that. There are so many incredibly different elements that go into teaching, so many different skills and tasks that all must be completed for a single effective lesson, as part of a single effective class. There’s just no way to observe it all for every member of a school faculty. And of course, it changes every year, as students change and class dynamics change and class assignments change for teachers, as curriculum changes, as new ideas occur to us and we replace things that didn’t work last time — and so on, so on.

When I worked as a janitor, my performance evaluations were both easy, and fair. There were a set of assigned tasks that had clear outcomes: if I was told to mop the upper corridors, then my boss could go look at the floor and see the job I had done. If the floor was clean, I had done my job; if not, not. My boss was generally at work with me every shift: she could see how long it took me to complete a task, how efficient I was. She could see if I had initiative to take on a different task if I finished my assigned duties, or if I just sat around like a lump. She could hear me interact with my coworkers (Not to mention she herself interacted with me every day, pretty much) and with the clients and the general public, because she was there when I was working, and we were working in pretty much the same place, all the time. Once I’d worked there for two or three years, I was given more independence and responsibility, which meant I worked unsupervised more often; but still, my boss could look at the windows the next day to see if I had actually washed them like I was supposed to. So those performance evaluations were a breeze, and I never felt like they were unfair.

Now? I don’t feel like I could possibly get an evaluation that could be fair. I generally get sterling evaluations: I really am a good teacher, and a popular one, and the school both recognizes that and recognizes that they should probably keep me happy, because it would hurt the school to some extent if I quit. (The school would remain, don’t get me wrong; but here in Arizona, where School Choice is such a strong part of the education environment, you can bet your sweet bippy that some students would leave the school if I did. It’s happened several times in the past when popular and successful teachers have moved on.) But even though the evaluations I get are good, and I get an amount of “merit pay” as a reward for my good ratings, I still get a little offended by the evaluations. Because those people don’t have any idea what I do. Not really. So who the hell are they to judge me?

The irony, of course, is that so much of school these days (And maybe always) is about judgment. Assessment. Evaluation. Accountability. It seems like that’s all anyone in authority can talk about — though my colleagues and I have noticed that they have stopped using a phrase that was all the rage ten or twenty years ago: authentic assessment. Authentic assessment was the idea that some evaluations of a student’s learning would be more genuine and more effective if they were attached to a task that was, first, genuinely part of a class, rather than an externally created and scored standardized test, and second, similar in some way to something the student would actually do with the skill in question: so, for instance, testing a student’s writing ability with a resume and a cover letter seeking a job, if a class has been studying resumes and cover letters, would be an authentic assessment. We don’t talk about that any more. Probably because standardized tests are still the only thing that higher-ups pay attention to, a problem that has only gotten worse in the last decade; but maybe also because they became aware that their own assessment of teachers was anything but authentic, no matter how it had the trappings of authenticity. It seems clear to me, at least, that the idea of having the appearance of authenticity is self-contradictory: and so with formal classroom observations.

I’m talking about this this week for two reasons, even though it doesn’t necessarily fit in with my planned course of investigation and explication of the state of education in the US today; certainly this is a part of the world of education, and inasmuch as observations and evaluations have some impact on teacher retention and so on, this subject isn’t far away from what I’ve been speaking about. But if I had been going straight ahead with my intended subject, this week would have been about school as an entity: the purpose and value of actual schools with actual classrooms where students sit in actual desks, as contrasted by virtual classrooms or homeschooling. Hopefully I’ll take that on next week; unless I find something else that takes my focus, as has happened this week.

The first reason for this semi-tangent is my wife. My wife taught art full-time for three years, and then quit three years ago, because she is first and foremost an artist in her own right (And an incredible one) and teaching full-time took too much time and energy away from her art. But while she was working there, she got observed — by administrators who do not know the first thing about art. They told her, directly, that they hadn’t understood what she had been talking about in class while they observed her — “But the students seem to get it, so good job!” In truth, past administrators who have performed my evaluations haven’t understood my subject terribly well; some of them haven’t even understood teaching in general, and their comments and critiques relied on what they had gleaned from professional development and teaching manuals and so on. Not terribly helpful, but they seemed satisfied when I would nod, say, “Okay, that makes sense, I’ll try to do more of that” — and then go straight back to teaching the way I always have. Because I do understand teaching, and my subject, and because the way I teach is effective. It is not effective with every class and every student: but that’s part of the conversation about schools, which I will come back to next week.

The second reason I wanted to talk about this subject for this post is because this last week, I was observed. Not by my school-level administrators, and not to evaluate my teaching: this time it was district personnel come to check my compliance with the new systems that have been put in place this year. As with every year (And this is the other contender for next week’s subject matter: the way every new year brings new systems and new demands and new policies, and the old ones are sometimes superseded but never simply taken away, until we end up with something like a multi-layer shit sandwich — or perhaps a shit tiramisu would be the better metaphor. I’ll consider.), and despite the last two years being maddeningly difficult and exhausting years because of the pandemic and the quarantines, we have a new system in place, implemented by the district without any consultation with the teachers (and apparently over the objections of school-level administrators, though that is only scuttlebutt), which has to do with the curriculum. Not a change in curriculum: only a change in pacing, and in — you guessed it, if you have any experience working in education — assessment. So two district administrators made the first of what will be several monthly visits to the school, to step into various classrooms and examine how well the teachers are implementing the new system.

And if you have any experience with me and my teaching, you already know what they found: nothing. I’m not complying with the new system, precisely because it doesn’t mandate any change in curriculum; and I’m not going to change my teaching methods unless somebody gives me a good idea. They didn’t. So they saw what every other administrator has seen when they come into my classroom: a discussion — lively, in the case of the class they came into, one of my more active groups — with a fairly intense focus on specific details that show characterization and theme, in a complex piece of literature, in this case the brilliant short story “Valedictorian” by the incredible N.K. Jemisin, a piece I have picked up in the last three years because I’m trying to include more modern writers, more women writers, and more writers of color, and Jemisin is all three in addition to being incredible. And I hope they liked what they saw, even if I’m not in compliance with their system: because if their job is to improve education, then what they saw was reflective of their goal, if not of their methods.

But I don’t really care what they saw: what I care about is what they did. These two men, complete strangers to most of my students (One of them used to work at my school site, but was largely invisible in the lives of students, particularly these students, because they have often been online for the last two years and so don’t know any school personnel other than their teachers, and us only as faces on Zoom until this year, in some cases), came into class, opening the locked room door with a master key, in the middle of said lively discussion. They had emailed me that they were coming (I had warned the students they might come in, but I had no idea what period or what time they might come into my classroom) and told me not to make a fuss, so I didn’t acknowledge them; but I’m sure I did exactly what I saw the students do: they got quiet, they subtly hid away their phones and headphones and so on, and sat up more straight, their eyes darting to the men and away. Passing by the comfortable chair I had set up front in case one of them wanted to sit there, and ignoring my desk chair, which was also open, they went and sat amongst the students: one in an unoccupied student desk, and one standing awkwardly in the corner of the room, right behind a female student who spent the next fifteen minutes deeply uncomfortable with the close presence of a strange man right behind her. They stayed there for a quarter of an hour, saying nothing, while my students gallantly and honorably maintained their composure and actually had a pretty damn good discussion of the story; and then they left. And, I’m sure, promptly invaded another classroom, and made another group of kids vastly uncomfortable.

This is not a good system. If they wanted to see if I am in compliance with their system, they should have asked me. I would have told them I’m not. I might have done it sheepishly and said I would try to comply in the future; but I wouldn’t have pretended to be doing what I’m not. They could have looked at my online records to see whether or not I was completing the tasks they wanted me to; it should be immediately clear that I’m not (To be fair, I’m doing a couple of the things they want. And also, I already achieve what they’re hoping to achieve: one of those same administrators gave me an award at the beginning of this year for my students’ achievement last year. But I’m not in full compliance, and they could know it without even setting foot in my room.). If they wanted to know if I’m writing what they want me to write on my board every day (Standards and objectives in “student-friendly language,” and no, I’m not — that’s another post I’ll write, about the appalling lie that is standards-based education), they could have come in at the end of the day: no teacher on Earth erases the board at the end of the day, except those who then go ahead and fill it up again with the needed information for the next day; if I was writing standards, they’d see one or the other, the past day’s or the next day’s.

All of that evaluation could be done without disturbing my class. Without making my students — and me, but that’s not important — uncomfortable when we should be working, trying to achieve the very thing they are trying to see if we’re achieving. And if they’d stayed away, we could have made more progress towards that goal of actual learning. Not much more progress; they weren’t in there long, and it didn’t mess the discussion up too much — but it did get in the way. It was a problem. And for what? So they could leave some boxes unchecked. If you’re thinking they came back to talk to me later, to let me know I was out of compliance and that was an issue, or to share with me their observations, perhaps even to offer helpful or at least well-meaning advice, well — you’ve never worked in education. School administrators sometimes do that. District and above? Never.

The last reason I’m writing about this, the part that upset me most, was this: the observation made one of my students, as they told me the next day, feel as though they weren’t being treated as a person, but rather just some data point to be measured. It made that student mad, and it should have. And it made me mad, because I have worked very hard to make this student feel as though they belong in my classroom and at this school. And they do. It’s the administrators who don’t. And let me just note: you people put cameras in every classroom, over the objections of the majority of the students and staff. Use them. Observe me through the lens. Stay the hell out of the room unless there’s a problem you’ve come to fix, instead of cause.

One part of my job which I hate, but which I take very seriously, is assessment. My students want to know how they’re doing; the community, everyone from the school administrators to the students’ parents to their future employers and college admissions officers, all want to know how they’re doing. So even though I hate and despise grades and grading, I do it. I do it as well as I know how, and I spend appalling amounts of time doing it. And one thing that is critical to the process is: time. Time, and multiple measures. No one thinks that we can know all about a student’s knowledge or ability or especially their progress based on a single assessment, a single observed moment, no matter how rigorous that assessment may be, no matter how reliable or valid is the data that comes from it. If nothing else, all of the education system these days is focused on growth over time: and of course growth can’t be tested in a single instance, because you need two points to make a line and find the rate of change for that line over time. So I guess it’s good that the administrators are going to come back to observe again — but it’s absurd and terrible that they’re just going to do the same thing over again, with the same problems and flaws and negative consequences of their actions, many of which will invalidate their data. Again.

If I graded my students this way, those same administrators would fire me.

If they had any idea what I was doing.

Back to Balance

Dusty Leave a comment

What is education?

I mean it. What is it really?

Is it school? How much school? What kind of school? Elementary, secondary, post-secondary? We call all of it school, call it education; but is that really all the same thing, from kindergarten all the way through a doctorate?

Or is it experience? We’ve all heard that Twain quote, right? “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.” Great line. It’s not Twain’s, of course. Man named Grant Allen said it first. But regardless, it’s the truth, isn’t it? You don’t really begin learning until you get out of school — and into the school of HARD KNOCKS! Amirite?!?

Maybe. It certainly makes sense to recognize that learning must continue outside of the classroom, that application of knowledge and skills is as important as the acquisition of the knowledge and skills, if not more so.

But if that is the case, then is school itself unnecessary? Is it better to learn by experience?

Let’s discuss.

I had wanted to go back to the beginning of education, to try to figure out the fundamental concept; because I have no doubt that the essence of education is being lost, is being forgotten, in the modern era. We have fallen prey to a completely human and understandable error: the temptation of opportunity. We look at all these kids in school, all trying to learn, and we think, “Hey, you know what else those kids need? They need to learn CPR. And how to do their taxes. And cursive! Gotta learn cursive; how else will they learn how to write their signatures? And maybe how to square dance — I loved square dancing when I was a kid. Ooo! You know what else they should learn? To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved that book. They should definitely read that. And wait — what do you mean, kids today don’t learn Latin? Bah. That’s what’s wrong with the world today: we’ve gotten soft! We’re taking it too easy on those kids, gotta toughen them up!”

And so on. Having almost every child in the country, readily available, particularly with a large institution already in place designed to impart knowledge and skills to those children? It’s too tempting. We all have things we think kids should or need to learn; and everyone with any authority piles on their pet project. Not enough awareness of how the country works? Add a required government class. People don’t understand how the economy works? Add economics. Our math scores are falling behind those of other countries? We haven’t won a space race in 70 years? MORE STEM! Hey wait — STEM is fine and all, but really, those kids can’t even name the three branches of government. Give ’em a civics class. They need to know this stuff before they get out into the real world!

It never stops. And that’s what’s mainly wrong with education today: we’ve been adding to it for a hundred years, and we’ve taken very little away.

(Another issue, and one I want to write about in its own post, is the way we try to solve problems in education, and by doing so we create other problems; which we then try to solve, and create other problems… But that’s still just adding, without taking anything away, so same basic issue.)

So I want to go back to the very beginning, and try to figure out what it really needs to be so we can honestly decide what we need to be doing right now with education.

The problem with that strategy is the assumption I’m making that the people in the past had any damn idea what they were doing, and that their ideas were good.

Wrong.

“In Mesopotamia, the early logographic system of cuneiform script took many years to master. Thus only a limited number of individuals were hired as scribes to be trained in its reading and writing. Only royal offspring and sons of the rich and professionals such as scribes, physicians, and temple administrators, were schooled.[5] Most boys were taught their father’s trade or were apprenticed to learn a trade.[6] Girls stayed at home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking, and to look after the younger children.”

…

In ancient Egypt, literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this preserved the scribes’ status. Literacy remains an elusive subject for ancient Egypt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

So class segregation. And gender segregation, too. Awesome. It makes sense: whatever else we may think of it, knowledge is power, and the ability to control knowledge is even greater power; of course school was originally used to reinforce the existing power structure within the society.

(Though also, I am down with this curriculum: “Ashurbanipal (685 – c. 627 BC), a king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, was proud of his scribal education. His youthful scholarly pursuits included oil divination, mathematics, reading and writing as well as the usual horsemanship, hunting, chariotry, soldierliness, craftsmanship, and royal decorum.” I could teach the hell out of an oil divination class.)

(Also please note that not all ancient cultures were quite so rigidly authoritarian:

In ancient Israel, the Torah (the fundamental religious text) includes commands to read, learn, teach and write the Torah, thus requiring literacy and study. In 64 AD the high priest caused schools to be opened.[18]

…

In the Islamic civilization that spread all the way between China and Spain during the time between the 7th and 19th centuries, Muslims started schooling from 622 in Medina, which is now a city in Saudi Arabia, schooling at first was in the mosques (masjid in Arabic) but then schools became separate in schools next to mosques. The first separate school was the Nizamiyah school. It was built in 1066 in Baghdad. Children started school from the age of six with free tuition. The Quran encourages Muslims to be educated. Thus, education and schooling sprang up in the ancient Muslim societies. Moreover, Muslims had one of the first universities in history which is Al-Qarawiyin University in Fez, Morocco. It was originally a mosque that was built in 859.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

I think, however, this is the kind of thing I was hoping to find:

In ancient India, education was mainly imparted through the Vedic and Buddhist education system. Sanskrit was the language used to impart the Vedic education system. Pali was the language used in the Buddhist education system. In the Vedic system, a child started his education at the age of 8 to 12, whereas in the Buddhist system the child started his education at the age of eight. The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture. [Emphasis added]

The Buddhist and Vedic systems had different subjects. In the Vedic system of study, the students were taught the four Vedas – Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, they were also taught the six Vedangas – ritualistic knowledge, metrics, exegetics, grammar, phonetics and astronomy, the Upanishads and more.

Vedic Education

In ancient India, education was imparted and passed on orally rather than in written form. Education was a process that involved three steps, first was Shravana (hearing) which is the acquisition of knowledge by listening to the Shrutis. The second is Manana (reflection) wherein the students think, analyze and make inferences. Third, is Nididhyāsana in which the students apply the knowledge in their real life.

During the Vedic period from about 1500 BC to 600 BC, most education was based on the Veda (hymns, formulas, and incantations, recited or chanted by priests of a pre-Hindu tradition) and later Hindu texts and scriptures. The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

Let me repeat that last part one more time: “The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.” And that earlier part, too: “The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture.“

(No, it didn’t take them long to fuck it up, either. “Education, at first freely available in Vedic society, became over time more rigid and restricted as the social systems dictated that only those of meritorious lineage be allowed to study the scriptures, originally based on occupation, evolved, with the Brahman (priests) being the most privileged of the castes, followed by Kshatriya who could also wear the sacred thread and gain access to Vedic education.”)

(And also, of course so-called “Western civilization” wasn’t any better: “For example, in Athens, during the 5th and 4th century BC, aside from two years military training, the state played little part in schooling.[35][36] Anyone could open a school and decide the curriculum. Parents could choose a school offering the subjects they wanted their children to learn, at a monthly fee they could afford.[35] Most parents, even the poor, sent their sons to schools for at least a few years, and if they could afford it from around the age of seven until fourteen, learning gymnastics (including athletics, sport and wrestling), music (including poetry, drama and history) and literacy.[35][36] Girls rarely received formal education.”)

(Parts of the U.S. were better. For a while. The Puritans valued education and so provided it. Not so in the South, and not once the secular authorities took over the New England colonies, and began reserving education for the sons of the wealthy. So it goes.)

So here we have, I think, the fundamental conflict faced by cultures that begin any form of formalized, standardized education: knowledge is power, and the society has to decide whether it wants to spread that power out among the populace, or concentrate it in the hands of a few. Most of the time, we choose the latter. That is largely what we are doing right now in this country: letting education collapse (Or hoping and praying for that collapse, or even pushing it to collapse faster, depending on which side you’re on and how evil you are.) because then power will be more concentrated, and easier to wield for those who have it. So just as soon as the power elite recognize the value of education, they work to keep it all for themselves; nowadays by convincing the rest of the people that that education stuff is just not necessary, and probably pretty stupid — and maybe a little too socialist.

But that’s not what education is: that’s how it can be corrupted.

For what education is, I think I’m going to go straight to the root: the root of the word itself.

educate (v.)

mid-15c., educaten, “bring up (children), to train,” from Latin educatus, past participle of educare “bring up, rear, educate” (source also of Italian educare, Spanish educar, French éduquer), which is a frequentative of or otherwise related to educere “bring out, lead forth,” from ex- “out” (see ex-) + ducere “to lead,” from PIE root *deuk- “to lead.” Meaning “provide schooling” is first attested 1580s. Related: Educated; educating.

According to “Century Dictionary,” educere, of a child, is “usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind,”

https://www.etymonline.com/word/educate

That’s the etymology of the word educate, and it taught me something I didn’t know: there are two words that serve as the roots of educate. The two words are related, even in Latin (Both are pronounced with a hard c, by the way, so educare is pronounced [ed-you-CAH-ray] and educere is pronounced [ed-you-CARE-ay]), but one of them in English is closer to the word educe (pronounce with a soft c, like “reduce” without the r), meaning to draw or lead out. To bring forth. The etymology website points out that in Latin, the word educere was related more to bodily nurture and support, and while nurturing and supporting students’ bodies is certainly worth talking about, I think in our society that has more to do with making our current system of mandatory attendance at brick-and-mortar schools feasible and positive for the students, more than it has to do with understanding why we have or should have brick-and-mortar schools in the first place. (And that’s something writing a separate post about.)

I’m more interested in the idea of education being at least partly about educing something.

But it turns out (unsurprisingly) I’m not the first to notice or care about this.

Craft (1984) noted that there are two different Latin roots of the English word “education.” They are educare, which means to train or to mold, and educere, meaning to lead out. While the two meanings are quite different, they are both represented in our word “education.” Thus, there is an etymological basis for many of the vociferous debates about education today. The opposing sides often use the same word to denote two very different concepts. One side uses education to mean the preservation and passing down of knowledge and the shaping of youths in the image of their parents. The other side sees education as preparing a new generation for the changes that are to come—readying them to create solutions to problems yet unknown. One calls for rote memorization and becoming good workers. The other requires questioning, thinking, and creating. To further complicate matters, some groups expect schooling to fulfill both functions, but allow only those activities promoting educare to be used

Educare and Educere: Is a Balance Possible in the Educational System?
Bass, Randall V.; Good, J. W.
Educational Forum, The, v68 n2 p161-168 Win 2004
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ724880.pdf

In the United States and most other western countries over the last 150 years, school has been thought of as a system to prepare well-behaved citizens and good workers (Parsons 1985). Neither of these functions requires much educere. Students who demonstrated a significant capacity for creativity were viewed with alarm, because they could not be counted on to follow orders. Those who questioned the wisdom of the ages and suggested alternatives to the tried and true were dealt with harshly, and they too eventually faded from the educational scene. History is littered with creative geniuses who were less than exemplary students but went on to make significant contributions to society. Even one of the latest transforming forces—computer technology—is not immune to this phenomenon. Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest man, is a college dropout; and he is only one of many in the field with less than stellar academic achievements.

As schooling has become more universal and longer in duration, the relative shortage of educere has become more important in our society. When students spend more of their time in institutions that don’t teach in educere-friendly ways, and even condemn initiative and creativity, they have less opportunity elsewhere to learn to question and create. Correcting this problem is not a simple undertaking. A culture has been established that is remarkably resistant to change. When new teachers or administrators enter this culture, they are pressured from every side to conform to the cultural norm. If the culture cannot change them, it attempts to drive them out. Generally, it is successful in one or the other of these endeavors.

Clearly, the preceding scenario does not exist in all schools today. It does, however, accurately represent what takes place in many schools. In many others, there is constant movement along the continuum between educare and educere. It is this vacillation between the two that consumes so many resources. The result is much time, money, and effort put into education, producing little net result.

In the overall scheme of things, educare and educere are of equal importance. Education that ignores educare dooms its students to starting over each generation. Omitting educere produces citizens who are incapable of solving new problems. Thus, any system of education that supplies its students with only one of these has failed miserably.

Bass and Good, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ724880

Now that’s what I was looking for.

Forgive the long quotations, but this was a good article. I’m not sure I believe their final conclusion, which is that the organizational structure of schools has to change, so that the thinking can change; but I love what they say about the two aspects of education — which, as they correctly point out, are both important, and I shouldn’t mock the importance of learning the fundamentals, which does often include memorization and repeated focused practice. Honestly, learning to be a good worker isn’t a bad thing: as long as it isn’t the only thing you learn. I consider myself creative and non-conforming — but I also pride myself on the fact that I work hard and I do a good job. Bass and Good push for balance between the two aspects of education, and I think that makes excellent sense. I also appreciate when, in describing how educational organizations must change, they identify these as the priorities:

Educational leaders must take action to support education as a learning organization. Most importantly leaders must provide the conditions favorable for a learning organization. These include facilitating development of personal mastery in schools and providing information to challenge existing mental models of educators. Specific actions include involving stakeholders in decision making, encouraging creative actions in the classroom, and supporting educators with sufficient resources.

Bass and Good, p.7

And if you know me at all, you know I really loved the next paragraph:

Balance Requires Dialogue

Communication and understanding of what students are learning also contribute to balance. For example, there must be a change in thinking from importance of grades to importance of learning. A grade is devoid of balance and, by itself, connotes no evidence of achieving balance. Only dialogue about learning will achieve balance. To achieve understanding, it is necessary to focus on what is learned and not learned rather than on a grade representing the learning. Focused thinking comes as a result of examining personal mastery and existing mental models.

So. I think we have it, now. Educare and educere as the two fundamental aspects of education, and the goal of the system of formal education (meaning schooling, because experience is certainly a good and valid way to gain education; but formal schooling certainly is too. I’ll write more another time about what “school” is and what it should be.) should be the balance between the two. I think my personal bias towards educere is largely because I teach at the final stage of compulsory K-12 education: I teach high school, and in fact I only teach grades 10-12, and I focus on my Advanced Placement classes, which are intended to be college-level curriculum. Of course I’m more interested in the educere side; that’s the side I live on. And I think that’s a reasonable and important point to make: that balance between fundamental skills and creative enrichment doesn’t have to be achieved simultaneously, it’s not a matter of spending Mondays on skill building and Tuesdays on application and problem-solving, in every single class for all the years of formal education; there’s no reason why we couldn’t do more educare in elementary school and more educere in high school, which is largely what we do. But it’s worth remembering and talking about how we need both sides at all levels: I do skill-building repetition, and first-grade teachers absolutely should include creative enrichment in their curriculum.

One more time, now, I want to bring back the essential ideas from Vedic education in ancient India, because I don’t want to fall into a trap that I think snares a lot of us: I found an answer I really like, and so I’m ignoring that it doesn’t really answer my original question, which was, What is education? Because I think you can’t really understand something unless you understand what it’s for, what the purpose of it is. Form follows function. So I have an understanding which I like of what education is: but what is it for? If the goal of education in this country, in this society, is to maintain the current imbalance of power, then I don’t really want to understand it better: I want to remove it, destroy it, kill it with fire. (And you bet there are parts of it that need to suffer exactly that fate. Like goddamn school uniforms. Burn ’em all. [Take them off the kids, first.])

So here they are again: and there’s no particular reason to choose the Vedic ideals over the Muslim or Jewish or Athenian ideals; except inasmuch as the Vedic ideals are the best ones of the bunch.

First: “The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture.”

And second: “The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.”

Now look how well those align with, first, educare; and second, educere.

Character, self-control, social awareness, culture.

And then: liberation.

That’s education.

More Weight

Dusty Leave a comment

Continuing from last week’s post, I still want to discuss the probability of education collapsing under the current weight we are carrying. In last week’s post, I wrote about how educators are leaving the profession, largely but not exclusively due to the poor pay compared to the duties and expectations of the job; and rather than deal with that problem, America is asking teachers to do more to cover the gaps left by those who have already made it off of the sinking ship, which is making it even harder on those of us who remain.

Today I want to talk about the other reason why people are leaving.

It’s because we’re tired.

I had another day, yesterday. Another day that wore me out completely, that left me dragging my way home, feeling drained and depressed even after I had a lovely, fun, relaxing evening with friends, and even after dinner with my wife. I woke up this morning feeling the same way: at least partly because I have to go back and face the same classes, the same students, who wore me out yesterday, which certainly puts a pall on the morning; but partly because I just don’t have the energy to keep going back and doing all of this, day after day after day. I used to have it: but it’s gone now. And that fact makes me worry about my long-term future as a teacher, and even more, it makes me worry about the long term future of education.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m whining: I recognize that everyone is dealing with this, and all of us for the same reasons. I do not think that teachers have it harder than everyone else; that’s not my point.

My point is that teachers have it harder than we used to have it.

I’ve been a teacher for 22 years, and it’s always been hard. But it’s gotten tangibly worse in the last three years.

Here’s the problem, and what I felt yesterday and what I have watched get worse and worse and worse for the last three years: we’re tired, more now than ever before, and all for the same reason. All of us: students, teachers, parents, administrators and staff. We’re all so tired. The pandemic and the shutdown took this already difficult and troubled endeavor — using limited and uneven resources to provide a complete education for every student in the country — and made it so much harder. Over a two-week span, between March 13 and March 31, I had to change everything I had done for 20 years before that, and essentially without any help or guidance, because everyone else was doing the same. Students, too, had to try to adjust to a brand new, entirely different way of learning, at the tail end of the school year — and they, like their teachers and parents and all of their supports, were also dealing with the threat of a deadly pandemic, and all of the political and economic turmoil that came with it. Worrying about ourselves and our loved ones, and the whole world, while trying to build whole new resources for learning, on the fly, before the school year ended. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

And it didn’t stop there: at the end of that school year, we were still in a serious quarantine, still watching the crisis take the lives of millions of people around the world, watching economies crumble, watching our “leaders” screw the whole thing up in a hundred ways (And worrying that the election in the fall was not going to fix that problem, and uncertain what we could or should do about that) — and knowing, the whole time, that we would need to continue doing things differently in the fall, when classes started up again. That whole summer, I had no idea what to do about the coming school year. I wasn’t sure what it was going to look like. At the time, I was primarily worried that we would have in-person classes, and I was confident that I would, therefore, get COVID, because children are germ factories, and every teacher gets sick every year, usually several times, because children sneeze on us; so I knew that I would probably get it, whatever precautions I took — and I was certain that I would bring it home and give it to my wife, who has indeed gotten numerous colds and flus over the two decades of my teaching career for precisely that reason; and because she has severe allergies and consequent asthma, I was terrified that COVID would kill her. That’s what I spent my summer worrying about. And I know I wasn’t alone.

And before I leave that terrible summer of 2020 to talk about the terrible school year of 2020-2021, let me point out another aspect of the whole ordeal that affected me and other high school teachers — and to a different extent, teachers at all grade levels: graduation. It’s one of the parts of the school year that makes being a teacher worth it: to watch our students cross that final finish line, accomplish this remarkable achievement, and to celebrate it with them, is one of the great joys of being in education. I expect elementary and middle school teachers have the same feeling watching their students move on to the next stage; but high school graduation is the real rite of passage, and it is a tremendous source of joy and satisfaction. I have for the last five years taken a key role in the actual commencement ceremony at my school, as I took over the Master of Ceremonies duty after my predecessor left: I’m the one who welcomes the students and their families to the ceremony; I’m the one who reads all their names as they come up to get their diploma; I’m the one who tells them to turn the tassels to the right, to officially mark their completion of their mandatory education. It means a lot to me, because it means a lot to them.

And in 2020, we didn’t have it.

We did, actually; precisely because we knew graduation meant so much to the students and their families, and because the seniors who were graduating in 2020 had already lost the last third of their senior year, including Prom and the Senior Trip, we found a way to make graduation work. We had it outside, during the day — in 100+° heat, in glaring sunshine, in masks with social distancing. But it was terrible, and the graduates have told me since they wish we hadn’t had it then; they would have preferred to come back a year or two later and had a proper ceremony inside, with a tiny hint of reunion. Ah, well. Hindsight is — never mind.

We had a graduation ceremony, but it didn’t feel right. Just like everything else that year didn’t feel right. The usual rewards for what we do were missing. The usual joys were all stripped away from us, leaving only the bad things behind, the worry, the stress and anxiety and fear. And the anger. And the exhaustion. The exhaustion from doing all the work, first, while also trying to make joy when there wasn’t any, trying desperately first to hold onto normal, and then to recapture and recreate normal after it had vanished. It didn’t work: we would have been better off moving on to new normals, finding new joys. Frankly, we should have known that from the outset, should have accepted it and dealt with reality instead of trying to cling to a doomed past; but I guess when it comes to longing for what has been lost in a time of upheaval, we’re all Boomers.

But we tried. We tried to lift up that weight, to make everything okay even when it wasn’t okay. And like adults all over the world who try to conceal difficulty in order to protect their children, we were suffering ourselves while we were trying to lift up that weight. We couldn’t do it, but we tried. And that trying took everything we had.

We haven’t gotten it back.

Okay. I’m losing control of this. I apologize: I started this post Friday morning, and now it is Sunday morning, and I want to finish it and post it, but — I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what point I’m making. I don’t know where I’m going with this.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense; I don’t know if other people had the same experience — or a worse one. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like to go through all of that and also lose your job and your home, move back in with family with your own family coming with you, or even move onto the streets; I certainly have enough examples of people all around me who have lost their homes, as the unhoused population has exploded in the last two years, here in Tucson, where it doesn’t snow and kill people with cold (Though the heat is certainly deadly in the summer) and therefore the population of visibly desperate people is larger and more obvious; but I find myself shying away from that. It’s another result of everything we’ve gone through, the trauma we have suffered, the grief we are still suffering for what we have lost, for the joys that were taken and have not and will never return: the loss of empathy. I can’t do it, can’t reach out and take on the feelings of other people, not like I used to. I don’t have room. I have too many feelings inside me already. And yes, that means I shouldn’t be talking about all of this to other people who are also suffering empathy overload. All I can say is, I seem to not have any choice. I looked back at my posts for the last two years, and I realized that I keep writing this same thing, over and over, about every six months: I’m tired. This sucks. I can’t take this any more. And here I am again. Again. I’m frankly getting sick of myself feeling this way.

And just like that, I know that I am speaking for others as well: because I know other people feel that, too. We’re sick of ourselves feeling this way. Sick of being tired. Sick of being angry. Sick of not feeling the happiness we used to feel. Just fucking sick of all of it. Aren’t you? Aren’t we all?

I’ve had more students come to me for help this year. Not help with school work, my students never do that; help with their lives. Help with their emotions. I am sort of a pseudo-therapist: mainly because I listen well, and I know how not to give too much advice when people really just need to talk. And I’m very pleased that I can help young people who need help: but also, I don’t know how much more weight I can carry. Judging from how this post has gone, the answer is — not much.. Not very much more weight at all. I got pissed, just furious, on Friday this past week, the same day I started writing this post, because my administration sent out an email reminding all of the teachers that we need to update our grades, and that the expectation is that we should all have two grades per week, per class, which means we should now have 10-12 grades in the gradebook. The reason they sent this email and prodded us to update our grades? Sports. The student athletes who had failing grades, who had turned in their work, had not had their grades updated for as long as three weeks, and so they still couldn’t play.

This blew my top. Completely. First because I don’t have two grades per week per class; not every class does work at that exact pace — my AP classes, for example, tend towards larger, longer projects, because they are doing college-level work, which for English generally has complete essays to write and full books to read, not worksheets to complete in a half hour — and secondly because I don’t have all the assignments graded. Know why? Because they are essays. I read them. I comment on them. I give suggestions for how to improve them. It takes time: 20-30 minutes per essay. I have just about 100 students in classes that write essays (I teach two electives that don’t currently include essay writing): that means, if I give them all essays and they all write them (The latter is far less likely than the former, though they do all trickle in eventually), then I have 50 hours of grading to do. That’s on top of all of my other work. And of course grading is part of my job, and yes, there is some time built into each day to get it done: one hour. Per day. Actually, 50 minutes, because I have one prep period and our periods are not a full hour long. So if I can get two essays done in that time, that means I can get all of the essays done in — yup, only ten weeks.

So of course I work before and after school on grading, and on the weekends as well; but I also have prep work to do, to get ready for my other classes. And those students who come to me for pseudo-therapeutic help? That takes time, too. And I don’t want to turn them away, because I know they’re close to the edge, and I don’t want them to harm themselves, and I don’t want them to suffer additional trauma because they get desperate and feel alone and lost. So all of that time is not spent on grading essays.

And then my admin gets on my case because kids want to play sports.

I get it: of course I do. Those sports are exactly the source of joy that I’ve been talking about which is missing. Of course those kids need that joy. And why should I stand in the way of them having that joy, when all that is needed is for me to go back and grade a piece of late work and enter it into the gradebook? Then everyone will be happy.

I mean: not me, of course. But the kids will be. And that’s all that matters, right?

I lost control of this, and I’m sorry. My wife read my last post and was pleased and complimentary to see that I had stayed on topic the entire time, which is unusual for me; I was proud of that and meant to do it again, this week. I’ve failed. But you know what? I just don’t have the strength to keep up with all of everything, and also take on more weight. I need to put something down. This week, it was this blog being rational and organized; I need to use it to vent. I will honestly try to get back to the actual project of rationally discussing and exploring the world of education; but I think I won’t be able to be focused and reasonable every week. But I do want to post every week, because I need to write and keep writing. So, for this week, here it is.

I’m fucking tired of being told, desperately, that I need to do everything I used to do, and also all of the new things that people have realized also need to get done, right away, or else everything will fall apart. That’s what it has felt like to be a teacher for as long as I’ve been teaching, because every year, they add new things, but they never take anything away: it’s just that now, it’s worse. Much worse. Because I have all this other weight on me from the pandemic and everything that came with it, including the trauma and the grief and the loss of joy. I’m fucking tired of being asked to help other people out with their needs, while not being given help with mine. (Please note: my friends, my family, my wife, they are all doing everything they can for me, all listening, all present, all willing to offer support. I’m only speaking of school people, and not the friends I have there.) And on top of all of that, I’m just fucking tired. Scroll back through my other posts for a better description of why.

Arthur Miller’s classic play “The Crucible” is about the Salem Witch Trials, and about the Red Scare of the 1950s. But really, it’s about a society turning on itself during a crisis, and devouring itself, starting with its best and most beloved members, who are destroyed mainly because they just can’t prevent the destruction, and so they become the first targets. I love teaching the play — though it’s hard to get it right, because the students have to get swept up in the story, and sweeping teenagers up in anything is difficult — and one of the big reasons is Giles Corey. Giles Corey was a real person in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692; he was an 83-year-old farmer at the time, and he was one of the casualties of the society’s inward collapse. Miller turns him into a fantastic character, a cranky old coot with a heart of gold who argues with everyone but means no real harm, who screws up and gets his wife arrested for witchcraft, and then tries desperately to save her. Because he tries to save her — because he failed to protect her in the first place — he gets accused of complicity in the conspiracy, and therefore of witchcraft. One of the complications in the original trials, highlighted in the play, is that when someone was accused of witchcraft, they had to plead guilty or not guilty; if they pled not guilty, they would go to trial, and at the time, they would surely be convicted and sentenced to death. If they pled guilty, there would be no trial and they would not serve time in jail — but their property would be confiscated and sold at auction to the highest bidder. People accused their neighbors of witchcraft in order to essentially steal their land.

But Giles was too smart for that: he had children, and he wanted his farm, which was large and prosperous and valuable, to go to his children, not to his corrupt and greedy neighbors. So when he was accused of witchcraft, he refused to plead. He wouldn’t say guilty; he wouldn’t say not guilty. (In the play, he won’t reveal the name of a friend who gave him evidence, because he knows that friend would be accused in turn; but the end result is the same.) He just kept his mouth shut and sat there.

So they tortured him. They pressed him with stones: they laid the man flat on his back, and put heavy stones on his chest, one at a time, one on top of another. And after each one, they asked him, “How do you plead?”

And Giles Corey simply said “More weight.”

I love that. I think it’s amazing, and brilliant, and courageous, and the perfect cantankerous coot’s way to say “Fuck you” to people who really need to hear someone say “Fuck you.” I admire Giles, and want to think I would be willing to do the same, to suffer torture in order to protect my family and my rights.

The problem, of course, was that Giles Corey died from the weight.

So my question for myself, and my fellow teachers, and for the society and the school system that keeps piling more on us is: how much weight can we hold? How much will they keep adding? How much weight is there?

How much more weight?

Starting with Ending

Dusty 1 Comment

I was going to start this project with the very beginning: with the meaning of the word “education.” Trying to decide what it even means to educate, to be a teacher, to have a school, and students.

But after the day I had last Monday, I think I should actually start with the ending. Because over the last year, I have seen some of what that ending will look like: and keeping that in mind is, honestly, even more important than fully understanding every aspect of what we are trying to do in education. Because if we don’t remember what we have to do to keep this going, there won’t be any education to understand, at least no public education, no teachers, no students, no school.

I do still plan to go all the way back and try to understand where education comes from and what it really means. I have large plans for this project; writing about education is a thing I have been meaning to do for a long time, a thing that I have done in small pieces for essentially as long as I have been teaching. I want to collect all of those thoughts, and try to make some real sense of them: and end up with something worth doing to try to improve the world where I have worked for better than two decades.

It wasn’t just Monday. Monday honestly wasn’t even that bad; of my six classes, one didn’t meet, leaving me with two prep periods (And maybe that’s the first general prescription for improving education in general: teachers who have heavy loads of writing instruction, specifically — certainly English; much of social studies; advanced language teachers and so on — should have twice the prep time while still being considered full time. For students to learn the intricacies of good writing, teachers need sufficient time to prepare, and especially to offer feedback on student work.); my AP classes were (mostly) good; my Fantasy/Science Fiction elective was great, as usual. It was my regular Sophomore English classes that gave me trouble.

But it was more than how my classes behaved Monday, and that’s the point, and the reason why that day helped me to see the end. I was talking with my good friend, fellow teacher, and carpooling partner about where we think this is going, and this is my opinion: either we’re going to change things to make education work again, and better; or it’s going to collapse. I believe that we can make the changes we need to make to fix this situation; but I also believe that the collapse is more likely.

You can already see elements of it. My school has always had trouble keeping teachers, both because the pay is too low in this state, so even though my school is one of the higher-paying schools in the area, people keep leaving teaching altogether, mostly to go into tech jobs (Which is kind of hilarious because I work at a STEM school, which means we can’t keep teachers teaching STEM to students because the teachers would rather just work in STEM — and so goes the nation), and also because our former principal was a terrible, terrible administrator, who drove people away both intentionally and with bad management. But lately this problem has grown so severe that now we can’t fill positions: last year we lost a social studies teacher, and it took three months to find a replacement, who then quit at the end of the year; we also lost a math teacher after the first semester, who was then replaced for the second semester, but then we lost the replacement math teacher after three months, and there was no replacement, just a long term sub. This year the school hired a math teacher from outside the US (One of the great things about my school is that the community is widely diverse, both staff and students), who unfortunately has not been able to get through the US Immigration rigamarole, despite having a job waiting for them. The long-term sub who took the math position at the end of last year, after the second teacher quit, has been hired permanently to replace the social studies teacher who left; and the school has been unable to find a long-term sub for the currently missing math teacher — so the math department has been covering the classes, filling in on their prep periods. This unfair imposition (which really approaches exploitation) was ended after four weeks of school: only for the math department to be replaced by all the other teachers, being forced to cover classes on our prep periods. So now I’m teaching Algebra 1 every Wednesday morning, instead of preparing for my own ELA classes.

It’s not just my school, of course. This article has many lovely little gems in it. Here are the highlights:

“According to one school administrator, many districts started panicking earlier in the year. While Arizona has suffered a teacher shortage for a while now, districts appear to be facing even more teacher vacancies at the start of the school year in 2022 than in years past.”

Isn’t it strange that when you have a problem and you do nothing to address it, the problem gets worse? The fact that the statewide response has been Do nothing, then panic, explains everything about how Arizona has dealt with this issue. And, of course, how America is dealing and will continue to deal with this issue. Or at least the half of America that hasn’t dealt with the issue.

“In May, a lot of my HR colleagues throughout Arizona were contacting me that they have zero applicants for their teacher jobs,” said Justin Wing with the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. “They’re worried. Whatever is worse than severe is going to be happening this year.”

“Whatever is worse than severe?” Sir. There are a million words in the English language. Several of them describe a situation that is worse than severe: Dire. Abominable. Deplorable (Oop — not that one…). Abysmal. Execrable. A shitshow.

Or how about “predictable and intentional?”

Why do I say “intentional?” Because here is the crux:

Arizona has one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios in the country, and despite recent raises, Arizona still has one of the lowest average teacher pay, at around $52,000.

The national average for teacher pay is just over $64,000

“When teachers received that 20% in three years, we went from 49th in teacher pay, to 49th in teacher pay,” said Wing. “I do think the main root cause of the teacher shortage is pay.”

This state is loath to pay teachers. Even when they raise the rate, they don’t raise it relative to other states, or to the actual cost of living. The fact that Arizona could raise the teacher pay rate 20% and still not move in the rankings shows just how bad it was before the current governor, Doug Ducey, added the raise to the state budget. (Let’s also note that he cut corporate and top-bracket personal income taxes in the same budget, so. We’ll see how that will all work out. We’ll further note that Governor Ducey is leaving office at the end of this year due to term limits, so the budgetary mess he’s leaving behind? Not his problem.)

Last one from the first article:

In a recent statewide survey of school administrators, two-thirds agree that there are more teacher vacancies this year than ever before. As of June of this year, schools reported more than 2,200 teacher openings, mostly for K-6.

“It’s very concerning,” said Wing. “We can’t leave kids alone in the classroom teaching themselves. Districts have to move administrators or coaches back into the classroom, which means other things are not being supported.”

So here we are: teacher vacancies that can’t be filled, because the root cause of the problem has not been addressed; and the stopgap measure is to put the wrong people in front of the classroom. They would raise class sizes and drop teacher positions entirely, but they already did that. Now they are making those of us who remain work even harder to handle the load. And the state’s newest strategy? Bring in young, inexperienced, underqualified teachers to fill the jobs. But this will, of course, only worsen the problem in the long term, as the state is asking future teachers to become full-time employees before they are ready, before they are fully trained and prepared; and their task will be made even harder by the fact that they will be required to do extra work to cover all the other teachers who have already left. Right now these degree-less teachers have to be in their last year of college, and must be “supervised” by a licensed teacher — verbiage that is supposed to make us think that the licensed teacher is in the room, but of course that’s not what supervision usually looks like with new teachers; usually it means something more like mentoring, with maybe a single weekly meeting and some random check-ins to see how it’s going. When they run through these future teachers, they will expand it to students two years before they earn their degree, and then three years; eventually last year’s high school graduates will be asked to step up and cover a couple of classes. After all, they learned the material, right? They can handle a class or two. (And they’re so much cheaper than fully trained and qualified professionals!)

Or of course we could follow Florida’s lead and believe that, somehow, being a military veteran qualifies you to teach.

This is the path we are on. And it ends when there simply aren’t enough adults to supervise classes, and the students get thrown together into huge masses in gyms and cafeterias, and told essentially to teach themselves. The step after that is when the school just shuts down.

It’s fine: kids can go online, right?

I have no doubt that this is the end goal for those, mainly but not exclusively on the right, who want to end public education and promote stratified private education, which will allow the upper classes to maintain their current stranglehold on economic power and mobility. Education is the great leveler, and the great lifter of those born into poverty; and thus it is the great enemy of the ones on top who want to stay there, and don’t want to share with those below them. And so they yell and scream about indoctrination, and grooming, and thus create livid hatred and distrust of public school teachers: adding social pressure to all of the current pressure.

And at some point, we will collapse under the weight.

But that’s not the really insidious part. You want to know the really insidious part?

It is that public education is locally funded and locally controlled. Which means that, in the most liberal and progressive states, teacher salaries are — well, reasonable, if not fantastic. And education is well-funded and successful.

Which means that people in those states can ignore the problem in the other, redder states. And so they do: because what can people in Massachusetts and Hawaii do about laws and budgets in Mississippi or North Dakota? Their own children are cared for as well as they can be; and that’s the limit of their responsibility. I understand that entirely: I make sure that my students know as much as I can help them learn about English, and I not only don’t care how much math they know, but I actively mock math as a subject. And PE, too, but that’s as it should be.

So I understand NIMBYism.

But consider how that has affected all of the nations in Central and South America, which we have actively exploited and ruined, and then left to their own devices. The problems we created and ignored have returned to us, arriving in our own backyards. As with climate change. And our imperial interventionist tendencies around the world, particularly in oil-rich regions.

And so it will be if we allow education in this country to remain uneven and unequitable from state to state. If we do not all deal with the whole problem, we will all face the consequences.

The two biggest issues facing education today are a lack of funding, combined with ever-increasing workloads as school employees are required to fill in for all of the missing personnel and programs; and the disparate, unequal, and frankly insane system of local funding and local control of schools.

If we fix those now, we can turn this around, still. And it’s one fix: a single, federal source of all funding, of all oversight, of all control. That’s the answer. I know. It’s socialism. Take a deep breath and swallow the medicine: local control of schools is insane and stupid. A nation that has one people — which is, after all, the whole fucking idea of a nation — needs one system of education for everyone, with specific measures to accommodate individual local needs and difficulties. Otherwise it isn’t one nation of one people. Because it isn’t the topic for today, but what is education? The creation and maintenance of a culture. And what is a culture? It is what sets one people apart, what makes them into one people. So if you want this country to be a country, then it needs to have a single, universal, fair, equitable, effective system of education. If we can achieve that, we will have a chance.

If we can’t, then we’re doomed.

http://www.sheina.fr/united-we-stand

Write Right, Right?

Dusty Leave a comment

My wife says I should try to solve the problems in education. I should write letters, she says. Start the letter-writing campaign that was once my greatest fear, but turn it into an asset, an attack, a strategy to achieve change.

Okay. That’s probably a good idea.

I know I need to write. I should be working on the final volume of Damnation Kane, and in the last week or so I’ve started to feel some tinges of excitement about telling that story again, finishing it for real; so I know I will want to get to that, soon. That makes me not want to promise myself — and you, my friendly anonymous reader, who has put up with so much shit and so many broken promises from me about how I’m going to start writing more often, more regularly, more generously — that I will take up this blogging pen again, because then I would have to stop to write the book, and both together might be too much time and too much pressure when I’m trying to keep up with school work, and also house work, and also working on myself — because I’ve gained weight, sort of since the pandemic, but really ever since I quit smoking twelve years ago, and I’ve gotten serious about taking the weight off and getting in better physical shape, and I don’t want to give up on that.

But I know I need to write. I’ve been feeling despondent about it because I’m 48 and I’ve been writing for, what, 25 years now? Writing seriously? And yet I’ve never gotten a book or essay or even a short story accepted for publication. Mainly, of course, because I don’t submit my work; because I got tired of nothing but nameless, faceless rejection — but the point is that all of my writing has gotten me nowhere, and that makes me think that I shouldn’t spend the time on it when I have so many other things I want and need to do.

But that’s simply not an option. I’ve been telling myself that I’ve been a bad writer because I haven’t been writing, but actually, I have been: I’ve written something around 50,000 words in the last month, a respectable pace when most of my time is spent teaching; it’s just that most of it is garbage that nobody will ever see but me.

There is nothing wrong with writing badly: it’s only when you could write better that the bad writing is a problem. I can write better than I have been, so I should. But still, writing anything is better than writing nothing; and I have been writing.

Because I’m a writer. There’s no way around it. It’s who I am. That’s why, even with everything else I’ve been doing, I’ve been writing the garbage: because I have to write. Have to. It makes me feel better. It makes me feel more — me.

I know I have to write because I got in a Twitter argument today that went on far too long: and when I said I was going to stop debating, and the jackass I was debating said “We weren’t having a debate. You were trying, via various circumlocutions, to attack school choice and haven’t bothered to answer any of the points I’ve brought”, I went on a 26-tweet rampage answering every one of his so-called “points,” and explaining in great detail why I was not in fact attacking school choice, but rather his bullshit anti-education arguments which he was masking as school choice. Which was a complete waste of time, because nobody will ever read all that garbage, including the jackass who will surely smugly say that I have lost my temper and therefore am not worth debating, possibly before either blocking me or screencapping one of the tweets to share on his shithead school choice Facebook page. Twitter is not a good place for debates, nor for rants.

What I should have done is come here, and written out a reasonable explanation of the argument. Because I want things like that to be said, which is why I say them even when the person on the other side of the argument will either not read or not understand them. But I have to be better about picking my medium and my venue for actual discussion of actual points.

All of which is to say: I should be writing. About things that matter to me. In a way that will actually have some impact, at least potentially. To an audience that will understand and appreciate my words, thus making me feel like I’m using my time and my gifts well, and maybe even expanding my reach and the possibility of selling my books. Which I also need to write.

So. I should probably write about education.

I think I will.

Let’s begin.

Justice

Dusty Leave a comment

Once again, I found myself faced with an opportunity to write an essay in response to a student. One of my AP Language students argued against the death penalty. The assignment asks someone in the class to respond with a different perspective, generally but not necessarily in direct opposition to the original argument — so in this case, someone needed to argue for the death penalty, in some way. Now this should not have been a hard one to get: there is a ton of evidence and resources out there on this subject, many of my students are in favor of the death penalty, and as I have told them many times, you don’t have to believe in an argument to present a case for it. But this time, no one volunteered.

So I wrote it.

Here it is.

The death penalty? 

That’s all? Just death? Weak sauce. Pathetic. Unimaginative. I bet you want it to be painless, too. Or, well — apparently painless. Like lethal injection, right? Give them a sedative first, so they don’t show their suffering and you can pretend it’s not cruel or unusual. Right?

Wrong.

That’s not justice.

Justice is giving serial killers what they deserve. We (Because we are the best people) all know what the worst people – the worst people –  in all of human history deserve: they deserve the worst suffering we can impose. Every time I talk about this subject, people have to suggest the most awful punishments they have been able to dream up, often apparently trying for extra style points awarded both for savagery and for originality. This, then, is clearly what we think serial killers deserve: to be the canvas on which we paint our very best, most aesthetic, most barbaric cruelty. 

You know. Justice.

I have heard that we should bring back hanging. Or the guillotine. Or the rack. A very kind-hearted friend of mine said they should be put, naked, into a full suit of metal plate armor, and then sent out to wander in the desert. I’ve heard that we should abandon murderers on a desert island so they can turn cannibal. Or that we should bring back the Colosseum and gladiator combat, or even better, the Hunger Games. A fine idea, I say. Murderers deserve it. They deserve to be raped and murdered and then brought back to life and raped and murdered again. They deserve to be tortured by a specialized cadre of CIA waterboarding experts (I’m confident we have these people working for the US government. We should be proud of that. We should make use of them.), deranged sadists personally descended from Spanish Inquisitors, who also learned from the torturers in the deepest dungeons of every brutal dictatorship in history how to cause the most inconceivable pain. MURDERERS DESERVE TO BE SLOWLY DIPPED INTO BOILING OIL AND THEN BREADED AND CUT INTO PIECES OF KENTUCKY FRIED MURDERER SO WE CAN EAT THEM AND THEN PUKE THEM BACK UP AND THEN RECONSTITUTE THEM AND REBREAD THEM AND REFRY THEM INTO MURDERER NUGGETS SO WE CAN FEED THEM TO OTHER MURDERERS WHO WILL THEN BE EXECUTED BECAUSE YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT AND THAT WAY THE FRIED NUGGET MURDERERS WILL BE EXECUTED AGAIN WHEN THE NUGGET-EATING MURDERERS ARE THEMSELVES DIPPED INTO BOILING OIL.

Because the goal of the justice system is justice. And we know what justice is: it’s vengeance. It’s blood. Rivers of blood pouring down our collective throats, and symphonies of screams, resounding in our collective ears. Slaking our thirst. Thrilling our nerves, raising goosebumps of rapture. We long to be filled with their suffering. We hunger for it. We need it: need to see them die, and to see them wracked with pain before they die, arching their backs until their spines snap, pulling with all their strength at their limbs, until they gnaw off their own hands and feet in a futile attempt to escape the pain that we inflict. We want them to feel it, and we want to see them feel it. And when we watch the spark fade from their eyes, we will laugh and laugh, for we will be righteous, and strong, and we will have won. We will have shown that we are better than them, because we are stronger, and so we don’t have to be afraid of them. They’ll be afraid of us.

That’s why it should be televised. Also performed live in front of a large audience. We should bring our children, and have picnics. That way, not only can we all shiver ecstatically as we watch the blood pour down – the red, red blood, so hot and sticky, so delicious – but also it can serve as a lesson to everyone else who would be a murderer, everyone else who wants to end a human life, everyone who wants to make someone suffer and die, that murder is wrong. The lesson will be clearest when we all cheer as their heads are at last lopped off and the blood inside them geysers out, heated by the boiling oil that they are immersed chest-deep in, a steaming blood fountain of vengeance and joy and savagery.

And justice, of course.

There are some people out there – weak people. Soft people. – who think that justice is “restoring balance.” Not imposing more suffering on a perpetrator in response to the suffering that perpetrator imposed on their victims: that moves us farther away from balance. These people actually think – if you can believe it – that the right thing to do is to reduce suffering: which, while it should definitely include some kind of reparation or restoration for the victims, including when society itself is the victim, will also most likely include some measure of restoration or reparation for the perpetrator: who is, most likely, also a victim of suffering, prior to their crime. Now, it is certainly clear to all of us that the first task of society is to ensure that the imbalance doesn’t continue and worsen, which means the perpetrator must be prevented from committing crimes again; which likely means something like incarceration: but if we consider the case of a drug addict, suffering from the disease of addiction and all of the terrible consequences of that disease, committing a crime, then while incarceration may prevent that addict from committing a crime in the short term, if the addiction is not addressed during that incarceration, then after the criminal’s release, they will almost certainly re-offend. Because the original source of the imbalance – the drug addiction – was not addressed. Address the source of the imbalance, and alleviate suffering on all sides, and not only will crime be actually reduced in the long term, but also, justice will be restored, because balance will be restored; and let’s also be clear that a former offender who has been made whole is very much the most likely to then feel remorse and to try to atone for their crimes, which may help to reduce the suffering and restore the balance for their former victims. 

There are people who think that is the best possible outcome of the criminal justice system, that a mindset of restoring balance and reducing suffering, reducing harm, will lead to a better outcome for all, and only requires a cool head not inflamed with ideas of payback and vengeance and just desserts examining the facts to arrive at this paradigm.

But that’s just ridiculous. That’s no way to show that we are tough on crime. Being tough on crime is the only way to prevent future crime. We know that because it’s always worked in the past. Back when the only penalty for pretty much any crime was death – back in the Middle Ages – there was no crime. It worked perfectly. QED.

Also, that “restoration of balance” stuff is hard. Payback is easy. It’s so much easier to think of someone “guilty” as “someone who deserves punishment.” Right? And there’s nothing wrong with us as regular, fallible, ignorant people deciding what someone deserves. Especially when we decide that someone deserves an irrevocable and terrible punishment. Surely we are qualified to decide that.

Because murderers definitely deserve it. Most murderers on death row are people who committed murder in combination with other crimes, like robbery, because that’s the most common “aggravating factor” to a murder, that it is committed in the process of committing another felony. In fact, 

Historically, the death penalty was widely used for rape, particularly against black defendants with white victims. When the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the Supreme Court left open the possibility of imposing the death penalty for offenses other than murder, such as rape or even armed robbery…

Many states allow all those who participated in a felony in which a death occurred to be charged with murder and possibly face the death penalty, even though they may not have directly killed anyone. The case of unarmed accomplices in a bank robbery in which an employee is killed is a typical example of felony murder. Since the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the “worst of the worst” cases, legislatures or the courts could restrict its use only to those who directly participated in killing the victim. Prisoners have also raised claims that the aggravating circumstances that make a crime eligible for the death penalty are too broad, with some state death-penalty laws encompassing nearly all murders, rather than reserving the death penalty for a small subset of murders.

(Death Penalty Information Center, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/crimes-punishable-by-death)

But we don’t talk about those cases: we talk about the famous ones. The most interesting ones, the ones whose crimes we make movies and books and TV shows and podcasts about, the ones we discuss endlessly, the ones who fascinate us: serial killers. Mass murderers. Psychopathic sexual sadists. There’s nothing we love more than examining their crimes in minute detail, looking at graphic photos, where you can see the blood, so you can imagine the screams…

Sorry, I got lost in my fantasies there. Oops — little drool. Excuse me. Where was I?

Anyway, surely the worst people imaginable in all of history – the ones who are portrayed by Zac Efron in Netflix movies (And definitely not cases like the Scottsboro Boys) – deserve to suffer as much as they made their victims suffer. It’s only fair, right? That’s sort of what justice is, isn’t it? Fairness? It sure feels like making the perpetrator suffer exactly what their victims suffered would be “fair.” And sure, the innocent victim of a serial killer experiences something unimaginable, something impossible to recreate (And maybe it’s true that the suffering caused by violent and terrible people should not ever be the model for our own behavior, that to do what they did requires us to be much too much like them); the victims of crime suffer fear and shock and regret, and a serial killer being bludgeoned to death by men wielding spiked clubs soaked in acid as part of a sentence imposed by the courts and carried out legally wouldn’t feel any of those same emotions, often because those serial killers are suffering from some form of psychopathy that limits or eliminates their ability to feel normal human emotions: but forget all that.  Emotions are hard. Hard to understand and hard to create. Pain, we can understand. We can see the pain on their faces. And we can see the blood. And the death. And we can understand the power inherent in watching another person die at our hands. We can experience that. We can enjoy it. We wants it. 

That’s how we get justice on serial killers: by becoming them. 

It’s totally different, of course. The victims of serial killers are innocent, and serial killers are guilty. Which is what makes it okay to make them suffer as much as possible: guilt. We are, of course, entirely confident in our determination of who is guilty and who is innocent. We know that people convicted of capital crimes are guilty. You just know, you know? You can just look at them, and you can see how guilty they are. Especially if there’s a documentary about their crimes. Sure, there have been hundreds of cases of people on Death Row who were innocent, and several executions in the modern era of people who were possibly innocent; and since the death penalty goes back for millennia, back to when humans were little more than animals clubbing each other to death so we could steal their food, there have been countless examples of innocent people killed by a judge and jury; but as long as we don’t talk about those, as long as we talk only about the most extreme, unusual outliers like serial killers, we won’t have to think about abstract ideas like “guilt” and “innocence” in “specific cases.” We can totally trust the justice system, which is in no way “prejudiced” nor “biased,” and never makes “mistakes.” We can just remember that someone who is on Death Row surely deserves the same punishment as the worst people in history: people who have been executed for crimes against the state. 

Like Jesus.

Hey, there’s a thought: crucifixion. 

But anyway, they deserve it because they are guilty. And we are righteous. Plus, this is how you prevent murder. You show everyone that you are the absolute worst murderer that will ever exist. Then you win. And that’s what justice means: winning. Killing them worse than they could ever kill any of us.

That’s what the death penalty is for. 

Justice.

No Pizza For You

Dusty Leave a comment

One of the best things about being a teacher who is really a writer is this: my students and my school and my profession frequently inspire me to write. Usually essays. Usually angry.

This is one of those essays.

Some background on this one: my AP Language class studies argument, and the project that culminates that unit is a class display of dueling arguments. A student volunteers to write an argument, which is due the next day, on any topic they want (that is school appropriate, of course); I project it on the board, read it aloud, and then we critique the argument as a class. Then someone volunteers to argue back, taking a different side of the same topic, with their essay due the next day, and going through the same process. Then if someone wants to argue a third perspective on the same topic, they may; if not, someone volunteers to start a new pair of arguments the next day. Everyone who completes the essay gets a 100% grade; if anyone volunteers to write an essay, but doesn’t turn it in, then the whole class takes a test — that way the peer pressure will overcome the nerves, and I know I’ll get the essays: so long as I can get them to volunteer. If someone starts an argument on a bad topic and nobody wants to argue back, then the first student has to write the second essay, as well, taking a different perspective snd arguing against themself. If no one wants to argue and it’s a good topic, then usually I will argue back against them.

This year I have had some trouble with all this. Students are not interested in volunteering. I got the first four essays, two pairs, all from the students who generally speak up most in class discussions; then I had to struggle to get the next essay. Finally I got one student to volunteer to write about corporal punishment: but then he decided not to argue that. He didn’t want to sound weird, for arguing that kids should be spanked, and so on. This student generally has strong political opinions, so much so that other students roll their eyes when he starts in on them; but he didn’t write about politics, either. No, for this project, he chose to write about — pineapple pizza. He argued that pineapple is just fine on pizza. He wrote a good essay; he just picked a terrible topic, because he didn’t want to be too controversial or weird. Which then required someone else to argue that pineapple does not belong on pizza. Unsurprisingly, nobody did it, so he reluctantly argued back against himself.

That was the essay we got yesterday. it was much too short, because he’d already written a full essay so this one didn’t matter; but it was long enough to show that even with a bad topic, one can write a good essay, or at least an amusing one.

Then I asked for volunteers to write for the next day. I got nothing.

So I read them this.

“Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Okay, here’s the truth. Pineapple on pizza is amazing. If you’ve had it, and you have taste buds with even a minimum of function, then you know. If you’ve never had it, you’re missing out. But in either case, you should never get to have it again. 

Because you don’t deserve it. 

You don’t want pineapple on pizza? That’s fine, to each their own. You’re wrong, but you’re welcome to feel that way.

But you don’t deserve your preferred pizza, either. None of you are pizzaworthy.

Because you won’t fight for it. 

This doesn’t apply to some of you – though I am tempted to use this to label your entire generation, the No Pizza Generation, because Lord knows I have enough students in other classes to whom this does apply, in addition to most of you – because some of you are willing to fight. More specifically, you are willing to argue. You have the courage of your convictions, and sufficient passion to draw the words from within you. Believe me, I know how hard that is, especially now: I haven’t written a word worth reading in a month, and barely any real words this entire school year. But I think I’ve done enough in the past to give me the standing to write this to all of you who have not tried to put down your real feelings, to say what you really believe.

Until you stand up and speak, you’re a coward. A chicken. A lily-livered milquetoast. Heartless. Gutless.

And you don’t deserve pizza.

If you want good things in life, whether it is pineapple on pizza, good grades, the respect of your peers, or a country that isn’t a burning dumpster fire sinking slowly into the rising oceans, then you have to fight for it. And no, I’m not talking about fighting with guns and bombs and sticks and stones: I’m talking about real fighting, the kind that makes a difference, that changes things because it changes minds: fighting with words. Arguing. People talk about democracy, about the value of freedom and equality, of a state where everyone has a voice, where everyone can be heard – and rightfully so; history overflows with the stories of tyrants and megalomaniacs whose voices drowned out, and eventually smothered entirely, the voices of millions of people: people who had something to say, people whose words could have affected someone, people who could have won the argument. But they weren’t allowed to make it. They were not allowed to speak. And they died silent. And the world went on, a little bit worse for the loss of the person, a little bit worse for the loss of their ideas. Want to know how we got to this place, where everything is screwed up? Because too many people have not been permitted to say something that could have made the world a little bit better. We lost too many good ideas because people were not allowed to talk, to speak their truth. To argue. To fight.

But you all are not only allowed to speak your truth, you’re not only encouraged to speak your truth, you are required to speak your truth. But you won’t. It doesn’t even have to be your deepest truth, you are welcome to write about something ridiculous like pineapple on pizza; that was a pretty good argument we saw yesterday. 

But you won’t even do that. 

Democracy only works when people talk. When people argue. Argument is inevitable when people talk, because no two people see the world the same way. Ever. Hell, even one person doesn’t see the world the same way as themselves: sometimes I hate pineapple on pizza. Sometimes the taste of that sickly-sweet/sharply-acidic fruit is overwhelming, and I can’t taste the rest of the pizza, and that sucks. 

That’s what happens when one voice dominates the room. Even a sweet voice. Even my voice: when I’m the only one talking, the sense of my words, my voice, my understanding, my truth, overwhelms the senses of everyone else, the truths of everyone else. It ruins the flavor. It ruins the pizza. 

Most of the time, that doesn’t happen here: but also, most of the time, the other flavors that appear on this AP Lang pizza, the other voices that speak up in this room – they’re the same voices. Over and over again. The same ones who have already spoken, for the most part, on this assignment. I know some of you are working on your arguments, are preparing your truths to share, and good for you, please continue doing that. I’m not speaking to you: there’s nothing wrong with trying to take your time and do a good job, with trying to find the energy, at the end of this very long school year, to say what you really want to say in words that are worthy of your feelings. I have no problem with that: in fact, I appreciate it. I applaud it.

It’s the rest of you I’m speaking to. The ones who just keep saying “Nah. I don’t wanna.” 

The ones who can’t be bothered.

The ones who are too bored, who think that everything, everywhere, always, is too boring. Not because the world is boring: but because you don’t want to deal with it. Having an opinion means being willing to defend that opinion, and sometimes, that’s hard: so you’d rather just not do it. Even if it means you suffer through things you don’t like. You’re the ones I’m speaking to.

The ones who don’t like pineapple on pizza not because you don’t like pineapple, or because you don’t like how the taste overwhelms: but only because you don’t want to deal with it. Don’t want to speak up and say what you like on pizza. The ones whose vocabulary starts and ends with “I don’t know, whatever.” 

The ones who are hoping for a way out of this assignment, as you hope for a way out of everything challenging. Who will let opportunities pass you by simply because catching them is too much work, and you’re busy looking at your phone. Not looking at anything in particular, of course; just scrolling mindlessly, laughing at people being lame. Isn’t it nice? How there are so many losers on the internet? People who you can feel better than? It’s hard, sometimes, to feel good about yourself when you don’t do anything worth feeling good about, because you avoid all challenges, avoid all risks, when you can’t be bothered to care about anything. And because those people snoring loudly on TikTok are so ridiculous, so terribly pathetic, you don’t even have to do — anything. You just get to laugh at them. And do nothing. Or if not that, you can play video games endlessly: because there, you can win, without even trying. No challenge, no risk – just “winning.” It’s so easy to feel good about yourself when you don’t have to put out any effort, when you don’t have to take any risks, but you can still win. Isn’t it?

“What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t know, whatever.” 

“What do you want to do this weekend?” “I don’t know, whatever.” 

“Does anyone want to present the next argument for the class?”

“Does anyone have a topic they want to argue about?”

“Does anyone have any opinions?”

“Does anyone care about anything?”

That’s the last place where you hide: behind opinions. It feels magnanimous, it feels open-minded, to say that people can have their own opinions, and that’s fine. To say, “Well, you said how you feel, but I feel how I feel, so we’ll just agree to disagree.” To use that cliche in all situations: because that way, you can avoid argument. It feels smart to avoid the difficult subjects, to talk about how politics are boring, or how stupid it is that people get all upset about things; it doesn’t matter, you say, Who cares anyway, it’s not like anything’s going to change. I don’t know. Whatever.

That’s not magnanimous. That’s not smart. It’s cowardly. Chicken. Gutless.

That’s how we end up with two days of arguments about pineapple on pizza. It’s how we ended up with a half-dead stooge in the White House. It’s how we will act as we watch all of humanity slide slowly into a grave we are digging for ourselves. Without speaking up. Without arguing. Without fighting.

“It doesn’t matter, nobody ever wins arguments anyway.” 

Have you ever tried?

“Nobody can change anyone’s mind.”

Have you ever changed yours? Then why would you think that nobody’s mind can change? And if you’ve never seriously tried, how do you know you can’t?

Do you agree with everything other people – people in this classroom – with everything they do? With everything they think? Do you think everyone here is right, except you? If any of us are wrong about something: why aren’t you telling us? Why aren’t you calling us out on it?

It’s entirely possible that you all are burning with topics, absolutely bursting with words, that you have a thousand things you want to say, shout, scream at us, or at the world. All I know is that when I ask for volunteers, I get crickets. I get people avoiding eye contact. But why? Are you afraid that you’ll fail? Literally, with this assignment, that will only happen if you don’t try. Are you afraid that people will mock you? Maybe you didn’t notice (maybe you were too wrapped up in video games or TikTok), but we had an argument about pineapple on pizza: and yet no one made fun of that essay. Nobody said it was garbage. It helped that it was well-written, but still, it was about pineapple on pizza. And yet, nobody insulted the author. As far as I know, none of you thought less of him. And let me point out that you all mock and insult and criticize each other all the time: why is this any different? 

People asked the author why he didn’t talk about something he was passionate about, why he didn’t talk about politics. Maybe it was because all the rest of you not only fail to meet his enthusiasm about politics, but you mock him for it. Because it’s easier to mock someone else’s passion than it is to share your own. Isn’t it?

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll do a bad job. I understand that. But I’ve read all of your writing. All of you, everyone in this class: you all write well. More important, you all think well. The only thing missing is the passion to say what you really think, and the single moment of courage to say “I’ll go.” 

That’s all it takes. Making a decision, having an opinion, being willing to fight.

If you aren’t going to take advantage of this opportunity, to argue about essentially anything you want, in this class where everyone is respectful and generous in their critiques: when will it be better? When will it be easier?

Never? 

Are you really never going to fight for anything? Even something small? Even something silly, but that matters to you?

Then it means that you will never get anything that matters to you. Because unless you fight for it, you’ll never get it.

Unless you fight, you don’t deserve pizza.

What We Need In Education: The Need for Education

Dusty 2 Comments

I’m feeling a little bitter this morning (Not better, bitter. Bitterer?), so I think the hopeful and thankful tone of last week is not going to happen. I had a dream last night in which I walked away from a student end-of-year celebration, thinking I’ve wasted my life, because I’ve spent it helping students instead of doing what I want to do. That’s not fair (When are dreams ever fair?), because I most definitely haven’t wasted my life, I haven’t spent all of my time teaching and helping students, and the time I have spent helping other people is well-spent, and I am proud of it. Still: I had a rough week this last week, dealing with classes that are ready to be done even though there are months left in the school year, and I’m ready to be done, as well; so I’m a little bitter.

But I already blew an entire once-a-week post on tangents and side issues instead of getting to the point, so I’m not going to do that this time. Unfortunately, I’ve also realized that I’m not sure my insights into what we need to do with education are worth all this buildup; which goes to show that I should spend more time getting to the point and also developing the point before I write and post these. As I said last week, things take time. And since I don’t have a lot of time — I am currently stealing time from three other things I need to do this weekend in order to write this — the quality suffers. Hopefully it’s still worth reading. I’ll try to make it so.

Now, I’ve already written about my ideal school, so I’m not going to do that again. Rather, this post is in response to the comment I have heard and seen more times than I can count in the last year:

Something has to change.

Something in education has to change. This year has been too hard on everyone, but particularly on teachers, who are leaving the profession in droves. I don’t know that I have an idea to fix that, because first, I don’t blame them; I’ve thought about leaving as well, this year more than most; and second, it’s already done: it would be better to try to retain the teachers we still have, and work to recruit new teachers, than to try to bring back the teachers who are burnt out and alienated and don’t want to teach any more. It’s certainly possible that they will come back voluntarily if we make the system better, and that would be good all around.

So that is the goal today. How do we make the system better?

Here are my thoughts.

The first and biggest problem with education in this country isn’t teacher retention; it’s inequity. This country has systemic inequity in the education system, and that has created large-scale inequity along racial and class lines, for generations. Which was, of course, the intended result and the reason why the unequal system was created in the first place. But after Brown v. Board of Education, when segregated schools were no longer legal, the systemic inequity continued, and still exists today, for one main reason: local funding of schools. Most schools are funded by local property taxes. Supposedly because that allows for local control, and for people in a place to have ownership of their local schools; but really, it’s so that the people in rich, predominantly white areas can have the very best schools for their kids, while the people in poorer areas — particularly rural areas and urban areas, where the property tax base is small and property values are low — cannot have the very best schools, and cannot close the gap either in funding or in achievement for their students. This plays out in a hundred different ways: teachers are paid better by the richer districts, which means they stay longer, and generally speaking the better trained and more experienced teachers will migrate towards the wealthier areas. Richer schools have more resources for technology and new curriculum materials, as well as for more programs of all kinds — tech programs, vocational programs, language programs, and so on. This funding problem only gets exacerbated with school funding proposals and referenda, which local districts often propose in order to pay for capital improvements and deferred building maintenance projects; poorer areas are unlikely to vote to raise taxes for local schools, where wealthier areas are more willing to pay more on top of property taxes when there is a need. So over time, the physical buildings in poorer areas fall apart, and become more expensive to maintain while also being impossible to replace; thus more funding is lost to just keeping the lights on and the building heated (or cooled), which also then impacts the funding available for all other needs, squeezing the poorer schools even further.

This truth, by the way, is the main argument behind the rise of charter schools, which allow families in poorer districts to escape the poor schools in their area; this of course doesn’t solve the problem, particularly because charter schools are underregulated and often shady. Trust me: I work for a charter school. And while my school is one of the longer-established and better schools, there are still issues that would not exist if it were a public school. And regardless, giving some kids an escape doesn’t help the kids who can’t get into the schools; traditionally those with learning disabilities, low achievement scores, language barriers, or lack of transportation (because charter schools generally do not provide transportation).

So the first thing we need to do, before anything else, before we discuss curriculum or school structure or even teacher retention, is to equalize funding. The easier way is to do it at the state level, which several states have already done; the only truly fair way is to do it federally. Collect all the money that currently gets paid in local property taxes, put it in one federal fund, and then distribute it to all public school districts in the country. I would say (not having any idea of the actual numbers) 60-75% as a baseline funding for all schools, with the additional 25-40% going to those districts most in need, those with broken down school buildings and ancient textbooks and no technology, and so on. The kids in lower Manhattan and San Francisco can make do with last year’s textbooks for a little while. This article in Forbes shows why this is a good idea for everyone. Even more, it’s just the right thing to do.

Okay: once we’ve got that problem solved, the next problem is teacher retention. (Don’t be surprised: just because it wasn’t the first issue doesn’t mean I’m going to boot teachers down to the bottom of the priority list. I am a teacher, after all.) Now, part of this issue is a done deal: we’ve abused and undervalued teachers for decades, but ratcheted the abuse up in the last two years, and we’ve already broken thousands upon thousands of teachers. That’s all done. It’s going to be really goddamn ugly for the next few years. Some schools have already had to close for lack of staff, and that’s only going to happen more; all of those kids are going to be stuck going to school online for some period of time. Nothing we can do about it other than try to hurry to fix things starting from here.

So the two things we need to do to recruit and retain good teachers are: one, stop abusing them; and two, value them fairly. The second one is easy: pay us more. I’ve been a teacher for 22 years, and I’ve never been paid what I’m worth. Oregon came close, but they also froze my pay for four years after the Great Recession hit (Another reason to use federal funding as a mechanism for all school districts: it would help cushion the blow in the areas hardest hit by economic downturns. Let the districts where the American oligarchs pay taxes make up for the places where people are out of work. Oh wait — the oligarchs don’t pay taxes. Silly me. We should fix that, too. I have a suggestion.), so that wasn’t reflective of my value as a teacher. I moved to Arizona for good and understandable reasons — and took a 40% pay cut when I did. Eight years later, I’m still not making what I made twelve years ago. But at least the cost of living has kept going up. Yes, I have good benefits, and that’s an excellent thing; but also, teachers should be paid more. Simple. I’d like to see a 20% raise across the board; I figure we can fire 75% of the administration and make the numbers work. That’s not a dig at administrators, by the way, who are generally well-meaning people who work incredibly hard; but they would, in my opinion, serve education far better simply by taking up classroom teaching. I’d be happy to see every administrator cut for budget purposes offered a chance to become teachers. We’ll need their help.

In terms of ending the abuse of teachers, it has to begin with working hours. There is no reason whatsoever why teaching has to be a career that requires more than 40 hours a week. We don’t actually teach 40 hours a week, so it should be possible to get all of the work done within the standard 8-hour day — except for two things: teachers have too many students, and too many responsibilities. That’s the abuse. We are required to just keep working even when overburdened with students and classes; we are expected to give up any time that is necessary to have meetings or to complete paperwork and such — and then on top of that, we are socially expected to do things like coach sports, or direct plays, or take field trips, or run extracurricular clubs, all for free, and all for the sake of the children. Look: I’m a teacher. You want a coach, hire one. You want an activities director, hire one. You want a clown, hire one. I teach. That’s what I do. It’s enough. I used to teach 150-200 students at a time, which was absurd; at my charter school, that’s down to more like 100-120 — and it’s still too much. As a high school English teacher, I need time to read and grade essays, and to give feedback on their work; I think I could handle 75-80 students at a time, within a 40-hour week. Give me that, and I will do a better job with the students. It will be worth it, believe me.

And I still want that 20% raise, too. You all owe me for the literally thousands of children I have already helped while simultaneously skimping on my personal budget and worrying about being able to pay my bills.

Okay. Those are the first two things. Now let’s get a little more imaginative.

One thing that I’ve seen in the last year, which actually might give us a chance to take some of the pressure off of schools, is the fact that some students really like online learning. Some really thrive when they don’t have to come into the school building. I definitely think it has to be done right, but if it is, we have an opportunity to not only make up for some of the worst of the local inequalities, but also to solve a problem of getting good teachers to work in unattractive areas: let them live anywhere and teach students who also live anywhere, students who don’t want to come into local schools for any one of a thousand reasons. This will allow us to relieve the worst overcrowding, and to offer larger program options even to students in out of the way places, along with greater resource access for those who need it. Of course, this will require both national broadband infrastructure of a sufficient quality to enable students everywhere to access teachers everywhere, and also a national curriculum. Both are an incredibly good idea, by the way, though I know neither one is practically possible right now. So maybe put a pin in that for now. Having done it for the last two years, seat-of-our-pants online teaching is not better than in person, not for anyone, not even for those kids who prefer it. But long term, it’s genuinely a good opportunity.

But that’s just an observation, based on the students I’ve been working with for the last two years. Let’s get to my ideas. Ready?

Idea #1: Age Is Just A Number

My friend and colleague Lisa has been teaching adult education students (In addition to teaching a full load of high school students. Because she doesn’t get paid enough.) for the last couple of years, and one thing she has frequently commented on is that they are much easier to work with. Because they want to be there. I ranted last week about how absurd it is that we insist on deadlines for education, that we require all students to start at the same age, and that we then require them all to finish at the same time, having all learned at the same pace. And there is literally no reason for it.

So my first idea is this: let people come to school whenever they want — and don’t make them come to school when they don’t want. If they want to drop out at 13, let them. I’ve written before about my friend Carlos’s brilliant idea of a half time in education: Carlos, like me, was a good student through elementary and middle school, and then a terrible student in high school — and then a good student again in college. Because that’s when we wanted to learn, when we wanted to be there. The teenage years for me, educationally, were useless, as they are for thousands and thousands of students. This is much of the problem that my colleagues and I are dealing with right now: because we have students that don’t want to be there, who don’t want to learn, and they are deeply frustrating and terribly draining, requiring extra attention and effort from everyone involved just to deal with them.

So don’t deal with them. Don’t make them come.

Part of me wants to advocate for the European system, where students can choose to take a vocational track and then finish school at 16 to enter the workforce; but that would still put years of frustration on teachers and students and families and everyone involved with those kids who just don’t want to be there. So I’m going to go with this: let them stop going to school whenever they want to (I do think we should have a base education level required, say 8th grade). Let them stay home and play video games if they want; let them go to work if they want. And then, ten years or twenty years or fifty years from now, when they want to go back to 9th grade, let them. Because there is not one single solitary reason why 9th graders all have to be 14 or 15 years old. Grouping students by their birthdays is insane; if I needed to actually prove that (I don’t, because give me one good reason why we do it. I’ll wait.) all I have to do is point at community colleges, where I sat my 19-year-old just-out-of-high-school self next to people of all ages, from 20 to 80, and all of us learned together.

Now: I realize that ending mandatory school leads to a serious potential for abuse, and also losing education due to simple apathy. Teenagers, when given the choice, will all elect to sit at home and play video games for the rest of their lives, and that would be bad for everyone. Well, first, of course, not all teenagers would do that: many of them want to be in school, want to learn, want to progress towards their life goals. And second, many of the ones who dropped out to play video games would decide to go back within a year. You should have heard them complain about staying home during the pandemic. You should have seen how happy they were to be around each other at school again when we came back. But admittedly, many students would drop out for no good reason — and there would be far too many families who would remove their children from school in order to make them work. And also far too many students who would be driven out of education by unjust treatment at the hands of racist or sexist or variously prejudicial and biased schools.

So here’s what we do about that.

Idea #2: Pay students to come to school.

When adults look to go back to finish an interrupted or shoddy education, pay them. Give them the chance to become more educated, more productive, and better citizens. When kids go to school and learn, pay their families. Want to give parents who don’t value education a reason to make sure their kids stay in school and learn? PAY THEM.

For too long we have relied on the abstract ideal of “Education is good” to serve as motivation for students to learn. It’s never worked well, as I can attest personally. It has fallen apart completely now: one of my classes told me, clearly and without hesitation, that they would rather underachieve and learn less, because it meant they would have to do less work. I asked them if it would shame them, make them feel stupid, if they did poor work; they said it would not. “Education is good” is not motivating. Because for most kids, it’s simply bullshit.

Bullshit walks. Money talks. Pay them.

We can talk about paying them more if they get good grades (Though I would also like to suggest we eliminate grades), but I think that allows for the possibility of corruption and kickbacks to teachers who will hand out As for profit. Simple attendance will be a good metric. If we also then give teachers and schools the genuine ability to remove students from the classroom, for discipline and behavior problems, or as a sort of wake-up call if they are not progressing — you know, “Stay home for a week and study more, then come back” — then there is an immediate financial incentive for the family to help solve the problem. This is currently lacking, and it’s part of the reason why schools are struggling: we do not have the support of parents any more. I want to say it’s because families don’t value education, but I suspect it’s simply because families are struggling.

So pay them. You want to say that capitalism and the free market are the key to innovation and motivation? Awesome: let’s put that theory to the test with schools.

Imagine if a single parent with two or three or four kids could actually earn a living wage just by going to school with their kids. By ensuring that their kids go to classes — which would be far easier if they were in the same building, or if they were close by in the local high school, or what have you. The whole family could sit down to do homework together, because everyone would be in the same boat, and everyone would have an incentive to study and improve in order to stay in school and continue earning the wage. If we extend this wage into community college, we could actually help people move out of minimum wage employment, without asking them to do the impossible by adding education to a full load of work and family needs; they could quit their jobs, or cut back hours, and go to school, for money. We could provide the bootstraps by which people could lift themselves up.

This is going on longer than I intended, and I suspect just these two ideas are enough for people to start thinking about (Hopefully nobody really needs to think about the need to achieve funding equity for every student in this nation, or the need to pay teachers more), but I want to make just one content/curriculum suggestion. Again, I have a thought for an overhaul of the entire system of subjects that we teach in schools; check my school plan post linked above; but there’s a more general suggestion I want to make before I close this up and post it.

Idea #3: Education For Life

As I said, the idea of education for education’s sake, while I happen to agree with it, as I believe that education is valuable for everyone in every circumstance, is too abstract and too disconnected from daily life to be motivating any longer. Schools and teachers need to accept this, and to adapt to the current view, which is: experience teaches better than school.

Now, that isn’t true. Experience does teach, surely, but it teaches very concretely, with two obvious downsides: one, it doesn’t allow for higher-level thinking, thinking outside the box, thinking of new ways to do something by drawing on areas of knowledge not obviously part of a specific endeavor — for example, my brother studied music composition in college, and then went to work as a computer programmer; his experience as a computer programmer, combined with his knowledge of music, is what made his current project possible: a new way to make and record electronic music. If he hadn’t studied music, he wouldn’t be able to do what he is doing now; his experience as a computer programmer would essentially only allow him to program computers. I have a dozen different areas of knowledge that I draw on to teach English: history and politics and economics and science and music and pop culture and role-playing games and so on. This argument combines with the second problem with experience as teacher: it takes time. Of course everything takes time, but learning ideas in a classroom, concepts from a book or the internet or what have you, and then extrapolating those ideas into specific circumstances, is a far more efficient and effective way to figure things out and get things done than simply to live through every circumstance once so you know what to do the second time. Everything I’ve said as examples of the value of education over experience could all be achieved through experience, of course — but that takes longer.

The third problem with experience as a teacher? It hurts more. Sure, you learn how to ride a bike by falling down; but learning from a textbook doesn’t scrape your knees and crack your skull. (I’m aware that riding a bike is not a good example of something that could be learned from a textbook, but the point is still valid. Learning from the school of hard knocks involves taking hard knocks; think of it as having to go through the pain of having a terrible boss, and being abused and put upon because you’re the new guy or the intern. Experience teaches you through suffering. School does not. At least, it doesn’t have to.)

All that being said, it is hard to see the value of learning the subjects we learn in school. Because we have no idea how they apply to life. And I don’t mean as students: teachers have no idea how most of our subjects apply to life. We know how we use them: we teach them. It’s important for us to know history and algebra and grammar. But when students ask the very fair and reasonable question “When are we ever going to need this?” we most often have to fall back on one of two answers: later on in your education, giving rise to that terrible lie we’ve all had thrown at us: “You’ll need this in middle school!” followed by “You’ll need to know this in high school!” followed by “Your professors in college will require this!” when the skill in question is writing in cursive, and actually none of us need that, ever.

Or the other answer: shut up. Learn it because I said so.

This has to change, too. Teachers have to actually figure out how the content and skills we teach translate to value in real life. We need to be able to justify it to our students, and to ourselves. And if we can’t justify it: we should stop teaching it — or at least stop requiring it. Frankly, higher math, much of history, several of the sciences, and quite a lot of literature should only be taught as electives. Unless, that is, we can find a way to connect it to the real world.

I think we can. I teach dystopian fiction because it connects to the real world. I teach argument because it is a necessary skill in the real world, and the same with rhetoric. I tell my students that the ability to read and understand poetry will be applicable in their lives: but that’s pretty much bullshit. But it’s bullshit only because I haven’t found a direct connection to the real world for the poetry I teach — because I haven’t tried. Could I find one? I think so, yeah.

I know where I would start looking. I have a friend who is a poet. I have another friend who is a lawyer, but who is a passionate devotee of poetry. I would ask them.

I would ask other people too: and then I would have those people come in to talk to my students about poetry and why poetry is useful for them. And I would take my students out to see them at their work, in their lives, and see where poetry — or algebra, or geometry, or computer science, or Spanish — is useful in the real world.

That’s the last thing we need to do. We need to stop allowing schools to turn into ivory towers. The separation between schools and the “real world,” as if schools are not in the real world, as if teachers and students are not real people, as if somehow the purpose of school is separate from the real world, is why people don’t trust the education system, and why students don’t care about learning: because they don’t see the point of learning stuff they don’t know when they will ever need. And that’s a fair criticism. It’s annoying as hell when they’re arguing with me about what I want to teach them, especially considering how much I love my subject; but it’s a fair point. The stuff I teach them should be useful, or else I shouldn’t teach it.

So I and other educators should work with the community. Bring people in to schools, bring students out of schools into the world. As much as possible. Field trips, guest speakers, guest teachers, internships, anything and everything. This goes back to the point about letting students leave school if they don’t want to be there: school is boring and feels pointless. So we need to make school more interesting, and to make sure that everyone involved knows the point. If we can talk to people in the community who can explain how they used what they learned in school, then not only will students see the actual value of learning something (And while that may be limited to the one specific engineer, say, who uses geometry every day, which would only interest students who want to be engineers — until we bring in the professional billiards player, who uses geometry in every shot. And the muralist, who uses geometry to plan out the project before putting paint on the wall. That’s why we have to bring in as much of the outside world as possible: to show the incredible variety of the world, and the people in it, and the countless ways that education can connect to it, and them. To show students those possibilities.), but also, teachers will see a new and interesting and current and vibrant way to teach the skill. We’ll have a reason to teach the skill, and not just because it’s in the required curriculum, or it’s on the test. Part of the reason school is boring is because teachers are boring, and it’s because we teach abstract skills for reasons we don’t even understand, and can’t even explain; that’s why we default to saying “You’ll need this in next year’s class,” or even worse, “Because it’s on the test!” We’ve forgotten the reason for education, and it’s destroying education. We do not educate people simply for the sake of education: we do it because education is how people get better at life. So let’s make use of that. As much as possible. For God’s sake: education is for life: so let’s bring life back into education.

Students need education. Everyone needs education. But we have to understand why people need education before we can give them the education they need. Maybe my ideas aren’t the way to get this done: but we have to do something.

Doing something will mean a lot of work — which is also why I deserve that raise, along with everyone else who takes on this task. But we have to fix the problem. And if we don’t, if we ignore the problem, then nothing we do will matter, because the whole system will collapse entirely. It’s already teetering. Parts are already falling off. We can keep applying ineffective bandaids — or we can try something new.

I say we try something new.

What do you think?

What We Need In Education: Time and Hope and Change. But mostly time.

Dusty 1 Comment

Okay, I had two preliminary thoughts this morning, which I want to get to before I dive into the main subject, because both thoughts are pertinent. (And then I came here to write this, and had a third thought, which is — holy crap, there are people reading this blog? Hundreds of people?! When did that happen?!? Welcome, and I’m sorry I haven’t been posting regularly, and I will do my very best to change that. Feel free to check out my years of archives, linked on the sidebar. Also you can go to my website and see my other projects. And a picture of me with a sloth.)

The first thought is in regards to what is happening in the world right now. Russia has invaded the Ukraine, and there are people fighting and dying; I thought it would be awful of me, entirely selfish and exhibiting “blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance” to quote the great Monty Python, to write about really anything other than that crisis. I keep seeing fluff items in my news feed, things like what Meghan Markle wore to the NAACP Spirit Awards, and I keep thinking, “Man, they’re still going ahead with that kind of thing? Now? When Russia has invaded the Ukraine?” So surely I wouldn’t be so tone deaf to the suffering of others to write something about teaching in the US today? Especially if I wrote something hopeful and positive in tone?

But that’s not fair. First of all, there is literally nothing I can do about Russia and the Ukraine. I don’t think I need to do anything to raise awareness; I’m confident that anyone reading this blog already knows, and most of you certainly know more than I do about this. I may have something to say about it, being a dedicated pacifist, because this is exactly the point where pacifism becomes questionable, when there is violence instigated by a clear aggressor, acting without provocation; does that make it acceptable to fight back against that violence? Recognizing that allowing violence to continue — well, it allows violence to continue; being pacifistic while people are fighting and killing doesn’t reduce the amount of violence in the world, and arguably, if fighting against those who are violent would end their violent aggression, it might reduce overall violence in the world. At the same time, I have to honor the choice of dedicated pacifists like devotees of Buddhism who refuse to fight back when attacked: maybe they have the right idea.

Most importantly, though? There is always suffering in the world. There is always violence, and atrocity. And while we certainly shouldn’t turn a blind eye, neither can we let the suffering of others, no matter how terrible and heartbreaking, stop us from living our own lives, and doing what we can to alleviate suffering about which we can do something. If I can help make life a little easier for myself, for my friends and family, for my fellow teachers and my fellow countrymen, then that is a good thing to do, even if it doesn’t help people currently being bombed by Vladimir Putin’s stormtroopers. It’s good to spread hope, and to promote progress on the problems that face the world today, both the existential crises and the slower, less obviously catastrophic concerns: like the state of education. The fact that people are dying doesn’t change the need to make the American education system better, or to maybe help teachers feel a little better about our world right now.

So I’m going to go ahead. For real, and I’m sorry this took so many words for me to get to the subject. And no, I haven’t forgotten that there were two preliminary thoughts: the other was, simply, that things take too much damn time to do. You know? I got up this morning, fed my dogs, drank some coffee while puttering around on the internet, then I walked the dogs, went to get bagels for breakfast, made a run through Target for some supplies and then came home — and cursed out loud when my wife was already up and met me at the door, because I was carrying presents for her birthday tomorrow, unwrapped presents which I was just about to wrap with the shiny new paper I got from Target, and she wasn’t supposed to be awake yet, but the run to Target had taken longer than I expected and it was already the time when she usually gets up on the weekend, but fortunately she’s wonderful and so when I yelled “GO AWAY!” she ran away and went back in the bedroom so that I could wrap her presents, which I did — and then I ate breakfast and now here I am writing this: and it’s almost 11am and I need to stop so I can give my dog a bath which he sorely needs, after which I will need to take my own shower, and then it will be time for lunch and a nap: and I haven’t even gotten to my subject for this post, and I haven’t done the grading I need to get done this weekend. And my weekend, which was a very welcome four-day break (for the Tucson Rodeo! A four-day weekend! After we didn’t have a day off for Presidents’ Day! And this isn’t even a cowboy sort of area any more! It makes no sense! Wheeee!) is almost over, and I need to get back to work. And I’m not really sure what I’m teaching tomorrow.

So that’s the second thought, and I am using this to enter directly into what I want to talk about, which is: what we need to do about teaching in this country. Because the truth is, what we need to do will take time. A lot of time. And while we are doing those things, while we are making the necessary changes, we also need to keep doing the things we are doing now, because if we put everything on hold today so that we can make tomorrow better, then the people in need today suffer. And while it sucks to realize that working on the immediate needs of present students in the present system will delay the necessary changes that will improve the system, especially when we recognize that much of our work now is necessitated by the problems and flaws in the current system, it’s also important to realize just how much work we’re getting done, and how important that work is.

Let me emphasize this. The biggest problem in education right now, for teachers and for students, is burnout. We are overworked and overstressed, and we’ve reached our limits. Students are showing that by acting out and by rebelling, because they can’t change the system, so instead they refuse to participate (which just makes things worse for teachers, but then, it’s not the students’ fault that they have no other recourse [which does not make it any easier to handle them on a daily basis]); teachers are showing it by quitting, retiring, and also by losing our minds. For me to say that we need to keep doing this work, all of it, and that we also need to put in extra effort to reform the system — well, I sort of want to punch myself in the throat for it. But: first of all, not everyone has to participate actively in the reform of the system. We do what we can, and that’s all we can do; most of us will be simply maintaining the status quo, at least for right now. But that is important, because maintaining the status quo? Means educating students. In a flawed and inefficient way, which promotes even greater burnout; that’s why we need to do something to change the system. But anyone who does anything to help a student to learn is doing a good thing. Teachers, who put all of our time and energy into helping hundreds and thousands of students to learn, are doing wonderful and awesome things.

Don’t forget it. Don’t minimize it. Teaching is of vital, critical, importance, both in the immediate and in the long term. If all you can do right now is teach, or do what you can to support teaching and learning, then that is enough. That is amazing and wonderful. I thank you and honor you for it. And I thank and honor myself, because I’m still doing it, too. I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, but I’m going to. And I’m going to teach as well as I possibly can.

Not totally sure what I’m going to teach. But it’s gonna be something.

Look at my morning. I took up hours doing a bunch of things, and it’s tempting to focus on what I didn’t do — writing, or grading — and see the morning as wasted; but instead of that, look at all I got done: my dogs are well cared for, my wife and I had a delicious breakfast, her presents are now wrapped; I even got little things done, like I stopped and did the recycling, and I listened to an episode of my new favorite podcast. (It’s called Unf*cking the Republic. It is political, progressive, and utterly brilliant. Highly recommend.) Time was spent: but it wasn’t wasted.

Time spent working in education is — no, wait; I can’t say it is never wasted. It is constantly and consistently wasted. But, time that is spent actually helping students or teachers is never wasted. It is always good work.

Sadly — and this is why there is so much burnout right now — it’s a lot of work. And a lot of effort is wasted in the process of doing that work. Take ESS (Exceptional Student Services, the new term that has replaced Special Education — and if there’s anything that is more wasted effort than dreaming up new euphemisms to conceal that there are efforts being made to help students learn, I don’t know what it is): I have a couple of pretty extensive forms I need to fill out for a couple of students who are having meetings to consider their individual learning needs and how those needs are being addressed; I have two after school meetings this coming week to discuss the students’ progress in my class. Figure three hours, outside of the time I normally spend preparing and teaching my classes. Multiply that by the six other teachers each student has, along with the time spent by the ESS coordinator to arrange the meeting and make sure that everyone fills out the paperwork, and the time contributed just to this specific part of the process by the student, the parents (Both of whom, students and parents, spend uncountable hours trying to help the student learn), and the administration, and you’ll see something of why teaching is so hard and why we’re burnt out. And the real issue is? What these students mostly need, in addition to their resource classroom, is — consideration. Extra time on assignments, preferential seating in the classroom, and the ability to check in with teachers about progress and understanding are by far the most common accommodations, along with the option to take breaks when needed and to take tests in a more relaxed setting like a smaller classroom or after school. Tell me which of those things would be refused by any reasonable teacher. Of course, the very fact that we have the official process and all the paperwork shows that there are definitely teachers who have refused to allow those and other reasonable accommodations; and that is certainly one of the problems we need to address in education. And I also recognize that having a system in place to provide plans and communicate needs to individual teachers alleviates the students and their parents of the obligation to discuss with every single teacher what the student needs to succeed; I know full well that without that process, most of my students who need accommodations would never talk to me about them, because it is still stigmatized to need help in any way for any reason.

I can’t quite fathom why it is bad to do what it takes to learn. To want to learn enough to look for and find the particular ways that one can learn successfully despite one’s inherent difficulties. I mean, that’s all the ESS students want, is to learn. Why exactly is that bad? Why is it shameful enough that we need to stop calling them Special Education students? Why has our society stigmatized those who want to learn?

So that’s what I mean. There’s too much work, and too much of it should not be necessary — but to make it unnecessary would require different work in different ways. We would need to make it easier for students and parents to talk to their teachers. We would need to get rid of teachers who stand in the way of learning, thereby necessitating a process that forces them to provide what students need to learn — because any teacher who isn’t willing to take reasonable steps to help students to learn doesn’t need to be in public education. And all of that, either the current work that puts bandaids on the problems, or the additional work that would be needed to heal the problems permanently — it all takes time.

It all cascades, you see. The reason why teachers and students are so burnt out right now is because we didn’t allow ourselves time off when the world came crashing to a halt. Instead, we all doubled or tripled our work load overnight. When I left school on March 13, 2020, I was a classroom teacher; when I went back to school two weeks later, I was an online teacher. All of my students suddenly had to become online learners. We had to find ways to do the same work we had been doing, but in an entirely new way: most immediately for me, I had to figure out how Zoom and Google Classroom worked, how to record the sessions (which my school required), how to help my students get into the sessions, and how to present the content through online media. I scanned two entire books, page by page; I recorded audio of me reading those books chapter by chapter. And I spent the same hours I had always spent teaching classes, grading work, responding to emails, and so on. My students did essentially the same things in reverse.

All, of course, while watching our world collapse, and for many of us, worrying acutely over the health and wellbeing of ourselves or our loved ones.

That continued into the fall, when classes were going to be in person, then went online, then went hybrid, then bounced around all three for the remainder of the school year. All of it required me to do my usual work and also the extra work of making my class available over the internet. All while still watching my world collapse and worrying acutely over myself and my loved ones.

All, by the way, without any extra pay for the extra hours and extra effort.

So because I had to spend extra hours doing the same work, what did I sacrifice? Myself, of course. I slept less. I read less. I played fewer games. My wife and I didn’t do the things we used to do to have fun — go out shopping, go to restaurants, play boardgames with friends, and so on. I didn’t take time for myself, at a time when I desperately needed time for myself, to deal with the constant stresses. I had even less time to decompress, as well as less time to help my family and friends, to do the things I normally do when I am not working, even while the need for all of those things was greater, because I had to spend extra time working just to do the same job in the new circumstances. And all of it was harder, because I knew that it wasn’t working. I read dozens of articles saying everything about why and how it wasn’t working: how we needed to go back to in-person school, how we were incurring “learning loss,” how we were doing a terrible job; and also how it was vitally necessary to protect the health and wellbeing of the students and the staff and everyone’s family by having school online, and it was terribly critical for teachers to figure out how to keep students engaged even over the webcam. All that weight was on us.

I can’t even imagine the pressure that was put on health care workers.

So because I was working harder, and taking less time to recover, and also being told (and seeing direct evidence) that my efforts were leading to less positive results, it wore me out. Worse than any year I’ve had as a teacher — and that’s saying something, believe me.

And then this school year started: and on the first day of classes, with no advance warning of any kind (That is the fault of my specific school, though I don’t doubt that other teachers at other schools had similar problems), I suddenly found out I was teaching four online classes at the same time I was to be teaching six in-person classes.

So it kept on going. All through the first semester. Then, thankfully, the online school hired its own specific teachers, and I and my colleagues no longer had to teach two simultaneous groups of students; so I guess this current semester is easier.

But it sure doesn’t feel like it.

So the wear and tear on my mind and my soul make it feel like I have to do more to take care of myself, to destress and unwind; also, the last two years that I have not had the time and energy to pursue my personal projects as much as I would like — which for me is a particularly big deal, as I still consider myself a writer as much as if not more than I consider myself a teacher — have made me feel guilty and sad, and desperate to get back to who I used to be: and all of that makes it harder for me to take the time to do my work as a teacher. Which then makes me feel guilty because I know how much my students need to get back to normal, and how much they need to learn; and that falls to me, because they aren’t really holding up their end right now, since they are also tired and burnt out and stressed and in need of comfort and a break from work.

All of which — and I know it’s too much, and forgive me for ranting, but this is some of what I need right now — leads me to the one thing I am going to say we need to do to change education, the single most important thing.

[Warning: there is cussing ahead.]

We need to take away the goddamn fucking deadlines.

Who gives a shit, WHO GIVES A SINGLE SOLITARY SHIT, if a student takes two years to master a subject or skill while it takes another student only one year? Why on God’s green and verdant Earth do we need to make sure that every student learns the same stuff IN THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME?? Why do they have to graduate by eighteen? (For that matter, why the hell do we sort them according to their birthdays? Rather than making groups of students according to their interests and aptitudes, we group them according to age? Whose stupid goddamn idea was that? But hold onto that one, I’ll come back to it.)

Do you realize how much better this whole situation would be if we had just LET STUDENTS TAKE A YEAR OFF??? If we had let teachers just take a year off??? I realize that means teachers wouldn’t be doing our jobs and therefore we wouldn’t get paid — but let me just point out that we should have simply paid everyone who was forcibly unemployed because of the pandemic and quarantine, the whole time. But anyway. If we have to have teachers working, then it would have made perfect sense to offer educational opportunities to those who wanted them, and to offer childcare to families who needed it, without actually calling it a school year; that’s how we could have kept teachers employed. If we didn’t have to think of it as a school year, I guarantee teachers could have found a way to keep kids occupied so their families could go to work; though based on the number of students who actually went in to school even when we were fully online in the fall of 2020, there weren’t actually that many families who needed the help. There were some, and our system is what provides most families with childcare, so I see the need to continue providing that, within the limitations of the pandemic and the quarantine: but why, in the name of all that’s holy, did we have to try to make them learn? Everything they would have learned if nothing had changed? Why did we need to pretend that we could still teach, and they could learn, with the same rate of success as a normal year?

Deadlines, that’s why. Because letting this specific group of students graduate when they were 19 instead of 18 (Again, those who desperately wanted to learn to graduate “on time” could have made use of the opportunities without driving everyone involved to the brink of insanity) was apparently unthinkable.

And that’s why everything in education sucks right now. Because we couldn’t fucking take a fucking year off DURING A FUCKING PANDEMIC.

Okay, sorry. I’m better now.

I have more thoughts for where education should go in the future, but I’m going to save them. I’ll try to write about them next week.

This week, I just want to reiterate, again and again: things take time. Work takes time to get done. If the work is made harder by circumstances, it takes even longer, because it puts more stress on the people doing the work, who then need even more time to wind down from their work, in order to maintain their productivity.

If you are and have been working to help students learn, you have done good work. Thank you. If you are and have been working to help teachers teach — or you have been helping teachers survive — thank you. You have done good work.

And before we talk about anything else with education, start with this: the only reason, the only reason, we have concepts like schedules and deadlines and on-time progress and “learning loss” in education is because we choose to force people to complete things in a specific time period. No exceptions.

That needs to change.