“Adventures” with My “Pets”

10/07/202310/07/2023Dusty 2 Comments

I enjoy frequenting thrift stores — as who doesn’t? — and one of my favorite things to do is peruse the books, especially the older ones. This is not my wife’s favorite thing for me to do, so usually while I am geeking out over some 100-year-old grammar textbook (I swear one of these days I’m going to teach my class out of one of those and then WATCH OUT), she comes up behind me and says, “Are you ready?”

I am not. I am never ready to leave the books. I always want to spend more time looking at them. It’s a little frustrating because I don’t always want to spend as much time READING them, so they tend to pile up. (Another reason why my wife interrupts me, and she’s right to do it.) But my wife is right to interrupt me, so I say I am ready, and I leave. Usually without any books. Which is probably good, as they are often more curiosities than books I want to actually read and own.

But sometimes, when I am quick and lucky, I get to find something genuinely awesome. I have a collection of hundred-year-old romances by my favorite pirate author, Jeffery Farnol, some acquired at thrift stores and library book sales, which I am very proud of and love reading.

And a few months ago, at the local Human Society thrift store here in Tucson, I found — this.

*Doesn’t the picture of Dumas look a little like this cat?* *Or maybe this picture is the one that looks like the cat…*

This is a memoir written by the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Now, Dumas was a badass, particularly as a writer. I’ve read Monte Cristo, and it’s bloody brilliant; and pets are absolutely my thing — so I had to get this. Plus it was only $5.

Unfortunately, as Dumas lived in the 19th century, the times they have been a-changin’: and Dumas did not think of pets the same way that I do — and neither, honestly, did he think of adventures in the same way I do. I was hoping for, I dunno, hiking in beautiful mountains with dogs, who run off the trail and then make friends with an elk and bring it back to get a scratch behind the ear and take a treat from Dumas’s hand; that would be an adventure! With a pet!

Instead I got a whoooooooole lot of hunting. Dumas surely did like to shoot him some animals. Particularly rabbits and birds. The title, you see, comes from the fact that one of the main characters in the memoir is Dumas’s hunting dog, his English pointer Pritchard. And if you count all the times Dumas blasted a bunch of small helpless creatures with a shotgun while Pritchard pointed at them, then you betcha, there were plenty of adventures with his pets. But as you can probably tell, it was not my cup of tea.

It was interesting. Dumas was still a hell of a writer, and he does manage to make a lot of the little anecdotes come to life. Some of them were even fun: the man had a lot of pets, some of which he treated well; while many of Pritchard’s stories are about hunting, there is also one about how Pritchard often brought home many other dogs from the neighborhood to share in his lunch, because Dumas spoiled his animals and therefore Pritchard’s friends wanted the same good food he provided his dog. There are many conversations between people, often but not always about the animals, which were interesting and amusing. There’s a great secondary character, Michel, who was Dumas’s groundskeeper/animal expert, and he is interesting and amusing; Dumas presents a bunch of ridiculous folklore legends as coming from this guy, and clearly we’re supposed to laugh at them (there’s a chapter where Michel asserts that frogs act as midwives to other pregnant frogs, and so either frogs must have taught this to OBGYNs, or OBGYNs must have taught this to frogs — and as a fan of frogs, I’m good either way), but Dumas never makes Michel seem like a fool or a doofus, which I enjoyed. I appreciate that Dumas was, as he was described in one chapter, one of the most arrogant and self-centered of men (Which, not to be stereotypical, but I feel like saying that about a Frenchman is saying something) — but also one of the most generous and compassionate. He is completely ridiculous about handing out money left and right, usually, in this book, to acquire more animals, and I like that. I love the chapter where Dumas is described: because he reprinted a letter from a friend of his who defended him in Parisian social circles, with a letter to the local newspaper, which is fantastic; the letter basically says, Yes, he is arrogant, but also generous — and the real difference is, he’s arrogant because he actually is the greatest author in France, and that makes him a better person than all the rest of us.

I loved that.

But I did not enjoy all the killing of animals. I liked the cat Mysouff, but not when Mysouff killed all the pet birds. I liked the dog Mouton, but not when Dumas kicked Mouton in the rear, as hard as he could, for digging up his garden, and Mouton bit the crap out of Dumas’s hand — and the point of the story was that Dumas therefore had trouble writing for a while, because it was his right hand. I liked Pritchard, but not when Pritchard went hunting, or just killing and eating animals for fun — and especially not when Pritchard gets hurt and Dumas plays it basically for laughs: the dog gets shot by a hunter friend of Dumas’s, and the joke is that the pellets hit Pritchard in the testicles — but not to worry, one of the testicles is still functional! So all is well! And I was just like, “MOTHERFUCKER, SOMEONE SHOT YOUR FUCKING DOG, GO KILL HIS ASS!”

Plus: the dog dies in the end. And not of old age, surrounded by the family that loves him.

So nope: this was definitely not the book I was hoping for, and I would generally not recommend it. If you are a huge fan of Dumas, then you might enjoy it; it gives more insight into him and his lifestyle than it does into his pets or his attitudes towards his pets — but if you, like me, are a pet person, give this one a pass.

What’s In a Name?

03/07/2023Dusty 3 Comments

I want to write about the AP exam I scored. But those scores haven’t been released yet, and neither have the examples and so on, which show how the scores were earned; and I don’t want to get in trouble for posting confidential material.

So, without going into too much detail about the exam or the prompt or how a student earned a specific score, I’m going to talk about one general aspect of the exam which I noticed this year more than most: terminology.

In keeping with the theme I seem to have established of talking about my dad, and also of using quotations to center and introduce my thoughts, here is one of my dad’s all-time favorite quotes:

“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing itself.”

This is from the science fiction novel, The World of Null-A, by A.E. van Vogt. It hasn’t been turned into a meme on the internet — so I’m going to put the cover of the novel here, because it’s awesome.

A.E. van Vogt – The World of Null-A (1948) Review | A Sky of Books and Movies — *Wouldn’t you love to live in Purple World? Arches and spires everywhere? STAIRCASES TO NOWHERE?!?*

The quote is slightly adapted from a statement originally from Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher and engineer, and while van Vogt’s words have not been memed, Korzybski’s have been.

Map And Territory - We Confuse The Map With The Territory

That’s the full quote, and you can see how quickly it makes one’s eyes cross. Here it is made even more confusing by the visuals:

The Map is Not The Territory – Explained in Simple Terms – Welcome to Club Street Post — *This was made by someone who does not understand how to explain things.*

But that’s okay, here’s the simpler version, complete with standardized background image:

*The more observant among you will notice the resemblance to a meme I used in yesterday’s post here.*

But really, I prefer this last version, because I also like Watts’s iteration of this — and I love Rene Magritte.

The map is not the territory - Tom McCallum

So the point of this, then, is to recognize the limitations of representation and image — and of language itself. The map is probably the best example, because a map always sacrifices detail for coverage, showing a greater area while not showing everything about that area. If a map showed every detail of the area it depicted, it would be a photograph, not a map — and its value would be limited.

(Though it might be funny sometimes.)

On some level, this shows the difference between “book knowledge” and “world knowledge” — which my students still, still, call “street smarts,” a perfect example of a name that has lasted despite its limitations, which makes it a perfect example of the second half of this statement. If you know the name of a thing, that is analogous to “book knowledge;” and if you understand the thing (which is where I think the quote is going here, to a point about understanding, because certainly with a concrete object there is no doubt that the word could be the thing itself: I’m not sitting in the word “chair” right now.), that is equivalent to the experiential and deeper understanding implied by “street smarts.” Knowing the name for something does not mean you understand that thing, because the word is not the thing itself; again like the map, words reduce specific details in order to gain another value — generally universality, and economy, meaning I can communicate a fair amount of information, to a lot of people, without too many words. If I say I own a black SUV, then you don’t have much detail about my car — but (if you speak English) you have a general understanding of the category of vehicle to which my car belongs, and a general idea of its size and shape and appearance and so on, because we understand what aspects are included in the category “SUV,” and we know the color “black.” Also, as my wife has pointed out many times, with steadily growing annoyance as each year passes, all SUVs look the same — and a large proportion of them are black. But that means, while you can get a general idea of many, many cars with just two words, you can’t really identify those specific cars very well. And you definitely don’t know the things that make my car special, that make my car into my car. Not terribly important to understand the special things about my car, of course; but if you want to understand a person, you need to know much more than their name.

This comes into focus with the AP exam because I teach my students that they don’t really need to know the name of what they are talking about: but they need to understand the thing. This is, clearly, not how all AP teachers instruct their students, because I had MANY essays that used vocabulary the student did not really understand: and it showed. They named things they didn’t really have, because they didn’t understand the thing named. So that I don’t do that, to explain the details lacking in the term “AP exam,” so that you have more understanding of this thing instead of just knowing the name, the essay I scored last month was for the AP Language and Composition exam, which focuses on non-fiction writing, and examines primarily rhetoric. “Rhetoric” is another good example of a word which people know and use without really understanding it, because the connotations of the word have changed; now it mostly comes in a phrase like “empty rhetoric,” and is used to describe someone — usually a politician — who is speaking insincerely, just paying lip service to some idea or audience, without saying anything of substance; or in more extreme cases, using words to lie and manipulate their audience for a nefarious purpose. My preferred definition of rhetoric, the one I teach my students, is: “Using language to achieve a purpose.” What I am doing now in this blog is rhetorical: I am choosing words and using examples that I think will achieve my purpose — in this case to explain my idea, and to a lesser extent, to convince my audience that I am correct in my argument: that knowing the name of a thing is less important than understanding the actual thing.

So in the AP exam on Language and Composition, which focuses on rhetoric — or understanding and explaining how a speaker or writer uses language to achieve their purpose, as when a politician tries to convince an audience to vote for him or her — there are 50 or so multiple choice questions, and three essay questions. This year I scored the second essay question, which is the Rhetorical Analysis question; for this year’s exam (This is not privileged information, by the way; the questions were released right after the exam in May. It’s the answers that are still secret.) they used a commencement speech given at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove. The goal of the essay was to “Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Dove makes to deliver her message about what she wishes for her audience of graduating students.”

Interestingly enough, the AP exam writers have given hints to the students in this instruction, which I’ve taken from the exam. They generally give important context in their instructions, quite intentionally; it’s easier to analyze rhetoric if you understand the context in which the speech or writing was delivered, so knowing that this speech was given at a commencement, at a university, in 2016, gives you a better idea of what is going to be said in the speech — you get the general shape of what is included in the thing named “commencement address.” One of the key aspects of this speech by Dove is both the expectation of what is included in a commencement address, and how she subverts that expectation: and that centers around the term “wish.” That’s the hint in the instruction there, along with the buzzwords “message” and “audience,” which are commonly part of a study of rhetoric and of rhetorical analysis.

Okay, that wasn’t interesting. I’ve lost you here, I realize. Let me use fewer words and just give you the general gist of my point: when students were analyzing Dove’s rhetoric, they did much better if they explained what she was doing and why, but didn’t know the proper name for her strategy; some of them knew the name of the strategy — or of a strategy — but couldn’t really explain it. They had the name, but not the thing itself.

Partly that’s because the study of rhetoric is very old, and thus has an enormous amount of terminology attached to it: much of it based on Latin and Greek roots, which makes the words sound really smart to modern speakers and readers of American English. It’s cool to use the words “antithesis” and “juxtaposition” and “zeugma,” so students remember the words and use them for that reason. I think it is also partly because a number of AP classes focus on remembering the word for something, rather than knowing the thing itself, because lists of words are easier to teach and easier to memorize and easier to test. Partly it’s because students under pressure try to impress teachers with the things they can do, to dazzle us and make us not notice the things they can’t do — like actually explain the thing they named.

Again, I don’t want to get into too many specifics on this particular essay because it hasn’t been released yet and I don’t want to get in trouble, so let me just give general examples.

There’s a rhetorical device called “polysyndeton.” (Cool name, isn’t it? Little annoying that the two y‘s are pronounced differently…) It means the use of more conjunctions than would be strictly necessary for grammar. If I listed all of my favorite activities and I said, “I love reading and writing and music and games and spending time with my pets and eating delicious food and taking walks with my wife,” that would be an example of polysyndeton. And if you were writing an essay about my rhetoric (Please don’t), you could certainly say that I used polysyndeton, and quote that sentence as an example. And if you used that sentence, it would be a correct example, and the person scoring your essay would recognize that you know what polysyndeton is, and you correctly defined and identified it, which is surely worth some points. Right?

But what does polysyndeton do? What did I do when I wrote the sentence that way, instead of, for instance, “I love reading, writing, music, games, spending time with my pets, eating delicious food, and taking walks with my wife.”? The ability to understand that, and to explain that — and, most importantly for the AP exam and for rhetorical analysis, the ability to explain how the effect I achieved through the use of polysyndeton helps to deliver my message, to achieve my purpose — that’s what matters. Not knowing the name.

(It’s a bad example here, by the way, because I made up the sentence just to show what the word meant, so it isn’t really part of my larger purpose; the purpose of using polysyndeton there was just to show what the hell polysyndeton is. And sure, I guess it was effective for that.)

The worst offenders here, on this year’s exam as in most, are the terms logos, pathos, and ethos, which are words used to describe certain kinds of argument, and also certain aspects of rhetoric. The words are Greek, and were chosen and defined by Aristotle; most rhetoric teachers at least mention them, usually, I imagine, as a way to show that there are many different ways to win an argument and to persuade an audience. That’s why I mention them in my class. But while a lot of students know the words, they don’t understand the thing itself, and so they find items in a passage they’re analyzing that looks like it belongs in one of those categories. Like statistics, which they identify as logos arguments, meaning arguments that appeal to reason and logic, which is indeed one way that statistics can be used. Dove uses a statistic in her speech, and a raft of student writers identified that as an instance of logos. The problem is that it isn’t logos, partly because it’s not a real statistic — she uses the phrase “150% effort,” and at one point lowers that to “75% effort” and “50% effort;” but at no time is she trying to present a reasoned and logical argument through the use of those numbers, which of course don’t come from any study or anything like that — and even more, because she’s not really trying to persuade her audience.

She was telling her audience an anecdote. And that’s where I ran into a stumbling block, over and over again in reading and scoring these essays: just because students know the name for something doesn’t mean they understand the thing: and just because students remember the name for something doesn’t mean they remember how to spell it.

Let me note, here and now, that these students are brilliant and courageous for even trying to do this damn test, for even trying to write three college-level essays in two hours AFTER answering 45 difficult multiple-choice questions in one hour. Also, because this was written under pressure in a short time frame, and with almost certainly only one draft, mistakes are inevitable and should be entirely ignored when they don’t get in the way of understanding. I knew what every one of these students were trying to say, so I ignored their spelling, in terms of scoring the essay. I also ignored their generally atrocious handwriting, not least because mine is as bad as any of theirs and usually worse.

I just thought this was a fine example of knowing a term but not really knowing it. Ya know?

(Also I apologize for the image quality. Just trying to make a point. And the picture is not the point.)

The first one gets it right. Another one gets it right — but spells “English” as “Enligh.” Also please note the spelling of “repetition” which students repeatedly struggled with.

Fun, huh? I scored 695 essays this year. Last year it was over a thousand. And that exam passage also used anecdotes.

I’m really not trying to mock the students; just using this fact to show that knowing a term doesn’t mean you understand the term, because the word is not the thing itself. By the same token, knowing the spelling doesn’t mean you know the term, or that you understand the thing itself; which is why we ignore misspellings in scoring these essays. I think understanding the thing is much more important than knowing the word — and I’m a word guy. I love words. (Flibbertigibbet! Stooge! Cyclops! Wheeeee!) But I’m a word guy because I think this world is magnificent and incredible, and I want to understand as much of it as possible; words help me to do that, and to share my understanding of the world we live in. That complicated image I used above to show how some people can’t explain things well? Here, I’ll bring it down here so you don’t have to be confused which one I’m talking about.

This makes a few important points, even if it makes them badly. I do like how it goes from an image of the Earth, to a jumbled collage of colors inside the head, to the one word “world.” I think that, once you can follow it, makes this point well, how much translation and simplification happens between observed reality and the words we use to represent them. Though it should also lead to another head, of a listener, and show how that one word activates their own jumbled collage of colors in their head represented by the word “world.” (Far be it from me to suggest making this more complicated, though.) Because communication happens between two minds, and both minds contribute to the communication: which is why language works despite this simplifying process.

I do also like the statement at the bottom of the image: “Change the map, you change the world.” (Even though I hate how they capitalized and punctuated it.) Because that’s the last point here: while words are not the things they represent, they are incredibly important to our understanding of the world and our reality. Because we think and communicate in words. Not exclusively: my wife, for one, is deeply eloquent in communicating with images; my dogs can communicate with a look; musicians communicate with sounds that are not words. And so on. But language is our best and most effective form of interpersonal communication: and also one of the main ways we catalogue and recall our knowledge inside our heads. So getting the names of things right is incredibly important to our ability to use the information we know, and to communicate it to others. And what is the most important factor in getting the names of things right? Understanding the things we are talking about.

Because a rose by any other name would smell as sweet — but if you want people to know you are talking about one of these, you better call it a rose.

How to Say Rose in Different Languages | 1800Flowers Petal Talk

And for my sake, please spell it right.

Where Is This Going?

29/05/202330/05/2023Dusty 1 Comment

Last week, I had no words; it was the end of the school year: when I have to grade everything, when I am not sleeping, when I am frustrated with my students every damn day, when I have to say goodbye to people I like and appreciate, either for the summer or forever. So I posted pictures instead.

The week before that, I was sad; so I wrote about being sad — and I got some…reactions. I’m glad that my writing reached people, and affected people, so that is overall a good thing; and talking about being sad led to more conversations about sadness, which is also a good thing. But it was hard to write that post, and hard to have the conversations afterwards; this shows why it’s important to talk about emotions, particularly negative emotions, so those conversations can get easier for all of us — but I didn’t (and don’t) want to write about all of that again, which was also why I didn’t post last week. The end of the school year is depressing, and that’s not what I wanted to write about.

But now? Now it’s summertime. At last. I have been work-free for two days (Almost. I had one student write to ask why they had not gotten a grade on a paper they claimed to have turned in, and one student whom I have been asking to turn things in so I can give them a passing grade. But both of those are minor tasks, both resolved in a matter of minutes — and both finished, now.), and so I have read my book, and I have walked my dogs, and I have played Minecraft. I have napped. It has been lovely.

So now I feel like I can find some time to put together some words that aren’t just a cri de coeur, or packaged a thousand at a time into a picture. Some of those words are definitely going to go into my book: because by God I am going to finish my third pirate novel, and wrap up the Damnation Kane series — the first series I will complete in my writing career. But some of the words can come here, I think.

So. What shall I write about?

Part of me wants to write about how much nicer it is to be relaxed and happy than to be stressed and sad; but that’s really pretty stupid. Because of course it is nicer. Nobody needs to hear that from me. And some people would probably be bothered hearing that from me, because they might have to think about how they are not relaxed and happy, and then they might feel bad for not being relaxed and happy. Also, I’m not simply nor entirely relaxed and happy. So we won’t be talking about that.

Part of me thinks I should review the political book that I read, which I said I would be reviewing; but I’m not sure that’s important. I have noticed, in looking at the stats for this blog, that my old book reviews and essays are by far the most popular posts over time; that some of my personal weekly essays get a lot of views, but the book reviews (like this one) and essays about books (like this one) are the ones that people keep coming back for, month after month; but those are about popular books, not political books — and not political books that are almost two decades out of date, which didn’t change the power of the book’s message, but did leave me wishing it was more current. Which probably means that fewer people will want to read this particular book with each passing year. So I don’t know how many people want to read my thoughts on that book; and I don’t think I could have fun with the review, as I did with the two linked above. So I think I will probably let it go, and maybe write a review of the next book I’m going to read — Slaughterhouse Five, which I am re-reading for the first time in a decade or two, as part of a book swap with my former student, the one who got me to re-read and actually appreciate John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

But that’s later. For now, right now, what have I got to write about?

I’ve got it. Let’s review this past school year.

Now, I haven’t moved far enough past this school year to be able to judge it fairly and logically; also, I don’t think it a good idea to take an entire segment of either life or education and boil it down to a simple rating out of five. (Because grades are garbage…) I just want to give some of my thoughts and impressions of this past year.

First of all, some of the good things: my wife came back to work at my school again this year. That is one of the best things that could ever happen, because my wife is my favorite person in the world; every time I get to see her at work, it makes my day better. This year I got to ride in to work with her every single day. I got to walk her to her classroom. I got to help her with tasks at school. When she left (Early in the day, because she only worked part time, exactly as she wanted to), she would usually stop by my classroom to say goodbye; it made my morning better, every single time. It’s also good because my wife is an excellent teacher, and I’m happy for the students who got to take her classes; even though not all of them appreciated it. She’s coming back next year, but with an even better schedule, because for the first time in her five years of teaching (Not counting her years of work as a sub, or her summer school experience, or the internship program she helped run and the computer skills class she taught as part of that program — want to know why she’s an excellent teacher? Because in addition to being a brilliant and sensitive and honest person, and in addition to knowing every single little thing about her subject, she has a ton of actual experience teaching. Unlike the administrators who give us our performance evaluations every year. BUT ANYWAY.) she will not be teaching middle school students who are all shoved into a mandatory art class that most of them don’t want. It’s awful to try to teach a subject to someone who doesn’t care about it and so doesn’t care if they learn or not, or if they pass or not; it’s especially tough when you love the subject and know the great value it can bring to lives, as my wife loves art, and as I love English.

Another good thing: in addition to the mandatory English classes I’ve always taught to students who don’t always want to learn English (It’s not as bad for me as it is for her: because I teach high school, not middle school. Middle schoolers are demons. My students are just annoying.), I got to teach my first elective this past year. It was a class in fantasy and science fiction literature, and though there were definitely some missteps, overall it went wonderfully well. It was fantastic to be able to select books because they mean something to my world as a nerd and a writer, rather than because they have lessons I think are important for students to learn; and the books I chose, though something of a mixed bag, generally went over quite well. I actually got a whole class full of students to read four complete novels this year, something I haven’t been able to do in the last two decades. They wrote short stories, and they participated in both discussions and in reading — and I didn’t give a single test. For the whole year. It was wonderful. It was also outstanding to feel vindicated in my choice of M.T. Anderson’s fantastic dystopian novel Feed, which I wanted to teach to my regular classes but was told I could not (Because the book uses dirty words, though with a clear and effective purpose), so I taught it to this class — and they loved it. And were deeply affected by it. One of my better teaching experiences.

(Lessons learned, by the way, from my missteps: The War of the Worlds is a seminal science fiction classic, but it is also as boring as snail snot. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a fantastic book, and an important book: but it is not much of a science fiction book. And it’s damn hard to read, because it does such a good job of depicting American chattel slavery. I think next year I will teach The Time Machine, and maybe Fahrenheit 451, and maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

Another good thing: all of my best teacher friends were all around me this year, and they all helped support me; and they’re all coming back next year. I have an excellent group of teacher friends at the school, and that makes a world of difference in the teaching experience. As important as it was to me to have my wife there every day, these wonderful people are critical to my survival and stability as a teacher and a person. Thank you Lisa, Aleksandra, Danielle, Scott, and Toni (whom all the teachers refer to as “Not your Toni”) — and let’s add Carrie and Anasazi to the group, shall we? Thank you all for your friendship.

I also had a number of wonderful students this year, both academically and personally, and I think, despite my constant self-doubts, that I was able to help most of them to get better, to learn and improve, to grow as people and as readers and writers. Even though I teach because I need the income, it means quite a lot to me that I can teach well, that I can have an impact on my students, that I can make their futures better, their lives fuller, by imparting to them curiosity and insight and some of my passion for language and literature. That happened this year — it doesn’t always — and I am grateful that it did.

All right, so those are the good things.

YARN | you're still thinking about the bad news, aren't you. | The Office (UK) (2001) - S01E06 Drama | Video clips by quotes | 7e789b6c | 紗

The main thing that went badly this year was something I’ve hinted at in the good news: my friends, my wife, and I are all returning to the same school next year. Which is remarkable (as in something about which I can remark) because there are so many others who are not returning. Out of a staff of 38, there are TEN people who are not returning. More than 25%. I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, about the reasons for people leaving, because it would cross a line I don’t want to cross, in that I would end up criticizing my school for things I think they have done wrong, and I would have to do it in a specific and even personal way; but the real essential reason for everyone who is leaving is the same: teachers are not valued commensurate with our effort and our worth. We are not paid enough, not supported enough, not cared for enough. Some of my fellow staff members are being actively devalued, and some have simply grown fed up with not being valued enough; but the result is clear: the school is going to change. Maybe in some cases the replacements will be better, sure — but not in all cases. In the years I have been at this school, and more broadly in the years that I have been a teacher, I have watched teachers and staff members come and go; and it seems to me that in all cases, over time, the staff replacements have been for the worse. Partly that’s because teachers who care get better with experience, all the way up to the point where we get so bitter and jaded that we give up, and then we become much worse; so improvement generally happens with teachers who stay, not teachers who leave and are replaced; but part of that is because good teachers quit when they aren’t valued, and new people coming into the profession are not always good teachers, just by the law of averages. Now they’re not even coming into the profession: we had one position that just never really got filled this year, instead being temporarily patched by a string of substitutes; maybe they’ll fill that spot with a full-time teacher next year. Or maybe they won’t, and the students will suffer again with subs. Maybe, if they find someone, that teacher will even be a good teacher, or someone who may become a good teacher over time.

And maybe they won’t.

It’s hard to watch your school get worse. I feel bad for the students who come here. Not because they get a bad education; I think we still provide what we always have, a generally good and useful education with some definite holes. Partly that’s because there are still teachers who are staying, and who have gotten better over their years of teaching — and yes, I am one of those — and partly it’s because there have always been holes, always been areas where we lack (Arts, along with CTE and practical skills classes, have always been the most glaring lack at my small charter school, and it is the reason why probably 10% of our students leave the school every year to go to larger schools with more programs. Our graduating class every year is half the size of our incoming class.), so the holes are shifting more than they are growing. When I came to the school, they had an incredibly strong math department; now we have an incredibly strong English department. I don’t think one or the other of those is better or worse: they’re just different strengths. (Okay, the strong English department is better. Because math sucks.)

But though we still do our jobs, it’s getting harder. Because the problems exist which are driving teachers away. Every year it gets more and more tempting to follow them, and that means that every year, it gets more strenuous to stay where I am. I’m getting tired of fighting to survive at my school, fighting to overcome the bad policies, the bad atmosphere, the bad personalities that all contribute to the decision so many people have made to leave. I hope things start to get better, at some point. I really do. But in the meantime, I feel bad for the students because their school is in a constant state of flux. It makes them uncertain, of course, and it takes away their relationships and replaces the familiar teachers with a string of new faces. It strikes me that, every year, the students ask me if I will be there next year. Even the seniors ask this, so it’s not only because they want to take my class, or even to see me in the hall; they just want to know that I will still be there, because I am part of their school as they understand it.

The second thing that was difficult this school year was the students. Hold on, hold on: I’m not going to complain about how the students are getting worse; they’re not. I’m also not going to complain about how the students are the root cause of every problem with education — though they are, of course; I say all the time that this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the students.

Schools See Big Drop in Attendance as Students Stay Away, Citing Covid-19 - WSJ — *See how neat that room looks? How peaceful? Just a teacher by themselves, working on a computer. Bliss.*

No, the trouble with students this year was that the students were troubled. I think I have to write about this in more depth, and before I do that I need to talk to a couple of my former students, and get their opinions on how school has been for them; but I think we don’t really know the harm that was done by the pandemic and the quarantine. I do also recognize that it’s too easy to point to that enormous black cloud, the crater that it left in our landscape, and blame it for all the problems we face; I don’t think the pandemic experience is the only factor influencing students today, or the root of all the problems in education, any more than I think students themselves are the root of all the problems in education today.

But it happened. And it happened to these kids. And I think for them, it changed — everything.

All students are different. I tend to think that the trends my fellow teachers always see in the students are generally false. For instance, it has frequently been observed to me that this class or that class is a “bad” class, or a tough class; and my experience has rarely been the same as what my colleagues have told me it would be, based on their experience. I’m sure it goes the other way, too: I have in the past warned my fellow teachers about students and classes I’ve had trouble with, and frequently those students and classes have been great for my colleagues. Because the problem is not that the students are bad: it’s that not every student works well with every teacher, and not every teacher handles everything the best way, nor does every student. Bad circumstances can sour a working relationship very quickly, and often it never really sweetens.

But see, I think that’s part of what happened with the pandemic and the quarantine. The schools didn’t handle it properly. I’m not sure there was a way to handle it properly: my Republican countrymen would argue that schools should have stayed open, but I think there’s no reasonable argument that such a policy would not have led to a hell of a lot more sickness, and that would have had a negative impact on students as well. So I don’t mean to find fault with what we did or how we did it; we did our best. But the reality is that it didn’t work. Teaching a class on Zoom is simply not effective: not when the teachers and students are familiar and comfortable with in-person learning. It’s a separate question whether Zoom made the situation better or worse; it seems to me that simply cancelling school entirely for six months or a year would have been worse — but there’s an argument to be made that giving everyone a break would have been better, and the students could have come back to where they left off, and simply graduated a year later, and so what? I’m a fan of gap years. If I could have used that year to prepare, on my own, for the next year’s classes, my God, what I would have achieved. On the other hand, in that scenario, social isolation would have been much, much worse; I can largely ignore that because I live with my best friend and my four favorite animal friends; but I recognize that many of my students would have suffered even more without being able to hear friendly voices and see friendly faces every day, even if it was just on a screen.

But the gap year, or bulling ahead through sickness, is not what we did. What we did was try our best to pretend that nothing was wrong: when everything was wrong. The students were miserable; the teachers were miserable; the entire world was miserable. The transmission of education online did not work: students were bored and constantly distracted. Teachers were frustrated and floundering. So the result is that teachers lost confidence, because we watched ourselves suck at our jobs for an entire year; students lost faith in schools, because they watched schools fail them for an entire year, and they also lost faith in themselves, because when they were entrusted with the responsibility of being at school while they weren’t at school, they pretty much all failed to live up to it. That is not an insult: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have spent the entire school year at home stoned and playing video games while pretending to do my work, if there had been a quarantine while I was a student. The point is that students should never have been given that responsibility. They weren’t ready for it, and so they were set up for failure: and they failed. At the same time, the schools failed: and the students were shown what was behind the curtain of the schools. They saw that their teachers are not wizards, but, too often, traveling salesmen trying desperately to maintain a facade. The advantage we teachers have always had is that, frequently, just like the Wizard of Oz, the facade is enough: students are able to learn enormous amounts on their own, so if I can give them a poem which I myself don’t understand, and then just seem wise when I say, “Well what do YOU think it means?” Students have been able to pull real knowledge and improvement out of that — which knowledge they frequently then teach me. So as long as students had faith that we were really guiding them in the right direction, we were able to move them in the right direction even if we didn’t actually know the path ourselves. Because students could find the way.

But students saw that we couldn’t always get it right, that we didn’t always know the answer: and I think they don’t trust us any more. Combine that with their knowledge, gained from a year so far out in the wilderness that a path forward didn’t exist, and so they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how fast they ran in circles, that they themselves can’t always come up to snuff (This is not true, by the way — but there’s a certain amount of faith, which requires a certain amount of innocence, and these kids don’t have it, for the same reason: they realized that their ruby slippers are just shoes, with no magic at all, and that means they don’t have the ability to make the magic happen. The magic is still there, where it always has been, inside them; but if they don’t believe in it, they’ll never achieve it.), and the constant drumbeat all around in our society these days about how school is maybe not necessary and maybe even bad, how college is maybe not necessary and definitely too expensive — and who could blame them for giving up a little? Or a lot?

So what we have, what we had this year, is a school full of students who maybe don’t see the point of school, and so maybe they don’t do their part. They don’t do their assignments. They don’t pay attention in school. What’s more — what’s made this year much harder — they don’t really care about their grades, or about passing and graduating, no matter what their teachers say. They maybe don’t care as much about what their teachers say, either about the subject matter or about what’s important in life. Because they lost faith in us, and in schools, and in themselves. This is not true of all of them, I have to say; we always have students who are successful, and those show that the school system is not lost, is not entirely broken; but there are a lot of students now who don’t seem to see the point. And as a teacher, there’s nothing harder to deal with than students who don’t see the point.

I would like to apologize to all of my former teachers for what I put them through: because I was one of those kids. I must have been hell to deal with, for a lot of them. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’m getting my just desserts now.

So that has been this past year. It should be no wonder that I had a tough time with it. It should also be no wonder that so many of my colleagues are leaving now, that so many teaching jobs are hard to fill, and getting harder. I don’t mean to excuse my school, to put all the blame for the departures on the bad situation with the students; my school has made the problem much, much worse. But what’s more important is that the schools, and the teachers, and everyone else involved — including themselves — we all have to try not to make the situation worse for the students. Because they don’t have a lot of options. They don’t have a lot of opportunities to learn what they need to learn. If they can’t do it now, they may never get it right. And the more years they go through without succeeding, by their standards or ours, the harder it will get to actually succeed. If we keep failing them, we fail.

And then what?

How bad could it actually get?

Boy, good thing I didn’t write about sad things this week, huh?

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Just Imagine

01/05/202301/05/2023Dusty Leave a comment

I want you to do something for me.

Imagine you were born with only one arm.

Doesn’t matter which one, left or right; for simplicity’s sake, imagine you have your dominant arm, whichever hand you write with. That one is still there, exactly as it is right now, and has always been there. But the other one — in my case, my left arm — was never there. You didn’t lose it in an accident, or to cancer or anything like that; you were just born without it. No stump, just a perfectly smooth shoulder.

Imagine that for a second.

Now, if you were born that way, with only one arm, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Really: there are some things that would be difficult to do, because they require two hands working simultaneously; it would be a bit harder to drive, for instance (though you certainly could do it), and there are a lot of musical instruments you just couldn’t play, like guitar and piano (But if Rick Allen of Def Leppard is any example, you can play drums with one arm all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); and sports would be challenging, especially baseball and basketball and hockey. You could play football, if that were your preference, though not all the positions; and soccer, of course, it wouldn’t even be a disadvantage, really. Other than that? You couldn’t play pattycake, and jumprope would be tough (unless you jumped double-dutch), but you could play tag, or hide-and-seek; and you could play with dolls and Legos. Some video games would be impossible or close to it: but you could play Wii, and handle most driving games; and of course with any strategy or puzzle based games, your one-armedness would mean nothing at all. Most parts of life, in fact, having one arm would mean nothing at all: you could still read and write and do math and science, you could use a computer or a smartphone, you could ride a bike, you could dance in the rain. You could date and fall in love (There might be some people who would reject you for only having one arm, but come on, how ridiculous and messed up is that?), you could marry and have children. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, a car salesperson, a carpenter, a sculptor, a farmer, an engineer, a rocket scientist, a dogwalker. You could live a full and healthy and rich life.

It would be difficult to find clothes that fit you well. People would probably stare. Little kids would make jokes, and tease you. For a lot of people, it would be the first thing they would ask you: it would be a thing that defined your identity, even though to you, it would mean next to nothing. You never had the arm. You don’t miss it. You may sometimes wish you had two arms so you could throw a flowerpot on a pottery wheel, or shoot a longbow; but it would be more comfortable for you to sleep on that side, because you’d never have to figure out where the hell to put your arm so your hand didn’t fall asleep. Mostly, it just wouldn’t matter.

Can you picture that? Try going through your day, in your mind, with only one arm. Some things might be a little tougher — mostly it would just take more time — but really, not that big a deal.

Okay: now imagine, having lived your life with only one arm, you came home today, took a lil nap because it’s Monday and we all deserve a lil nap on Monday; and when you woke up — you had two arms.

Picture that. Not how wonderful it would be to suddenly be able to juggle three chainsaws: but how incredibly brain-meltingly shocking and horrifying it would be to suddenly have a whole other limb where one hadn’t been before. Step out of this whole thought experiment for a second and imagine how it would feel to wake up from your lil nap to find you have three arms, one new one growing out of the middle of your chest. Would you think “Hell yeah, now I can juggle FOUR chainsaws!” or would you think “AAAAAAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING GROWING OUT OF MY CHEST JESUS CHRIST GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!”

I know what I would think. And so I know, for the person who had one arm their whole life, suddenly getting that second arm would be absolutely appalling. Your body would suddenly be different. Your balance would be off. All of your clothes, bought and maybe adjusted or even tailored to fit your one-armed self, would suddenly be different. Everyone who ever knew you would talk about nothing else, pretty much forever, especially if you didn’t have an easy explanation for what happened. If you have any fundamentalist Christian friends, they might decide it was a miracle, a gift of God, and they might try to make an example out of you; conversely, they might think it was the work of the Devil, and shun you, or try to exorcise the demon in your new arm.

Your whole idea of yourself would change. You wouldn’t recognize your body in the mirror. Imagine how weird it would be to keep seeing a hand, fingers moving and gesturing, in the wrong place, attached to the wrong side of your body. Everything you had ever thought, ever said, ever come to a difficult recognition of, about what it is like to be a one-armed person in a generally two-armed world — all of that would go out the window. You’d have to be — normal. But at the same time, not at all yourself. Everybody would think you were normal now, and they would probably congratulate you, and be super happy for you: but the whole time, you would, most likely, feel wrong. Just wrong. Not yourself. Not at home and not comfortable in your own body. You wouldn’t know how to sleep, because you’d have spent your whole life sleeping on the side where there was no arm, and being perfectly, totally comfortable that way: now there’s a fucking arm there, and the whole thing is different. Is wrong.

So here’s the question. If you felt that way, if you felt uncomfortable and strange and weird, all the time, would you grow to hate your new arm? You might. I might. I might not: I might adapt, might adjust; but I might not adapt, either. I might resent my new arm. I might miss being one-armed. And if there were people around me, if I had joined a group of one-armed people, say, and I had to see them sleeping comfortably with their single arms, I might really hate what had happened to me: and I might even grow to hate myself.

If that happened — and I know we’re getting pretty out there, but hold on, we’re close to the end — what if I came to a decision, and went to a doctor, and told that doctor to remove my left arm? To give me back my self-image the way I thought it should be, to make me into the person I knew I really was, no matter how I might look to others who thought I should be happy to have two arms like they do?

Would that be wrong of me to do? Would it be insane, to remove a healthy limb? Would it be butchery, for the doctor to agree?

What if I had really descended into depression and self-loathing? What if I were suicidal, because I had too many limbs, and I couldn’t stand it any more? Then would it be wrong of me to ask, and would it be wrong of the doctor to remove my unwanted body part?

I think it would not. I think it would be my choice, and I think there is nothing at all wrong with being one-armed. I think if someone chooses to be one-armed, then they have every right to make that decision, and to be that person if that’s what they want — particularly if being that person would help them to live a happy life, to have a good self-image and self-esteem, and to keep from harming themselves.

And that’s why I support trans rights.

Now: this may seem offensive. And if this were the actual analogy I were making, it would be; because there actually is a disadvantage in only having one arm, and there is literally no disadvantage, at all, in being transgender, other than how people treat transgender people. There is nothing “wrong” or “missing” in a transgender person, at all. But this is not the analogy I’m making: this is just the warm-up, just the practice round. (Okay, I’m kind of making this analogy: because there are a number of parallels. But it is an imperfect analogy. And it is not the main one I want to make.) Now it’s time to move to the actual topic of conversation here.

You see, there’s a trend I’ve seen in arguing with conservatives (And with assholes, let me point out, because I do my arguing these days on Twitter, which is now like the black hole of assholes [WON’T… MAKE… THAT… JOKE… WORSE… THAN… IT… ALREADY… IS!], pulling them all in until they have more mass than anything else in the solar system), and it has to do with the issue of transgender people getting gender-affirming health care, in two specific areas: one, young trans people getting puberty blockers and then hormone therapy during their adolescence, before they complete puberty; and two, trans people of any age getting surgery.

The trend is this: these folks, both the “compassionate” conservatives (And some of them probably are genuinely compassionate, but not a one of them tries to understand or empathize with what trans people experience, so their compassion is more performative than genuine) and the transphobic assholes, say that they don’t mind people being trans or living how they want: but they don’t agree with people changing their bodies to match their gender identity. They do what conservatives, and compassionate people, and assholes the world over have always done, which is claim to have the right to decide what other people should do, in this case because they are arguing only for young trans people: for children, they will tell you, children who are not mature enough to make decisions about themselves or their lives or their identities.

“What about a young person making decisions in collaboration with their parents, and with loving and competent medical care providers?” I ask these people, over and over again. I get either a simple refusal to accept anyone making a decision these people disagree with — or silence. It speaks volumes, either way. It shows that they are lying when they claim only to be watching out for children, only protecting those too young to protect themselves.

And at some point, I realized why.

They object to surgery, most specifically and frequently, because, they say, nobody should “cut off healthy body parts.” That’s crazy, they say. And for them, maybe it would be — though I would disagree with calling it “crazy,” because our bodies do not define us, we define our bodies: starting with tattoos and piercings and circumcision (Not that I’m getting into THAT conversation, because while I will fight all day with transphobes, intactivists scare the bejeebers out of me) and all kinds of voluntary surgery like cosmetic surgery and permanent birth control like vasectomies and tubal ligations; so honestly, if somebody decided their life would be better with only one foot, then I say mazel tov: go for it. Save all that money on shoes; now every sale is BOGO (though you’d need a friend who only had the other foot, in the same size. [Business idea: ShoeMates, for people who only need one shoe, to share with another person who only needs the other shoe. Call the Tinder people. Whole new meaning for swiping “left” or “right.”]). Make all kinds of jokes about “The shoe’s on the other foot now!” or waiting forever for the other shoe to drop. Joke — or lament — about how you will never again have to do the Hokey Pokey. But okay, let’s say that to someone who likes having two feet, removing a healthy foot would be crazy. Or to stop stigmatizing mental health, let’s just say it would be something they would never, ever do. To them, it would make no sense, and they’d never, ever do it. Just like most of us would never voluntarily choose to remove an arm, particularly not one that we’ve had our whole lives, particularly not a healthy one.

But what they are not considering is how one’s body feels if one is trans.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trans. I have never been trans, and I do not for one second think that I can speak for trans people or try to explain how they feel or how they experience the world or their bodies. I, unlike the conservatives and assholes I’ve been arguing with, would much rather leave ALL people, trans, cis, and everyone else, to make up their own damn minds about who they are and how they feel, and what their bodies should look like, with absolutely no unsolicited input from me at all, ever. But what I want to do, what I think I can do, is try to get some of the people who actually can be compassionate to understand what is wrong with this argument that I’ve been facing. This argument that it is wrong for someone to remove a “healthy” body part just because of how it makes them feel, particularly when they are young (though again, conservatives are not actually protecting young people, as can clearly be shown BECAUSE TRANS PEOPLE ARE AT PARTICULAR RISK OF SUICIDE AND SELF-HARM AND GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE IS PROVEN TO HELP WITH BOTH ISSUES AND IS THEREFORE THE BEST WAY TO PROTECT CHILDREN BUT I GUESS I FUCKING DIGRESS), and therefore, gender-affirming health care should be banned for those under 18 (or under 21, when the mask starts to slip and they reveal that it isn’t about children, it’s about control), particularly hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgery.

“Butchery.” They keep fucking calling it “butchery.” They insist on it. As if we weren’t talking about medical procedures carried out by fully trained and licensed physicians in a modern hospital with all the proper precautions and care and science around it.

It’s because they’re not trying to understand how the trans person feels, what made them decide to pursue hormone therapy or puberty blockers or surgery.

The people arguing against GAHC (Gender Affirming Health Care, and yes I hate the acronym, but it’s a pain to type out over and over and I don’t want to change the name from what it actually is because words matter and my opponents intentionally use the wrong terms) are thinking about what it would be like if they went to the doctor and removed their body parts. Their healthy body parts. Their wanted body parts.

That’s not it.

Here’s the real thought experiment. Ready?

So instead of picturing yourself with one arm, and then suddenly waking up with two, picture yourself as you are now: and then you take your lil Monday nap — and you wake up with the wrong genitalia.

If you are a woman, imagine waking up with no breasts. Not that they have been removed, which would be traumatic enough: they’re just not there. Flat chest, completely. And imagine in between your legs, you suddenly have a penis and testicles. If you are a man, imagine waking up without your penis and testicles. And you have breasts. And — forgive me for this, but it helps make the point — they’re big. That penis and testicles, those breasts, they’re HUGE. Just slapping around, there. Every time you move — and when you move, it’s awkward, because you never had them before so you do it wrong, and it hurts more than a little — they shift, they flop, they smack into something else, into your legs or arms, into your belly, into everything. They are there, and they are unavoidable.

And they are WRONG.

Joking aside: can you picture that? Can you imagine how awful it would be to wake up with the wrong body parts in the wrong places?

Now imagine you go running out and go to your loved ones, and say “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME!?!?”

And imagine if they acted like it was normal. And like you were strange for thinking those body parts were wrong. Maybe they would even be offended.

If I woke up with different body parts, with large lumps where before there had been no large lumps, I would immediately think it was cancer. Or like some kind of horrible infestation or infection, like the aliens had laid eggs in me. It would terrify me. It would be awful.

But to everybody else who wasn’t me, those lumps would be — healthy. Normal. Not only normal, but positive, important, defining.

Think back to when you went through puberty. When your body started changing. Did you have someone — a loved one, or maybe, like me, one of those terrible cheesy sex ed movies from the 70s — tell you that you were perfectly normal? That your body was supposed to change, that it was supposed to look like that? That you were becoming a man, or a woman?

What if you were becoming the wrong one?

Can you imagine how that would feel?

If I had woken up as a young woman, with breasts, with feminine hips (And imagine if I burst into tears, and immediately thought that I was crying like a little girl), my mother would have been ecstatic. I said before, she always wanted a daughter: it would be affirming for her if I had been her little girl. She could have taught me everything she knows about being a woman, as she understands it — and my mom knows a lot. She cooks. She knits. She sews. She is a nurse. She worked for decades with post-partum mothers and children with complications, so she can handle ANYTHING to do with babies. And my mom is a very feminine woman, in the classic stereotypical sense: she sings, she dances, she wears bright colors and pretty dresses. She would have LOVED to take me under her wing and show me how to dress and how to act with my feminine body. How to sing with my high feminine voice. How to live with my menstruation, and what it all meant for my future as a mother.

But if I was me — and in my mind I have always been male — all of that would be horrifying. Particularly because I would know that refusing to be the girl my mom wanted me to be would break her heart. But I’ll tell you right now: even apart from the horror of finding my body was not the body I wanted or expected it to be, the very thought of pregnancy and childbirth is the most horrifying thing I can imagine. It has always given me the heebie-jeebies in a way and to an extent that I can’t explain. I’m terrified of all of it.

And if I were, in my mother’s eyes, a girl, and she started talking about how lucky I was that I would get to look pretty in dresses, and eventually get married to a man (Ew) and have babies?

Aw, HELL no.

This is not how it feels to be trans. Puberty does not happen overnight, and doesn’t change a familiar, known, comfortable body into an entirely different body. But puberty does feel sudden, because you don’t notice the changes until you do: and then suddenly it feels like everything has changed. And for someone who is trans, that change might feel — wrong. And every day it continues unchecked, it gets worse: it gets wronger. But if you go to someone for comfort, for understanding, they will most likely not sympathize with your feeling: they will most likely tell you that your feelings are wrong, that your understanding of yourself is wrong, that your body is right, and you should just try to accept it. They might even get offended: and insist that the body, and the identity that they associate with it, is a good thing, a thing you should be happy about and proud of.

Picture that: you, as a man, wake up with breasts, and your loved ones say “But you’re such a pretty girl!” You, as a woman, wake up with a penis and testicles, and your loved ones say, “Come on, stop crying, BE A MAN! Show some BALLS!” But you are not a man. You do not want balls.

That’s the point. Don’t imagine GAHC as removing your body parts, healthy, wanted body parts: imagine if you had body parts you DID NOT want. Body parts that DID NOT belong on your body. They might look healthy to everyone else, but to you, they are more like tumors. More like infections, or infestations. They are wrong. They do not belong there. And worst of all, those body parts redefine you, in everyone else’s eyes, as something you are not. As something you do not want to be.

Wouldn’t you want them removed?

Wouldn’t you want to have the right body, the body you know, the body that you belong in?

What wouldn’t you do to get that body back?

That’s how we should think of GAHC. It’s not changing someone from what they should be into what they should not be: it is AFFIRMING a person’s body, making it look like what that person knows it should look like, what it should feel like. Making it into the right body. And, not least important, changing the way everyone else responds to that person and their body, so that they can live the way they know they should live.

I know that I have done this badly. I apologize for that. I know I’ve said this in a terrible cringey way, and I’ve probably been insulting. I do not mean to be. I just want people who think that GAHC, particularly gender affirming surgery, is removing “healthy” body parts, to understand that it is not what conservatives and assholes say it is. It isn’t about taking your body, that you belong in, and making it different; it is about taking a body that is already wrong — and making it right.

That’s the point. I hope, if I have said everything here crudely and stupidly, that I have at least helped make it more clear that most cis people think of GAHC in entirely the wrong way: we think about it like ourselves. But we never think about it as it is for trans people.

We should stop that.

Hey, you know what we should do?

Listen to the people in question tell us, themselves, what they need, what they want, what is right for them. And then we should support them so they can have that, the same way of life that most of us enjoy without ever recognizing how easy it is for us to live as ourselves.

Imagine that.

Take My Penis, Please

24/04/2023Dusty 2 Comments

Warning: I’m not sure how offensive this is going to get. Can it get more offensive than my title? you may ask. Of course it can. I don’t know how far I will go. I am not intending to offend everyone who is capable of being offended; there is a specific group of people that I intend to be maximally offensive to, but they will never care at all what I say, and the rest of you fine people are not targeted for intentional offense. I suppose the issue is more that this post might make you feel — kinda squidgy. Uncomfortable, like. For that, I’m sorry, but I can’t write anything other than this right now. I won’t. This is the one for now, until I finish this. Then I’ll go back to less squidgy things. Promise.

I mean — if I can.

I am a white male. I am, more specifically, a cis/het white male American. If any of those terms confuse you, allow me to explain: American should mean I was born in any of 35 countries or 13 territories in the North and South American continents or in the Caribbean; but because I was born on the pushiest, grabbiest, most narcissistic nation in the Americas if not on the planet, it only means that I was born in the United States. And I was: in the Northeast, in the state of New York, to be precise. “White” means nothing: we should probably switch to blanco, the Spanish version of the color name, because the “blank” cognate is much more appropriate than “Caucasian,” the usual, err, technical term for my race and ethnicity. Because “Caucasian” makes no sense. To find any of my ancestors who were anywhere near the Caucasus region (The hunk of land between the Black and Caspian Seas, which is mostly Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia.), you’d have to go back so far in my family tree that it wouldn’t be recognizable as my family tree. My race is, basically, “Nothing specific,” and my ethnicity is “More of the same.” I suppose I am European; what I know of my national heritages includes Welsh, English, Scottish, German, and French; my family name is most probably derived from a Saxon word that means “Defender of the Home,” though my grandfather theorized it came from “Dall’Umpre,” from Umpre, which he thought was an area of Spain where the Basque people lived. That’s way more interesting than my family heritage actually is, though. I’m just white. Moving on.

The “cis/het” is the most recent addition to my descriptors; I will add that I use the pronouns “He/him,” because I, unlike a whole bunch of goddamn idiots on the internet, am not upset nor offended by the use of pronouns. I speak English, I read and write English; I understand the necessity of pronouns in my language. If you don’t, allow me to present English without pronouns: here is the same paragraph I am finishing up now, without any pronouns. Ready?

The “cis/het” is the most recent addition to Dusty’s descriptors; Dusty will add that Dusty uses the pronouns “singular male signifier subjective case/singular male signifier objective case,” because Dusty, unlike a whole bunch of goddamn idiots on the internet, is not upset nor offended by the use of pronouns. Dusty speaks English, Dusty reads and writes English; Dusty understands the necessity of pronouns in Dusty’s language. If the audience reading this paragraph doesn’t, allow Dusty to present English without pronouns: here is the same paragraph Dusty is finishing up now, without any pronouns.

Isn’t that fun? Sorry: Isn’t the activity Dusty just completed fun?

Of course not. It’s garbage. Everything is better with good pronoun use. Everybody should, therefore, embrace the appropriate use of pronouns. Which means respecting what other people want you to use in reference to them. And which also means including your preferred pronouns in your self-description/introduction when you can, so we all can get used to asking about and respecting people’s preferred pronouns. I know that it may feel strange, especially to those of us who had the habit beaten out of us, to use singular “they,” or to use a pronoun that doesn’t obviously match a person’s appearance, or to use one of the new pronouns like xe/xem/xer [Those are pronounced “zee/zem/zurr”, and are, in order, subjective, objective, and possessive: Xe wanted a ride on xer pony, so we gave xem a turn.]; but suck it up. Practice a little bit, don’t feel bad when you unintentionally make a mistake; just do your best, and you’ll get used to it. My first trans student — pardon me; I had trans students whom I did not know were trans students at the time they were in my classes — my first out trans student used pronouns I wouldn’t have associated with him, based on my assumptions about his appearance, and I struggled with it more than once; but over the four years I knew him, I stopped making the mistake, and he never got mad at me about it. Partly because I never said anything like “This is hard and I’m tired of it, why can’t I just call you ______?” The only expectation, the only burden being asked of us is, “Don’t be an asshole.” Which is too much for some, I know, but don’t let them influence you: you don’t have to be an asshole. So don’t.

“Cis/het” means that I am cisgender, which is the opposite of transgender, meaning I identify as the gender to which I was assigned at birth, and which matches the stereotypical assumptions based on my appearance, at least most of the time — I had very long, very pretty hair for a long time, and I was frequently mistaken for a woman, which I did and do find flattering. Because the “het” part means I am heterosexual, so I am attracted to members of the opposite gender from myself, in this case women; calling me a woman means I would be, in my eyes, far more attractive than most men. (I say “most” because there are some very pretty men out there.)

Why am I saying all of this when most of you certainly already know this? Two reasons: one, it’s difficult to ask about all this stuff, and I know some people are still confused; it took me quite a while to remember what “cis” meant. And it’s difficult to ask for clarification because the issue seems very sensitive, and it often is: but remember, the only expectation is, Don’t be an asshole. I constantly ask my students to explain what their slang and lingo means, and they think it’s cute that I don’t understand. They love teaching me, even though they cringe, visibly, when I use the slang myself. You know why? Because I’m not an asshole. (I’m based, fam. frfr.) And also because I’m not an asshole, I very much want to normalize this entire topic: I want everyone to be comfortable talking about preferred pronouns, and transgender and cisgender people, and heterosexuality and homosexuality and bisexuality and pansexuality and asexuality, and everything in the queer world, in general. Because this is the queer world. Right here. Right now. We all live in it. There is no “normal.” There’s just — people. All of us. And all of us need to not be assholes: and that is the only expectation that matters.

The second reason I am talking about all of this is because there are, apparently, too many people in this country who don’t understand, or who misunderstand, and I assume that some of my friends and loved ones and my beloved readers are included in that group. That is not an insult: none of you are assholes. (Because assholes wouldn’t read what I write every week. I don’t hang out with assholes.) But some of you are uncertain, or confused, or misinformed, I assume. So I want to clarify. I want to help, and I believe that understanding reduces tension, and there is too much goddamn tension in this country right now. (Please also note: I am not an expert in this, and there is stuff I don’t know and stuff I get wrong. This is just what I do know, presented in the hopes that it will be helpful to some.)

So here I go: not talking about my penis.

The last word I used to describe myself is “male.” I identify as male. I think of myself as a man, which is not the same thing as being male: when I was young, I was male, but I was only a boy; when I was an adolescent, I was male, but I was an asshole. And in this whole list, the only one that has anything to do with my genitalia is the last one: because the main reason why I was an asshole when I was a teenager was because I had a penis, and the usual teenage sex drive, and the common total lack of morals or empathy where that sex drive was concerned. Too much focus on the penis makes one less of a man, I have found.

That’s why I picked the title. Because honestly? I don’t need it. I don’t care enough about it, and it drives me fucking nuts that there are so many goddamn people who believe that the existence of a penis attached to my body is somehow the most important defining characteristic when it comes to my gender and sex; so I’m sick of it. Take it. Give it to someone who wants it. I wish them well of it.

I wrote last week about being proud, and what it means to be proud. I am proud of being a man. I believe that is something I have accomplished over the years — though I will immediately and repeatedly say I didn’t do it all by myself. But I am not proud of my penis. My penis did not make me a man. My penis did even make me male: because the category of “male,” biologically speaking, means “of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.” [Also, writing this I realize that I may not be a male, because I have not to my knowledge ever produced offspring. So do my testicles actually produce spermatozoa? Maybe not.] Which means that my testicles made me male, and more generally, my XY chromosome structure (So far as I know. As I have never had my genes examined, I may not be chromosomally male, any more than spermatozoically male. That’s not a word.). Know how I know that my penis didn’t make me male? Because if I lost my penis in an accident, nobody would identify me as anything other than a cis male: because most people (Obviously no longer including Republican lawmakers, who are trying to pass bills requiring genital examinations as a prerequisite for sports. For fucking sports.) do not check my penis before deciding that I am a male. So its lack would go unnoticed in the face of secondary characteristics: I would still have facial hair and body hair in a “masculine” pattern, and I would still have a relatively deep voice, and I would have the same shoulders and hips, hands and feet and facial structure, and I would still be 5’10”. Those things, amusingly, are much more to do with my heritage, with my race and ethnicity, than with my gender or sex, because I am squarely in the average for most adult white people. Those things are also, at this point, not dependent on my testicles; I could lose those in an accident (And seriously, take ’em. Useless lumps. Itch and sweat and get in the way. And give me cancer scares. [Also, PSA to testicle-havers: do self-exams in the shower. Get used to how your testes are shaped, because you are looking for changes as a sign of potential problem.] Totally pointless, and very annoying.), or have them removed if they became cancerous, and still keep most of the same traits that would make people identify me as male; the ones that might fade would be easily recovered with some simple hormone treatments. Which many of my fellow men will get voluntarily as they get older, even without losing their testicles. And that won’t make them men, either, just as the natural decrease of testosterone doesn’t make one not a man. Regardless of what all those ads on the radio and the spam emails want me to believe.

You know what else didn’t make me a man? Having sex. I know because I had sex when I was still — I don’t want to say “a boy,” because that takes this into weird[er] places; I was between about 15 and 17 when I first had sex, so not a boy: but I was sure as hell not a man. I was an adolescent. I was immature. I was selfish. I was, as I said above, an asshole. And, again, not having sex would not make me not a man: if I lived the rest of my life as a celibate, I would still be a celibate man, and everyone would see me as a man, with no idea of what my sex life was or was not like. The vast majority of you, thankfully, not caring, and wanting to know nothing about it, as I don’t want to discuss it. Further, having children does not make you a man, because I don’t, but I am. (Again, and this still makes me chuckle, the ability to produce sperm that can father children apparently does make you male, which means I might not be male. Well, Mom always wanted a daughter.)

Being aggressive does not make you a man: I am an introvert, and I hate and fear and dread confrontation of all kinds. I can do it, and I have when it is necessary; but I hate it. Being violent does not make you a man: I have never committed an act of violence, never been in a fight, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse. (Killing a mouse does not make you a man. Elsewise cats would be men. Though of course they don’t want to be men: cats don’t want to be anything other than cats. Why would you? Once you’ve reached the peak, you don’t come down if you don’t have to.) Loving sports, especially blood sports, does not make you a man; I don’t care for most sports, but the ones I do like are generally skill and grace sports, like gymnastics and skateboarding.

We’ll come back to sports. Because there are a whoooooole bunch of assholes focusing almost exclusively on sports these days, in relation to this issue.

I think to be a man means, in part, not being an asshole. And I hate that, not only do millions of people disagree with that, but millions of people think the opposite: that being an asshole makes you more of a man. It does not. It just makes you an asshole.

And here’s the point: believing and affirming that trans men are not men, or that trans women are still men (or confused men, or “biological men”) makes you an asshole. Not a man. Not a rational person. Not a defender of women, or of people in general. It does not mean you adhere to science and accept objective reality. It means you are an asshole. Because you are helping to oppress and potentially destroy the lives of thousands upon thousands — millions, more likely — of trans people. Men don’t oppress and destroy innocent people. Monsters do that.

So okay, out of all of these things that do not make one a man — including a penis and testicles — what does make one a man?

Well that’s the thing: it changes, doesn’t it? It depends on context. I know that’s an annoying answer (This is why my students hate English sometimes, and prefer math, where there are definite answers. It’s easier that way. But please remember that life is poetry, not geometry.), but it’s the only one, and we know it. I’ve been giving some examples of the classic standards by which we define men, along with counterexamples that show those standards are not actually definitive: appearance does not make one a man, genitalia does not make one a man, fatherhood does not make one a man (Though it sure would be nice if more men were fathers and more fathers were men — though also, more fathers should be women and more women should be fathers. By which I only mean that shitty people shouldn’t be parents, and people who are parents shouldn’t be shitty people.). The only answer that actually fits all circumstances is this: I make myself a man. By deciding that I should act like one, according to my definition of a man’s behavior, and then doing it.

This is a dangerous answer, though. Because if I happen to think that being a Nazi and slaughtering millions of innocent people is what would make me a man, and I did that, then by my definition I would be a man; and I think it’s clear that would make me a monster, not a man. So there have to be some real standards of manhood, for the idea of manhood to have any meaning or value; and since, as I said, I am proud of being a man, I think we should retain the idea of manhood and manliness. I just really, really need us not to focus that idea on the genitalia. And preferably without any gender distinctions, because I think anyone can be a man who wants to identify themselves that way. Anyone who shows the qualities I define as manly qualities will absolutely be welcome to be called a man by me, if you want me to.

So what does manhood mean? First, it means being responsible, because being a man is about being an adult. Children are not men. Nor are they women: they are children. For me, the major difference between childhood and adulthood is responsibility. Responsibility means knowing what is needed, and then being strong and using that strength to do what is needed. Please note that this is not exclusive to men, because women also must be responsible and adult in order to be women — and also, children can be responsible and even adult in some ways, while still being children. The difference there is that children who must be adult are being harmed by that: asking adulthood of children is asking too much, and is harmful even if the kid can handle it; it’s still bad to make kids grow up too fast. Adults are those for whom responsibility doesn’t harm, it actually helps. I feel better when I am responsible, when I do my work, when I do what is necessary. I don’t like it, a lot of the time; but I feel better for it. Another aspect of adulthood which is necessary for manhood (and also for womanhood) is control: self-control, that is. Children do not have good self-control, but that is forgivable in children; it is less so in adults, in men and women. (Though I will note that everyone can be irresponsible from time to time, and also can give up self-control and let loose, sometimes. Just not all the time. Not when it matters. And to be an adult, you have to know when it matters.)

I will also say that one of the toughest kinds of self-control to have is the ability to keep yourself from controlling others. It is also, however, one of the most important. I have been struggling lately, because one of my classes needs to learn that it is important for them to pay attention to the class when I am teaching it; the way I am teaching them that is by not teaching them for a time, and letting them teach themselves. And they are doing a terrible job. And it is so damn hard for me not to stand up and take the class over and make them all learn the way they should be learning: but I need to not control them, I need them to learn. So I’m controlling myself, and letting them learn this vital lesson. It’s hard. But I’m doing it. Because I am a man. Men control themselves. (Also: please note, therefore, that rapists are not men. They are monsters. And any definition that allows rapists to be fully included in the ranks of men is a shit definition. Remember that when we talk about penises as man-defining.)

So that’s what distinguishes men from boys, from children. What distinguishes men from women?

As I said, it’s unclear: it changes. It depends on context. There is not a single trait of manhood that I could name that should not also be part of womanhood. Which is why transphobic bigots have to rely on the one clearly distinct difference in their eyes: genitalia. Ask them about intersex people (Intersex people are those who have more than one of the traits for male and female biological sex — so both ovaries and testicles, for instance. There is a wide range of people with a wide range of traits, and the term is non-exclusionary. Read more here. Note, for instance, androgen insensitivity syndrome, which can affect people with XY chromosomes and can, in some cases, mean that their cells reject male-trait inducing hormones entirely: and they will be phenologically [Is that a word? Should it be “phenotypically?”] indistinguishable from someone with a stereotypically female phenotype), or about men who lose their genitalia, and they will dodge the question. Every time. “Intersex people are so rare,” they will say. “I’m talking about MOST people.” Sure: most of the time “shit” means excrement; but sometimes (say, on 4/20) one might want to go out and buy some “good shit,” and would be VERY upset if someone sold them a baggie of excrement for $50. If you insist that “shit” only be used, ever, for the most common cases, you are losing some very important uses of the word — and your definition, therefore, is shit. A shit definition of shit. So too with simple definitions of “man” and “woman.”

I think in our society most people see the major distinction as being one between strength and kindness. Most people in our society see strong qualities as men’s qualities, and kind qualities as women’s qualities. People who are not assholes, of course, understand that everyone should be kind and everyone must be strong; but if there is a meaning to gender at all (And by the way, I’m totally cool with dispensing with gender entirely: I’m a human and a person much more than I am a man. I said I was proud of being a man, but I am really proud of being strong and responsible and kind.), I think it lands there. I think that I am a strong person, and my accomplishments that have required strength are the ones I am proud of, as a man. I have developed greater strength over time, and I am proud of that; though I think there is an upper limit (like, it’s not true that the stronger I get, the manlier I get, ad infinitum: if I am twice as strong as I used to be, I’m not two men [though I might like just repeating the syllable in one word, like I could go from being a man to being a manman, and then a manmanman].), I do think there is a general area where having enough strength to get through something — and often, to help someone else get through something — distinguishes one as a man from a child, because a child would need to take strength from someone else, where a man would provide strength to someone else who needed it. And a child who got through something requiring strength just on their own is seen as — grown up.

But here’s the thing: I may be a man because I am strong — but I am a good man because I am kind. So let’s not pretend that either virtue is exclusive, or disallowed to anyone in any category. Let’s not be assholes. Which category certainly includes a subset of both men and women. But recognize, again, that there are no traits that are exclusively men’s traits, and no traits that are exclusively women’s traits.

Which is why the debate over trans rights is so goddamn stupid. They have to focus on the only thing that they can point to as exclusively male: my penis. And ignore all the exceptions to that oversimplified definition. Most particularly, they have to ignore that the logical result of that argument is this: if someone who wasn’t born with a penis acquired a penis, then they would, by the anti-trans bigot’s own definition, become a man. This is why the more intelligent anti-trans bigots focus instead on chromosomes: which is just as reasonable and intelligent as distinguishing between people based on their skin color. You can describe someone with their chromosomes, if you can know their genes; but you can’t define them that way. Also, if you look at the intersex links I put above, you will find that there are people with chromosomes that just don’t fit into either category. “But those cases are so rare,” they say. “I’m talking about most people.”

You know what’s amazing about these people, and these arguments? That they then make the exact opposite point by claiming that trans athletes are a threat to sports. To women’s sports, of course — they never talk about trans men in men’s sports. (Someday a trans man is going to join a men’s gymnastics team, and he’s going to wipe the fucking floor with those dudes. But anyway.) Do you know how many trans athletes there are competing at the collegiate level in this country? In this nation of 330,000,000 people or more?

36. 36 trans athletes. (Source)

Out of 520,000 NCAA athletes, nationwide. (Source)

It is impossible to get a complete count of the number of trans athletes, of course, because not all of them are out; but whatever count you come up with, it is vanishingly small. So if you’re going to ignore intersex people and insist there are only two biological sexes, then you should bloody well ignore the tiny percentage of trans athletes and just let people compete. Actually, you should just let people compete even if there are millions of trans athletes: because people who want to compete should be allowed to compete. I wrote once before about how biological differences are sometimes accepted and sometimes not in sports, and it’s earth-shatteringly stupid to say that Usain Bolt has a fair advantage and Caster Semenya has an unfair advantage because Bolt has a penis and Semenya does not. Protecting women’s sports from trans athletes only makes sense if you pretend that trans women are not women: and they are. More importantly, why are we so goddamn concerned with some people winning sports and other people losing? Aren’t they still sports if you lose?

Or did all of my PE teachers lie to me?

Sports are supposed to be fun. I keep hearing they’re not about winning, they’re about sportsmanship and competing and building team spirit and so on; but apparently not so to Republican legislatures around this country, and all the assholes on Twitter, who are fucking up sports, and fucking up the lives of young people, because they hate and fear trans people. The assholes who constantly use videos and photos of trans adults to mock the idea that someone can be trans: and yet nobody speaks of all the men in the world who look damn “feminine,” and all the women in the world who look damn “masculine.” They only attack trans people, which shows how absurd their bigotry is: exactly like racism, exactly like thinking someone is less because of the color of their skin, but ignoring when some “White” people have darker skin than some “Black” people. Or more orange skin than any human anywhere. Because it’s not actually about appearance: it’s about hating the idea of trans people. They see trans people as toxic, as dangerous; as able to spread their “condition” (variously called an illness, a delusion, and every other shitty word that assholes use to insult other people unfairly) to others like a contagion.

That’s why all the arguments about people “turning” children trans, of trans kids being “peer pressured” into seeking gender-confirming medical care like puberty blockers or hormone treatments or even surgery. Look: I am a high school teacher. I have trans students, and I have had several trans students in the past. I did not know all the trans students I had in the past, because not all of them were out; until the last decade, none of them were out, so far as I know — but of course, I don’t know if any of my earlier students were trans and I never knew it, because they might have been visibly indistinguishable from other people of their identified gender; and some of them may have been transitioning without me knowing about it.

Know how much that affected me, or my relationship to them as students?

Neither do I, because I don’t know who or how many there may have been. So I’m going to have to say the impact of their being trans was — none. No impact. Didn’t matter in the least. As with the former students who have come out as trans, or queer, or genderfluid, or anything else under the sun: none of my relationships have been affected by their gender identity. Which is as it should be.

But those people themselves have been sometimes greatly affected by their gender identity. In every single case that I know of, these young people have been happier when they have been accepted as who they are, as people who have been able to find their way to live their truth, to define themselves according to their own standards. As I have been doing for myself in this blog, because I have a right to: and not because I have a penis. Those young people have struggled mainly because they have had people who denied their self-identification, people who told them they were wrong for being who they are, for knowing who they are, and for defining themselves, as we all not only have the right to do, but the responsibility to do, the obligation to do. And then, as reasonable human beings should, the rest of us are responsible for accepting what other people determine their own identity to be. As I have accepted with my trans students, which is why I have never had any trouble with them being trans. Nor will I ever: beyond sometimes slipping up with names and pronouns. But I’m not an asshole, so I do my best, and I always accept people for who they tell me they are. I don’t question or argue with it. Because it’s not up to me, and I don’t try to control other people’s choices, because I am a man, and I am not an asshole.

And in no case, not one case of any student I have ever had, or ever will have, has genitalia been anywhere in the consideration.

Right! See how horrible that is? The very idea of an English teacher judging a student by genitalia? SO WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYONE DO IT, EVER??? How can anyone rationally decide to pass a law requiring genital examinations as a prerequisite for participation on a specific sports team? How can that happen? What kind of insanity is that? It’s as ridiculous as me asking all of you to read this essay I titled with a consideration of my genitalia. Don’t nobody want that. (Actually, the anti-trans bills are unquestionably worse than my title for this piece. But I still feel guilty for talking about my piece in this piece. Kinda.)

By the same token, taken one small step further: we don’t actually judge anyone’s identity by secondary sexual characteristics, not in terms of identity. Nobody thinks a boy with a high voice is not a boy. Nobody thinks a girl with a flat chest is not a girl. Nobody (sorry, guys) thinks that a teenager with a sad peachfuzz mustache is actually a man. But also, I have students with more facial hair than I will ever grow: but I still don’t think of them as more manly than me. Because I am an adult, and they are not, however thick and luxurious their face-locks. Appearances don’t matter. Not for who people are.

So.

If someone wants to be called by a different name, call them that. (Definitely don’t ever be the person who uses only the name on the attendance sheet: my wife’s birth name was Anthony. Because her dad was a prick who wanted a son, not because she is not a woman. On a much less controversial note, my official name is Theoden, but I prefer to be called just Dusty. Partly because most people can’t pronounce Theoden correctly.) And because pronouns are not at all more meaningful than names, if they want you to use different pronouns, then use the different goddamn pronouns. Mistakes are fine, but do your best, and don’t be an asshole. (Unless you identify as an asshole, in which case, fuck you. And don’t ever make an “I identify as…” joke. They’re not funny.) Don’t judge someone by their appearance. Yes, someone is perfectly able and permitted to be a trans man or boy and wear dresses and long hair, as someone is perfectly allowed to be a cis male and wear dresses and long hair. Yes, someone can be a trans woman or girl and have facial hair. If you think it doesn’t look right, nobody cares what you think. It’s not up to you. If someone changes their name or identity or preferred pronouns several times, just try to keep up: and expect to make mistakes, and expect those mistakes not to matter, so long as you are being kind. Don’t question why they changed; it’s not up to you. Don’t say they’d be happier if they didn’t change, or you liked them better before; it’s not up to you. Your only job is to try not to be an asshole.

And one last thing. I wanted to write this blog because I heard about recent polls that show that the public view of trans people in this country is, in my opinion, going in the wrong direction. This research from Pew shows that the majority of Americans believe people’s sex is only what is assigned at birth (and that majority has grown over the last six years), and that the majority of Americans think that trans athletes should not be allowed to compete on teams that match their gender identity, and that almost half of Americans think that medical treatments should be limited for trans youth under 18.

So let me be clear. Gender is not determined by sex. Sex is not determined by chromosomes. And neither is set in stone and immutable. That being the case, who is the one person most likely to know best what their gender identity is? Themselves. (Notice the singular “they” there. And if you wanted me to write “Him/herself,” then get over it.) We know ourselves better than anyone else knows us. And sure, not all of us know ourselves very well; I have been confused about how much of myself I have discovered just in the last few years, and I’m 48 years old. So it’s reasonable to think that young people who think they may be trans may be unclear, or uncertain — just as some cis people are unclear or uncertain about who they are, for countless reasons, including the possibility that they may actually be trans, and not know it, or not be able to accept it.

In that case, you know who are the best people to help the young person figure out what their real self, their true identity is? It’s not reactionary, transphobic, attention-seeking Republican lawmakers, that’s for goddamn sure. No: it is the young person’s family, and their caring medical professionals. And of course some people have fucked up families, who shouldn’t be allowed to influence their children’s choices: but don’t you think that’s true in whatever way the family is fucked up? Macaulay Culkin’s family should not have been allowed to steal all his money. Brittney Spears’s father should never have been granted conservatorship over her. Abusive parents should not be allowed to abuse their children. But if you think that trans youth are only trans because their parents, or their friends, or their teachers, or their social media, tell them they should be trans, then you’re either an asshole, or an idiot. The world tells trans people they should not exist: nobody tells cis people they should be trans. Nobody chooses to be trans, just as nobody chooses to be white: some of us just are. The world should allow us to be who and what we are, so long as we don’t cause any harm. And trans kids don’t harm anyone by being trans. Or by playing on sports teams. Or by receiving gender affirming care, which is often critically important to prevent harm being done to the one person most likely to be hurt by a trans kid: themselves.

And if it helps, if the young trans person who told me that he wants a penis wants mine, he can have it. Take it. Please.

But it’s still not going to make you a man.

You’ve already done that, sir: because you are strong, and you are kind.

Now if only everybody else could be the same.

That Costs HOW MUCH??

26/03/202326/03/2023Dusty Leave a comment

A Twitterer (Tweeter? Just Twit?) I follow posted an observation about English:

“Price” and “Worth” mean the same thing, yet “Priceless” and “Worthless” are opposites.

They followed this with the usual metatags, you know, #DeepThought, #Philosophizin, #MindBlown, the identifiers that are much more “tag” than “meta,” in the sense that they are markers used to track things, clunky lumps sutured to one’s ear out in the wild; or perhaps they are a children’s game that seems designed to frustrate all the players but one. But just as those tags are really more prosaic, more obvious, and more concrete and direct than they are meta, so this conundrum of English is not that difficult to untangle: it’s a paradox like any other in English, meaning it is only contradictory, only interesting, if seen from one particular angle. Change the angle and it becomes clear. The answer, I posted in a reply to this Twitterer, is that “price” and “worth” are not actually the same thing at all: “worth” is something’s inherent value, its qualities that make it precious and/or coveted; and “price” is a measurement of what someone is willing to pay to acquire that value. So “worth” is set by the thing itself, and by the perceptions of the owner or coveter; “price” is set by the market, and determined much more by one’s available assets and one’s eagerness to possess: the depth of one’s coveting, that is. “Worth” is internal (though externally perceived), and “Price” is external (Though to some extent internally determined). In recognition of this, we use the antonyms, priceless and worthless, to name two different qualities: one describes an object you would never sell, and the other describes an object you would never buy.

This is why I don’t have more followers on Twitter. Because my posts, while free for all, are not valued by many, and are not coveted by any. So I don’t earn much of the modern currency of social media: attention. I could, of course; I could post nothing but #HotTakes, and maybe some #FunnyJokes, and throw some #Shade at some #Influencer; that would earn me more currency, more attention, and that could eventually translate into value for me: especially insofar as I would be able to sell copies of my books, and raise my #Profile by #EngagementFarming — and I don’t mean to mock or belittle the people who do that, because they do, as I said, find value in it: usually through price, because they market their products successfully to their circle of engaged followers, but sometimes through genuine connections made with people who reach out to them personally and build relationships, which I would consider worthwhile. Either way, more power to them, whether they draw in attention currency through the worth of what they create, or through using the market to raise the price (The key to engagement farming is not only to capture attention, it is too demand attention and receive it; since attention is the currency of the social media market, when an engagement farmer [If you’re unfamiliar with the term, this means one of those accounts that posts things intentionally for likes and follows and responses of any kind: either platitudes or intentional irritation are the most common paths] demands more of your attention and receives it, they are raising the price of their product, and you, the consumer, are paying it.) of what they offer. Either way, it is creating value, and it’s a fine thing.

But it’s not my thing. I’m bad at price. You can tell because I am a fantasy author, married to an artist, and both of us are public school teachers: nowhere in there did we find a way to get rich. And we’re not, subsequently. The things I do with my time have a low price: at least partly because I love doing them. But that doesn’t mean, at all, that they have a low worth: my writing, my wife’s art, and both of our teaching, are extremely worthy pursuits, and ones that are generally valued in our society: just not by the market. This is because markets value scarcity, not worth. Which is why, again, the comparison of “price” and “worth” is not good: not only are they not equal, but they are almost unrelated in the modern world.

Not entirely: I make a living, a decent living, through teaching, and I have for more than 20 years; this last week, I went to speak to my principal about something, and as I was leaving after saying my piece, he stopped me because he wanted to ask why I hadn’t signed my contract for next year: he wanted to know if there was a problem, or if, in the worst case scenario for him, I hadn’t signed it because I was leaving. I am not leaving, I assured him: I had actually just signed the contract the day before, he just hadn’t seen the notice yet. (I hadn’t signed it earlier not because I refused to sign it, but because when I looked at the online document awaiting my signature, it said that the contract start date was — my salary. I don’t know when “63,810” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this coming August, which is when I have to start teaching, so I thought I should double check that the contract was correct before I signed it. But when I went back to check again, it had resolved, and the correct start date was there, so I signed it. Or at least I typed my name into the text box and clicked on the blue button, a process that will never not be weird to me. At any rate, on hearing that I had signed and would be returning, my principal literally did this:

So that tells me my work has worth. Last week I Twitterered that I was struggling, on evening; I felt like my students didn’t value my teaching, and I didn’t want to stand in front of them and be ignored; it feels not only like a waste of my time and a waste of their opportunity, but also, it’s just damn insulting: first because my teaching is valuable, whether students recognize it or not; and second because their idea of value is so skewed that they would rather watch a video of someone falling down than listen to me teach them about reading and writing and literature. But one of my former students replied that I was her favorite teacher, the one who had the greatest impact on her; that I was damn good at teaching and she would always be grateful that she had been in my class. That, even more than my principal, tells me that my work has worth.

But it is not valued in our society as much as it is worth: and that is why my price is low, compared to, say, an engineer or a doctor or a professional athlete. When people talk about the teacher shortage, and how to fix it, this is how: we have to value teachers according to their worth; not according to their price. Teachers should not be paid at what the market will bear: partly because the market has intentionally been jiggered to keep all wages artificially low; and partly because teachers are generally passionate about our work, and therefore we are willing to do more work than we are paid to do. So we get exploited as workers, and we get exploited as people who care about children.

And then they call us indoctrinators. And fucking groomers.

And you wonder why there’s a teacher shortage.

There’s another issue going on today in our society regarding a disparity between value and worth; it’s inflation. Actually, it’s consumerism in general, but we’re seeing the making of the sausage right now, in a way we haven’t really seen for a long time: there’s been inflation, but not this much and not this quickly.

Inflation occurs when the worth of something is greater than its price: sometimes because of supply and demand, sometimes because of changes and innovation, but for whatever reason, if something is worth more than we are paying for it, as sure as sunshine in summer, that price is going to go up, until the price is equal to the value: which is generally above the worth. (By the way: I’m definitely not using the economics terms for these things correctly; but then, I’m not a trained economist. You can tell because I’m not evil.[#FMF]) It’s above the worth because we have always equated price with value: whenever something is expensive, we think it is a good thing, surely a better thing that that cheap knockoff, or that discount brand, or — God forbid — that used version. And so because expensive things automatically have more value, in order to increase both sales and profits, we mark up the high price even more: that draws more people in, and more people want to pay more for something they have to pay more for, even though it has no more value than it would if it were priced more reasonably. This is why there is premium gasoline. Or gasoline at all, for that matter.

The problem with inflation right now is that it is no longer being driven by the worth of the products being more than their price. It was initially: because during the pandemic, people needed something that could cheer us up. We also needed to adapt to our new circumstances. And we needed to stop putting things off for later, because we didn’t know if we would have a later. All of these things increased demand, which also increases the worth of something: if I need it more now than I would have last year, because I’m having an ongoing existential crisis right now, then the thing that will cheer my up out of my crisis is more valuable now than it would have been before, because it will have a better and more powerful impact on me. The same with equipment that will allow me to work from home, in a time when people are losing their jobs and their businesses left and right: I am more desperate to keep my job, and so I am more desperate for what I need to do my job in these trying times. In addition, as people lost jobs and businesses closed, the supply chain for our goods and services simply disintegrated. Which increased the scarcity of things we wanted just as we started really desperately wanting them. And although scarcity doesn’t actually increase worth, it does increase price, because people grow more desperate to get something they want when that thing is hard to get. (I suppose in some way it increases worth because if we want something very rare and we get it, then our satisfaction is greater than what we feel getting something common: but also, a root beer and a good tuna sandwich would make me happier than a limited edition copy of a novel by my favorite author.)

So when inflation started, it was because of that: people really, really wanted to buy stuff, and there was less stuff to buy: so prices went up. No, it was not the government giveaway of money: because prices went up around the world, and the US government only gave money to American households. U.S. inflation increased fourfold between 2020 and 2021, which put us — 19th out of the 44 most industrialized economies.

The problem since then has been that inflation has continued to rise: and there are two reasons for that. One is that the people who sell things to us very quickly realized that our desperation to buy things meant that they could charge us more, while the supply chain issues and the fanatical belief propelled by neoliberal economists that increases in the monetary supply are the only and inevitable cause of inflation (I mean, other than the many, many times this government has increased the money supply without affecting inflation; but those other times don’t count. This time was the one that proved their thesis. Certainly not the first stimulus checks that came to us in the middle of the quarantine shutdown, which affected inflation not at all. It was the other ones. You know: the Democrat ones. Damn those tax and spend Democrats. Totally their fault that a change in the monetary supply had a greater effect than any other similar change in the last four decades. Totally not other causes.) gave those companies cover. Because normally, if a company just raises prices because they can, there is a backlash: people get pissed that the stuff they want is more expensive now, and so they don’t buy it. This is why I don’t go to Starbucks any more, because their coffee is too damned expensive, without giving me any greater happiness from buying it.

But if companies are raising prices because they’re struggling, too, then it’s not their fault: and we grumble — but then we pay the higher prices. And somehow, we ignore the unbelievable increases in corporate profits for the last two years: and we just get madder and madder at — Joe Biden. (Please follow that link: not only is it a very reasonable explanation of what has actually driven inflation, but also it includes this AMAZING statement: “It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.” #DAMN.) So now, the price of goods and services is higher than the value we gain from them, and MUCH higher than the actual worth of those goods and services: which I’m going to say is lower than the value because the things we buy make us happy, which we need, but they aren’t actually making our lives better, which should be part of calculating something’s worth. Because the corporations and megacorporations that make the world economy move find value and worth in only one thing: money.

So okay: here we are, watching prices go up and up, and still paying them, partly because we are still in need of comfort (And it’s getting even worse as our financial positions get harder thanks to how expensive everything is now! DAMN JOE BIDEN!), and partly because we don’t want to deal with the difficulties that would arise if we went looking for alternatives. I’m not sure I want to encourage everyone to look for alternatives: because that seems to me like accepting the prices and the inflation and the reasons for the prices and inflation. That is what the Fed is doing: having accepted without comment that corporations had started gouging Americans, the Fed did the only thing they can do: raise interest rates, fuck up the economy, and throw people out of work. If enough people are poor enough, they stop buying things, and that should make prices stop going up. But since the prices are going up out of alignment with the actual situation, simply because corporations decided to take all the money they could, it’s nearly impossible to say when enough will be enough, and people will stop buying things. Take cars, for instance. At what price point do people stop buying cars? New car prices will easily drive people to buy used cars, of course; but when used car prices are nearly at new car prices? Will people stop driving?

Of course not: not only are cars necessary for productive work across this bigass car-centric nation, but we see our car as part of our identity: it’s not even about buying a car to make ourselves happy, it’s about being utterly miserable without one. Nobody could abide that. My students still see getting a license and a car as more important than getting an education, which is why they let their work and grades slip so they can get an afterschool job: so they can buy a car. And they, and their families, will go into deeper and deeper debt in order to get a car. And then, if the Fed keeps raising interest rates, those car loans will become unsustainable: and they will lose their cars, and have to buy older used cars, which they will still be barely able to afford, but won’t be able to live without. So they’ll have to cut back on other things, or they’ll have to get a second job in order to afford their car in order to get to their first job — and probably their second job.

Hey, isn’t it a blessing that we’ve moved into a gig economy? It’s so much easier to get a second job!

Now let’s talk about rent, shall we? It’s the same thing, but worse: at what point can people stop paying rent? They can’t. They have to get second jobs. They have to cut back on everything else. Or else they have to live on the street. Which, of course, people are doing. In record numbers. (That is to say: people are struggling with rent more, not necessarily becoming homeless more often. This report gives the current state of affairs, which isn’t all bad — veteran homelessness, teen homelessness, and family homelessness are all down. But the most chilling bullet point here? This one:

This stability belies more serious issues among those most at risk of falling into homelessness, at
the time of the 2022 PIT Count roughly 50% of renters making less than $25,000 a year reported
being behind on rent.

So what do we do?

Honestly, I came into this intending to say that we should stop trying to find comfort in the act of purchasing material things. And I do believe that: I want to encourage more people to read, because reading is comparatively free and can take up literally every free hour of your life. The same with taking walks, or playing games with friends and family. I think there are wonderful things we can all do that will make us happier, and which don’t cost money; and I think that our society would be better off if we did more of those things. Not only because we’d be happier — and for a longer time because the joy we get from shopping is ephemeral and superficial — but also because it would be better for our planet to stop consuming everything available, and better for our economy to simply stop paying the prices that corporations are demanding of us: because if we stop buying, they won’t stop selling: they’ll start selling for less. It will happen, it will work; the Fed is doing the same thing, just by coercion and with a whole lot less choice and a whole lot more pain in the bargain.

But. I don’t mean to sound like a Boomer telling millennials to stop buying lattes and avocado toast, because the real problem is the system, specifically the way it is intended and designed to reward greed. The whole point is to push the exploitation of the masses as far as they possibly can, because that is how they extract wealth from us. That’s how it is supposed to work: and it does. Here we are, being pushed farther than ever before, while the wealthy capitalists get richer faster than ever before. I think we should try to escape consumerist culture for our own well-being and the well-being of the planet: but for the plutocrats who are destroying not only our world, but also us, in their pursuit of ever greater wealth? The ones who would drive people to live on the streets? Who would exploit people’s joy, and expand and then exploit people’s suffering, for the sake of profits?

I have a different answer. And I think it will certainly improve our moods — and probably help to bring prices down, pretty damn quickly. Because it will increase the cost to those who would increase the prices without increasing the value: and who would discard our worth as human beings in the process. Because whatever worth we can find in consumer goods, and whatever worth we can find in non-consumer goods, and whatever value our exploiters find in the wealth they hoard, it is nothing to the worth of people, nothing compared to the cost of people suffering so that other people can have money.

Here it is. Ready?

A Slight Freshness on the Neck”: Prints Depicting the Execution of Louis XVI (ca. 1793) – The Public Domain Review

Please be aware: this video is good because it shows the lyrics of the (honestly terrible) audio of this unfinished recording, but it also shows EXTREMELY graphic footage of protests, specifically suicidal self-immolations, in Vietnam and in Czechoslovakia.

It’s Not Soup, It’s a Sandwich.

19/03/202319/03/2023Dusty 1 Comment

With many layers. Like an onion. (I’d say “Or an ogre,” but I love Shrek and I won’t bring him down to this level. [Spoiler: I am absolutely going to bring Shrek down to my level. And then sit on him.] But here’s the clip anyway:)

Because everybody likes parfait.

I love Shrek because I relate to everything about him, from his introversion, to his grudging love of humanity, to his deep love for his wife, to his lack of self-esteem combined with an awareness of his strengths and abilities. I appreciate Shrek because he’s a Republican. Honestly. At least, he’s what Republicans should be. (And I don’t mean to ruin Shrek for anyone with this comment, but also, if more Republicans were like Shrek, we wouldn’t have the partisan problems we have now. But noooo, we get the other, uglier, eviler ogre. Ah, well. This isn’t the point.) Shrek is definitely a conservative: he dislikes and distrusts big government, he doesn’t like change, and he wants to be left alone. He’s the NIMBY in all of us. Though that should be NIMS, No’ In Ma Swamp, of course; and I mean that for all cases and circumstances (Though again, the other ogre has sort of ruined the rhetorical use of “swamp.” What an ass. He’s like the anti-Shrek. He doesn’t even have any layers.), because if I ever go to a city council meeting to object to them building a prison in my neighborhood, I’m definitely going to channel Shrek defending his swamp.

I also have to note that Shrek takes action when his home is invaded by refugees: but he doesn’t go after the refugees, he goes after the evil people who took their homes and drove them to his swamp, namely Lord Farquaad. See what I mean? Anti-Shrek.

But if anything is likely to turn me from a progressive into a Shrekian conservative (Definitely not going to become a Republican right now: the party is just too toxic. But also, if Shrek ran for office, I’d vote for him over most mainstream Democrats I know of.), it’s the layers in the sandwich of modern education. The layers in the onion.

Definitely not a parfait.

See, here’s the thing. I’m a teacher, right? We all know this by now; I talk about little else on this blog but books and teaching. But what does that mean, being a teacher? I’ve fulminated and pontificated over this many a time, because if there’s one thing that is clear about teaching, it is that it isn’t clear what teaching is; but the basic concept is pretty simple: it’s right there in the name. I teach stuff. I stand in front of a bunch of people who don’t know some stuff, and I help them learn that stuff. In my case, the stuff is literature, which is another complicated, amorphous concept that isn’t easy to define; but once more, the basic idea is really quite simple: written stuff, words and stuff. So basically, I help people who don’t know word stuff to learn more about word stuff.

Gonna need that on a business card, please.

(I bitch about it a lot, but right now? I thank all the gods there ever were for the internet. Because check this out. I made this on an instant business card generator on the internet, and I love it.)

Eighty or a hundred years ago, this could basically have been my card. It wouldn’t have had Shrek, so it would have been much less awesome, and the font would be much more calligraphic; but basically, it could have said this, and everyone would have nodded and doffed their bowler hats respectfully.

But then in the last fifty or sixty years, things started changing.

Obviously I am taking too broad a view of the history of pedagogy and education to be able to clearly identify causes and effects; there have been far too many influences and impacts on the education system in that time for any one to stand out. But I’m still speaking simply, broadly, in fundamental ways: and sometime over the last two to three generations, educators realized something: education wasn’t working for everyone. And also, that that was a problem.

So they tried to fix the problem.

It makes perfect sense: prior to about the WWII era, the problem was that not everyone had access to education; so the major push in the country was to build schools and hire teachers and buy books and such. But in the war years and the post-war boom, most of that got accomplished; and so the focus changed, from spreading education, to improving education.1954 saw the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision from the Supreme Court, and that threw into stark relief the clear truth that not all schools were equal, and also that people who did not have access to an equal education were in trouble. Title IX in 1972, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which then became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990, helped to show that race was not the only reason why some people were denied equal access to education. And somewhere in there, we reached a point where everyone had access to school (Though obviously as this is still not true, particularly in rural areas and especially affecting indigenous and Native American children, I’m not covering the whole story: but I’m not covering the whole story.), and so at that point, where broadening inclusion into education became less of a concern, people started looking more at the quality of education that everyone in this country now had some sort of access to — part of that fight being the specific issues I have named, making sure that people of all races, genders, and abilities had equal access to education. Because once everyone gets something, which is always the first fight, then you try to make that thing better for everyone. Hence, reform.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read — and What You Can Do About It.

It was a bestseller for — no kidding — 37 weeks. In my own shallow understanding of the history of education in the U.S., I’m going to identify this as one of several flashpoints, points when people started looking seriously at the deficiencies in the education system, and started trying to plug the holes, fill the gaps, bandage the wounds. If you look at that image, you see one example of what I’m talking about: the top banner text there calls this “The classic book on phonics.” There: that’s one thing, one example of what I’m talking about. Not the first, I’m sure; if this isn’t the right era and the right flashpoint to identify, I should probably go back to John Dewey, who singlehandedly broke down and then rebuilt American education in the first half of the 20th century. But I think for quite a long time after that, people were still just — helping people who didn’t know word stuff to learn more word stuff. I don’t think they were doing as much to discover the gaps in some people’s learning of word stuff, and trying to figure out how to fill those gaps, or at least stop the wound from bleeding any more.

I’m using the wound metaphor because there’s a metaphor that I and all of my fellow teachers use all the time for this kind of stuff: bandaids. Which is actually where I came up with the metaphor that started this whole mess, this idea of layers, of a sandwich, or an onion. Or an ogre. (Sorry, Shrek.)

Not a parfait.

You see, the issue is, once someone identifies a problem, and then tries to diagnose it, and then proposes a solution to the problem, that leads to — repetition of the same process. Partly, I think, because most solutions proposed for most problems in education are bandaids only: they are a failure to understand the real underlying problem, along with two things: a refusal to admit that the underlying problem can’t be solved — and a refusal to throw up one’s hands and do nothing, since the problem has been identified. That last part is particularly insidious in education: because teachers, who are the ones most likely to become reformers, are used to attacking problems when we see them: and we’re also used to being right. (Look at me, spouting all this “history” without any source or evidence that my account is right. Forget about it: I know I’m right. Because I’m a teacher. So my idea for solving all of this is the right one. Now sit down and start taking notes.) So when we become aware of a problem, we immediately have a solution: and we are immediately going to put it into practice, even if we are running entirely on assumptions. I think that urge, to take action always, and that (generally misplaced — certainly true in my case) overconfidence in our abilities and ideas, means that education gets waaaaayyy more bandaids than other aspects of society that need fixing. Medicine, for instance (since I’m using the bandaid metaphor) is much more likely to investigate and analyze, using the scientific method to find real solutions, and to make change happen slowly, but effectively; schools are just like “That didn’t work? Oh well — here, I have another idea. No no, this is a good one!”

Flesch, an education theorist, had a pretty reasonable proposal here about reading instruction: having recognized that Dick and Jane books were a crap way to learn word stuff, he suggested an expansion of the use of phonics for reading instruction, rather than the “Look-Say” method that had been in common use prior to the publication of his book (Look at the word; now Say the word. “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run!”). Now, I haven’t read the book, but I’m confident that Flesch noted that there was a problem with literacy in this country, that too many people didn’t know how to read, or didn’t know how to read well enough. He identified that problem, and then after examining the education system, he diagnosed a cause for the problem, and suggested a solution. Phonics instead of Dick and Jane. Awesome.

And I bet it worked. Pretty well. In some cases. Maybe even a lot of cases. Which is wonderful, because it meant more students learned more word stuff, and of course that’s always good. Of course, it meant that teachers who had been teaching Dick and Jane for generations had to change: they had to learn better how to use phonics, how to teach phonics, how to explain to confused parents why their kids weren’t learning from Dick and Jane the way the parents had; but I bet it worked.

For a while.

But then they realized that people still didn’t know how to read. Not enough of them, or not well enough. Because then Flesch published this:

Why Johnny Still Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch | Goodreads

That one came out in 1981: because the problem persisted. And why did the problem persist, despite the gains that might have been made — that probably were made — in the area of child literacy, at least partly because of Flesch’s promotion of phonics, which is in truth a pretty good way to learn reading?

Because the problem wasn’t simply a lack of phonics training. It wasn’t just a problem with Dick and Jane. That was surely part of it — which I know because Dick and Jane are gone now, and have been gone for a long time; I don’t specifically recall learning to read with phonics, but I know I never read a Dick and Jane book when I was a child. And I was in 2nd grade in 1981; I could have been that kid on the cover of the sequel, with its “new look at the SCANDAL in our schools.”

I haven’t read this book, either, but I bet I know what the scandal was: it was that some people still couldn’t read, or couldn’t read well enough. And I bet this book has a new proposal for helping those people learn more and better word stuff; whole language instruction, maybe, which was one example of a backlash against phonics teaching. Flesch might have still been flogging phonics in this second book, but plenty of educational theorists have completely reversed their field and gone back on their own pedagogical theories when faced with new evidence that says their old theories were garbage. And that’s good, because you should be willing to change your ideas in the face of new contradictory evidence: but if you just make the same errors in trying to understand and address the problem, rushing ahead with your new idea (“No no, this one’s a good one! Seriously!”) you’re still not going to actually solve the problem, no matter how innovative the idea is you end up on: it’s just going to be a much more innovative bandaid, slapped on top of the other bandaid. And as bandaids are wont to do, it might slow the bleeding for a while: at least for as long as it takes for the blood to soak through the new bandaid just like it soaked through the last one.

But education gaps, and problems that real people face in trying to learn, are not like bleeding wounds, because problems in education don’t clot. They don’t have mechanisms to solve themselves. They do eventually disappear, but that’s because the people who have trouble learning leave school, and don’t show up on our graphs and charts any more. They are replaced by other people who have the same sorts of issues, often because of the same underlying problems.

But the people trying to fix education, trying to fill gaps and stop the bleeding — and also heal the wounds — never recognize the actual underlying cause of the gap, of the bleeding; or they recognize it, but can’t or won’t face the truth and try to at least name the problem, if not address it: which they avoid because they can’t address the problem. Teachers hate when we can’t fix the problem: and what we generally do is address the symptoms, just so we can do something. Like if students come to school hungry, rather than deal with whatever the home life issue is that leaves kids coming to school hungry — lots of teachers just buy and distribute snacks. So when education reformers, largely teachers and ex-teachers, can’t deal with the real issues, instead they find something else they can point to, and some other new bandaid program they can slap on top of the issue, to make it look like it’s going away.

Like this:

Writing in a Nation of Testing: Why Johnny Can't Write

I mean, my first theory is that Johnny can’t write because Johnny can’t read.

And please notice that we’re still not really talking about why Johnny can’t read, beyond the idea of More Phonics Training: which is only trying to address one symptom, and ignoring entirely the underlying cause of the gaps in literacy in this country.

Then that leads to this:

Why Johnny Can't Sit Still: Straight Talk about Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Amazon.com: Books

Oof. That’s a big one. We still deal with this today. Still not well: I have many students with ADD or ADHD; many of them have had their issues addressed in a dozen different ways. But you know what?

They still have problems.

Because we’re not addressing the underlying issue. Just slapping on bandaids.

And that leads to this:

Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong | Book by William Kilpatrick | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

And eventually, to this.

Thomas Sowell quote: The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't...

And here we are, today. With conservative assholes like Sowell (Who, I must say, is clearly a brilliant man and an influential thinker and writer and teacher; but his mentor, when he studied economics at the University of Chicago, was Milton Friedman. The Fountainhead [In the Howard Roark sense] of assholes. And this quote here is an asshole quote.) making asshole pronouncements about what’s wrong with kids these days. And still not looking at the real, underlying problems. Just trying to find another way to slap a bandaid on the problem, and hope that it isn’t visible for a little while: long enough for the person who put forward the bandaid to get paid, or to win an award, or to get a cherry position in one thinktank or institution or another.

Okay: but I’ve strung this along too long without actually making my point. (There’s a reason for that.) So let me make the point, and then I’ll explain why I have done it this way — and also why I mentioned soup in the title of this post. (No, I haven’t forgotten that. It’s okay if you did. I know I am frequently confusing, and you kind people who read my nonsense are willing to put up with me, God bless you all.)

Again, I’m not versed enough on the history of education and education reform to have a strong argument about where this process I’m describing came from, how it got started, and how it came to dominate my profession. I just know what the actual answer is, which nobody ever seems willing to address: and because of that, for the last 23 years that I’ve been a teacher, I have had to deal with unending nonsense, while knowing it was nonsense. It is for this reason that I hate inservice: because I have to spend days being told how we are going to address the problems in education, and every single time, they don’t address the actual problem which is the cause of every difficulty in schools.

Here it is. Ready?

The actual answer is this: the problem is with school itself. And more broadly, with the human race.

You want to know why some people struggle in school? Because school is incapable of addressing everyone’s needs. The whole idea of it is to increase the efficiency of learning, through the use of specialization: that is, since I know a lot about word stuff, I can provide word stuff-centered learning to a large number of children, thereby sparing their parents or extended family members from having to teach their kids word stuff. In the past, those parents or family members did just fine, and better than me in a lot of cases, at teaching kids to read and write; but it’s more efficient if they can send their kids to school, and I can teach 100 or them at a time how to do word stuff. Or 200 at a time, at my last school. Those parents and family members of my 100-200 students can now spend their time and energy doing other things — in this country, mostly struggling to make ends meet while also providing a lavish lifestyle to the parasitic capitalist class who extract wealth from their labor. (I know a fair amount about Marxist stuff, too. I learned it in a class on word stuff in college. But since it was a word stuff class and not an economics stuff class, I can only give a basic overview of the economics stuff. You should find an expert in economics stuff to learn from instead of me. Specialization.)

Is this a better way to learn word stuff, in a classroom with several other students being taught by a word stuff expert? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. Two of the best students I’ve ever taught were homeschooled up until 9th grade. But the advantage that public school has over homeschooling in whatever form is efficiency: parents can only teach their own kids, and that only at the cost of much of their time and energy. But I can teach a hundred kids all at once. See? Efficiency.

But the only way I can efficiently teach a whole bunch of people word stuff is if those people all learn word stuff in basically the same way, and all of them can learn it from me and the way I teach word stuff.

And of course they can’t.

Some of my students have obstacles to learning reading and writing, such as language disabilities, or simply language barriers because their first language isn’t English, which is the only language I teach word stuff in. I am an auditory learner, and an auditory teacher; and some of my students — many of my students, in fact — struggle with learning that way. But honestly, there isn’t a whole lot that can be done to help a kinesthetic learner, that is one who learns by moving and doing things, to learn word stuff, which is inherently a non-moving and non-doing kind of system. These days, the biggest obstacle to learning word stuff for my students? They don’t care about reading. They like watching videos and playing games. They like livestreams and YouTube and TikTok. They don’t see the point in reading and writing, which means they don’t want to learn word stuff.

What do I do with that?

Nothing, is the answer. It’s just going to get in the way of my students learning my specific subject. Which may not, of course, have any serious negative impact on their lives (Though I will always maintain that a person who cannot read well enough to enjoy reading is always going to be a disadvantage: doubly because they may never realize what they are missing); but it certainly creates a gap in their learning progress according to the measurements we use in this country, which focus on math and English. My students’ test scores will be lower than in past years, because these kids don’t really care. (Also, they don’t care about testing. Or grades, really. Or, well — education.) Also, because I have taught Fahrenheit 451 for decades, I have to restate the thesis of that book, which is: a society that doesn’t read is a society that doesn’t have empathy, and is therefore a dying society. There is truth there. Want to talk about the empathy crisis in this country? (I will write a whole post about this, I think. It will be depressing.)

Which leads me to the other half of the problem, as I stated above, that isn’t caused by the inherent nature of the school system: the human race in general. Not all of us want to learn. Not all of us can learn. That’s just the way we are: we are different, we have different capacities and interests, different wants and needs. When we, as educators ALWAYS do, act as though one size fits all, that one set of goals will work for every single individual and one system of achieving those goals is the best path for every single individual (Specifically, the one that I choose, as I am the expert here. Now sit down and take notes.), our measurements are always going to show gaps and holes and flaws and even bleeding wounds: because not everyone can learn. Not everyone wants to learn. Not everyone can learn or — here’s the big one — wants to learn from me, or from my fellow teachers, in a school setting.

And then there are the other problems that get in the way of people who can learn and want to learn, but can’t do it at a particular time in a particular set of circumstances, and so also show up on our measurements as an issue to be solved, a wound to be bandaged: problems like poverty. Hunger. Illness. Trauma. Abuse. A lack of physical safety or security. Institutional racism or other forms of discrimination. And on, and on.

All of which get in the way of someone’s learning. None of which can be addressed by increasing my use of phonics.

You can see, maybe, why people don’t want to talk about the real problems, or the real solutions to those problems: because often, the real problems don’t have solutions. At least not ones we can implement.

There are people we can’t help. There are people who don’t want help.

That is not to say we shouldn’t try to help. We should always try. If for no other reason, then simply to show people who need help that someone cares enough to try. To show people who don’t want help that, if their wants or their needs change, someone will care enough to try, and help might be available someday which will do some good.

But we have to accept that we can’t fix every problem, and especially not in education. There will always be disparities. There will always be gaps, and failures. It’s inevitable. That’s the truth.

75 Inspiring and Eye-Opening Truth Quotes | Reader's Digest

So what’s the soup?

It’s the alphabet soup. Though as my title states, it’s not soup: it’s a sandwich. It’s not soup because the old layers don’t go away: we just slap a new layer on top of it. If it were soup, all the layers would mix together in one thick broth, and that’s not how it goes: the individual layers tend to have enough cohesion to avoid mixing with other layers. So, a sandwich. Or an onion. Or an ogre.

Not a parfait.

Though that is the reason I put that title above, and held off on explaining it until here and now: because now you have been through the layers. And maybe, if you have been confused by my wandering through half a dozen layers that touch on entirely different perspectives and different paradigms and different strategies about different aspects, maybe you will understand what it is like, as a teacher, to try to work through all of these layers — to try to master and implement all of these layers — when I just want to teach word stuff, man. That’s all I want. But they have all these layers stuck on top of that word stuff I want to teach. Layer on top of layer.

Those layers are often called “alphabet soup” because the snake oil salesmen who put them forward in an attempt to enrich themselves by treating symptoms instead of addressing the real underlying conditions are inordinately, eternally fond of acronyms. Everybody in education loves a good acronym: nobody more than the people who imagine they have created a brand-new system whereby schools can solve the problems in education.

See, that’s why I’m not just a teacher who helps people learn word stuff. Because snake oil salesmen are very good at convincing one particularly vulnerable group, who themselves don’t ever want to address the insoluble underlying conditions (Which, to be fair, are so large and so insoluble that it would be like a doctor saying, “Well, the problem is that you’re mortal, and so you’re going to die. Here’s your bill.” On some level it’s worth looking at treating the symptoms. But that’s not what the layers are about. That’s what teachers and other adults in schools trying to help is about. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for teachers to buy snacks and give them to hungry students. I do it, too.), that this new program that the snake oilers have cooked up is the best way to address the problems in education.

Those vulnerable people? Adminstrators.

It’s not their fault; they don’t know any better. They are simple people. They don’t understand. They just want to make a difference and fix things (And also improve their own reputation as people who get results), and when they hear about this new program, with its new acronym, which will treat these symptoms with these provable results as presented in this bar graph? Well hell, sign us up! they say. And here, take this large sum of money, which of course is not the administrators’ money; it’s taxpayer money. It’s so easy to spend taxpayers’ money. After all, we’re just trying to address these learning gaps, these holes in our data, and the blood that just keeps flowing out of them. (Like I said, if anything would ever drive me to become a conservative, it’s this. Bureaucrats spending taxpayer money for no good purpose, with no real understanding of what they’re doing or why: that’s enough to make any liberal go crazy. And here we go.)

So: I’m not just a teacher. I’m also an expert in PLCs (That’s Professional Learning Communities.). And in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination — I’m going to a conference this summer to learn more about it!). And in PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports — I was on the schoolwide committee for implementing that one.), which I insist on pronouncing “Peebis,” which makes everyone uncomfortable while it makes me laugh. And in SEL (Social-Emotional Learning). And in RTI, Response to Intervention. Naturally I’m an expert in ELA (English Language Arts) and in ELD (English Language Development — what used to be called ESL and then ESOL [English as a Second or Other Language]) and in SPED, which is now becoming ESS as SPecial EDucation becomes Exceptional Student Services (Which some places call ESE, Exceptional Student Education, but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying “Orale, ese!” every time I thought about it. So it’s good my school uses ESS.). I won’t say I’m an expert in ADD and ADHD and ASD and ED (That’s Emotional Disturbance, not Erectile Dysfunction — these are kids, after all) and ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder — and while I’m not a Boomer bitching about how we used to walk to school through three miles of driving snow every day, I will say that when I was a kid, ODD was just called “Being an asshole.”), but I’ve been in enough IEPs and 504s and dealt with enough SLDs that I know as much about all of those as most, and more than many. Naturally I can’t get more specific, because I’ve been well trained in FERPA.

This is the result of all of this: I have been given so many additional duties, so many new processes to learn and programs to implement, that I don’t have enough time and energy left any longer to just — help people learn more word stuff. My specialization — the whole reason for a public school system — has been smothered under layers of new generalized knowledge that I have had to master and implement. Because people keep identifying problems, and then prescribing solutions that aren’t really solutions, but maybe have enough of an impact, or at least are convincing enough to make an administrator think the program will have an impact that they spend money on it and implement — which means telling me I have to become an expert in this, and I have to be trained in it and then implement it, and then follow up by collecting data to show how effective this new program is, in order to justify the administrator’s decision to implement it, and the money they spent on licensing it and hiring a trainer to teach me how to do it and a data processing firm to confirm how well it works: provided I can implement it with fidelity and then collect the data on implementation to show how effective that program is. And guess who gets blamed if I can’t do all that on my end: not the snake oil salesman who got my administrator to buy the program, and not the administrator who bought the program — and not the students who spend my whole class scrolling through TikTok.

And if I do manage to do all of that successfully, the snake oil salesman who sold it to my school will then use my example as proof of their program’s efficacy, and go on to sell it to a hundred more schools. And the administrator will either squat in their job for decades, buying new programs EVERY GODDAMN YEAR but never taking away the old ones, because it worked so well that one time and that success ensured the administrator’s retention in their position (Meanwhile my retention depends on my ability to keep up with each new year’s new layer on the onion…), or else the administrator will move up the ranks, and be replaced by a new administrator who will have to buy all new programs so they can make their own individual impact on the problems in school (Also, since most administrators are ex-teachers, they also believe they have diagnosed exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, with this new acronym they bought with taxpayer money).

And my students, and the students at all those other schools, will learn a little bit less word stuff. And other stuff. Which will just convince the students that school isn’t really useful, after all; they’d be better off learning how to make their own Twitch livestream and making a living off of that. Which means they won’t try as hard to succeed in school.

And there will be new learning gaps.

Fortunately, I just heard about this new program to address it.

It’s called GET OUT OF MA SWAMP.

Late to Work, Work Too Late

26/02/2023Dusty 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I procrastinate my work.

Specifically, I procrastinate my grading. I procrastinate my paperwork, too; if I’m not the last one every year to get my self-evaluation done, I’m the runner-up. It’s almost a point of pride for me to refuse to turn in my Intent to Return paperwork until it is appallingly late; I dress it up as a sort of protest, because I hate the system — my school requires teachers in February to sign a letter of intent that says we do mean to return for the next school year, and listing the classes we would like to teach (There is also an option on there for “I would like to work for the school district, but I am willing to transfer schools” which I have never and will never check, because if anyone puts me into a middle school, I’m quitting on the spot and becoming a meter maid. Or maybe one of those guys who spin signs for tax preparers.), but then they don’t actually offer us a job, or tell us what we will be teaching, until JULY. I hate that we are supposed to commit to the school MONTHS before they have to commit to us — and in some cases, they don’t tell us the classes we are teaching until the school year starts: in 2021 I was teaching a full set of online classes, but I did not know until an administrator emailed me and asked “Hey, how do these students I have registered for your class sign into the Zoom?” ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES. So yeah, the system pisses me off: but also, I do intend to return, and the people who need my signed letter — specifically my principal — are not the people who set up this obnoxious unbalanced system. So there’s no particular reason why I procrastinate signing the letter; I just do. Like with all of my paperwork. And all of my grading.

I don’t like admitting it, because I’m a teacher, and I’m supposed to set a good example for my students; I’m supposed to not only teach them that, in the real world, deadlines matter, and organization and a work ethic are important; but I’m supposed to enforce that learning by requiring them to hold to deadlines, to be organized, to develop a work ethic, so that they will be prepared for the real world. If I don’t prepare them for the real world, I’ve been told, then not only will I be setting them up for a rude awakening when they get fired from their jobs, but also I am tearing apart the foundations of our society by eliminating personal responsibility, which means that everything in this country will fall apart when this current generation gets out of school and goes into the real world.

Where have I been told this? On Twitter, of course. Where I was this morning when I should have been working.

Step 1: head on Twitter Step 2: regret your life decisions | Twitter | Know Your Meme

Please don’t get me wrong: I have a strong work ethic. I take personal responsibility for the tasks that are required of me. If anything, I take too much responsibility, and work too hard; where I could just shrug cynically and say “Hey, if those rotten little punks don’t want to read the book, then they’ll fail and they’ll deserve it,” instead I say, “Maybe I should read it to them in class, so I can explain it and make it more interesting, and they can at least understand what’s in the book and what it means, even if they aren’t reading it on their own.” Does that require more of me? It does. Not only do I have to work harder in class, then, but also it means I can’t assign quiet independent work in class, and get my grading done while my students are working; that means I have to do my grading outside of class, which inevitably means I have to do it on the weekends.

Which causes a secondary problem: because I put so much effort into my daily classes, trying to run every lesson, keep every kid involved, cover every topic with them and make the information interesting, so I can be (at least somewhat) sure that they understand and are learning, I have little energy or motivation at the end of the week to do grading. And frankly, at the end of the week of work, I think I deserve a break: and I’m right. I do deserve a break. Teaching is a hard job, and I work very hard at it. It’s important to me: I recognize the value of education, and the value of an educated populace; I think of it as my most valuable contribution to a world that has been very generous to me in my life — and also, I’m good at it. And my students need to learn, and they need to have good teachers and good adults in their lives, and I am all of those things. So while I am at school, and after school, and during my lunch breaks, and so on, I work as hard as I can to do as much as I can for my students.

The result, then, is that on many weekends, I don’t do any grading. Even though I haven’t done it over the week at school, either. Because I’m tired, and because I deserve a break, and weekends are what I get.

The result is that it takes me too long to grade.

It’s a problem. It’s a problem for a lot of reasons: first because it’s bad teaching practice. Feedback should come quickly: students (like anyone) forget in short order what they did on an assignment or how they did it; if they get the assignment back with feedback within a few days, then they can take the feedback as constructive suggestions on how to improve. But if they get the work back two weeks later, or three weeks later, or four, five, six, seven, even eight weeks later — and yes, I have done that — then it’s useless. They don’t even remember doing the assignment. I have frequently handed back a paper to a class, and had them say “What is this? Oh man — I forgot all about this.” I cringe every time. And tell myself I’ll do better: I’ll spend more time grading, less time doing nothing at school or doing other things at home. The job is important, after all.

But then when the weekend comes, I can’t bring myself to do it. And there are all of the other things that I also need to do: I need to spend time with my wife, who is my whole world; and as important as my students are, and as important as teaching is, she is more important. Much more important. Orders of magnitude more important. Plus, spending time with her makes me happy: which does have the added benefit of helping me recover from the work week, which then gives me more energy to teach as well as I can in the next week. Which is also important: and maybe more important than getting those grades done. The same goes for spending time with my pets, and also working on my house, or going to the gym. All of them are important — the gym helps reduce my stress, and will keep me healthy, which will help me live longer (certainly something that teaching will not do for me…); working on my house makes me more comfortable, and also helps increase the value of the house, which means I will be more financially secure in the future — which not only reduces my stress, it also helps to ensure that I will be able to keep this important job in this underfunded, underpaying state of Arizona.

And so on. There are always reasons to do things other than grade: and I don’t mean bullshit reasons like “I just don’t really feel like it right now,” but valid reasons, genuine excuses: other important priorities that should come first. So I put them first. And so I don’t grade.

Grading Memes 20+ Funny Images Only Teachers Will Understand

And then there are the feedback loops.

You see, because I know that I take too long to grade, and I give myself all the excuses I could ever want to keep allowing myself to do that, I can’t bear to make my students stick to hard grading deadlines. Even though it would be easier, because that way there would be less for me to grade. Even though it would be “teaching them about the real world and taking personal responsibility.” Even though it would make the work more meaningful when they did it, because when they come back weeks or months after an assignment was to be turned in and they complete it then, the chance that they are still able to learn from the lesson is almost nil. But I can’t do it. If I don’t stick to hard deadlines, how can I make them?

I mean, of course I could. We have unequal power in the class. I get to set their deadlines, and the consequences for missing those deadlines; and I get to decide when I complete my own work. I have the power to make these determinations.

But I can’t justify it. I can’t justify the time I take to do the grading, so I can’t justify holding my students to a short, hard deadline, and then taking weeks and weeks to give them back the grade on the assignment they turned in on time.

So I don’t hold them to deadlines. Which is how I contribute to the imminent collapse of our society, according to those Twitter pundits who told me that holding students to deadlines is critical for preparing them for the real world.

It’s also, I know, how I leave an opening for students to put themselves into a real bind. Because I don’t hold them to deadlines, and I don’t get mad and yell and get them in trouble and ruin their GPAs if they don’t get the work done for my class, I make it that much easier for them to procrastinate the work for my class. And, see, they have so many classes, and so much homework for all of them, and their math and science and history teachers all keep hard deadlines, and chew them out and shame them when they miss deadlines, and refuse to let them turn work in late, and therefore ruin their grades if they don’t get the work done — that they always choose to do the work on time for their math and science and history classes. They know they can take a little more time for Humphrey’s work. So they take it: because after a long day of sitting in classes and trying desperately to learn — and they are trying — even when it is boring, even when the teacher doesn’t communicate well, even when other things in their lives or in the classroom are distracting them, they are tired. And understandably so: it’s hard work trying to learn. Especially trying to learn complicated advanced concepts like how to write an essay. But that’s okay, they can put off Humphrey’s work; he doesn’t care.

Let me just set the record straight on that one, because it makes me mad every single time they say it.

Are you listening, kids? (Of course not.) Here it is anyway.

I care.

I care about how you act in my class. I care about whether or not you are paying attention to me. I care about whether you are looking at your phone or if you are reading. I care about whether or not you turn in the work on time. I care about your grades. I care about your test scores. I care about everything. All of it. Always. I care.

I just don’t have the energy to apply pressure on all of you, all the time. I can’t do it. I can’t make the lesson interesting and useful to all of you, while also fighting to make you listen to the lesson I have already put effort into to make it interesting and useful. I can’t stand to have to fight to make you listen to my interesting and useful lesson: you should just fucking listen. Okay? You want to talk about not caring? How about all of you little punks not caring about how much you annoy me when you don’t listen to me no matter what I do or say? Even after you say you like me and like my class? You still don’t listen, and you don’t care how much that hurts, and how frustrating that is. You make me fight you, make me make you follow the rules you know you have to follow already, and then when I ask you to follow the rules, you argue, and you fuss. So I have to fight harder.

Think of this: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right? So if it takes a certain amount of time and effort to overcome your resistance to doing work in class any given day, and I have to be the one to overcome that resistance for you, then that means the effort put into my action to create the reaction in you that allows you to learn is just as hard for me as it is for you. So if you struggle to make yourself pay attention and try, I struggle just as hard to make you pay attention and try. The difference is, I have to struggle with 20 of you, every single period, every single day. And then once I have managed the struggle, and gotten you all to pay attention and try — then I have to teach you. And make it interesting and useful for you, so you can keep paying attention. And that takes effort, too.

So much of the time, even most of the time, I just can’t do it. I can’t put out that much effort in every class, every day, with every student. So I blow it off. I procrastinate. I just start teaching the lesson, knowing that not everyone is paying attention; hoping that somehow they will listen to me as I try to make it interesting and useful, and they will do the work themselves, and then I will be able to help them learn.

It never happens. Not with the whole class. Not with a whole unit.

So I have to let it go. And since I let it go, I can’t demand that they put out more effort than I’m willing to put out. To be clear, again: I could do that. Lots of teachers do that. The fact that I don’t do that is one of the reasons they like me. But because they like me, they feel more casual about my class, and it’s easier to blow off work for a class that is more casual, especially when the teacher is cool and doesn’t care about deadlines. (I. CARE.)

So the students blow off deadlines, and that creates more work for me. Because I need to try to track them down to get the work completed so I can grade it; or by the time they get around to it, they don’t remember how to do it, and I have to take some time to remind them of what the assignment was. Or they blow off some assignments, which lowers their grade, and then they need to make sure other assignments are perfect so they can bring their grades back up — and that means they need to check with me about what the expectations are, and what they need to do, and if the work they have so far is good enough or how they can change it to make it better and get a better grade. Which is freaking awesome: because it means they’re learning, and they want to learn, and they want me to help them get better, and that is the whole point of all of this —

And it takes more time and energy. Which I am happy to expend on students who ask for help, especially the ones who have been struggling and have low grades because they haven’t turned anything in, which always makes me worry that they don’t understand the assignment or the content at all; when they ask for help, and I help them, and they get it, then I feel like I won. And they turn the work in, very very late, and I grade it immediately because I’m so pleased they got it done, and then I am complimentary in their feedback because I want to encourage them to keep turning in work and showing improvement.

Which, of course, just encourages them to keep turning work in late, and getting extra individual attention, and getting nice feedback and so on.

But then I’m even more tired, and so I get even less done for the class as a whole. Which makes me feel bad, like a slacker, like a bad teacher. Sometimes I get so depressed I can’t stand to work at all. But of course, I keep doing it. Because I have to. Because the students need me. Even if they never act like it.

Meme Creator - Funny You can come back to work now We miss you (& need you) Meme Generator at MemeCreator.org!

That’s what procrastination is.

I don’t know how or when or why we all forgot that, all got confused about it. Who told us that procrastination was being lazy? Nonsense: blowing off work entirely, never getting it done at all; sometimes that is due to laziness. (Rarely, I would argue. But sometimes.) Procrastinators do the work, we just do it late, or at the last minute, while also applying enormous pressure to ourselves mostly in the form of anxiety. So if you do the work a little at a time from Monday through Thursday, and I cram it all in on Thursday night, and we both turn the work in on Friday — or if I do all the work on Sunday and then turn the work in late on Monday — which of us has done more work? Nobody, of course, unless, as I said, you want to count the extra effort I expended on anxiety and guilt. (And maybe the extra effort you spent on organizing and managing your time and the project — but you loved doing that, and we all know it.) We all do the work. It is certainly true that waiting until the last minute frequently limits the amount of time we have to put into the work: but in my experience it does not at all limit the effort put into it. That is a separate decision, which lots of people make — and sometimes it is due to laziness, I agree. But procrastination is not lazy.

It’s prioritizing.

As I said, when I decide on Friday night that I would rather spend an evening with my wife than grade papers, that is a choice I am making based on what I think is most important: not what requires less effort. Okay, spending time with my wife does require less effort: but considering how much time I spend away from her doing work, it should be clear that I don’t always pick the easier path because it’s the easier path. I usually don’t. When I do choose to spend time with her, it is partly because I have spent all of the effort I can possibly spend, and now I need to do something that puts something good back into me: and an evening with the woman I love will do that. (Also I choose to spend time with her because she is the best and most important person in my world, and she deserves to have my time more than any of my students do.) The time I spend writing is time I could spend grading, and believe me, this is not any easier in terms of intellectual effort. I think it is more important, at least once a week, for my self-understanding and my identity. So I prioritize: I make a choice. And that choice means I have less effort and time to spend on the other tasks. I will still spend as much time and effort on them as I can: but sometimes — frequently — constantly — that effort is not my full effort. It just can’t be.

Because I have too much shit to do.

Want me to get all my work done? Reduce my student and class load, without reducing my pay (Because if I get paid less, I’ll need to go find a second job to cover my expenses, and I will not have more time.). Or even better, make all of my students do their part by having them pay attention to my lesson, to my whole lesson, every day, so I don’t have to fight to make them stay on task and learn the content. Though, to do that, you’ll need to lighten their load as well: because believe me, after being told all their lives that they need to learn everything and get good grades OR ELSE THEY WILL BE DOOMED TO A LIFE OF MISERY AND WASTE BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE ANY WORK ETHIC OR RESPONSIBILITY AND THEY WILL HAVE DISAPPOINTED EVERYONE AROUND THEM, they are also trying just as hard as they can: and it isn’t their fault they can’t do everything we demand of them any more than it is my fault.

We are simply demanding too much. And then calling it procrastination when everything doesn’t get done.

This is the point I want to make, and I want to make it twice. Because people on Twitter (Assuming they are people, and not malicious semi-sentient globs of slime) have repeatedly and vociferously claimed that teachers are lazy. We are not. We work as hard as any and harder than most. Of course there are lazy teachers, as there are lazy people in every group; but teaching as a profession takes all that we have, and demands even more. Students, like all children, are a bottomless hole of need: they always need something, and then they always need more. It’s fine; they are children, they’re not supposed to be self-sufficient. But there is never an end to their need. So we who provide care to children, of any kind, we have the full range of tasks required of us professionally — and then we have all those children. And all of their needs. It’s too much: and so I, like all of my colleagues, prioritize. Some of us choose to prioritize work over family, or over ourselves; some of us choose one aspect of work over others — I have colleagues who spend enormous amounts of time and energy making sure that their students are happy, even if the curriculum maybe doesn’t all get covered; I have others who make sure that the students are understanding all the work, even if that means they maybe don’t have the most fun and exciting classes; I try to make sure that my students find some interest in and affection for my subject, because I want, more than anything else, to get them to be readers: and thus lifelong learners, who will grow far beyond what I could ever impart to them. But the issue is, we all try to do all of those things, all at the same time, along with doing all the rest of our work; and it is too much to get done. So we do what we can, and procrastinate the rest, and when we finally run out of time — we say to ourselves that we’ll work on that next year.

And now let me make the same point twice: students need help. They need support. Not all of them need the same help in the same way, but all of them need something. All of them. Partly because they are children: and partly because everybody needs help; everybody, young or old, needs something. What students need more than anything else is grace. They need kindness. They need us to try to understand what each of them individually needs, and to try to provide that to them, as much as we can. We need to know where our boundaries are, when we run out of energy and the ability to give; because they can’t be expected to know how much is too much, and they will always need more than we can give. It’s fine: they are children. Children need support. And there are fortunate children who get most of what they need provided for them by their families and friends; those children don’t need much from their teachers and other caretakers. But they still need something: even if it’s only praise for a job well done, and a suggestion about where they could go next.

The other reason why students all need help and grace is because we demand too much from them. We give them limited time, limited resources, and the limited energy and support of their teachers, and expect them to accomplish — everything. Not only to learn all of the subjects which their teachers have spent our professional lives mastering, but also to learn everything else they need for adult life. And apparently — according to Twitter, at least — they need to learn it all NOW, before they get into the “real world” and discover that they are unprepared for the harsh realities of life. They need to learn to do their work, and do their best, all the time, no matter what they may have going on in their lives outside of school; because in the REAL WORLD, you don’t get to give excuses: you just get fired if you show up late or miss a day of work or miss a deadline or break the rules in any way.

Never mind that I have frequently been late turning in my work. Never mind that I have had colleagues and coworkers who show up late, or miss work, all the time. (I tend not to miss work, and I’m obsessive about being on time. But also, I let my classes get off topic at the drop of a hat, and waste all kinds of time arguing with students over silly subjects instead of pursuing curriculum. We all do the things our bosses don’t want us to do.) Never mind that I and several of my colleagues constantly disobey the dress code, or don’t clock in or out properly, or cuss in front of students, or spend time on our phones looking at social media when we’re supposed to be working. Or show up hungover to work. (I’ve never done that one, either. But I did get suspended because of things I posted online about my students. So I guess I never learned that “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” lesson in high school, huh? Must have missed that day. Probably hungover.)

No: we tell these children, who don’t know any different, don’t know any better, because they have only been in school, because we won’t let them leave, that they have no chance in life if they don’t learn everything we have to teach them RIGHT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. And then we give them far too much to learn, all at once. And tell them they not only have to learn all of it, but they have to get high grades, or else they are doomed, and we will be disappointed.

And then we are surprised when they procrastinate? When they blow work off sometimes? When they try to take a little bit of time and space for themselves, to do something they enjoy, after hours and days and weeks of doing work, for no tangible reward? We’re shocked when they sleep until noon on the weekends — and then we call them lazy?

How dare we?

No. Students are not lazy. They are doing their utmost to live up to our impossible standards, to our impossible expectations, even with their limited resources and their nonexistent experience, which means they have not mastered the same coping strategies that we have. They don’t know what to do other than — maybe not do some work. And then we get mad at them for not doing their work, and they feel bad, and they fear the consequences we give them right now so they can learn to avoid consequences later; and all of that adds pressure, which wears them down — and they need to take more time off, to escape from even more work. Just so they can survive.

Just like us.

The answer is: they need to work less. We all need to work less. And if we can’t, then the very least we can do for each other is, when we have the power and the opportunity — be nice. Be kind. Give someone a little grace. And take a little for yourself. Even if it looks to others like you’re procrastinating. It’s better to turn in the work too late, than to work until it is too late.

We’re all doing our best.

Sourpuss Sunday

27/11/2022Dusty Leave a comment

Holiday season is too long, which makes it too complicated. My answer? NEW HOLIDAY!

Okay so: the truth is I’m far too deep in NaNoWriMo to pull out of it in order to write a proper blog post. I’d apologize, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry for not writing, when the reason I’m not writing is that I’m writing too much. Instead, I’m going to take this time to do some better, more constructive destressing, by writing something that doesn’t mean too much. Writing just for fun. Which I don’t do nearly enough of.

So this weekend is the big turn. The month of October starts with Bitching Season (Though of course, Bitch-Creep has moved back into September, partly because September has no damn holidays. Labor Day. Bah!), when everyone gets mad at everyone else for either A) obsessing too much about Halloween, B) interrupting Halloween season with creeping Christmas cheer (this is mainly the stores that start stocking Santa before Satan has left the building), or C) buying pumpkin spice lattes and pumpkin spice donuts and pumpkin spice toothpaste. (You think I’m kidding. I’m not.) Not to mention the CONTINUING fight over Indigenous People’s Day, which used to be named after a genocidal slaver and rapist who “discovered” a continent 15,000 years after people migrated there from Asia, by “finding” an island that was already populated. But that all passes as we get closer to Halloween, and the Bitching Season becomes the Witching Season (I really want to point out that’s taking a big W for Halloween, because I enjoy making teenagers cringe), and we all enjoy at least a week or so of spookiness and silliness. Then Halloween ends (Here in the Southwest it turns into the Day of the Dead, but I just feel bad for the people who celebrate Dia de Muertos in the US, because it’s gotta be hard to go from the absurdity of Halloween to a genuine, solemn remembrance of those we have lost. Though respect for the cognitive dissonance required to hold a genuine solemn remembrance of those who have passed — with sugar skulls. [Though also please note that calaveras are an inheritance of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec empire, and thus have a whole lot more history than my joke gives credit for]) and — we don’t know what to do.

Do we start celebrating Christmas? On November 1? Or is that too early? Do we need time to wind down from Halloween? Do we start putting up pictures of turkeys? Almost four weeks before the holiday with the weakest iconography of all?

Seriously. Turkeys? I mean, turkey is delicious, don’t get me wrong — it’s one of the few things I genuinely miss since my wife and I became vegetarians (Though to be precise, we are ovolactopescatarians, so there) — but can we all just admit that making cute images of the things we plan to kill and eat is creepy as fuck? Befriending your cows while naming them “Hamburger” and “Sirloin” is terrible. People talking to giant anthropomorphic M&Ms is terrible, especially when they’re talking about eating M&Ms.

This is terrible:

(But this meme is amazing:)

I think the reasonable compromise is to focus more on the autumnal theme, now that it’s actually cold and the leaves have turned and are falling, now that we don’t have the confusion around Halloween. But I realize that’s not terribly exciting. How many times can you sing “Over the River and Through the Woods?” (You knew that was a Thanksgiving song, right?)

So November is a continually awkward part of the holiday season. Once again, but this time nationally, we try to be serious and solemn for once on Veteran’s Day; but in this country (or maybe it’s just me), anything celebrating the military is just so tangled and fraught and therefore just hard to deal with. Awkward, like the rest of the month.

But then Thanksgiving comes. And the week leading up to it is a madhouse of planning and preparation; then the day itself is halfway between madness and celebration — but I think that’s sort of as it should be. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival: and that means we celebrating having busted our asses for the weeks prior trying to get everything harvested before winter comes. Harvest festivals are supposed to be the final relaxation after a time of incredible hard work, bringing in the crops. Which is part of why it’s weird, because we have moved away from the agricultural society that once celebrated the harvest; we are in a state of constant abundance and even overabundance as a society. Our issue with food is not how hard we have to work for it and how rarely we get a surplus of it: it’s how badly we adulterate it, how foolishly we consume it, and why in the name of all that’s good and holy we still can’t manage to get everyone enough of it. Which means, of course, that we shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving until we actually manage a victory in one of those fights: we should have Thanksgiving whenever this country passes a law that provides free lunch at school for kids. We should have Thanksgiving whenever we manage to improve SNAP benefits, and feed hungry families. After that difficult work has been accomplished successfully: that’s when we should be giving thanks.

But one thing is for sure: Thanksgiving is not the time for feeling bad about the problems in the world. That is the real gift of the season: it’s time to actually focus on the good things, for once. And yes, that’s hard: the bad things are still around us, and keep happening, and if we are at all aware and sensitive to the suffering of others, it’s so very hard to be happy with and thankful for what we have without also feeling guilty for having what others don’t. But it’s useless to compare lives. We all try to live the best lives we can, and the fact that some of us live happier lives than others is, first, not a safe assumption, considering that anthropologists have shown that hunting, gathering, and foraging is generally a better and happier life; and secondly, usually not our fault. If we actively fuck up others’ lives for our own profit, then yes, we should feel guilty about that. But most of us are not corporate robber barons or exploiters of child labor or the like. So the point is, it’s important to remember that there are good things in our lives. And Thanksgiving, for all the cheesiness of being thankful and whatnot, is a perfect time to remember some of those good things. Family. Food. Celebrations with games and decorations and all that.

And then, of course, we move straight into unbridled consumerism: Black Friday. I don’t think I need to add my screed to the copious outpouring of bile about how terrible this day is conceptually; the truth is, I don’t buy a lot of stuff, and I sometimes like buying stuff: that being the case, sometimes I like buying stuff for cheap. So I usually buy something on Black Friday. And yes, I feel kind of bad about that; I’m aware that makes me a supporter of the consumerist culture that is killing everything. But since Thanksgiving is a time for focusing on the good side of things, and Christmas is the same, I’m going to focus on being happy that I got a new Blu-Ray/DVD player for $60, and so I can stop playing movies on my tired old PS3. (Also, that means I can move my PS3 into my office, along with the old TV we just replaced, and I can actually have my dream gaming setup. Please note that this is the first time I have ever had this — a dedicated gaming TV not in the living room — and I’m fucking 48. Like I said, I don’t buy a lot of stuff. Not gonna feel bad about buying this stuff.)

Suffice it to say that riots on Black Friday, and the excessive spending and consuming, and the commodification of the good parts of the holidays, are all terrible and disgusting and should be opposed.

So after Black Friday, we have the newest attempts to commodify and exploit the consumerist culture during the holiday season: one for a good cause, and one for the worst. Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Small Business Saturday is a lovely idea, and a wonderful cause: I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I am a self-published novelist, and I would love to sell you copies of my books; you can buy them from Lulu.com — which is not a small business, but also is not Amazon — or from Barnes and Noble — again, not an independent bookseller, but certainly not Amazon — or you can contact me directly (Comment here or find me on Facebook or Twitter) and I will sell it to you myself. Also my wife is a brilliant artist who sells her work through Facebook and Instagram.

And then on the other side is Cyber Monday, the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, who felt that one day buying shit was not enough of corporations exploiting American consumers, and so he made up a new shopping day that focused on his business, and intentionally took time away from productive work, because the idea of using Monday was that was the day everyone went back to work and had computer access: at work. To go holiday shopping, instead of working. Look at capitalism at its finest! However: while I detest Bezos and Amazon, I recognize two things: one, there are lots of places — I used to live in one — where shopping access is limited, and Amazon frequently is the only and usually is the cheapest way for people to get things they want and need; and also, while Amazon is grossly exploitative of content creators, still they do furnish something of a marketplace; so I will, once again, look at the bright side: sometimes it’s good to buy things, and buying things online is not inherently bad, so people can do a good thing on Cyber Monday by shopping. I do not believe that the toxicity of the seller transfers entirely to the buyer, unless the buyer is actively propping up the evil done by the seller.

After this whole weekend, spent recovering from the preparations and celebrations of Thanksgiving, and with three days dedicated to shopping — what is supposedly holiday gift shopping, but really is just shopping — as I said, there is a turn. The Christmas radio stations start broadcasting. The decorations start coming out. I put antlers and a red nose on our car. ChristmaHanuKwanzaakkah time is now in full swing. We teachers are counting the days (Fourteen school days!!) until Winter Break. We all start asking — “Wait, what do you mean it’s almost 2023?!?” Christmas cheer, and Christmas melancholy as well, kick it into high gear. After this weekend, the long awkward time is over, and we can all focus: so this, then, is the good time, the next month or so.

But there’s a hole there. Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday — see what’s missing?

It’s today.

So I have a suggestion. Since tomorrow begins the Happy Holiday season in earnest (It started earlier, of course, but tomorrow we all have to see each other again, and the Christmas cheer will be inescapable — and also, for the most part, genuinely nice), we should take one last chance to be in a bad mood. To be crappy, and to complain about anything and everything.

I would like to suggest Sourpuss Sunday.

As with all holidays, the existence of a special day in celebration of a specific idea or situation does not mean we can’t celebrate that thing any or every other day; there are people for whom every day is Veteran’s Day, and people for whom every day is the 4th of July. I do not tell my wife I love her only on Valentine’s Day, and for many people, Earth Day is all year. There is already something of this sort in the Festivus celebrations, which I support wholeheartedly, in the Airing of Grievances. But that comes too close to Christmas for me: I get happier as we get closer to the actual day, as the school season ends and I get to spend all my time pounding eggnog and looking at Christmas decorations. I think now, as part of the farewell to the awkward time, as a last hurrah for the darkness of Halloween, as a bit of relief after the stress of family on Thanksgiving, and well before the stress of family on Christmas: we should have a day when we bitch.

YARN | The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. | Seinfeld (1993) - S09E10 The Strike | Video clips by quotes | 6e01524c | 紗

Frank Costanza Seinfeld GIF by MOODMAN - Find & Share on GIPHY

So let me start things off, and then invite you all to continue it in your own way.

I’m sick. Not very sick: not too sick to stay home from work, or to avoid obligations; just sick enough, with a cough and a stuffy runny nose, to feel miserable whenever I lay down to sleep, and then again first thing in the morning when I get up. So basically, I’m just sick enough to make every day kind of awful. I hate snot.

I don’t know if I have a cold or the flu or Covid; it’s most likely that I’ve gone from one to another, and maybe through all three, and so has my wife. I HATE that we’ve added Covid to the usual collection of germs that come flying in for the winter: I hate that it makes the already dangerous flu season that much more deadly, and also that it means all the right-wing assholes in this country have to avoid vaccinations and masks and social distancing on principle. Fuck the politicization of disease: it’s a fucking disease, you shitheads. Just go to the damn doctor and do what the damn doctor says.

Speaking of right-wing assholes (And please don’t get me wrong: the operative term there is “assholes.” That is who I’m complaining about. Not people who are conservatives, or Republicans, or people who are generally right of me politically, all the way to the end of the spectrum: just the assholes among them.), FUCK Elon Musk and every single person on Twitter right now. I used to enjoy Twitter. It was fun, and funny. I spent an entire year tweeting out the lyrics of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one letter at a time, backwards, so it could be read by scrolling through my timeline. (Yes, I’m serious. Every Tweet I twitted in 2021 was part of that project. I am proud of it. I will always be.) But then, a couple of months ago, they changed the algorithm so that I had to start seeing more right-wing troll accounts in my Twitter feed. I assume it was because they wanted to increase interaction. And even though I knew I was being manipulated, it still worked: because I have a deep-seated need to reply to people who speak lies and falsehoods, and that was basically every single one of the Twitterati on the right. (Again: it’s not about being on the right, it’s about these particular fucktoads, who would be just as obnoxious if they were on the left. Also, I had one of the most annoying exchanges I’ve had in the last month or two with a leftist who failed to understand that I was on her side, and who kept giving me shit until she finally blocked me.) And ever since Elon took it over, the wave of masturbatory celebration, all founded on complete bullshit (“Elon fired everyone at Twitter and it’s working fine! Clearly all those overpaid leftist Twitter execs did nothing!” Right. Until there actually is a problem, and the whole fucking thing collapses because there’s not enough people to fix the problem. But since it’s been going fine for like two weeks, CLEARLY THERE WILL NEVER BE A PROBLEM EVER AND WE ALL SHOULD HIGH FIVE ABOUT IT), is just getting to be too much to take.

I’m also bitter about my inability to let things go. I don’t even like social media, in concept. But here I am, fighting pointlessly to save a platform that I am not enjoying, just because I can’t let things go. Sigh.

I would also like to complain about obligatory family phone calls on the holidays. I love my parents. I like talking to them. But the requirement that, every year, I have to call my dad and tell him what I’m eating, and listen to what he’s eating, well — it’s a little too much. It’s certainly not the worst thing: there are people who have much harder family obligations, and much harder holidays because of family, than me. But really. I’m tired of hearing about how big the turkey is.

And speaking of having the same conversation over and over again, I would like to propose that every single time a student in my classes says “Can we just do nothing today? It’s a half day,” a full day gets added to that student’s school year. I would also like to propose that every time a student says “Can we do nothing today? It’s Friday” that student loses a weekend. And every time a student says “Can we do nothing today? It’s Monday,” I would like to propose that Garfield pop up out of the ground and slap them.

I am so bloody tired of being the only one in the room who wants to do the work, and who has to fight with everyone else just to do what we’re all there to do. So tired of it.

OH AND ALSO

We bought this new TV, right? And it’s very nice. It’s a Smart TV. Which means it has internet capability, and can stream our digital services without the need for our Roku receiver. Cool. Except that requires that I create an account for the TV, which is an LG, and then sign into that account on the TV in order to do things like “install” the Netflix app directly on the Smart TV.

It won’t let me log in.

I spent two hours fucking around with that thing last night. I made an account, registered it, confirmed it with the email address, and then tried to log in on the TV — nothing happened. I tried a dozen times: still nothing. I changed the password, even though I was using the right password: no change. Still wouldn’t log in. It didn’t say “Login failed,” didn’t tell me that the username or password was wrong; just every time I clicked “Log In,” the loading icon appeared, and then disappeared, and I was still not logged in. I tried to use a different method of logging in — using a QR code on my phone, and then logging in through the website that came up — and the phone logged in, but then the TV said “Verifying login information” and didn’t do anything after that. Over and over, trying to log in to the “Smart” TV we bought, so that I could make our streaming more convenient. That’s all.

And let me note: I was logging in using the remote to move a cursor across a keyboard on the screen, to enter all the letters and numbers and special characters in my email address and the password. Said password, of course, had to be at least 8 characters long, including upper and lower case, a numeral and a special character. Right right right right up up click, left left left left left left down click. Over and over.

Still didn’t work.

I JUST WANT TO LOG IN! TO USE YOUR FUCKING SERVICE!

Okay. There.

Twitch Sigh GIF by Hyper RPG - Find & Share on GIPHY

That’s better.

Now. How about you?

Showing Up

23/10/2021Dusty 1 Comment

One thing I have done to try to improve my situation and specifically my mood and mental health, is that I have begun meditating.

It’s something I’ve thought about doing for years, but stupidly, never thought to actually try. Well, no, I tried a time or two; I asked my wife, who has practiced meditation for years (She’s not strictly a Buddhist, but her philosophy and mindset are often — let’s call it Buddhist-adjacent) how to do it; she tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t take the step of actually having her guide me through the practice, I just wanted instructions so I could do it on my own. And she tried, but it’s hard to work just from someone’s description of meditation, so it never really came together for me. Also, I am very aware that I don’t have much time during the average day: my work day is from 8:00-4:20 (And isn’t it amazing that my high school chose 4:20 as a significant time during the day, as the time when the students need to go home; it’s surely only a matter of time until they decide that each class should be 69 minutes long, and then every middle school boy there will be lost), and my commute is about 45-60 minutes depending on traffic and who’s driving for my carpool; then I need to do the usuals around the house — I tend to get the groceries and wash the dishes because my wife does the cooking; I usually feed the dogs and take them for walks, because she cares for the birds and the tortoise– and so on. I don’t need to list the daily tasks to help you understand why my day is full. But there is the extra factor that teaching means you work at home as well as at school, and also that the work is never done. So literally any time I have a choice about what to do, one voice in my head (sometimes soft, sometimes very loud) says “Maybe you should grade something.” And then because I’m a writer, which is also a task that requires a tremendous amount of time, another voice says “Maybe you should write something.”

All of which is to say that I have struggled to set time aside for something as seemingly unnecessary as sitting quietly with my eyes closed for ten or twenty minutes, trying to empty my head. Surely I should be grading. Or writing. Or vacuuming.

But then this year, my already-full head got over-full. Might have happened with the pandemic; might have happened with buying a house this past spring; might have happened with various health crises and concerns happening to my parents and my wife’s parents. What has always been “a lot” in my head finally became “too much.” I cried out for help, on Twitter, as it happened, and a very kind fellow teacher recommended a meditation app called Headspace, with the extremely strong recommendation that the app is free for teachers. He said it helped him deal with stress, and maybe I should give it a try.

So I gave it a try.

And I liked it.

Now, it has not solved my problems; clearly, since writing these blogs is another attempt to deal with the issues I’m facing. Headspace focuses on what is called “Mindfulness meditation,” which is essentially trying to be present in the moment and fully aware of where you are and what you are feeling, without judging or thinking about the moment or where you are and what you are feeling. And maybe that’s how all meditation works; I dunno. But this meditation is mostly about emptying your mind while focusing on your breathing.

I’m proud to say that I’m good at breathing. I sort of always have been; I’ve been a singer all my life, so I’ve got pretty good breath control and lung capacity. I lost much of that when I became a smoker during my senior year of high school, and for the subsequent 19 years when I kept my pack-a-day cigarette habit; but I gave up smoking better than ten years ago, now, so my breath is back — and seriously, that does make me proud.

But I SUCK at emptying my head.

That’s oversimplifying it, because the idea is not really to empty your head; it is to step back from your thoughts, observing and acknowledging them as they arise, and then letting them go without getting caught up in them. So the thoughts come, as thoughts always do; but they don’t stay, because you don’t stay with them. I like that concept, because it makes much more sense and feels much more realistic than my original misunderstanding of meditation, which was that you were to control your mind so completely that it doesn’t think anything beyond “Ommmmmmmmm.” (And again, not an expert, so maybe that is exactly what Zen meditation, for instance, is supposed to do; but I doubt it. Because I can’t really picture that kind of thought control being possible.)

Regardless, though, I still suck at it.

I think too much. Particularly, for me, I think of scenarios and then imagine myself in them. In those scenarios, I mostly interact with other people who I am also imagining, usually my mental versions of real people I have to, or should, talk to for one reason or another. I plan out conversations, imagine the responses I would get, and then consider ways to reply to them. Sometimes they are pleasant conversations I would like to have — I might think about talking to my wife about dinner plans, for instance — but much more often they are things I am somewhat anxious about, or angry about. I think a lot about what I will say to my students, and also about what I should have said to them but didn’t say. And because I’m picturing whole scenarios and conversations, I get caught up in the thoughts much too easily. I don’t simply observe the thoughts, acknowledge them, and let them go; I grab them and hold on tight. I swallow them whole — or maybe I let them swallow me.

Point is, I can sit quietly, breath deeply, still my body; but then I sit there and think about the same bullshit I’m always thinking about. And in this last year, especially, that bullshit has become extremely stressful.

I took a walk with my dogs this morning. A long walk, which is one of my favorite things to do on the weekends, when I have time. Usually I like to listen to podcasts; that’s been how I get my news, and also how I work slowly on improving my understanding of philosophy and a few other subjects I’m especially interested in. But this morning, I stopped the podcast after no more than a minute, because I had to think about that one class.

All teachers know that one class. (Though one of the especially difficult things about teaching is that that one class changes over the course of a school year, as the students come and go, or as the year progresses and their attitudes and demeanors shift.) Mine is currently my last period sophomore English class. I don’t want to get into details, but we’ve reached the point where something has to change. And I spent the walk thinking about that. The whole time. I went through three different ways I could handle the situation, three different attitudes I could present to the students; each one with an imagined speech I would give to them on Monday.

So that’s what I mean. I get caught up in the thoughts, think about them too much, and I lose time that I should be spending relaxing and enjoying myself — which is something I very much need to do in order to reduce my stress and discontent. I’ve always done it, always gotten caught up in overthinking; but it’s worse now both because there are more things bothering me, and because I’m struggling to deal with being bothered; it takes me longer to work through the problems in my head. Often I can’t work through them.

Though I am proud to say I have come up with a solution for the class, one that I like, and I feel ready for Monday. Which is good because it means I won’t keep thinking about the same issue every time I go to sleep, and every time I wake up. When I do that, lately (another thing I’ve always done, lay in bed overthinking and imagining scenarios), I’ve tried to follow my meditation practice: focus on breathing, relax my body, let the thoughts go.

I can’t do it. Too busy thinking. And also, I suck at meditating, so I don’t really commit to relaxing into meditation, because my insomniac brain doesn’t believe it will help. By which I mean, I don’t believe it will help, because I am my insomniac brain, and I have not yet learned to trust and believe in my meditation. Because I suck at it. Can’t stop thinking, and getting caught up in my thoughts.

You know what, though? I’m still doing it. I’m still meditating. Almost every day.

And I like it.

I like taking that ten minutes or so for myself. I really like being quiet for that time. I like making a commitment, every day, to trying to do something good for me and my mood and my mental health. I like breathing deeply (Maybe I mentioned that I’m quite good at breathing) and I like trying to relax and let go. Even if I suck at it.

I think it’s helping — though again, it clearly isn’t enough on its own to make me feel good all the time — but more importantly, as the guides on the Headspace app keep telling me, it’s not about being successful, or reaching a certain goal or achievement; it’s not about judging the success or failure of my meditation practice. It’s about practicing. It’s about showing up every day, taking the time, making the commitment. And they keep assuring me, if I keep doing it, eventually I will get better at it.

We’ll see.

But the whole point about showing up, taking the time, making the commitment? That’s true. I know it from — well, everything.

I know it from teaching, because I know one of the most important things I can do for my students is show up for them, every day or as close to it as I can manage, and willing to work to help them, or as close to that as I can manage. One of the worst things I can do to them is give up on them. One of the most frustrating things about teaching is that they give up on me. Quickly. Repeatedly. En masse. But my job is still to show up for them. Which I do. But it’s hard. And getting harder. But still, I take the time, I make the commitment; and it works. If nothing else, my students almost universally respect me as a teacher, and that’s why.

I know this also from my marriage. My wife is amazing, but also, we’ve been together for more than a quarter-century (and HOLY SHIT I just realized that), and that means not everything is or has been perfect, and that means work. But we haven’t drifted apart, or lost our deep connection, because both of us show up for each other, and keep showing up for each other. Every day.

I know it from writing, because I know that writing requires me to try to keep writing, as much as I can, as often as I can. That one’s tougher, because I don’t see the rewards from it. But I do see some rewards, because I know that my writing now is better than it used to be. And it’s not because I took a class, or apprenticed myself to a mentor; it’s not because I had an epiphany, and it’s not because I met the Devil at a crossroads at midnight and sold my soul. It’s just because I keep doing it. I keep trying, I keep putting in the time and the effort.

I keep showing up.

And things get better.

So that’s what I’m hoping for with meditation.

And with everything else.

Just Dusty

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