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Himself

Dusty 1 Comment

“Why am I feeling so melancholy?” he asked himself as he sat down at his computer, preparing for another long day of repetitive but difficult tasks at his second job — the second job he needs only because his first doesn’t earn him enough, no matter how hard he works at it, no matter how successful he is at the work.

“I’m just feeling so down, and I don’t know why,” he told himself, as he reminded himself to purchase the tickets sometime today so he can go visit his aging father. He adamantly doesn’t let himself think about how this could be the last time he sees the man who raised him, the man who will always be just slightly disappointed in him. Or about how he also needs to figure out how to go see his mother. He definitely doesn’t think about all of that chaos.

“I wonder what’s bothering me,” he ruminated to himself, seeing a notification that he would need to not eat anything for two hours before his appointment tomorrow, when a giant magnet will scan his head to see if there is a growth inside his ear canal which is causing the hearing loss and constant ringing he has been trying to ignore for the past year or two. His doctor assures him the growth, if it’s there, will be benign and slow-growing; the constant ringing, never getting much better or much worse since it appeared (which was probably just when he noticed it for the first time), says that the doctor is right. Though that still means that if there is a growth, then only surgery on his ear canal will alleviate the problem; and if there’s no growth, then he will have to live with this irritating sound, louder and more noticeable whenever there is a quiet moment, slowly growing louder and louder until it is the only thing he will ever hear again.

“I hate when I feel this way and don’t know why,” he complained to himself as he walked past the thermostat, which told him both that it needed servicing (The system had cost them more than they could afford a year ago, right after they bought the house they couldn’t really afford. He also doesn’t think about the inflation that has been moving up the price of everything, but never moving up his wages.) and that it was 80 degrees outside at 6:30 am. Seems like it never gets any cooler, these days. (He doesn’t think about the climate that would cost all of humanity more than they can afford in a generation or two. But he can’t do anything about that. That is, he hasn’t been able to solve the problem all by himself; he does what he can, and doesn’t think about what more he could do. He doesn’t think about this any more than everyone else does. Which is, of course, the problem. But he can’t solve that. Any more than he can solve the inflation or the political turmoil that the inflation is driving, which seems to be moving his country closer and closer to fascism. But he can’t do anything about that, so it’s better just to not think about it. Right?) But he needs to get to work.

He sits down at the computer, and as he begins to log in to the online test system where he will be scoring student essays (Always the same essay, over and over and over again) for the next several hours, he decides to stop and write about what he is feeling. “Maybe this will help me figure out what’s wrong,” he tries to convince himself, though he knows he shouldn’t be spending time writing, he needs to get to work, needs to get his hours in because they need the money, and writing — his passion, his calling, his greatest gift — has never been enough to earn a living. He has never been good enough to make a career out of it. And so he keeps teaching, and grading essays in the summer, and trying as hard as he can, every single day, not to let himself think about how he doesn’t ever have the time or the energy to write, and when he does find the chance to write, he has to keep himself from reflecting on how this writing, too, will not be good enough to get him what he wants, what he has always wanted. Because if he thinks about that, he won’t be able to find the words he wants, and finding just the right words is a great joy — and the only reward he gets from his writing, most of the time.

Himself, tired at last of listening to all this nonsense, tells him, “You’re kind of a fucking idiot, you know that? Maybe you should actually think about your thoughts, and actually feel your feelings; then you wouldn’t be confused by everything you suppress all the time.

“Dumbass.“

But he doesn’t listen to himself.

Instead he takes another sip of coffee and goes to work.

He’s sure everything will work itself out.

Justice

Dusty Leave a comment

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

So I wrote it.

Here it is.

The death penalty? 

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

Wrong.

That’s not justice.

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

You know. Justice.

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

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

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

And justice, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Jesus.

Hey, there’s a thought: crucifixion. 

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

That’s what the death penalty is for. 

Justice.

No Pizza For You

Dusty Leave a comment

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

This is one of those essays.

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

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

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

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

So I read them this.

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

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Because you don’t deserve it. 

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

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

Because you won’t fight for it. 

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

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

And you don’t deserve pizza.

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

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

But you won’t even do that. 

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

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

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

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

The ones who can’t be bothered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does anyone have any opinions?”

“Does anyone care about anything?”

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

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

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

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

Have you ever tried?

“Nobody can change anyone’s mind.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

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

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

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

Never? 

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

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

Unless you fight, you don’t deserve pizza.

What We Need In Education: The Need for Education

Dusty 2 Comments

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

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

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

Something has to change.

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

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

Here are my thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idea #1: Age Is Just A Number

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s what we do about that.

Idea #2: Pay students to come to school.

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

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

Bullshit walks. Money talks. Pay them.

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

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

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

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

Idea #3: Education For Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say we try something new.

What do you think?

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

Dusty 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it sure doesn’t feel like it.

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

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

[Warning: there is cussing ahead.]

We need to take away the goddamn fucking deadlines.

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

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

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

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

Okay, sorry. I’m better now.

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

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

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

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

That needs to change.

I Lost My Job*

Dusty 1 Comment

(*But not really.)

Don’t worry, I’m not unemployed. I just don’t know what my employment is, any more.

What exactly is my job?

Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? With a simple answer? I’m a teacher. I teach. I teach high school English, also known as Language Arts, with a few extra frills like AP and College Readiness (A required elective at my school intended to, well, ready students for — not really college, more college admissions. Though I do take the opportunity to teach some “life skills” like how to handle credit and resume writing and so on.). So as a high school English teacher, I help students aged 14-18 to improve their language skills: their writing, their reading, their speaking and listening.

Except it’s not that simple. It’s actually very tough to know exactly what my job is.

It’s tough to know, for sure, for a number of reasons. First and most important, because right now it is changing, and the changes are bad; I am grieving the loss of what my job used to be. 

It’s tough second because society is not clear on what role they want schools to play, and therefore what my job is. Am I a supplementary parent? Should I be teaching the wee tykes how to live in the world? Teach them responsibility, time management, punctuality, and how to distrust the Google predictive text? (Sorry, that last one was mine, not society’s — I will not be writing these on Docs any more.) Should I be teaching them morality? To be aware of and sensitive to the needs of others? To be kind, open-minded, empowered, woke? 

Or am I a functionary with a single, limited task: to prepare students for a career that will earn them a good living, while staying the hell away from their values?

It’s tough thirdly because my administration wants me to do a job that is so clearly not my actual job that I can’t abide doing what lazy-minded people throughout history have done when these kinds of conundrums confront them: just follow orders. 

Huh. Actually, you know, I could do that. It would make things so much easier. If I stopped thinking about what I should be doing, and only did what I was instructed to do. Followed the curriculum as it is prescribed, used the activities recommended by people who don’t teach and don’t care, gave students behavior recognition awards and sent them to the dean of students when they misbehaved. The students would stop having high expectations of me, and would stop giving me grief when I couldn’t be all things to all of them, all the time. 

It sounds nice. It sounds simple, and easy, to just do what they want me to do.

Except it also sounds like Hell. 

One of my classes asked last week how long I’ve been teaching, and I told them this is my 22nd year. And then they asked “How do you keep doing this? How are you still so patient with us?” And the answer is two things: one, I think I’m good at this, and that means I don’t worry too much about losing my job, or about not being able to do my job on any given day or given any particular situation; and two, I believe this job is important.

They confirmed for me that I am good at this job, which is very kind of them to say and made me feel good; but that doesn’t solve this essential conundrum, because if I asked my students what, precisely, my job is, they would give me all the same answers I have laid out here, and between which I struggle deciding upon as my fundamental task. (None of this, by the way, is made easier by the voice yelling in my head, which sometimes sounds like my wife, that my real job, my real task, is to write. It’s an important voice. Maybe I should stop silencing it just so that I can focus on teaching.) Some would say my job is to teach them English. Some would say my job is to do what the school tells me to do, whatever will earn my paycheck. Some would say my job is to help them get ready to get jobs — though if I pursued that line, and asked them how I, specifically, am to help them get ready, they would mostly say that reading helps expand your vocabulary so you don’t sound dumb, which is most often what they say when I ask them why English is a core subject, why it is important to study this language and our literature. And that ain’t it.

So here I am, good at a job I can’t define, trying to perform it while watching it essentially collapse around me.

I have to go back to something I said earlier. Because (confession time) I stopped writing this post four or five months ago, and I just came back to it this morning; I have been thinking about finishing it since I stopped writing it, but I’ve never made the time to do it until now (I don’t listen to that voice that tells me to write.). However, every time I thought about this post, I thought of it as the one about grieving the loss of my job as I’ve known it. That was the main point I wanted to make here, although I seem to have gotten off into my usual tangents about trying to figure out what the hell I actually do. That’s my usual tangent because, honestly, I really don’t know. Which is maddening. I perform my job duties as I see fit: beyond the basic requirements of showing up every day, making sure students don’t stab each other, taking attendance and posting grades and attending meetings, everything else I do is selected according to my thoughts and understanding of my job. But I am never sure, never, that I am making the right choices. I’m not even sure it matters what choices I make.

See? There I go again, off on this subject, instead of the one I think I need to write about. Grief. Suddenly it seems to me that I am avoiding it. (Pardon me, I have to go wake my wife up. And make more coffee. Eat some breakfast. I’ll come right back to this subject, I swear.) Now. Here I am. Let’s talk about this.

I got this idea from my meditation app, Headspace (Highly recommend. Many different styles of guided and unguided meditations, relaxations, sleep aids, etc. Free for teachers.), which at one point said that many of us, in this madhouse of a world, are grieving the loss of normalcy. That was the emphasized point: it is grief. We are grieving. And I realized that I am.

But also, I don’t want to be. Partly because I know my grief doesn’t compare to the grief of those who have lost someone in the last two years, and there are far too many of those people — though I also know that comparing emotions to someone else’s, and comparing situations to someone else’s, are both foolish and self-negating. Partly also because I don’t want to grieve my job. That would make the job too serious, too important. I’ve always wanted to leave teaching behind, and if I’m grieving the loss of my normal concept of teaching — doesn’t that mean I’m too attached to it? That I — ick! — love it? Was destined to do this? Isn’t that yet another indicator that, in fact, my true calling is not writing, or anything else I’ve dreamed of doing over the years (Voice acting, politics, running a bookstore-cafe, etc.), but is trying desperately to get lazy, indifferent teenagers to write a real paragraph without counting sentences?

No. It doesn’t mean that. (Also, that’s not what teaching is. I may not be sure of what my job is, but I have a very good idea of what it isn’t. That’s why I don’t simply give up and act the way my administration wants me to act. Because they’re wrong. [Also my administration has, staggeringly and unexpectedly, changed in the time between beginning this post and finishing it; but that’s a subject for another day.])

When I say I am grieving the loss of my normal concept of teaching, I mean just this: that everything has changed. I had a good grip on it. I was good at it, and I knew it. I knew how to be good at it. I knew how to actually help my students, how to give them something of what they need. I felt comfortable making choices about what my students should do, what I should do with them, in order to help them in the ways I knew they needed help. But that knowledge, that sense of comfort and expertise, was predicated on a version of teaching that suddenly vanished entirely in March of 2020. And it has not come back yet. And without it, without a class full of students, whose faces I can see, whom I can cajole and persuade and intrigue into participating in a discussion about literature — I’m lost. I don’t know what I need to do now, and I don’t know how to do it.

And that sucks. That is crippling. I lost my sense of purpose, I lost my sense of mastery and my consequent self-respect. I lost all of my confidence. I have always been puzzled by what others want me to do: but mostly because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, what I thought was important, which was frequently different from what others wanted me to do. But that was okay, because they were wrong, and I was right, and I knew it. And now I don’t know, any more. Because what was important and what I wanted to do? Those are gone.

That hurts. No, of course it doesn’t hurt as much as the loss of a loved one, as much as the loss of health, or any of the other severe, permanent, defining, devastating losses some people have suffered over the course of this damn pandemic. But it hurts, nonetheless. And it leaves me confused, and angry, and uncertain about what I do now, and how I define myself.

And that is grief.

I know that the right thing for me to do is address it. But of course, I don’t know how; I’ve never grieved for something like this before. So I’ve been ignoring it, just sort of hoping for things to go back to the way they were, for my normal to come back. And getting angry when things keep refusing to go back to the way they were. And getting more and more tired and frustrated and despondent with dealing with things that are unlike what I’ve lost, what I miss, what I wish would return for me.

But that’s just it. Things are never going to go back to the way they were. Even if some things return, other things will stay forever changed. My students will be back in the classroom — they are now — but they had over a year of working online while staying at home all day every day; and some of them loved that, and they miss it, and they resent being forced to give it up and go back into the building, back into the classroom. There’s a large section of the student population that have a whole new grievance of their own with school, now. And that changes the dynamic of the classroom. There are different ideas about priorities, and different ideas about what school should be and what it is; they have a new understanding of what’s important, and it’s different from what it used to be, which means they don’t want to do things they used to do willingly, because now they see those things as inconsequential. Things like following along with the pace of the class; looking at me when I’m talking; speaking up when they have thoughts. None of those mattered over the year we were online. And over that year, they never had to deal with the annoying kids in the class: and now they have to again, and they don’t know how.

Because they’re grieving too. Which is why I can’t just tell them to suck it up and act the way I want them to. Because that, for many of my students, is a loss, a serious and severe loss, which they resist as I have resisted this loss.

I have to deal with that: I have to adapt to the new normal.

But first, I have to accept that my old normal, the situation that felt so generally good and right to me, is gone.

And to accept it, I need to grieve its loss. The loss of the me that lived in that world. I really liked him.

Hopefully I’ll like the new me, too. We’ll just have to see.

Showing Up

Dusty 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.

Not Much. But Something.

Dusty 1 Comment

I’ve led a pretty charmed life. Part of me wants to feel bad about that, because I know many people who have had a much rougher time than I have, and it’s not fair; but also, it’s not my fault. I don’t think I take advantage of my advantages and privileges too much — though that doubt tells me I do it to some extent. That’s okay; I’m not perfect and don’t have to be. But with the advantages I’ve had, growing up as a white male American, with middle-upper class parents, blessed with good health and so on, I’ve been able to do pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do, other than the wilder dreams like owning my own island or becoming a space pirate and whatnot. I went to college, graduated basically debt-free, immediately gained middle-class employment as a teacher, which I’ve kept for over twenty years now — and it turns out I’m good at it, too. I have a wonderful marriage and the family of pets and no children that I’ve always wanted. I’ve been able to write a handful of pretty good books, and there will be more to come.

So why do I need help?

Partly it’s that all the privilege in the world, and all the luck, too, doesn’t actually keep me safe from troubles. It certainly shields me from many difficulties that others have to deal with on top of the troubles that I have; but the fact that I have it easier doesn’t mean I have it easy. Stress doesn’t go away just because other people have more stress. Not even if you’re aware that other people have more stress. I suppose I could try to live with more gratitude, keep counting my blessings and focusing on the positive; but when I try that, the problems keep coming back up, no matter how much I turn my focus away from them. In fact, I think that the good luck and the privilege and the blessings I do have make it harder for me to realize that I need help. They certainly make it harder to recognize this fact. Not that I’m bemoaning the white man’s burden, oh isn’t it hard to not be a victim in a world full of victims; I don’t think that about other people nor about myself. But whenever I feel troubled, I tell myself something along the lines of “What the hell are you bitching about? Look at how hard other people have it! You have all the advantages, who are you to complain?!”

But even when that works (And it usually doesn’t, because there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude in the idea that I should feel better because other people are suffering more than me; and also, comparing your life to others’ lives isn’t a good idea no matter who has the better situation), it doesn’t make the problems go away any more than gratitude does. The stress and difficulty and anxiety and sadness are still there.

A lot of it is because of teaching. It’s a stressful job to begin with, which I’ve written about at length and don’t need to rehash here; but realize that the essential task of the job is too abstract to ever feel confident about, yet everyone involved expects tangible results; and that everyone’s life touches or is touched by education, which means EVERYONE has an opinion about it, and that it is genuinely very important; and that my personality is not at all suited to teaching, even though my skills and abilities are — and I think you can see why it’s often troubling for me. I care quite a lot about doing it well; it’s hard for me to do it well; it’s impossible to know if I’m doing it well; a lot of people are watching to make sure I’m doing it well; many people think I am not doing it well, and they let me know. That’s a lot to deal with.

Now add the pandemic.

So I have been suffering. That’s the truth. Not as much as some people, but enough for me to feel it, enough for me to lose sleep, and question everything I should feel confident about (and question everything else twice), and fall occasionally into pretty deep emotional holes. Enough for me to lose my temper too often, over things that should not bother me. Enough for me to lose hope, and to feel like there’s no chance for success or improvement in the future. I won’t say I’ve been depressed, or anxious, because I have had ample experience with other people going through those specific difficulties, and mine are not the same; but a semblance of it, a shadow of it — yes. And frankly, it has sucked.

And at the same time, I hate saying that, hate saying that I’ve been suffering, because it seems to make light of other people who have it worse. But ignoring what I feel would be making light of my feelings, and that’s not fair, either. To some extent I feel some of that “MEN DON’T CRY! BE STRONG!” kind of ethos, but not very hard; I’m not very manly, and never have been, and I don’t give a shit. But I do care about other people, usually more than myself. Because it’s easier to deal with their problems than mine, of course; but that’s another thing that has become clear to me in the last eighteen months, and which helped precipitate this blog: it’s not feeling that way any more. I don’t want to help other people more than myself. I want to help myself.

Without making light of what I’m dealing with, I know that I don’t need a lot. I don’t need medication; my emotional turmoil has never yet been overwhelming. It has never kept me from going forward, from doing what I need to do — though it has sometimes kept me from what I want to do, which is why I haven’t been writing enough in the last year-plus. I am not as sure that I don’t need therapy. I don’t think I do. I admit there is some comparing there, because I know people in therapy, and they have it worse than me, which does make me say to myself, “Come on, you’re not that bad off.” There’s also the fact that I was in therapy for six years when I was a child, and though the experience has faded with the years, I remember that it didn’t seem to help anything other than the psychiatrist’s income. So I don’t think I’m at that point. I want to talk to someone, but I’m too private for that, most of the time.

So here I am. Writing these vague, rambling puddles of thought-drool.

I think it’s helping. It’s hard for me to say; I’m not very good at reading my own emotions. Not sure if that’s another aspect of the “MEN DON’T CRY!” piece of my psyche, or if it is the result of trauma that is more serious than I think it is, or if I’m just emotionally pretty stupid. All possibilities, and I have no idea how I would distinguish between them — which is also how I feel about distinguishing sadness from worry from anger from depression from — I dunno. But like I said, things tend to become more clear for me when I can write about them, so I’m going to keep trying.

Because I need something. Not much. But something.

Starting Something

Dusty 2 Comments

I need something. I’m not sure what.

I need a lot of things, of course, which confuses the issue. I need more money, I need more time, I need more certainty. Definitely the last one, since I’m here hemming and hawing from the first line of this. Maybe that’s the thing I need most.

Okay: as a teacher and a writer, my usual habit (and, arguably, my job) is to take a position with certainty and then invite people to either agree with me or to knock me off it. So let me change gears here, and see if that makes this better.

I need to talk. Which, because I’m an introvert, means I need to write. I think that means I need an audience to read what I write, but thinking of you all doing that immediately makes me feel bad: I don’t want to waste your time reading my maudlin meanderings, especially not when I’m not actually suffering that badly, certainly not compared to other people. I haven’t lost my job, or my home, or any loved ones or friends. Well, no, I lost friends, but only because we stopped talking, not because they’ve died; surely that’s not as bad a loss. And it might have been my fault that I lost them, which means I don’t get to feel sad about it, right?

The point remains that I don’t have any great, soul-rending grief to get off my chest. Which I am grateful for. I also don’t have any particular insight into — well, anything, really; and I’m realizing, right now as I write this, that that’s the problem. I haven’t been writing blogs — or much of anything else — because I don’t have any answers. I have become acutely aware in the last year or so that I don’t have any answers, that I don’t know what’s best or what’s right, that I don’t know how to make things better. I’ve thought about writing posts on things that occur to me, but every time, I run up against this: I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know which direction to point in. I’m like a signpost that’s been knocked down, and now I don’t know which road is which, or where to tell people to go.

But maybe that’s a better place to be, rather than thinking I know the answers. Being humbled is no fun: but there are lots of people who have recommended humility; maybe that’s what I’ve needed.

I don’t know. But I do know that I need to talk, to write. And while I have a journal, it doesn’t feel like enough; writing in it instantly feels like I’m keeping secrets, like I’m hiding things away. Partly because there are secret things that I need to hide away, mistakes and failings that I am not ready or not able to confess; I do write about those in my journal. But that doesn’t help, not at all. And I need help.

This probably sounds more desperate and despondent than I actually am (Though I realize I’ve said that a few times of late, so maybe I’m fooling myself and I actually am pretty despondent); I’ve seen real despair and desperate need, and I’m not at that point. But also, if we don’t look for the help we need before we get to that point, then eventually we all get there. I would rather not, so I’m going to try for the help I need now.

So I’m writing. And I feel bad about it, which is why I’m so apologetic and guilt-ridden. But I am actually confident that I need to do this, while I am deeply uncertain that this is a good thing for anyone else but me. Thus I am going to say this: you don’t need to read this. There are probably not great insights coming at the end. This is not my area of expertise, this whole self-care/therapeutic/wellness world, so I’m not going to be able to give advice, nor offer a catalog of options. I’m doing this for me, because I think I need to. Things make more sense to me when I write about them. Writing feels more honest and more important, more legitimate, maybe, when I write for an audience, even if it is only a theoretical one. So I’m going to write about what I’m feeling and what I’m dealing with. I expect that I will be fumbling around a lot, and sounding mostly like an idiot; I expect that these posts will be rambling and kinda pointless. So I want to warn you away from reading them.

But also, I am hoping that being open and honest about what I’m feeling and what I’m dealing with may be helpful. It’s not a special story; I’m just a regular person going through what I presume are pretty normal feelings. But because of that, it may be a more universal story. It may be easier to relate to. And that may help.

So that’s the reason I’m willing to share this on this blog. I need to, and I can envision an audience that would be glad to hear what I have to say. If that’s not you, that’s okay; I’m pretty used to not having much of an audience for my writing. It’s one of the things that confuses and frustrates me, and just makes it that much harder to move forward. Hopefully, this will help me get past some of that block.

Hopefully, this will make me feel better.

I need something that will.

The Court of Public Opinion

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George Floyd's mother was not there, but he used her as a sacred invocation
I want to open with this because I don’t want to center the discussion on me or on my erstwhile opponent in this debate: the real focus here is on the police murder of George Floyd. Rest in peace, sir.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I don’t like Ben Shapiro.

It’s not hard to understand why: he is deeply conservative and I am liberal; I believe in the value of real argument and he’s the definition of a sophist; I strive to be honest and a rational intellectual (Meaning someone who uses reason and thought to discern and communicate truth; I’m not necessarily trying to be seen as super-smart and therefore an authority — though I admit I wouldn’t mind being seen as super-smart), and he’s a manipulative liar who hides behind the trappings of pseudo-intellectualism (meaning he is trying to be seen as super-smart and therefore an authority, regardless of the actual merits of his position — and I think he is intelligent enough to know what he’s doing and why, which implies that he is either deeply cynical or tragically self-deluded).

Basically, he’s a stinky poopoo head. Just know that going in.

As a brief aside, let me address the likely counterjab from any Shapiro fans who happen to be reading this: no, I don’t hate Shapiro because he’s a conservative; I have deep respect for many conservatives. No, I’m not simply jealous; I freely admit I would love to have Shapiro’s platform, his fame and money and success, but frankly, I could get it the same way he did, the same way Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh and Steven Crowder did: I could loudly proclaim myself a prophet of outrage and amplify conservative grudges, and use my skills as a writer and a speaker to build a following. As to whether or not I dislike Ben Shapiro simply because he’s right and he proves my liberal ideas wrong, I’ll let this argument address that.

The argument I want to address specifically is this one:

I want to take this slowly: because one of Shapiro’s signature techniques is talking fast and overwhelming his opponents with words that have the appearance of sound, logical arguments. So, right from the beginning: his main claim here, as presented by the title of the video and the first 13 seconds, is that the real reason Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd was because he had already been convicted in the court of public opinion of being a racist. He expands this in the following 45 seconds by describing Chauvin as “emblematic of an American system of racism,” and uses as evidence the claim that if you asked Americans today if Derek Chauvin was a racist, Shapiro guarantees that a majority of Americans would say yes.

I don’t want to spend too much time exposing Shapiro’s logical failings; the fact that he is a poor debater who wins with sophistry is an issue I have with him and not the central problem with this argument. But it is necessary to identify the places where his argument shifts, because one of the most common manipulations of a discussion is changing the topic, or changing the focus, or changing the argument. We all know it: one of the classic cliches is that arguments between spouses start out with one problem, but then turn into an argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Shapiro does this here. Whether or not Derek Chauvin is personally a racist has nothing at all to do with whether or not he is emblematic of an American system of racism. Whether he is a racist or an emblem of racism has nothing at all to do with whether the majority of Americans perceive him as a racist. And none of that has anything to do with whether or not he is guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Again, because Shapiro is a sophist, he doesn’t seem to argue here that Chauvin was innocent of murder; he argues that Chauvin was unfairly convicted of racism, and simply implies that this unfair conviction of Chauvin for the “crime” (Shapiro’s description) of racism was the “real” reason Chauvin was convicted of murder. He also says, between about 1:00 and 1:30, that America was convicted of being racist because of this one “data point,” Chauvin killing George Floyd; he seems to be implying that America has also been unfairly convicted of that crime of racism, because the conviction of the country was dependent on the conviction of Chauvin for racism, and that conviction was unfair, and also convicting the entire nation because of this one crime is also unfair. Not the conviction for the crime of murder, again, but Chauvin’s conviction for the crime of racism. Which was unfair because it was never brought up in court, never alleged, and never proven, as he says, strongly, several times in this video.

This is what I mean about shifting the argument, and why I call Shapiro a sophist. He’s saying that racism was the reason for Chauvin’s conviction, and in almost the same breath (I don’t know if it was the same breath because I’m not sure that Ben Shapiro breathes: it is genuinely impressive how many words he can get out in a minute, without ever seeming to pause. Sorry; off-topic.) he states that race was never brought up in the trial. How on Earth is the lack of evidence supposed to serve as evidence? It’s not: his evidence is that “we all know” that Chauvin’s conviction was for racism, not for murder. His evidence is that if you asked Americans if Chauvin is a racist, the majority would say that he is. Or at least, Shapiro says (in fact he guarantees) that the majority of Americans would say that Chauvin is a racist.

What Shapiro is really relying on here is the resentment in his audience — generally a white conservative audience — about being called a racist. His audience doesn’t like to be called racist when there is not crystal clear evidence of racist action and intention presented: evidence that would meet the standard in a court of law. That is, unless you can point to the Nazi tattoo on my forehead, and the sworn statement I signed that my Nazi tattoo represents my genuine conviction that the white race is supreme, AND my conviction in a court of law for a hate crime committed in pursuance of the achievement of those white supremacist views — then it is not fair to call me a racist. And since that is his audience’s definition of a racist, calling someone a racist who does not have all of that evidence of racism is deeply offensive. Of course it is: who would want to be accused of that kind of atrocity?

This is, by the way, one of the central conflicts in our society, and it is a subject I will keep coming back to again and again: we have never had a real national conversation about what the word “racism” means, about what it is to be racist. We have not had that conversation because too many people, like Ben Shapiro and also like a much greater number of people on the left, garner too much political power out of misusing accusations of racism, which is easier if they don’t carefully define their terms. It is also much easier to continue maintaining a racist society if the definition of racism is unclear.

Shapiro points out that the evidence of Chauvin’s racism is the death of George Floyd. He says (About 1:00) that is not evidence of racism, it is evidence of a bad cop, of bad police procedure, of recklessness; it is not evidence of racism. But what is his evidence of this claim? That racism was never brought up in the court during Chauvin’s trial. As I said, the charge of racism can only be proven with evidence presented in a court of law: not in the “court of public opinion.” And in another amazing piece of sophistry, starting about 1:45, he says “Let us be real about this,” and then goes on to describe how the presentation of evidence to the public would have shifted public opinion, and therefore the verdict. He says that if the bodycam footage had broken at the same time as the video captured by Darnella Frazier, and if all of the evidence had been presented, and there had not been “20 million people in the streets declaring that America was systemically racist and that this case was and that this case was a case of racism” then it is “highly doubtful” to Ben Shapiro that the jury would have convicted Chauvin of murder.

I honestly don’t know if Chauvin is guilty of murder. I watched the video, and I saw the bodycam footage. I recognize that Shapiro is arguing here that the bodycam footage starts earlier, and shows the struggle between Mr. Floyd and the police before the officers put Mr. Floyd on the ground and before Chauvin knelt on him, and therefore it shows justification (Shapiro is alleging) for the use of force because Mr. Floyd was resisting arrest and so on, whereas the video that helped make this case so famous just starts with Chauvin applying force without giving us the justification for that force, and therefore prejudiced people against Chauvin. I did not see the extended footage as justification. I thought it showed that the police, who probably should not have been called in the first place (I don’t think passing a counterfeit $20 is evidence of criminal action requiring a police response), should not have approached a man in his car, unaware that he had been reported for passing a counterfeit $20, from out of his line of sight, startling him, scaring him and provoking an agitated response, and then using that response to justify pointing a gun at him, scaring him further and provoking an even more agitated response, and then continuously escalating the interaction until it becomes an argument about how much force is required to restrain someone who is resisting being restrained. In fact, I think the extended footage implicated the three other officers in the murder. Not because I know in my liberal heart that Derek Chauvin is racist, but because I don’t presume that George Floyd was a threat, as the police clearly did, and I don’t think that violence is justified in ending a threat, and certainly, without a question, the use of force should end when the resistance ends. If Mr. Floyd was fighting or running away, force might have been called for — but as soon as he stopped fighting, the use of force should have ended. Period. Not gone on for nine and a half minutes. Did the police see Mr. Floyd as a threat because of his race? Was his race the reason why the store’s owner called the police on him for passing a counterfeit $20? I think the answer is definitely yes, but I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that the full footage does not clearly, undeniably sway public opinion towards vindicating Chauvin’s actions, because it doesn’t exonerate Chauvin for me. Though I recognize that other people disagree with me, and think his actions were justified. I see Shapiro’s point, that the full footage might have moved people differently than just the witness’s video did; the death of Ma’Khia Bryant seems to be showing that: but that is a question of how you can move (or manipulate) public opinion, not an argument for how you can find the truth in this case: which is why this extraordinary sophistry. Just watching the videos does not prove Chauvin’s guilt or innocence, which is why I say I can’t know for sure if he was guilty or not.

But this I can say for sure: the best evidence that I know, on either side, is that 12 American citizens, after hearing weeks of evidence and argument, found Chauvin guilty on three counts including second degree murder. Shapiro has not one single argument here that is better or more reliable than that verdict. Nor do I. So I will accept that verdict as the answer, over the doubts of one Ben Shapiro. I suspect that Shapiro, who is in fact incredibly intelligent and both educated and experienced, having graduated from Harvard Law and worked as an attorney before going full time into conservative punditry, also recognizes that he does not have one single argument that is better or more reliable than that verdict. But he doesn’t say that, because he is a sophist and a manipulative pseudo-intellectual who profits from stoking the flames of outrage and partisan division, and convincing his white conservative audience that Chauvin is not guilty of racism, and therefore neither are they, and that the accusation of racism is much worse than the actual murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, because that false accusation of racism caused the wrongful conviction of Chauvin for murder, when at best he was just a bad cop following bad police procedure and acting recklessly. And why those three descriptors, Shapiro’s own, should not be sufficient to show that the killing was in fact murder is beyond me: clearly those reasons, which were presented in the trial and supported by video evidence and expert testimony, were sufficient to make the jury convict Derek Chauvin of murder.

Of course, because Ben Shapiro is a sophist and a manipulative pseudo-intellectual who profits from stoking the flames of outrage and partisan division, he builds from his claim (presented without evidence beyond his own opinion and “what we all know to be true,”) into greater assumptions and accusations, namely that this case has been entirely political, that it has been used by Democrats to build the narrative that America is racist. Again, not to get too deep into flaws in the argument and logical fallacies and such, because the focus here is simply that Ben Shapiro is wrong, but I have to revel in the towering house of cards he has built here: starting with (1) Derek Chauvin was innocent of murder; then (2) Chauvin was convicted because the public decided he was racist, along with (2B) The public would not have decided Chauvin was racist if they had seen George Floyd resisting arrest and being visibly agitated. Then you have (3) Because it was not proven in the court that Chauvin was racist, Chauvin was therefore not racist; (4) America was accused of racism because Chauvin was accused of racism, while simultaneously, (-4) Chauvin was accused of racism because America is and was and has been accused of racism; then (5) since Chauvin is not racist, America is not racist — and also (-5) since America is not racist, Chauvin is not racist — and then (6) the Democrats have taken up this issue because they use false accusations of racism for political gain. All assumptions, many of them contradictory and even absurd on their face, yet we’re just supposed to accept them as true (Because Shapiro’s audience does accept them as true, I would guess). As an example of this, Shapiro, starting at 3:28, begins talking about Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, who gave a statement about Chauvin’s conviction in which he compared his brother to Emmett Till. Shapiro gets very exercised about this, taking offense on behalf of Emmett Till’s family — and also revealing his (Shapiro’s) additional faulty reasoning for the justification of George Floyd’s death — but there are several problems with this. One is that he gets some of the details of Emmett Till’s murder wrong, but I don’t want to nitpick; I’m only pointing that out because if you want to get self-righteous about the truth, you should present the whole truth. The big problem is that he argues that the analogy is wrong because the circumstances surrounding the death of Till and the death of George Floyd were entirely different, and therefore it is a bad analogy intended to make the murder of George Floyd as tragic and abominably racist as was the murder of Emmett Till. And therefore, of course, the murder of George Floyd was not as tragic and abominably racist as the murder of Emmett Till.

But here’s the thing: that is not the analogy that is being made.

Frankly, I’m not going to speak for Philonise Floyd. His brother was killed, the murderer was convicted; Mr. Floyd is welcome to say whatever the hell he wants in the aftermath of that tragedy. He can say that his brother was the Second Coming, or the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln, or that he was cooler than Napoleon Dynamite: none of that is evidence of any of the accusations that Shapiro makes about the Democratic party using Floyd’s murder to make political hay. (I will say that Shapiro does not directly criticize Mr. Floyd: he rather goes after the more famous men standing in support of Mr. Floyd, namely Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Ben Crump — who, weirdly, I guess have to name as the head of George Floyd’s family’s legal team, which one would think could be the explanation for Mr. Crump’s presence at Philonice Floyd’s press conference, rather than the political agenda Shapiro seems to ascribe to him. Shapiro calls them all racebaiters, of course without any evidence whatsoever, allowing that ad hominem attack to support his house-of-cards assumptions about the political agenda being expressed here.)

But others have made the same connection between Emmett Till and George Floyd, so let me address that: the argument has not generally been that Floyd was murdered in the same way that Till was. Nobody has made that claim, other than Till’s cousin, Ollie Gordon, who did say that she felt the same way watching the video of Floyd’s murder as she did when her cousin was lynched. The point that has been made repeatedly is that Till’s murder, and even more importantly, his mother Mamie Till’s decision to publicize the horrifying details of her son’s murder, with an open casket funeral and published pictures of his wounds, galvanized the civil rights movement and helped bring about the changes the movement wrought over the ten years after the 14-year-old was killed; similarly, George Floyd’s murder, which was not unique but was certainly more publicized than most similar murders, galvanized the protests that happened in 2020, and may lead to some changes — potentially including the conviction of Derek Chauvin. And that is a reasonable analogy; but it does support the idea that the country is in fact racist, which is why Shapiro has to argue against it.

In the process of arguing against it, Shapiro does go after George Floyd: he describes Emmett Till with a list of negatives, all of which are points Shapiro wants to make about George Floyd. He says that Emmett Till was not someone passing counterfeit bills, that he was not a repeat drug offender, that he was not a repeat criminal who had done jail time, that Till did not hold up a pregnant woman at gun point and rob her house while her kid was in the house. And perhaps the most important point (though it is not the most emotionally manipulative point), Till did not resist arrest. Of course: none of these things matter in the slightest. George Floyd was not killed because he was a repeat drug offender, nor because he was high when the police detained him. He was not killed because he had a criminal record. He was not killed because he was passing counterfeit bills (There is no evidence, of course, that he even knew that he was passing counterfeit bills). He was, and this is the crucial point, not killed because he was resisting arrest.

George Floyd was killed because Derek Chauvin murdered him. As was proven in a court of law.

Now, I do have to point out again that Shapiro doesn’t actually say that Chauvin did not commit murder; he said that he doubted a jury would convict Chauvin of murder had it not been for the court of public opinion convicting Chauvin of racism. I don’t agree, clearly, but I will say there is some argument to be made that the jurors were swayed by the events of last summer, and by the protestors showing up in great numbers outside the courthouse throughout Chauvin’s trial. It may be that the jurors convicted because they were afraid that there would be riots if they acquitted Chauvin. That may be true, though of course it may not be; there is just as much reason to think that the jury, or at least some members of the jury, would acquit in defiance of that pressure, would even seek out the violence that may have followed an acquittal. It is extremely likely that some members of the jury would fear the consequences that might have come, that still might come, from the police because Derek Chauvin was convicted. In any case, it is not true that the jury convicted Chauvin only because of the accusation of racism. Since, as Shapiro states, race was never brought up in the trial, the only way the jury could have convicted based solely on the accusation of racism would be if they came in with that idea already in their heads, that they were prejudiced against Chauvin and no amount of evidence would ever sway them. But since 46% of Republicans and 25% of independents think it was the wrong verdict, based on the same public opinion evidence that Shapiro claims is the reason for the conviction, it’s far more likely that, if public opinion actually held such sway over the minds of the jurors, some of the jury would have voted to acquit. It’s practically impossible that the jury would be all Democrats (Also, 10% of Democrats think it was the wrong verdict, so at least one juror on an all-blue jury would have thought that, statistically speaking), and hard to believe that Republicans would overcome their prejudices while Democrats would not, based on the same evidence. One pro-police Republican voting to acquit would have led to a hung jury and a mistrial, and that has historically been exactly what happened in even the most egregious cases of police violence. Instead all twelve jurors, some of them likely sympathetic to pro-police ideas if not personally in support of them, all of them surely feeling pressure from conservative friends and neighbors as much as from liberal friends and neighbors, voted to convict. On all three counts.

Because Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. As was proven in a court of law. Without race being brought up once.

Now: is America racist? Was Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd emblematic of that systemic racism? Might the video, the case, the public response both from 20 million people on the streets and from politicians and political pundits, all potentially have had, or will have in the future, an impact on the racism in this country?

The answer to those questions is the same as the answer to this one: Is Ben Shapiro a sophist and an annoying twerp?