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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am still thinking about being positive, but I actually mean to do it.

As soon as I posted yesterday and then  went back to read it a little later, I realized that despite saying at the outset that I was going to be positive, most of yesterday’s post was negative. Either it was things we need to stop; or it was, once again, simple criticism. But as Ned Flanders said to Homer, “It’s easy to criticize, Homer,” (to which Homer replied, “Fun, too!”), and I should stop taking the easy way. Well, not stop, necessarily, but make an effort to do the right thing instead of the easy, fun thing. At least some of the time.

So what positive things can we do to make boys less suckish?  We can expand their options, starting when they are very young, and try to steer them in directions according to their interests and abilities, rather than their gender or with an eye to their future. For instance, when buying boys presents, get them an Easy Bake Oven along with the football. Buy them Legos, and also buy them stuffed animals. (I’m aware that these present examples are archaic, and I couldn’t care less. Substitute in whatever you want from the world of Pokemon or whatever.) Enroll them in dance class, and in music lessons with non-manly instruments: flute and violin and the French horn (Somewhere there’s a buff, tattooed flautist slowly twisting her flute into a knot and dreaming of doing the same to my neck. [Just out of curiosity: did you read that pronoun as I wrote it, or did you substitute a male one in there?] But I am speaking of traditional gender stereotypes in order to encourage defiance of them; I think that “manly” instruments according to the prejudice are the rock band instruments, drums and guitar and bass, maybe saxophone and trumpet. Orchestrals are welcome to tell me I’m wrong.) Get them into knitting and quilting and gardening, grow their hair long, let them help Mom on the weekends instead of Dad.

That’s a big one, I think. Encourage boys to spend more time with girls. One of the things that has made me a better man is that my best friend and strongest influence is my wife, whom I’ve known since I was 20; also, my profession is populated  predominantly by women, and so most of my work friends are female. I think it helped also that I was a Mama’s boy, my mother’s favorite son, and that my very best friend as a lad was a girl, with whom I used to play imagination games with our stuffed animals and her little woodland creature figurines. Man, those things were cute.

I think that most of the traditional competitive activities are fine if the competition is dialed down about thirty-four notches. Football is a fun game when it’s pickup tag/flag football, the kind of game where every side scores a touchdown every play. Same with most team sports. The problem comes when there is a focus on winning and losing: when the point is fun, or even when the point is to compete with one’s self and try to do better than one did the day before, then I think sports can be a fun physical activity, even a valuable one. This generally means that team sports are less positive than individual sports, because in team sports, while there is the cooperation and camaraderie of the team, those teams always turn on the weakest link, the one kid who dropped the ball and cost them the game, just like Jack’s hunters turned on Simon, and then on Piggy. More importantly, the team sports focus on wins and losses: and that means that anything  that gets a win is good. When one focuses on improving, then the sport tends to promote good habits, rather than an anything-goes mentality.

Let’s see, what else? I think reading is a key. A large part of toxic masculinity is a focus on self and a lack of empathy for others, and reading builds empathy and tends to downplay the value of selfishness, especially if one reads tragedies or stories with a tragic hero, because at least half of the time, the protagonist’s tragic flaw is arrogance or egotism or both. Watching hero after hero go down in flames that he set himself has a sobering effect on the male ego, I think. Reading is also quiet and intellectual, and therefore antithetical to the activities approved under the Toxic Masculinity seal. And if we can also remove the gendering stereotypes of books, that would be great, too; some of my favorite books are romances, and books by female authors or about female characters or traditionally female roles and situations — or all of the above.

Okay, one controversial one, and then I’ll call it a day. I think that dating and romance should wait until after the first towering inferno of adolescence has passed. One of the things that makes teenaged boys awful, in my opinion, is the terrible tyranny of the penis. It may be an exaggeration to say that everything that teenaged boys do is intended to get them laid — but it may not. The old trope about boys thinking about sex every seven second is, if anything, an underestimate. This monomania leads to all kinds of terrible treatment of girls by boys — and also of boys by boys, especially in our world of suppressed homoeroticism. It also leads to competition between boys for the affections of those they desire; and boys quickly learn, if they don’t already know from sports or the kind of friendly bullying that boys do to each other, that the easiest way to get ahead of your rivals is not to be better than them, but rather to make them look worse. That’s one of the reasons why boys are so quick to embarrass and shame each other, and do things that make other boys look bad, especially in front of girls. I don’t know if it is possible to stop boys and girls from dating until they’re around 18 or so, but it would surely be helpful, especially if we could encourage them to be friends instead. Maybe if we put a focus on friendly activities instead of dating activities in high school: like maybe the prom? Shouldn’t be about bringing a date? Just a thought.

That does lead me to an interesting thought about changing porn, both how we view it and what the standards should be for pornographic content; maybe if it was more acceptable and had better intentions behind it, it wouldn’t be so very encouraging of violence and objectification.

But I think that topic is not one I want to get into.

I guess I’ll just leave it with this: we should encourage boys to hug. Handshakes are lame. High fives, especially intricate ones, are cool; but you know what’s a far, far better way to greet your friends and to show your affection for one another? A good, genuine hug.

Here’s one from me to you.

 

This Morning

Dusty 2 Comments

This morning, I am thinking about teenaged boys. I am thinking about why teenaged boys suck.

Why do I say they suck? Because teenaged boys are, almost without exception, annoying, obnoxious, lazy, cruel, abusive, self-centered, vicious, snide, concupiscent fools (Sorry, but I love that word and never get to use it;  means “horny.”) who would be better off locked in a box for about ten years and only let out when they stop being bastards.

Who am I to say these terrible things  about teenaged boys? Easy. I was one. And I was as much a bastard as any of them, and worse than most, because in addition to being a savage amoral wastrel, I was smart, and so my cruelty was particularly biting, and my foolishness was particularly poignant, because I could have been so much better than I was.

Fortunately, I survived it; too many teenaged boys don’t, because they team up with other spear-wielding thugs to kill the pig,  and end up being the pig. Once I got out of being a teenager, and realized just how terrible I had been for all that time, I mellowed: I got better. Most of us do. But I don’t think that all of us gain much from our experience other than regret; I’d like to use my knowledge of teenaged boys — knowledge that has since been reinforced by observation in my years working with teenaged boys — to try to make the situation better. See, I don’t think teenaged boys have to be this way. I think they are put into a position where being this way seems the best option, if not the only one. Left to their own devices, teenaged boys would still be obnoxious — all teenagers are — but not a tenth as bad as they are now.

First let me deal with that last dig at all teenagers. No, actually, first let me say that I genuinely like most of my students. There are a few who are really pretty rotten, but even those grow out of it in time. Most of them I get along with quite well. But that’s because I am a teacher, and I can get them in trouble; they are on their best behavior with me. But then I watch them interact with each other, and I remember how nasty we all are at that age. It’s that contrast, between how they treat me respectfully and kindly, and how they treat each other, with the basest and most flippant brutality, that makes me want to try to make them better, all the time, particularly to each other. Okay? This blog, regardless of the apparent bitter hyperbole (Bitter, it is; hyperbolic, it ain’t. If you think it is, watch a group of teenaged boys going to lunch together. Watch them pick out the weakest of the pack, and pick on him, relentlessly, mercilessly. Even if — especially if– all of them are friends. Friends make the best victims. I can attest to that.) is not born out of hate. I don’t hate teenaged boys, and I don’t hate my students. I know how much better they could be, and I am maddened and saddened that they aren’t like that.

Next thing: why do I say that all teenagers are obnoxious? Two reasons: one, because the teenaged years are hell internally, with the ravages of adolescence and the psychic pummeling of hormones. Everything sucks when you’re a teenager, and so you suck, too, because when in Rome… The second reason why all teenagers suck is because they are all in this impossible position where we start expecting them to act like adults, but we give them literally none of the pleasures and privileges that make adulting worth the effort it takes. Seriously: what makes it worthwhile for me to act like a grownup? I get respect; I get independence; I get freedom. I can have my own family, my own job, my own property. I can be in charge of my own life. And teenagers get none of that. The closest they come is being able to choose romantic partners — but often those choices get  refused by parents, or mocked by peers, or rejected by the would-be romantic partners themselves — and cars. Teenagers get cars. In exchange for having to drive everywhere their parents don’t want to, which at this point is everywhere. (Don’t even talk to me about how they don’t have to work and pay bills: many of them do work, and that work is in addition to their actual full-time job, which is being a student, and as one of the people who make that job hard because I make them do work, believe me when I say BEING A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT IS NOT EASIER THAN HAVING A JOB.) And while we put all the responsibility we can onto teenagers, we don’t ever talk about that weight, that stress they have to carry; instead we talk about how lucky they are that they don’t have to deal with all the terrible things that adults  deal with. How is that supposed to make teenagers feel? They’re already suffering, and we run them this, “Just wait until you’re older, when things will REALLY suck!” Wow, thanks, Dad, now I’m motivated to try even harder and suffer more now. Because then I’ll get to keep on suffering my way through the rest of my life. Super!

But this isn’t about all teenagers; this is about the boys and the special ways that they suck. And the special reason for the extra suckitude of male adolescent humans is this: it’s competition. That’s right: I’m still on the same topic, just homing in on one particular aspect now. The rise of toxic masculinity. Also known as: Boys Will Be Boys.

We very carefully and meticulously teach all boys that competition is the only way they are allowed to find happiness. Sports, video games, playing Army with their friends; it doesn’t matter what era, what environment a boy grows up in: he is taught to fight, and to revel in victory. Even me, as non-competitive and anti-sports as I was, I was taught to take great pride in the fact that I was smarter than most other people. I was pulled out of class for advanced reading and advanced math; I remember in first grade I wasn’t even pulled out, I was just given access to the more interesting books to read, sitting in the classroom with all of my peers who were struggling with the Dick and Jane style readers while I got to read on my own; and my math workbook had some kind of banner on it reading “ADVANCED” in some large font that could be read all the way across the room, by the kids in the remedial section of the class. Spelling bees, gold stars, student of the month, honor roll; all of these things separate us into winners and losers as readily as do sports. And where girls are taught, at least some of the time, to play cooperatively, using their imagination,  playing dress-up and baking cookies for each other, boys are sent outside to wrestle and break stuff, especially each other.

(*Note: I recognize I’m being grossly stereotypical in this depiction of children’s upbringing, and of course there are exceptions; I had massive quantities of stuffed animals and was encouraged to use my imagination. Lots of girls play sports and are as competitive as any boy could ever be. I’m speaking in generalities. Bear with me.)

Breaking stuff, then, is really all we know how to do. So we get very good at it. We find each other’s vulnerabilities, and we stab at them, again and again. And the rest of society? They laugh, or at most, they say, “Take it outside,” with a strong intimation of “Come back with your shield or on it.” I was taught that story, that ethic, when I was a child. What the hell was I supposed to do with Spartan battle training when I was in elementary school? How was I supposed to think about it? How was I supposed to deal with that moral fable about the Spartan boy stealing food, keeping an animal concealed under his tunic while he is being interrogated by the farmer he is stealing from, until the boy drops dead because the animal has disemboweled him under his tunic, and the Spartan boy showed no sign of the pain. What the hell do I do with that? Do I admire it? Do I try to emulate  it? I do: because my friends will, and so will my enemies, and if I say, “Jesus Christ, that’s insane, that kid should have given up and admitted the thing was under his shirt,” my only reward for that honesty would be a contemptuous sniff and the old standby insult, “Pussy.”  Or something along those lines. I was taught that Spartan story in elementary school, while we were learning about the ancient Greeks. I did not learn how they admired close male bonds, both Platonic and romantic: I learned how Achilles savaged Hector, not that he did it as revenge, because Achilles was maddened with grief over the loss of his lover and companion Patroclus at Hector’s hands. No no, I can’t hear about that love; that’s gay, bro. Tell me more about how Achilles dragged Hector’s body around Troy through the dust of the battlefield. That’s manly as fuck. That’s the guy I want to be.

Did you know that in the Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in Hades? And Achilles says that he regrets his famous choice, to die young and be remembered gloriously? The greatest of all Greek warrior-heroes, and he wishes he had lived a quiet life as a farmer, surrounded by loved ones.

Yeah, they didn’t teach you that story, did they? Or if they did, it wasn’t when you were young and impressionable? Or they didn’t emphasize that story, focusing instead on the slaughter of the Trojans by the Greeks in the wooden horse? Or the slaughter of the suitors when Odysseus finally returns home after twenty years away –and his first act is not to embrace his son or his wife, but rather to kill and kill and kill?

That’s what we teach boys. We teach them to fight and to win. No wonder that they act like everyone is their enemy, and they have to hurt them all, as much as possible: that’s what we want them to do. Teenaged boys suck because we do, and we pass that torch straight into their eager hands. Burning end first.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about competition’s price.

Competition pushes us forward, motivates us to work harder and to seek that competitive edge, that special something that separates the winners from the losers. The will to win is what makes Olympic athletes, and Fortune 500 CEOs, and America — particularly Donald Trump’s America. And as long as you are one of the people born with the opportunity to be a winner — someone with the physical gifts that an athlete needs, or with the background and connections to network your way to the top of a major corporation, or you happened to control half a continent with an embarrassment of natural riches, which was conveniently emptied of 95% of its population by disease just before you arrived to take over, well! Then competition can help you strive to achieve all of your potential, can create a situation where you can be dominant and reward you for that dominance. Competition can make you great.

But there’s a price. There’s always a price. Capitalism should have taught us that: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always has to pay. We think that the price we pay for winning is the hard work we put in to be the best, but that’s not it: that’s the labor that produces the end result, but it isn’t the cost of the raw materials, and it isn’t the waste that is left behind. Before I lose you with this oh-so-clever industrial metaphor (Which, I confess, is essayed with only the dimmest understanding of economics and industry, at least half garnered from civilization-simulator video games) let me make my point: the cost of competition is twofold. It consumes the soul of the winner, and the life of the loser.

Competition requires an environment where competition can thrive. That means it needs a contest, an opportunity for too many people to struggle for too few resources (Or, in the modern sportsing era where athletes “earn” the GDP of a small nation every year, it is too many people struggling for too many resources which are all consumed by one enormous glutton rather than being distributed to all in need) and for the possession of those resources to be claimed by the winner of the contest. This quite obviously hearkens back to natural selection, the struggle for survival, which also produces winners and losers — or, more appropriately, those who live and those who die. Competition takes that same instinct and channels it into a situation that is not life or death, with essentially the same result: all else being equal, those with greater determination win — the early bird gets the worm — but inevitably, those with the greatest adaptive advantages are selected. You can see it in sports, where athletes are bigger and stronger and faster than ever before.

But even more than that, for our strongest to survive in competitions, we have to train them, essentially from birth, to compete. Tiger Woods is a perfect example of this: he was raised, quite literally, to win. And so he won, and now he is back to winning, and I suppose that gives his life meaning and makes all his effort worthwhile. But look at the cost: look at the rest of his life. The man has destroyed his own family life; he has ravaged his standing and reputation in society in every way other than what standing he gets from the fact that he can hit tiny white rocks really, really far with a metal stick; he has damaged his body nearly to the point of crippling himself; he has struggled with substance abuse.

That’s what it looks like when you’re the best.

I mean, it makes sense. If you are raised and bred to compete, then you would be likely to compete in everything. Having just one wife wouldn’t be enough: you have to have the best wife, the hottest wife; and then you need more wives. Getting high isn’t enough, you have to be the highest in the history of highness: you have to beat out such luminaries as Snoop Dogg and Bob Marley, and when you try to hang with those guys, it’s gonna cost you. And when you aren’t gifted with a freakishly impossible advantage (That would be Shaquille O’Neal, who didn’t have to work hard to be successful, simply because nobody else in the basketball world was that big. Andre the Giant, as well.), then the cost of beating out other people with the same gifts you have is — well, whatever it takes. Sacrificing every other part of your life so you can get in more training is only the first step: after that comes cheating, and doping, and Lance Armstrong, who was gifted with natural ability (His lungs are preternaturally efficient, allowing him to move more oxygen and therefore put out greater physical effort for longer — like, say, when you’re riding a bike uphill) and a drive to win, and who still used performance enhancing drugs. And also ruined his otherwise successful life thereby. Of course, he wouldn’t have had that successful life if he hadn’t won, but it’s hardly his fault that our culture rewards only the first person across the finish line; I don’t doubt that Armstrong could have been top ten in every Tour he won, even without the walrus testosterone or whatever the hell he stuck in his veins.

And that’s the final cost. Competition may make winners: but it also therefore makes losers. And everything that winners gain, losers — well, lose. And the very nature of competition requires that loss to hurt, because otherwise the losers won’t strive to become winners. So at best, with only two people competing, competition creates as much overall suffering as it does overall reward. But of course there’s never only two competitors: which means that inevitably, in all cases, competition makes more suffering than reward. Competition hurts us. Always. Even, I would argue, those who do win, because at some point, no matter who you are, you stop winning. Athletes retire, companies get eclipsed by new up-and-comers or by simple shifts in the economy or the culture, and nations — no matter how great — fade and fall. Competition makes losers of all of us. That’s the price.

 

Marketing lol

Dusty Leave a comment

“You’re not marketers,” she said. You’re right. I’m not.

So why have I been in a training about marketing all afternoon? (Especially on Monday?? After a four-day weekend???)

“It is not your responsibility to recruit.” Right again.

So why are we discussing the best ways to recruit new students?

“What sells this school, what brings new students here, is two things: the rigorous academics, and the familial atmosphere.” Makes sense to me; that’s what brought me back to this school for my second year.

So why, rather than spending these same 90 minutes working on my rigorous academic curriculum, am I being told how to bring strangers into the school family? Why am I being treated in this rather condescending way, which somehow assumes that I don’t represent the school well? Why do you feel you have to tell me that I should speak well of the place where I work, and that I should do my job well in order to turn people into positive voices for the school rather than negative ones? Do you think I don’t know that? More importantly: do you think I do my job well so that the school can have good PR?

Hi! In case we haven’t met, let me introduce myself. I’m Dusty. I’m a high school English teacher. I work at a public charter school. If you’re not familiar with charter schools, they are just like other schools, except rather than an elected school board making decisions, there is a private entity – in this case, it is a board of directors for the corporation that runs about ten different schools in this state – and the students are drawn from all over, rather than a specific geographic area. We are non-profit, tuition-free, state-funded, and we teach the same basic curriculum, with the same accountability, as do other schools. I teach five English classes, two of them Advanced Placement, and I run a creative writing club. My students like and respect me, and so do their parents, as far as I can tell. I work very hard at what I consider the most important aspects of my job: I create a comfortable atmosphere, where students feel like they can say whatever they need to say; I drive my students to think critically and dig deeper, both into the content I teach and into their own thinking and assumptions; and I try to make language arts a vital and useful part of my students’ lives, by showing the beauty and power of great writing, and the importance of reading and thinking. And I am good at what I do.

Now let me tell you what I’m not.

I am not a salesman. Despite what the marketing consultant hired by my school said to us in that afternoon workshop, that’s what the school wants us to be. She even said why: because the charter school market in this state is flooded, is one of the most competitive in the country, because Arizona turned to “school choice” as a priority earlier than most other states that have since followed suit; the school where I work has a 15-year history, which is lengthy for a charter school. But you see, despite the belief that competition brings out the best in everyone and everything, that the free market inevitably produces the best possible results, competition between charter schools to recruit students has quite the opposite effect: rather than encourage schools to be the best schools and get more students that way, it asks teachers to become marketers – because advertising is cheaper, easier, and let’s be honest, more effective than simple excellence. Just ask Donald Trump. As part of my regular job – which is apparently at least part marketing executive – I am required to staff open houses, where I give tours to prospective student families; I am frequently asked to volunteer at community events, to hand out fliers, to put those doorknob-hangers on the houses in my neighborhood. I am asked to encourage parents to post positive reviews of the school on Yelp and GooglePlus and the like.

But I am not a salesman. I do not consider my students to be either clients or customers: that’s why I call them students. Their parents are also not clients or customers: they are the parents of my students.

I am not a parent. I do not consider my students my family, nor my fellow teachers and staff members. I like them, both students and staff, and I do what I can to help and support them as I would any group of students or staff. But I do not staff sleepovers (Seriously: my school has sleepovers. Where students stay the night at the school, with teachers supervising them. I suppose I should mention that the school is K-12, and the sleepovers tend towards the younger end of the range than the elder.), and I don’t do home visits and have dinner with students’ families, and I would not describe the school to others as having a familial atmosphere. Even though the marketing consultant wishes me to say that, and what’s more, wishes me to draw other people – she calls them “prospective clients” – into that familial atmosphere, to show them how wonderful the school is so that they will want to be a part of it, will want to join my family.

But I can’t help but wonder: at what point does it cease to be a familial atmosphere? Do people recruit strangers for their families? I suppose if I were a medieval baronet looking to arrange marriages for my offspring, then sure; but I’m not. I think the answer probably is: it ceases to be a familial atmosphere when my bosses ask me to go out and bring strangers into our family so that my family can secure more funding. I think that’s the point that I no longer feel valued for my own contributions to the family.

Now all I can think of is The Godfather. Forgive me, my Don, for speaking against the family.

I am not competitive. I do not care if the school is the besterest in the whole wide world. I do not care if the school’s reputation is shinier than anyone else’s. I don’t care at all how the school is perceived, other than I want that perception to be accurate. I do want the school to be an effective place of learning, and a safe place for our students and staff; and if other people want to know about that, then well and good. But school pride makes no sense to me, any more than does patriotism: my country didn’t make me, didn’t raise me, didn’t teach me; people did that. Those people shared a national identity with me, but they also shared a generally symmetrical and bipedal form, two ears, two eyes, and a chin, and I don’t feel any special loyalty to that, either. (Yay for chins! Chinned people unite! See how ridiculous that sounds? Now replace “chin” with “America.”) So talking up the school? Trying to enter competitions so that the school can add awards? Creating special events so that we can brag about the awesome stuff we’re doing there? Nah, and double nah. If I do awesome stuff, if I encourage my students to enter competitions or help them win the ones they enter, it is for the sake of the awesome stuff, or for the sake of the students; I couldn’t care less about whether the school’s reputation benefits.

My essential point is that I am not a capitalist. I do not believe the profit motive is actually a good way to bring out the best in people; I do not think the free market produces the best possible goods and services. I teach as well as I can, and work as hard as I can, because I believe in what I do. I believe that art is the soul of humanity, and language is our church. I believe that young people should have help to become better adults (Though I also believe that help should be offered but not imposed, and the young people have to want it and take it from me.). I believe that I can help them, and that I do a good thing when I do it. That’s why I work hard. I require a wage for my work, because I require subsistence, and my work deserves reward; but I do not work harder and improve my craft in the hope of more money; I do it in the hope of better results. I teach as well as I can because I teach: and that is important to me.

I am not a data collector. More, I am not a data masseuse. I will not put my time and effort into squeezing a few more points out of my students. The school would like me to, as they would like me to actively market the school (And please note, in terms of capitalism: they are not paying me more for my marketing, not even if I bring in new students. And that’s why the free market doesn’t produce the best possible product: because sometimes you can get results without improving your product, especially if you can get your employees to work harder for nothing.). The number-one way that the school earns its reputation, and therefore increases its recruitment numbers, is academics. And rightfully so: I’d rather be at a school known for its education than one known for its football program; there’s a reason I don’t live in Texas. But there is a right way and a wrong way to show academic success: the right way is to hire good teachers and provide them the time and support they need to teach well; to provide many opportunities for your students to succeed in various academic endeavors; and to help your students achieve academic success in their chosen endeavor. If you then want to brag about that stuff, go nuts: I’ll even join in. And in those things, my school has done a good job: the graduating class earned an average of $25,000 in scholarships last year, we had two National Merit semi-finalists this year; we have an award-winning robotics program along with award-winning essayists, artists, and a poetry recital contestant going to the state finals.

The wrong way to go about it is to have high test scores and high grades. Because the more you focus on those aspects as the means to a better reputation, the more you force teachers and students to focus on superficial data, rather than actual education. The reputation based on test scores becomes advertising, intended largely to increase our funding; and like any other advertising, it takes on the shade of propaganda: in other words, it becomes a lie. We have all of those award winning students because they were not forced to focus solely on raising their test scores. I will not participate in that superficial, specious, insidious nonsense called “teaching to the test.” I will not recommend certain of my students for the AP exams and discourage others; when asked which of my students are ready to try the AP exam, my answer is, “All of them. And all of the other students, too. And how about some people walking down the street? And their dog? And that lizard basking in the sun over there?” Because why not? Other than the hefty test fee, why shouldn’t everyone give it a shot, if they want to? What does it matter if they fail? It’s only a test, after all.

I like the school where I work. I am proud to be associated with the staff there, and happy to work with the students there. It’s the best school I’ve worked at in sixteen years as a teacher, in three states. But I wish they had a better idea of who I am, and what I do. I wish they understood me.

Isn’t that what family is for?