Tag learning

The Most Important Lesson

Dusty Leave a comment

So this is how I started my English 10 classes this year. I first had my students write an essay about what they want, and what they need. Then I showed them this, and asked them first to discuss what I had to say here about wants and needs, and I asked them to write a second draft of their essay. Then we read a short story — “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov — and talked about how that story said something about wants and needs, because the goal of the class, in part, is to get them to think about what literature has to say about life and about the human condition, and how it relates to them personally and directly. Then I asked them to add another piece to their essay about that short story, which I also did with mine.

So here is my essay, on the most important lesson anyone can learn.

***

When I was learning how to be a teacher, we had a presentation from a guy who had been a teacher for a long time. He came in talking fast and loud, brimming with confidence: his opener was something like “What I’m about to show you is the most important lesson you’re ever going to see!” He was saying that on two levels: he was talking both to us, a group of university students on the way to becoming teachers, and to the students we would eventually have, because this was how he started the lesson he was presenting to us, which was the way he started his own classes as a teacher, and he was telling us what he thought we should say to our future students. He was saying this was the most important lesson we were going to learn, that would make all the difference for us as future teachers, and telling us that we needed to take advantage of it: and he was telling us how to pitch his lesson to our students, the way he pitched it to his, as the most important thing they would ever learn. And then his lesson was on the difference between wants and needs.

Here’s how it went. He would start his class by asking his students what they needed. Right then, in school or out, whatever: he wanted them to say what they needed. He would call on some, get some volunteers, and make a list of things on the board that they said they needed. “A job” was one. “A car” was another. “A girlfriend” was the one he put down as a joke, but I don’t doubt that he got that response many times over his years of teaching this lesson this way. “Sleep” might be another example, or “McDonald’s.” 

Once he got this list, he would then ask: Okay, what happens if you don’t get this? He would pick out the students who gave the different answers, and ask them: what will happen if you don’t get a job? If you don’t get a car? If you don’t get a girlfriend? The students would joke about it, maybe – “It would suck!” “I’d have to rob banks for money!” – and then get down to the answer, the truth: nothing would happen, really. If that student didn’t get the car, they would just continue getting rides from other people, or riding the bus or walking, or however they got around. They would be able to continue on just as they had been up until that point, because of course they did not have a car (Imagine if someone who had something said that they needed it? How ridiculous! You don’t need things you already have!), and they had been able to get to that point in their lives just fine.

“Okay,” the teacher would say. “Then you don’t need that. Right? You don’t need that job, that car, that girlfriend. You just want those things.”

Then he would go to one of the other examples given: like sleep. Or McDonald’s. And he would focus on those: what happens if you don’t get sleep? Is that the same as not getting a car, or a girlfriend? Or McDonald’s: okay, maybe you don’t actually need a Big Mac and fries – but if you don’t have any food at all… you would not be able to keep living.

That was different from not getting a car, or a girlfriend. Without food, without sleep, we cannot live.

“So those,” he would tell his students, “are needs. Things you can’t live without. Everything else is just a want.”

That lesson, that conversation, has stuck with me – obviously – for a long time: more than a quarter century. I’ve never actually used his lesson, because the want/need discussion went on to a different topic, which was his actual point: he would then talk about control. We all want control, he would say to his students, but we don’t need it. His point was that those students did not get to have a lot of control over their own lives – as you do not – and that they wanted it, as you probably do; and it was his belief that much of the misbehavior that students carried out in his class was an attempt to take control: teenager gets bored of doing what the teacher wants, which is really being tired of being controlled, so they yell out something disruptive or do something distracting, because they want to take control of the class. They don’t necessarily want to focus on the distracting thing they say or do: they just want to remove the teacher’s ability to control the class, and to control the time and attention of that particular student who was being disruptive. Who was trying to take control of themselves, and coincidentally, of the class. And he said that he would ask his students to allow him to have control over the class, so that the class could get through the work they needed to do: and that was why he talked about wants and needs, because while the student may want control, what they needed was to learn; and so while he as the teacher may not want control, he needed it if they were going to learn anything. He needed them to let him have control over them, to choose to let him take control. On days when they might be struggling with being controlled, he would take the disruptive students out into the hall and ask them if they could let him take control over them temporarily, and they generally would let him – or, if they just couldn’t stand to let him be in charge of them right then, he would accept that and just ask them to go to the principal’s office, where they would not be under his control, but they also wouldn’t be taking control of the class away from him. And when he gave them that choice, they usually were able to choose one or the other: accept his control over the class, or accept leaving the class for that day.

He said it was the best method he had ever heard of or seen for maintaining discipline in a class. He actually told us that we were not allowed to use his lesson if we ended up teaching in the same school where he taught, because he wanted to be the one to use it and he didn’t think it would work if two teachers used it with the same students. I remember being impressed by that. Because most of the people we learned from were not actually teachers, not in high schools or middle schools; they taught teachers, they didn’t teach teenagers. But this guy did teach teenagers, and this was a lesson that was actually important to him: not just an idea he had that he thought might work, maybe, which was my impression of most of the rest of the examples I was being given.

But I never taught that lesson to my classes. Because I hate the idea of taking control. I like the idea of being allowed to have control, of asking people to consent to my temporary control, because I recognize that I need to have some control to teach the class; but I hate the idea of taking it. I hate telling people what to do. Which is maybe something I shouldn’t be saying to you. Because what if you now think that you can take control away from me, and I won’t do anything to take it back?

See, the thing of it is, I may not want to take control. But if I need to, I can. And I will.

What I would rather do, though, is get you all to understand what you want, and what you need – and what I can do to help you get what you want, and what you need. So let’s get back to that.

The reason that teacher started his lesson about control with a discussion of wants and needs was that he wanted his students to recognize that they did not need to take control of the class, because they already had control over the only part of the class that really mattered: themselves. The teacher was telling his students – and us, his potential future co-workers – that we had control over ourselves, all of us, because we have choice. His students could choose to let him take control over them, or they could choose to leave. If they chose to leave, and go to the principal’s office, there would be consequences, of course – just like if you all choose not to come to school at all, or if I chose to quit my job – but the truth is, there are consequences of every choice: choosing to come to school and sit in class and let the teacher be in charge means you are choosing to be bored, at least some of the time. Choosing to sit through things that you already know, or do not need to know, or do not want to know. Choosing to be uncomfortable, to not have the things you want, right now, like sleep, or McDonald’s.

I never taught the lesson that teacher showed me (Which was titled “EVERYONE IS TRYING TO CONTROL ME AND I CAN’T MAKE THEM STOP!”) because I do not want to take control. I don’t like the idea of telling my students that I need to take control over them. (His explanation of how he proved to the students how they chose to come to school was “Nobody is holding a gun to your head!” And I do not like that, do not like the idea of a want being anything that is not literally a risk to the continuation of your life, do not like the idea that the need I am providing for is, therefore, someone holding a gun to the heads of my students.) I do, however, like the idea of helping my students to see that they already have control, because they have choice: you have choice. You can choose to be here, or you can choose to not be here. Both choices have consequences, of course, but both are possible. There are, in fact, several ways you could achieve your goal, if your goal is to not be here; and all of those ways have consequences, and all of those ways have steps you would need to take to get to where you wanted to be (Not here). For instance, you would not be here if you went to a different school; and there are ways you could try to achieve that. You would not be here if you graduated early; and there are ways you could achieve that – even at your young age, though you would have to have already started on that path to have achieved it by this current moment. Still: you could have achieved that. You could achieve not being here by ditching class, and maybe you could even avoid those consequences; but probably not for long. But hey, maybe your consequences for ditching would be a suspension – and then you wouldn’t be here!

Or, you can choose to be here. Which then leads to several more choices: you can choose to pay attention, or not; you can choose to participate actively, or not; you can choose to disrupt the class, or not. All of those choices have consequences, some good and some bad – though all I mean by that is that some are consequences that you may want and some are consequences that you would not want. (Choices also have moral consequences that make them good or bad, but that’s WAY too big a topic to get into in this conversation.) – but all of them are choices you can make. Because you have control over yourself. Unless you give me control, unless you choose to give me control, I don’t have control over you. Which is good, because I don’t want it. 

Why don’t I want control? Especially when so many other teachers do? Let me put it this way. There’s a part in a story I teach in one of my classes (“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin) where the main character realizes that she is now free, that no one will be able to control her any longer; and she thinks “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.” That last part, when I read it and thought about it, hit me hard: controlling someone else – imposing my private will on them – is a crime, whether it is done with a kind intention or a cruel intention. That’s why I don’t want to take control of you: because I don’t want to commit a crime.

Please notice, though, that when I do take control as a teacher, it is not me imposing my private will on you: it is done because it is my job to be in control of this class, and it is justified by the fact that you personally are not the only person here. There is a public need which overrides private will. But this is beside the point. The point is that I do not want to impose my private will on you. Ever. I want you to choose to work with me.

So that’s why I wanted to write about this, and to share it with you. That’s why I wanted you to write about what you want and what you need, and why I want you now to think about it more – and talk about it more, if you want to do that. Because while that other teacher focused his lesson on control, I want to focus on wants and needs; I think those are much more interesting, and important, to talk about, and think about, and then write about. (If you want to talk about why wants and needs are more interesting than control, we can talk about that.)

I think his distinction, the difference that he described, between wants and needs – that needs are things you can’t live without, and wants are everything else, which you can choose to have or not – is much too simple. I mean, you could get everything you need, and you would survive, but if you never got anything you wanted – would you want to keep living that way? And even in terms of getting what you need to live: how much of it do you need? Are there things we need more than other things we need? We need food and water and shelter, because without them we cannot live; but we also need sleep. But we can live without sleep: just not in any way we would want to live. The same with social interaction, with relationships with other people: we CAN live without any of that at all; but not any kind of full, healthy, satisfying life. And then, for me personally, I don’t just eat because I need to live, I eat because I want to. I love food. (Not McDonald’s, though.) So much, in fact, that I eat more food than I should, and that will at some point lead to me having medical problems that might make it harder for me to live; so, too much of what I need, as much as I want, becomes something I can’t have. 

His claim that, if you didn’t get what you wanted, then nothing would happen, nothing would change, is not true. There are consequences to both getting and not getting anything, wants or needs. And the idea that someone who had a car would not say they needed a car, because you don’t need something you already have, is clearly not true: we say that we need food even when we have food: because the need is ongoing. When we eat the food we have, we will need more food. Having it doesn’t mean we don’t need it any more. In some cases, having something might even mean we need it more, because we get used to having something – like a car, or a girlfriend – and we would suffer without it. Once we have it, and get used to it, we need it more than we did before we ever had it: so even a want can become a need, maybe. 

It’s complicated. But I also think it’s incredibly important. And also pretty interesting.

There’s a story about this, which I think comes at it in an interesting manner: Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet.” The story is about two men, in 1870, who make a bet about – well, actually, it’s not clear what it’s really about, or what their motivations are; it seems fairly clear that the bet is really just an example of how foolish these two men are, in different ways and for different reasons. The bet arises during a dinner party conversation about the death penalty: the participants discuss whether capital punishment is more or less moral than life imprisonment. Uninterested in actually considering what the meaning of “justice” might be, or the purpose of the criminal justice system in our society, a banker gets irritated at a lawyer who claims that life imprisonment is not so bad, and he bets the lawyer two million (he never mentions the units, but maybe “pounds” makes sense – which translates to something like $400 million in modern money) that the lawyer can’t stay voluntarily imprisoned for five years. The lawyer, apparently so incredibly arrogant in his opinions that he cares about nothing more than proving he’s better, ups that time to fifteen years, and the two agree. The lawyer then goes into confinement in a wing of the banker’s house for fifteen years. He actually goes through with it: he spends the next fifteen years trapped in a single room, without talking to a single person, without seeing the sun once. In that time he is given as many books as he wants, and he reads extensively – of course, having not much else to do – and then by the end of his confinement, he has changed. The banker has changed as well: since he is careless with his wealth (As is pretty obvious when a man is willing to bet 2 million pounds for – what? For winning an argument? He says later that this bet doesn’t prove either side, not that capital punishment is better nor that life imprisonment is better. Is it for the thrill of winning? Why didn’t he insist that the lawyer put up stakes? The banker stands to profit exactly nothing from this bet even if he wins it. That’s not a good money manager. So actually, I guess he has not changed.) he has lost much of it, and if he now has to pay out the 2 million pounds, he will be ruined. So, as one does, he decides to sneak into the locked room the night before he loses the bet, and kill the lawyer. However, he finds a letter beside the sleeping lawyer; he reads it and finds out that the lawyer has decided that nothing in this life matters, that he doesn’t want anything, not freedom, not money, not life; and so he will intentionally lose the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money. Saved from destitution, the banker leaves; then the lawyer leaves, losing the bet – and then the banker conceals the lawyer’s letter.

The interesting element of the story, for me, is the choices these two characters make, and the motivations behind them. Why does this bet happen? What are the characters after? In other words: what do they want? It’s definitely not a need – no one needs to bet anything, really. The original bet happens because both men are bluffing: they each want the other to give up. They both go through with the bet because they want to prove that they are men of their word: even when their word is foolish. It makes me realize that I want to be a man of my word, as well; though I think I need to not make foolish promises like “I will stay in one room for fifteen years just to prove that I can.” By the end of the story, the lawyer, after years spent alone reading and studying everything from natural science to philosophy to religion, comes to the personal revelation that Heaven’s value far outweighs everything on Earth, and therefore he does not want the money for the bet – but he also does not care if he has his freedom, or even his life. He stays in the prison voluntarily (as he has all along) to show that he doesn’t need freedom or health or anything on this Earth; he leaves just minutes before he would win the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money, either. I’ll agree with him that money is not something we need, not something of great value: but I could not disagree more that life on this Earth is without any value whatsoever. I need my life, on this Earth, and I need it to have value and purpose, while I am alive. Whether there is a heaven or not at the end of this life is irrelevant to this life, because we do not know anything other than this life exists: therefore this life is, for now, everything.

But in the story, both men’s choices are interesting to me. Among other impressions I get from this, I think it shows that more of our needs are really only wants than we actually think; when the lawyer deprives himself of things we see as critical to our lives, primarily human company, he realizes that he does not actually need those things at all. But I think the story also shows that we do need an audience for the important things we have to say – more often than we probably realize – and that sometimes we need to keep other people from having an audience, which is why the banker hides the lawyer’s letter at the end of the story. The narration claims it was to “avoid unnecessary rumors,” but it does not identify what rumors the letter will start; I have to wonder if it is the “rumor” that maybe two millions – or even $400 million – is not anything of great importance, if you choose to think of it that way. The banker’s decision to murder for that same amount shows that, for some people, that money is certainly important.

I would say that the actually important thing here is choice. 

So now you have a choice, which I am giving you because I don’t want to take control and tell you what to do. (Though I am limiting your choices within the boundaries of what I can control, and I am requiring you to make this choice; so in some ways I remain in control. Though you still, of course, have the choice to pay attention or not, to participate or not. As you always do. With consequences no matter what you choose.) We can talk, as a whole class or in small groups you will choose, about the difference between wants and needs, what it means to want something and what it means to need something; or you can each think about it on your own. In either case you will write about it, expanding on what you wrote before, because I want you to learn that writing about something is an excellent way to help you understand it, as long as you actually think about what you are writing about, especially after you already thought about it and wrote about it a little, and then read something about it and think about it some more.

No matter what you choose, you will eventually need to figure some of this out. You need to know what you need, and what you want, in your life. You need to figure out how you want to get what you need and what you want in your life. Not right now, not all at once – but eventually, you need to know.

Or else you won’t get it.  

And that’s the most important lesson you will ever learn.

***

Unfortunately, my students did not seem to learn this lesson. Their first essays about what they want and need were (mostly) incoherent, because they (mostly) do not think about what they write: they write to complete a task, to get finished and turn something in so they can get a grade. Their second essays were the same: because they (mostly) don’t re-think what they have already done; the task was accomplished without thought, what good would it do to think about it afterwards? Their third attempts, after we read “The Bet,” were confused in two ways: first because they didn’t really understand the story, they just thought it was weird and really dumb that the lawyer would choose fifteen years when he could have gotten the money for five, and they were pretty sure they would have done five years for millions of dollars, because money is (clearly) the most important thing in life; and then they were confused about how to include those weird ideas in their essays, which were about different things, things they want and need, not what some old guy in 1870 wanted and needed.

I’m exaggerating a bit (and leaving out the examples that were from students who really did think about this stuff, and really did have some insights and some interesting thoughts), but basically, my students did not see the need to think very much about any of this. They just wanted to get the task done. And when they found out that they would get a 100% for completing the essay, no matter what they wrote or how, they decided not to think, because it was easier to just do nothing. And while they accept that they need to do schoolwork and get good grades, so they can graduate and get good jobs, so they can make money (because money is the most important thing in the world), they don’t want to do anything other than fun stuff like talk to their friends and play video games. Which, okay, valid.

And I don’t want to control them.

I think I need to find a new career.

I Did It My Why

Dusty 1 Comment
when admin says remember your why - Tony Stark Eye Roll Meme Generator

It’s inservice season!

Of course that should be the time of year, as the old joke goes, when we all get to hunt inservices, but it just means that this is the time of year when teachers go back to work in order to pre-game before the students arrive. (Yes, if you’re wondering, we’ll be drinking – but not enough. Never enough.)

If you are wondering – or, if you are one of my fellow teachers, which means your mouth is hanging open and you are cussing foully at the very thought of this – yes, this is absurdly early. In fact I am writing this at the end of the first half-week of inservice: this year I went back to school on July 16th. I kept seeing memes from teacher meme accounts that joked about our general outrage over Back to School sales happening now, with some kind of How-dare-you caption or comment that included the phrase, “It is JULY!” And though I share that outrage, every time I saw it I had to just sigh. Because not only am I back to work in the middle of July, but I will actually have students in July: classes this year start on Tuesday, July 29th. Thereby spelling the doom of that last vestige of the past advantages of being a teacher: it used to be a steady job, that was respected and appreciated, and which offered good benefits and a lovely, long summer vacation; now none of that is true, at least outside of the wealthier blue states.

But at least we’re still badly paid. So that tradition goes on.

Whenever I think about inservice – which I try not to do whenever I am not in the middle of it, but when I am in the middle of it, I always find myself stuck in uncomfortable chairs in rooms full of people who will look askance at me if they do not actually accuse me of disrespectful misbehavior should I have the audacity to distract myself from the pointless and condescending lecture being presented as helpful instruction, and so I end up spending quite a bit of inservice time pondering in silence the meaning of various available abstractions like this one – I wonder: What is inservice? (Also Why am I here? And Is there value in suffering?) It’s a strange word, after all: is it intended to differentiate this process from some other system called outservice? Which, frankly, if the only difference between inservice and outservice is that outservice is carried out in some place other than the school building, I’ll still take that one every time. And whether the service is in or it is out: who is being serviced? Am I and my fellow teachers the recipients of said service, like cars out of tune? Or are we the ones servicing something or someone else? If it is the teachers performing the service, what (who?) are we servicing, and why?

The ostensible answer is that inservice is meant to provide teachers with time and training to help us prepare for the upcoming school year; so essentially, it is the first one: we teachers are rolling into the garage like smoke-belching, backfiring, broken-down jalopies (Not entirely inaccurate), and the mechanics tune us up to get us ready for the race about to begin. I’m not sure what that makes the students, who are not the drivers and not quite passengers – maybe the cargo? Maybe the road we are driving on? – but I think that’s taking the metaphor too far. This lens does bring into clarity a number of obnoxious things that happen during inservice, not the least of which is: remembering my why.

There are themes that run throughout inservice everywhere, always, and which return every year, like a repeating motif in a Beethoven symphony, or like a recurring nightmare; one of these is the certainty that someone, almost certainly someone who does not teach, will ask the teachers to remember their why.

Why do we teach? Why do we take on this difficult and underappreciated job? Why do we come back to it year after year? Is it like returning to an abusive relationship? Is it like trauma that hides behind a memory block, as is supposed to happen with women who go through natural childbirth and then have to forget how incredibly painful the experience is or they would never have any more children?

As I have never given birth, nor been in an abusive relationship other than working in education, I cannot say. I will say that I remember, every year, how awful the previous year was – and also how wonderful it was, at times.

Which brings me to this year, and the current inservice season, and the direction – which was indeed delivered last week, by a presenter who is not a teacher – to remember my why.

Last year was bad. It wasn’t my worst year – that will always be 2011-2012, when I was working through a recession and a state investigation and a union contract negotiation in which I was the lead negotiator (And it says something that 2012 was the year I won Teacher of the Year for my school district in St. Helens, Oregon) – but it was bad. I spent a fair amount of time last year thinking about, and looking for, jobs that were not teaching jobs. That’s how bad it was: it changed my why into a What the hell am I doing here?, a question that is much less conducive to being a good teacher, and so not one that will be recognized at most inservice training sessions, even though surely many teachers at those sessions are asking that question, repeatedly, sometimes out loud, though under our breaths, so we don’t get dirty looks.

But here I am, one more time – my 26th – starting a new school year, about to teach high school English to a new (Well, partly new; partly familiar, which is at least part of the problem) cohort of students. And I found myself this past week thinking, genuinely wondering, Why?

Why am I teaching? Still? Why am I doing this to myself?

I don’t have an answer, not an immediate one. On some level, I don’t want to be here any more, don’t want to be teaching, don’t want to be teaching at the school where I have been teaching for the last 11 years. But that, too, is not the whole answer, and the whole answer is not immediately obvious in that context, either.

So let’s talk about it.

Why am I here? Why am I teaching?

First of all, most clearly and fundamentally, I’m here because I need a job. If I lived in a different kind of society – one that I think would be better in countless ways – that did not define a person’s value by their economic activity, then I would not be a teacher, at least not a classroom teacher. I have often thought I would like to teach the way Socrates did: at dinner parties, in conversations with interested parties, or out on the streets with random passersby; obviously I couldn’t do that for money, but I think I’d be pretty good at it. But I don’t live in that society, I live in this individualistic capitalist one, and so I must work for money so I can have a house and food and air conditioning, all the vital necessities of life. It’s possible I could survive without a job, but my level of misery would go up exponentially, even over what I went through, what I go through, as a teacher. So I work, rather than become homeless and starve on the street.

But does it need to be this job? At the moment, that answer is close to a definite yes, because my wife, who was also a teacher last year, and who had a far worse year than I did, lost her job to budget cuts at the end of last year; as she is working to build her entrepreneurial endeavors, it falls to me to provide a steady income and health insurance; because teachers are generally more valuable as we gain experience, our pay goes up every year and then drops precipitously if we change schools or school districts – I have done this twice, the first time losing about 20% of my annual pay and the second time 40% — so that means I need to stay in this job, rather than get another teaching position. That wasn’t an easy or a simple decision: I applied for, and could have gotten, a job teaching in a different school that would have earned me about 30% less than I make now; but I just couldn’t afford the drop in pay. So here I am. (It does help that I have many dear friends at this school, and that some of my students are lovely people. But it only helps, it doesn’t make the decision easy. It’s not the why.)

It is possible I could change jobs entirely, even change industries; but because most jobs pay more with experience, like teaching does, I would have to start at the bottom of the scale, and that is generally also less than I make as a teacher, even if the upper end of pay would be more. I am also painfully aware that the current political power structure puts continuing health insurance across changes in employers at serious risk of ending, which makes me doubly unwilling to leave my current job for a new one. Any job that would pay as much as or more than I make teaching would require additional training and/or certification, which makes them possibilities for the future, but not for now. (Also, I am 51, so starting a whole new career at the bottom and working my way up is both less attractive and also less likely than it would have been 20 years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

But of course, I could do those things. I could get a job in marketing, or in public relations, or in corporate training. (I could become one of the people who provide inservice to teachers, but I would really have to hate myself to do that.) Especially if I and my family moved states, to one that had a generally higher payscale for professional jobs, I could find something that provided the same approximate income. Yet here I am, back teaching again. So there’s more reason for my returning to teaching than just necessity, more than just money. I will also point out that, if I just wanted to receive my paycheck and cared about nothing else, it would be fairly easy for me to keep my job despite becoming a terrible teacher, because it is in fact quite hard to fire bad teachers. So long as I didn’t hit or harass one of my students, I could treat my job very differently from how I treat it now, how I have always treated it, so that even though it was the same job, it would be a very different experience.

Let me be a little specific. I teach English to high school students, and I do it well. I make literature both understandable and interesting to my students – or at least I create an opportunity for them to find literature both understandable and interesting. I make the class as valuable and entertaining an experience as I can, as much of the time as I can – and that’s a good amount of the time (though of course the experience of my class is subjective and I don’t doubt that some students think I do a terrible job of teaching, and/or that my class is boring as hell. But mostly, they don’t think that, not if they pay attention and try.). I work very hard to achieve that: I spend hours and hours thinking about what I am going to teach and how, hours and hours preparing materials and assignments and activities, and then when it is time to go and teach those things, I show up, every day, as ready as I can be to teach the material to the students I have. I ignore the inconveniences and frustrations of my daily work, of my classes and my situation, and do my best to treat every class period as an opportunity for both progress and also fun. I try to learn as much as I can about my individual students, both so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect they are due as human beings who are as wonderful and valuable as every other human being, despite being adolescents (That’s not a dig, not really; adolescence is miserable, and all of us react to that misery by inflicting misery on others. I did it too. I don’t blame them for it: but it can be very hard to deal with them while they work their way through it.). I try to be as honest and vulnerable and trusting with them with my own genuine self as I can be, again so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect of being real with them, so they can trust me, so they can work with me.

The fact that I do that, that I have done that every year, is part of the reason why I had a bad year last year, and part of why I don’t want to do this any more: because my students last year did not generally return my respect and my openness. They did not listen or value my honesty and vulnerability, and they did not show me the respect I deserve as a fellow human being, let alone as a teacher who has some ability to affect their lives, possibly for the better. They mostly didn’t disrespect me maliciously, just being teenagers in this modern world; but it was hard to remember that and to keep caring about them and keep trying to be the kind of teacher I want to be with them while they treated me with callous indifference. There were many times, for instance, when I would ask my students about something, and they would ask me what I thought or what my experience was in regards to that idea or situation, and while I was answering the question they asked me, they would not listen: they would turn away and have side conversations, or look at their phones or Chromebooks, or leave the room, because they were bored. Not because they hated me and wanted to insult me, but just because they didn’t care, and they didn’t feel like they needed to show me the respect of their attention, even as I answered the question or gave the explanation they asked for. So as I said, not malicious, but nonetheless hurtful, and hard to deal with. And this year, I will have many of those same students back again. Will they treat me more respectfully? Will they listen to me when I talk, either as their teacher or as a fellow human being?

Probably not. But I am willing to try.

I don’t have to: I could assign them readings, and questions, and maybe videos or audio files of literature – particularly non-fiction, which is what my administrators want me to focus on anyway, as it is the heart of the testing that produces the data that is the obsession of all administrators everywhere –  and I could sit at my desk and monitor their online activity to ensure they were on task. To my school, that would be considered teaching, to a degree sufficient for me to keep my job and my current pay, which is not really related to my success or failure in actually teaching my students. If I produced data that was better than what I currently engender with my involved, honest, human, active, interactive teaching, then I would be even more secure in my job. I might even get a little bonus money if their test scores went up. And it would be so easy. Especially if I just had AI design my “lessons” for me. And grade their assignments.

I choose not to do that. I choose to take the much more difficult path, which does not necessarily make my job more secure, and which definitely does not produce the best test scores. And why do I choose that, you might ask?

That’s the Why worth thinking about.

I teach the way I do because I don’t just teach for money, and I don’t ever teach for test scores. I think that my teaching methods help students to get better at understanding literature and at explaining their understanding in writing, and so higher test scores should be the result of my methods; but those test scores are not my why. If anything I sometimes, perversely and against my own best interests, want those scores to go down while my students’ knowledge and abilities improve, for the data to become less reflective of my students’ actual learning and abilities. Because I want my students – and also my school and my community and my society – to care less about test scores and measurable progress data. Ideally they would not care about it at all, ever; and my hope is that when students grow and learn in my class, and know that they grow and learn in my class, and everyone around them knows that they grow and learn in my class, and then those test scores don’t improve, or even go down, then it shows the truth: that test scores do not measure what matters in education. Test scores and measurable progress data are the wrong focus for educators, because they put the focus on the wrong thing, especially in my subject: English as a subject of study is not about measurable progress in discrete skills. There is no “mastery” in English. It is about growing: growing as a person, as a thoughtful person, as a person who thinks about the world and our place in it, who is curious about the world, who is appreciative of the world, and who cares about the humans who live in it with them.

I want my students to be that. It will make them better people, with better lives, in a better world. I want to make that happen. So I am willing to work for it. Even though it’s hard. I’ve worked for it, worked hard, every day and every week and every month and every year, for coming up on three decades.

Last year, and to a lesser extent the few years before that, it didn’t work as well as I thought it should. My students did not grow as much as I wanted them to. Partly because they did not pay attention enough and did not try enough to actually improve in the subject, to actually work and learn in the class; because they did not pay me the respect I deserve as their teacher and as a fellow human being with some ability to improve their lives and the world they live in, who is working hard to do that, who shows up every day and who is as honest and vulnerable and genuine and compassionate as I can be with them, as often as I can be, and regardless of how they treat me and the work I do and the subject I love. Part of what made last year bad, I think, was that I was not able to keep being patient with my students when they disrespected me and my class: it made me lash out in frustration, or it made me shut down, which then confirmed for them that this was not a class and I was not a person they needed to listen to or be respectful of. We spiraled, because of that, both my students and myself, more than once; it took extra effort to drag us out of those spirals – and very little of that effort came from my students. If anything the majority of them encouraged that spiral, because they know that if I give up, and they give up, then they can stop trying, and they can just do nothing for as long as I have given up, as long as I stop trying and do nothing. For many of my students, for much of the time, their goal is to do absolutely nothing, to put forth no effort, to achieve no ambitions – to have no ambitions – and to not care about anything at all. Because of that they put all of the requirement for effort and motivation on me: often consciously and intentionally, again so that they can give up by making me give up.

But I did not give up, not in the long run (though I did, too often, in specific moments with specific classes), no matter how annoying some of my students were to work with, to be honest and vulnerable with, no matter how disrespectful they were in not listening, in not trying to think or empathize with me or to connect to the material. And the reasons why I didn’t give up are another part of my why, and more of what brought me back to teaching again this year.

The first one, the simpler one, is that I love English. I love literature, I love poetry and plays and novels and stories and essays and screeds and letters and songs and – all of it. I love reading and writing, and I love talking about those things, and learning about them, and teaching about them. All of it is fascinating and beautiful and magical to me, as well as incredibly important, both practically and esoterically, concretely and abstractly. It would wound me, deeply, if I were to treat my subject as something not worthy of real attention and focus and thought and energy, if I were to reduce it to excerpts and handouts and multiple choice questions and AI-generated content. It would dishonor this area of knowledge, this way of living in and interacting with the world, that has meant so much to me, that has consumed so much of my time and effort, that has brought me so much joy and also so much power. And I won’t do that, not even though my students do it every minute of every day, in every class, to one extent or another. Part of my why, part of my reason for teaching, is to fight back against that apathy and indifference and cynicism, that belief, endemic among my students and my society and growing worse every year, that reading is boring and pointless unless it is reading the captions on a TikTok or the comments on a YouTube video or a SubReddit, that writing is something best done with a prompt to ChatGPT. Preferably one entered with talk-to-text. I don’t think I can change that attitude in all of my students; certainly not in the ones who never even try to get better in my class, the ones who prefer to do nothing, at least in this context, and to be nothing as a consequence, at least in this context; but I can help change it for some of them, at least. And because I have read and taught and thought about Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 for so many years, I know that winning some people over to the side of the angels, to the side of the readers and the writers and the thinkers, the poets and the storytellers and the wordsmiths, is enough to save the soul of humanity and society – at least until we blow it up.

But then we will rebuild. If there are people who have not given up. The character Granger says it at the end of the book, after their world has, at least a little, blown up:

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”

That’s the other reason why I keep teaching, and again it is fairly abstract and idealistic, and again it is generally ineffective with the majority of my students: I want to make my society a better place. I want my students to understand the damn silly things we do, and that burn us up, so that they can help get us closer to that day when we stop jumping in the middle of our own goddamn funeral pyres. I want some of them to remember. To never give up.

I can’t fix all of it, of course, and so that makes it harder to keep coming back and trying again; just this year, I have had to sit through a conversation among teachers, who should all know better, about how AI is both inevitable and a valuable tool, and so we should not only accept it, but take part in it, contribute to its growth, tumor-like, on the collective mind of humanity; hearing that from my fellow teachers felt like being stabbed in the gut, and it makes me want to throw up my hands and cry out “A plague on both your houses!” I have for years chosen not to fight my students on their use of electronics, preferring to ask them to come along with me into the world of literature I make available and interesting and useful in my class; but I have watched as more and more and more of them have refused my kind invitation, my well-meaning passivity, and have failed to gain anything from me as a consequence. So now I will have to fight to make my classes available to my own students, and I don’t know how well that will work – and I don’t want to do it. I have no choice, so I will; but I don’t want to. That’s a why on both sides: I want to teach so I can fight for the souls of my students, and I want to let them do what they want, even if it destroys them.

But as I have learned from literature and from being a part of humanity and thinking about humanity, when some people are allowed to destroy themselves, they bring the rest of us down with them. I don’t want to allow that, not for a reason as stupid and worthless as laziness or fear of failure which creates failure, which are the main reasons why students don’t pay attention in class. Again, I don’t think I can save all of them – I don’t think I can save any of them, really, but I think I can help make a change in the paths for some of them, which will allow them to save themselves – but if I can save some, that will be enough. Not enough to make me happy, or to make my job easy; but enough to keep society moving mostly forward, and to allow humanity to continue to get better. If I can help them to empathize with others, as they might learn from To Kill a Mockingbird, or to think about the consequences of lies and self-serving fingerpointing, as they might start doing after reading The Crucible, or if I can just make them curious about the real value and power of reading, as they might learn from Fahrenheit 451, then I will accomplish that goal. I’ve done it before: and I hope to do it again. And again. Until I can’t do it any more.

That’s why.

Art Schooled

Dusty Leave a comment

This was a bad school year.

It was a bad year for a number of reasons: I taught Freshman English for the first time in seven years, and it was a struggle. My students – nearly all of them – are addicted to their phones and generally unwilling to read, which made every class a struggle. My administration, which has changed – hang on – eight times in the last five years, changed again, and it was both unexpected and unwelcome, as the principal, who was a friend, had to leave the position for health reasons. But before he left, he asked me to take down a Facebook post for political reasons, which was gross, and he wrote me up for cussing at my class (which write-up was justified, because I did – well, I cussed about them in front of them, I didn’t cuss AT them, strictly speaking. But it deserved some kind of sanction.) and for leaving them unsupervised, which was NOT justified as I had just stepped out into the hall and was right outside the door, as teachers are instructed to do when we want to talk to a student individually. He left before the end of the semester, and a district admin filled in until the new principal started with the new semester: and that guy wrote me an email warning that he would write me up if I didn’t keep my classroom door closed and locked at all times. And on top of all that, Toni’s and my personal lives, specifically in relation to our families, was difficult all year, which made every stressor at school just that much harder to deal with.

And then, this spring, the school cut staff because our enrollment is projected to go down: and one of the first ones laid off was my wife, who had been the advanced art teacher at my school for the last three years, teaching an Honors/AP class and the only life drawing class offered in a public high school in Arizona. (We checked.)

That last one. That’s why I’m here writing.

Not because my wife lost her job: that sucks, it came as a shock and it ruined a very manageable system for our family, because it was very convenient for us to work at the same place, and it worked well for her to teach only part-time, and the income she earned on top of mine was enough to cover our expenses. No, I wanted to write about this because my school cut back their art program. Toni wasn’t the only art teacher, but the full-time art teacher (Who, to be entirely fair, had less seniority than Toni, and so Toni should have been offered her position rather than being cut first – but also Toni would have turned it down, because the full-time art teacher position includes teaching two levels of middle school art, which Toni did for three years the first time she worked at my school, and she will not do it again. But also, they should have offered her the position, if we are using the seniority rules that most schools abide by. But I digress.) will only be teaching Art 1, which is the usual survey art class most people get in high school, where you try a little of this and a little of that, and focus on nothing in particular – it’s a bit ADHD, really. Toni’s classes were the ones that really got into some depth, into the specifics of a form of art – drawing and painting, which are Toni’s specialties. And she knows them better than any high school art teacher: because Toni is a specialist, she doesn’t really want to do clay sculpture or weaving or whatever other art forms most high school art teachers include. But Toni’s students learn more about drawing and painting than they will anywhere outside of college – and in some cases, more than they would in college. Toni changes their way of thinking, their way of perceiving the world: it is her intent, and her students have attested to it. It works. She does it. She teaches them not only how to make art, but how to think like an artist.

My point is, our family’s personal situation aside, and my basic dander being ruffled over those buttheads RIFing my wife, my school had a unique art program. And they cut it. First thing. No, second thing; first they cut the Turkish language classes, which in some ways was even more shocking, as the school was founded by Turkish immigrants who were working in tech jobs here in Tucson, and started a STEM charter school with an international focus so that their kids could have a decent place to learn the STEM skills their engineer parents wanted them to have. The original charter for the schools includes a requirement that Turkish always be a language offered to the students. And they cut that too. But with Turkish, there may have been other reasons: the teacher struggled with the job in ways Toni did not, and the Turkish classes were not terribly popular, which Toni’s classes are; and there are two other languages (Spanish and American Sign Language) offered at the school still. So other than simply recognizing that the administration cut back on both languages and art, and they removed two different unique aspects of the school’s programs, I’m going to focus more on the art that they cut.

Because it was stupid to cut it. And damaging, both to the school and the students. I will note, along those lines, that they did also cut our paraprofessionals, who offer one-on-one assistance to our SPED students, and they cut our wonderful counselor/504 coordinator, who offered emotional and educational support to all of our students as well as to our staff. So they made the school worse in several ways, not just through cutting the arts and languages programs.

Now, of course, cuts had to be made: the enrollment is down for next year, and we get paid per student by the state. We’re losing something over 10% of our total student body next year, according to projections. We have always lost some number of students because we are a small charter school (Just so that everyone is clear on this, charter schools are public schools but we don’t have elected school boards and we don’t have a geographically fixed district to draw students from), and students who want to go to schools with larger sports programs or more elective options usually leave: every one of our high school classes (with some exceptions) is smaller than the one below it – we have fewer seniors than juniors, fewer juniors than sophomores, and fewer sophomores than freshmen. That’s expected. The problem is that we are losing students from every grade: and the puzzling thing is, so is every other public school in Tucson. One of the middling public school districts has had to cut millions of dollars from their budgets because so many students are leaving.

So the obvious question is: where are they going? If public schools were shrinking and charter schools were growing, that would make sense; it would show that parents wanted smaller class sizes for their children, and maybe a specific focus like my schools’ STEM identity. If charter schools were shrinking and public schools were growing, that would mean even more students than before wanted more elective options or maybe more varied social life and so on; also, there is definitely a number of students who are not successful at our school and who transfer to other schools hoping for a different outcome. But that goes both ways, as well; we usually get the ones who “get in trouble” and need to be removed from their friend group. And in Arizona, at least in Tucson, ALL public schools, charter and comprehensive, are shrinking.

So where are those students going?

Some are going to private schools. Some – more, I would guess, though I don’t have data – are going to online schools, or homeschooling. Some are probably just dropping out, though they may be lying about that, telling their prior school or the state that they will be homeschooled or attending online school, and then just going out and getting jobs instead.

And that’s where this all starts getting frightening.

Because this shows that public education is dying.

Probably not everywhere, though I highly doubt Arizona is alone in this; we’re just first, because we have pioneered the Republican party’s long, slow erosion of public education in this state, and we have pushed it a little farther and a little faster. Arizona has been in the bottom three for both test scores and teacher compensation for several years; now we are seeing the payoff. Especially when you include the fact that our business-friendly – sorry, make that business-sycophantic – state has cut taxes to the bare minimum and below (A trend exacerbated by the number of “snowbirds,” retired people from cold states who winter in Arizona and sometimes declare residency here and vote here, where they obsessively and virulently oppose all taxes, because they don’t need much from the state in the way of services and damned if they’re going to pay for those friggin locals), while also allowing families to create “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” which allow them to pull funding from public schools and spend their tax dollars on their children’s private schooling. So now we can see why private school enrollments are going up: because it is a well-established principle that our capitalist society believes that something you pay for is higher quality than something you get for free, so paying tuition at a private school clearly means their kids are getting a better education.

I mean, maybe not one with advanced art programs.

But now we don’t have that at our charter school, either, so. Might as well send my kids to that big Catholic school. You know they can maintain discipline. And they have a pretty good football team, too.

Those same ESAs help explain online schooling, as well, and I suspect there are at least some parents who take the money and make some idle gesture towards homeschooling – probably while telling their lazy kid to go get a job. Though honestly, I would guess most people who go the homeschooling route, or the drop-out-and-go-to-work route, either don’t know about the ESAs and how to access them or don’t care, and the money probably just stays in the system. What money there is in the system. Which really ain’t enough, even without families pulling it along with their kids, as though the only reason we pay taxes for schools is to educate only our own children.

Funny how those ESAs aren’t offering rebates to childless couples like myself and my wife. It’s almost like it’s intended to harm public schools, not to be “fair” to taxpayers in some way. Oh wait, that’s right: it is.

This is part of the long-term Republican project. You can see it happening faster, and a thousand times clumsier and stupider, in Trump’s attempted destruction of universities, with Harvard currently acting as the breakwater. Public education is bad for Republicans, you see, in a number of ways: first because educated citizens are harder to fool, and when your entire mission statement as a political party is to use cultural wedge issues to get elected, and then bait-and-switch so you can cut regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy, you need citizens who are easy to fool, or else you’ll never get re-elected. Secondly, public education tends to teach people how to question, how to reason, and how to research for themselves; all of which makes it harder to gin up a successful level of fear and anger with wedge issues. Someone who can Google competently, for instance, is far less likely to vote for politicians who promise to keep trans athletes out of sports: maybe because the competent Googler could find out just how miniscule is the population of trans athletes in sports, or one could discover that trans athletes do not have a persistent advantage in sports once they start hormone therapy, or that the divisions we have used in sports for the last century or so are not as black and white as the GOP would have us believe, as human biology and sex categories are neither simple nor clear-cut. And lastly, modern education, especially taken to the university level, tends to reduce people’s adherence to dogma, and to increase people’s empathy, not least because universities are where people meet other people who don’t look or talk or act or believe just like them. It’s easy to keep a childhood faith when you live in the same town you grew up in, where everyone goes to the same church every Sunday; it’s much harder when you go to college in a different state, and not only don’t have the exact same denomination of Christianity there, but also start meeting people from other nations, people who are Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or atheist. Especially when you learn real science, or history.

Oh: and then there’s the fact that uneducated people make more easily exploitable workers. Right? Because uneducated people in the Appalachians are always going to be coal miners, and uneducated people in the South are always going to be sharecroppers and farmworkers, and uneducated people everywhere are going to cling to the “good” jobs they can get – by which I mean being sexually harassed at Wal-Mart or having to piss in a bottle in an Amazon warehouse – because they know they won’t be able to find anything better. So they’ll absorb wage freezes and benefit cuts, they’ll live with reduced hours and a lack of promotions. They’ll (generally) oppose unions, because they don’t want to see their paycheck go down even as little as unions dues would take; and they’ll immediately and violently turn on darker-skinned immigrants who are “taking our jobs.” All of which serves the desires of corporations and the wealthy, and therefore the primary mission of the Republican party.

So for all of those reasons, the Republican party wants to destroy public education. I am now grown cynical enough to think that the Democratic party is on board with at least some of this project – because this has been going on for decades, and the Democrats haven’t made any of the structural changes that would be necessary to solve the problems, primarily a national school funding scheme and a national curriculum and free college tuition – but at least Democrats want to appear to support education, and so they don’t pull shit like trying to close Harvard or removing evolution from school curriculum.

But they’ll sure as shit agree to cut art. Which is why my wife got cut.

To be clear, the decision to cut the advanced art teacher specifically came from the district administration. As I said above, they have cut everything they could that makes the school a better place for students; because they district administration, unsurprisingly, are Republicans. That’s an assumption, but it’s not exactly a leap, based on every interaction I have ever had with said administrators. But just like when Republicans in Washington cut something – SNAP benefits, for instance – that Democrats support pro forma but not with any sincerity, there is some noise made about opposing the GOP, and then about reversing the cuts; but all they actually do is use those cuts as their own wedge issue, to get Democratic voters to vote for whichever corporate stooge the party wants to install in power, who will then make life easier for their wealthy donors, while making it harder for their poor voters; because even though Joe Biden didn’t create a national minimum wage, or create a national system of health care coverage, or tax the wealthy in any kind of rational way, or cut the military and end all wars and the American network of international political oppression – hey, at least he’s not Donald Trump, amirite?

My friends and I have joked – bitterly, and often humorlessly – that our administration is DOGEing our school: making stupid, short-sighted cuts that are going to do far more damage to the entire endeavor than they are worth in terms of money saved, and with reckless and almost gleeful disregard for the lives they are affecting with those cuts. But while I guess the Democrats in Washington are trying to oppose Elon Musk and the DOGE cuts, I didn’t see any real opposition from any of our administration to the cuts made at our school. Regret, sure; I saw that. Wishes that a way could be found to avoid the cuts, and plenty of blame for those mean ol’ district administrators who actually determined who would be RIFed. But no action. And not that I expect anyone to throw themselves on their sword and quit so that my wife could keep her job – after all, I didn’t do that (though I recognize that such a self-sacrifice would actually be self-defeating in our particular case) – but a friend of mine pointed out that all of the teachers were given a raise this year; not a substantial one, but several hundred dollars – and if you took $500 of that raise from all of the staff members at the school, that would basically cover my wife’s salary. So if my friend the teacher could find that money, I don’t really believe the administration couldn’t. No: they didn’t try.

Because the school administrators didn’t really disagree with cutting the advanced art teacher.

They did not cut the core teachers, of course. They DEFINITELY did not cut the STEM teachers – sorry, the STM teachers, as we do not currently have an Engineering program. They did cut the administration a few years back, when they combined the principal positions at the elementary school and the middle-high into one principal of both schools (another DOGEing, because it was a stupid cut that has caused nothing but inefficiency and problems at both schools), but they didn’t cut it more to meet this most recent budget shortfall. Even though administrators get paid two to four times as much as teachers (and an even greater multiple for my wife, who was part-time, or the paraprofessionals, who were paid less per hour).

They may have regretted RIfing my wife, because she is a wonderful person and a wonderful teacher: but on the inside, they agreed that cutting advanced art was the right thing to do. And cutting the third (and least-popular) foreign language. And cutting the staff who only serve some, but not all, of the students.

Because those cuts make sense, right? I mean, the people who serve the largest number of students are clearly the most valuable. And come on: it’s not like art is that important. We all know what really matters, what schools have to focus on: jobs. And STEM is where the jobs are, the good jobs, the career jobs like computer programmers and software engineers. Aerospace engineers. Mechanical engineers.

You know: the guys who work for Elon Musk.

I could go off on this topic for a very long time. I already have, frequently. Schools should not be focused on jobs: the task of education is to make life better for our students, and thereby to make the world better for all of us; and nobody is actually served by having students go into engineering. Sure, it’s a career; but is it actually a satisfying one? One that would serve to define the identity of our students, over and above any other element, all of which other elements we almost completely ignore? Job preparation, inasmuch as it is an appropriate topic for schools, should not be focused on STEM white collar jobs like engineers or accountants or science teachers or researchers: the real need in this country, and the real area of potential employment, is in the trades. And I would argue our students would be FAR better served by becoming trained mechanics, who would make as much or more as many engineers and scientific researchers – who would go home and read philosophy and compose classical music and act in community theater and, most importantly, PAY ATTENTION TO FUCKING POLITICS IN THIS WILD SHITSTORM OF PRIVATELY FUNDED GASLIGHTING WE PRETEND IS A NATION.

But school shouldn’t be focused on job preparation, not at the K-12 level. We need to do three things: give students the basic tools they need to succeed in ANY serious endeavor in their life, primarily the ability to think critically and to learn on their own anything they have not already learned; teach them to be decent fucking human beings; and expose them to as many different kinds of human activity, as many different modes of thought, as possible. We particularly need to focus on the exactly the ones they will not use at work every day of their lives: because if we teach them nothing but how to work, what will they do during their off hours?

You know what they will do: the same thing most of them do now, the same thing that too many of us do.

Nothing.

We should teach them how to make art (And music, and poetry, and everything else that we include in the “arts”), precisely because it is not the thing they will do 9-5 Monday through Friday throughout their lives. (And also, even at a small charter STEM school, let’s not pretend there are not at least a few students there who WILL make art into the thing they do 9-5, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives; and let’s be clear that the more people we can help move into that kind of life, the better off we will all be.) It is the thing they should do to express themselves in ways they cannot, during their 9-5 jobs, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives. It is the thing they should do to claim time and mental energy for themselves, even when they willingly sacrifice all of their free time, money, and energy to their future children. Because art is one of the most personal things we can do, and everybody needs personal time, and everybody needs personal expression.

Because art is fundamental. It is fundamentally something that makes us human: it defines us as humans, because no other animals make it in quite the way we do. Art allows us to express what is inside us that cannot be expressed, which forces us to find ways to express it: and if no ways exist, it forces us to create ways to express it, because that voice inside cannot be silenced once it is ever allowed to speak. Art makes us more human, because it forces us to think in ways we normally do not, and that adaptable, imaginative projection outside of our habitual thought patterns is our primary survival strategy, our defining trait, whether we are hunting mammoths or trying to survive in the rat race of society. If we intend art to be shared with others, then it forces us to think about how others think, and how we can communicate and affect other humans; and that improves our empathy and our cooperation, and it opposes our desire to exploit and oppress each other, because you can’t exploit and oppress people you see as your equals, as your fellows: as other people who can appreciate art as you do.

That’s why billionaires are never artists.

The job of schools should not be to channel students into specific pathways; that is limiting them, it is oppressing them – it is lessening them. Art expands us: it frees us, and ennobles us. It makes us greater. That’s why students love it, because they are dying to be more than they have been allowed to be: because they want, more than anything, to discover themselves and express themselves.

Are they supposed to do that in chemistry class? In computer programming class? In math?

My school does not understand what the task of a school is. Which means they will fail at their actual task, while they are pursuing, single-mindedly, the wrong task. And they will fail at that, too. And they will never understand why.

Because they, too, are not artists.

(I’ve been listening to this next one for more than thirty years, and always loved it, and never knew what it was about — because I never bent my mind in this particular direction. Now I love it even more. The audio here isn’t the best version, but it goes SO well with the image.)

And this one’s ridiculous, but — necessary. Entirely necessary.

The Price

Dusty 1 Comment

I saw an opinion piece which stated that schools today don’t teach enough economics.

Fair enough. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem – I will argue, probably in future posts, that the lack of humanities education is at least partly responsible for the loss of empathy which is at least partly responsible for the rise of Trump – but it’s certainly true that schools don’t teach a whole lot of economics.

But you know what? Even though I didn’t learn economics in school – not one jot, not one tittle; I knew nothing whatsoever about macro or microeconomics by the time I finished my compulsory education – I did learn how to learn: and I have learned some of the basics of economics on my own.

I have learned enough now to correct the mistaken argument I accepted from my students in Oregon over a decade ago, which was part of the impetus for me to learn some economics, because I hate losing arguments, and I hate feeling stupid, and I thought, back then, that my students had won an argument and made me look stupid in the process. They were saying that immigration caused inflation, which I thought (without any strong factual basis, just vibes) was false; they said, “But immigration means more people buying things, which raises demand.”

“Right,” I said, waiting for them to get to the point.

“Raising demand raises prices,” they said.

“Right,” I said, still waiting for them to get to the point.

“…That’s inflation!” they said, and then chortled when I turned red and flapped my open mouth uselessly, unable to reply. I felt dumb. They won that argument.

Well, kids, it’s not that simple, and I know it now. Now I would say, “Increases in demand only raise prices when there is a restriction in supply; once the supply increases to match demand, that should level out prices unless there is some other upward pressure on the prices. So if immigration is slow over time, and spread out over an area as large as the US, it probably wouldn’t change prices at all: it might lead to a temporary spike in any given location, but once the supply chain adjusted, then all that would happen is a greater volume of sales, spurred by more customers, who also enter the supply side of the chain by getting jobs and adding to the aggregate productivity – and we call that growth. Not inflation.”

What’s that? You say the actual information, the specific content, which I gained during my primary education wasn’t nearly as useful as the skills I gained??

BUT ANYWAY.

(I don’t doubt, by the way, that I have made some errors in the above long-awaited rebuttal to students who couldn’t possibly remember the original argument; none of them will even see this post, I’m sure. My economics understanding is far from complete. But it still feels good to say that, so I’m going to leave it there.)

Here’s something I do understand, and would like to discuss now that we have some better idea of what the numbers are: the costs, and the benefits. We’re looking for a balance: and preferably greater benefits than costs. Right?

So what has Trump cost us? Compared to how we have benefitted from his election?

When Trump got into office, and I learned from at least one friend on Facebook that their vote had gone to Trump in hopes that he would bring down grocery prices and restore the (apparently) wonderful economy that we had in his first term, I decided I would keep track of the prices people wanted to elect this man for. Because I understand: I have spent most of my adult life not making quite enough to be comfortable, not enough to have it easy; things like price hikes and tax increases and wage freezes, furlough days and interest rates and insurance – I have been pinched by all of them, and slammed by some – have all caused pain and worry. Not to mention what I’ve had to go through with student debt, house debt, deferred maintenance costs, and medical bills – including medical bills for my pets. I get it, I really do, I understand why kitchen table concerns override most ideals, no matter how important those ideals may be. I understand that people are hurting: believe me, my family is too. We have debt. We have a mortgage. We have family medical costs, now. My mother, who will turn 81 this summer, is working, full time, to pay off her mortgage and her back tax bills. (I will mitigate that last one slightly by saying that my mom is a nurse, absolutely loves being a nurse, and the work she is doing now is in-home hospice care, mostly things like keeping an eye on someone overnight or while family caretakers are away. It is not heavy work, and she likes doing it. But she’s fucking 81, and she is still working. Full time.)

But now that we are two months in, almost two-thirds of the way through that “First 100 Days” marker that we like to make so much of, I think it is time to look at different prices. To be specific, I think it’s time we looked at the price we are paying for Trump: what it is costing us to have Donald J. Trump as our president, this second time around.

Ready?

First, gas and eggs:

As you can see, they have not gone down. Egg prices shot up because there has been an outbreak of avian flu, and millions of chickens have died or been put down to prevent further infection; eggs are in comparatively short supply right now. They will remain in relatively short supply until the chickens can be replaced: which means that even more of the eggs that might go to market will instead have to be used to hatch new egg layers (Not directly, of course, because the eggs we eat aren’t fertilized: but some clutches, some hens, some broods, however the egg farmers arrange and measure this, will need to lay fertilized eggs instead of unfertilized eggs, and that means fewer eggs produced for sale. And we are talking a LOT of chickens, and thus a LOT of eggs.), and then we’ll have to wait until those new chicks get big enough to lay eggs themselves. So it will be a while. And all of that assumes the bird flu which caused the problem gets resolved, the chances of which don’t look great right now. But while we are waiting on our egg prices to drop, it is also true that grocery prices in general have not dropped. Grocery price tracker: Inflation trends for eggs, bread and more during the Trump administration

It is to be expected that, assuming that some (or all) of the tariffs remain in place, prices will go up, which will include grocery prices. Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War

It is to be noted that Trump’s constant promises to lower grocery prices starting on day one appear to have been lies: this has not been his focus since taking office.

Gas prices have also not gone down, because again Trump has done nothing to lower them. “Drill baby drill” means nothing if you are looking to drill within the continental US; our oil is the wrong kind to make gas. And Trump has proposed a 10% tariff on Canadian energy – which is where we get most of the crude oil we turn into gasoline.

Why Trump’s fix for gas prices won’t work | CNN

“Why don’t we just start using American crude oil? Champagne oil sounds so nice!” Because oil refineries are set up to handle certain products, and changing them to other products is either too expensive, too slow, or just impossible. I mean, in theory the federal government could step in and use tax dollars to make the changes or subsidize private refineries so they could make the changes…

But that would require actual reliance on, and responsible management from, the federal government.

So: gas prices are not going down, probably will go up. Egg prices are not coming down for a long time, months if not years before all of the supply chains are back to where they were before the avian flu (and that also assumes there won’t be any other price shocks in the egg industry, or the grocery industry, or anything else – like changes in interstate commerce, or retaliatory tariffs, or hell I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia).

How else are we paying for Mr. Trump’s return to power?

Well there’s the stock market.

United States Stock Market Index – Quote – Chart – Historical Data – News

You can go look at the graph. The stock market jumped up right when Trump was inaugurated, and climbed slowly upward to a new high a month in, on February 19th – and then, tariffs. And the Dow Jones took a dive. It’s coming back up, the last couple of days, because the Fed announced they still plan to lower interest rates this year, because the overall economy is still strong and improving; but the temporary stays and exemptions Trump put on his own tariffs expire in two weeks.

So we’ll see.

The stock market is not the economy, and the market is volatile, so I don’t intend to use this as the only or even the main measurement of the cost of Trump; but it’s surely been a jolt to people with retirement savings in mutual funds.

I wonder how many of them voted for Trump?

So what else is there?

Well, there are all the people who have lost their jobs. And while I’m sure that hardcore Trump supporters will argue that these are actually benefits to the American people, because we are saving money by cutting these people off the government payroll, I’m going to look at the other side: we are losing their services.

DOGE Cuts Update Today: Social Security Changes, Pentagon Slashes Jobs – Newsweek

Let’s see: the Pentagon is cutting 60,000 jobs, which is actually fine with me in terms of our military budget and activities; I would like both to be curtailed. But that sure is a lot of people to put out of work. I’d really rather see those people still working, and maybe a couple fewer aircraft carriers and whatnot.

The EPA is cutting 1,000 scientists. The Department of Education is laying off 1,300 employees – and now Trump has issued an illegal order to shut down the department entirely. 24,000 probationary employees were fired; several of them will go back to work because the administration lied about having fired them for cause – but also, by the time the cases work through the courts and these people are allowed to go back to their jobs, many of them will have found other jobs, because who wants to wait several weeks or months to go back to work for somebody who fired you with a goddamn email from Elon fucking Musk?

The IRS is cutting 20% of its workforce, 18,000 jobs – which is great if we don’t want to find waste, fraud, and abuse among billionaire tax cheats and corporations contorting through loopholes and government contracts – and the USPS is cutting 10,000 people, which is great if we don’t want to, you know, communicate and stuff. But that’s fine: nobody even wants to know what’s happening now. We don’t want to watch this shit show.

The Veterans’ Administration is cutting 80,000 workers. I have no jokes at all to make about that. I have spent the last year and a half, with my wife, trying to work a claim for her mother, who is the widow of a veteran, through the VA’s system. I tried to do it myself. I couldn’t do it: after thirteen months of trying to make it work on my own, I finally got help from a VA counselor whose expertise is in helping people finish their claims. He got it done for us in two months. Now my mother-in-law is receiving the widow’s benefit she deserves, and needs.

Was that guy cut?

He is a veteran himself, and now he helps fellow veterans and their family members get into and through the system. He is kind, and professional, and very easy to work with and to talk to. He helped us.

So you tell me: if he was cut (and I honestly don’t know if he was, but 80,000 is a big fucking number, and I have no idea how many of these counselors and account managers are going to be cut in the future even if they weren’t thrown out in this first round), was that a benefit to our country? Or a cost?

How about the Social Security Administration? There are cuts coming: they are closing regional offices, and they are reducing workforce – firing people, that is. Oh, and also they are making it impossible to verify your identity over the phone, which means people who need to talk to the SSA will have to actually go into an office and talk to someone to get help with their account.

Right when they close offices and cut the number of workers available to help people.

How about that one? Cost, or benefit?

How are those eggs looking now?

My problem with all of this, of course, is that I don’t see any benefits: I only see costs. I see our economy getting battered, and people being callously thrown out of work, and services that I know directly are incredibly important to the point of life an death being cut. I guess people who hate the government are happy, but as I understand it, people hate the government mainly because it doesn’t help people: and while I’m sure that is the experience some people have, it is not the experience that others have; and surely, we can see that ripping the whole system into tatters is not going to help people more. Trump claims that there will be benefits in the future, but Trump is a known liar; and to my knowledge, he has never explained clearly what benefits will come from all of this, or exactly how they are supposed to arrive. Are we really supposed to believe the same old trickle down economics lies? That if we cut taxes for the richest 1% then the rest of us will be better off? It didn’t work the first time Trump did it, or when George W. Bush did it, or – EVER. So I’m not going to accept it now.

So if anyone actually knows what benefits there are to all of this to offset these costs, please, write me and let me know. I would really like to know what the upside is.

I would love to learn.

Deep Breath — Now Hold It… Hold It… Keep Holding…

Dusty Leave a comment
I bet this would work.

***

Wow. It’s been so long since I’ve written a post that I got logged out of my own website.

I would apologize, but first, you all are sick of hearing me apologize; as I say to my students when they offer an apology for their behavior, “I don’t need you to apologize, I need you to do better.” And I can’t promise that I will do better: because the reason I haven’t been posting is that I’m too busy drowning in work and responsibilities. I haven’t caught up on the work, and the responsibilities aren’t going away; so I won’t be writing much any time soon. Though I do have a break a week from now, so I may be able to find some time there to post some more; I do have several ideas for things I want to write.

But this one has to come first. Because, you see, a large part of my problem with keeping up this school year is that I am extra exhausted: and a large part of that problem is that my students are extra exhausting. I’m back teaching 9th grade English, for the first time in 8 years; and the last time, it was an Honors class. I don’t have my lovely fantasy/sci-fi elective this year; not enough students signed up for it — though I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want to take a class in which you get to read “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth.” (And I BEG you, if you like swords and sorcery and epicness beyond the known realms of epic, click on that link and go read the story. It’s lengthy, but it’s SO good.) The class was fun, and therefore easier to teach; the classes I have now are mostly not fun, and mostly not easy. And though I don’t want to sound like an old man shaking his fist at a cloud, I have to say that part of the problem really is my students, their attitude about school, and the way they treat me and my class.

But another factor — a more difficult one — is how my administration directs me to deal with those students.

For the sake of this post, which I want to keep shorter and more to the point than my usual logorrhea, I’m just going to share the text of a … friendly lil email I got from my administration. Let me preface this by saying that I actually like my administrators very much, first on a personal level and then second (and somewhat less than the personal) on a professional level. They work very hard, even harder than I do; and they, like me, like everyone in education, have enormous and ridiculous demands on their time and energy. One of the demands on my administration is for them to implement the systems that the higher-up administrators want them to implement; and at my school, as at many schools, one of those systems is PBIS.

I have written before about PBIS. But there is nothing I could say about it that would communicate the full level of insipid uselessness that it imposes on teachers. The basic idea of it is that we need to praise students for the things they do right, more often than we need to criticize them for the things they do wrong; and that’s fine — but the idea of it being a system that we need to impose on teachers? Processes that require training? The idea that it will produce data which we will then analyze and use to form data-driven decisions that will surely improve school for everyone? My god, the pile of steaming bullshit in that is larger than Mount Olympus. I already praise my students when they do things right. I do it because I am a kind person, and I care about both my students and the work we are involved in, this pursuit of their best selves. So it already happens. Any system, any process, any practice that teachers are trained in, is inevitably going to be artificial, and therefore undermine the actual relationships that teachers form with students, and which are far and away the best chance we have of changing the way they act, changing their attitudes and reducing their misbehaviors. Relationships, guys. Not PBIS.

When my students are being resistant, or obstructive — or just little freaking jerks — they don’t really need me to be nice to them and find something in their behavior to praise. They need me to tell them to shut the hell up, and make it stick: they need me to have a relationship with them that means they will listen to me when I tell them they need to shut the hell up. That is 99% of the problem with student behavior. For the sake of contradicting the image of me as old man shaking my fist at a cloud, let me say this: students today aren’t worse than they were ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty, when I was a student (Okay, thirty-five…): but they aren’t any better. They are sometimes, some of them, intentionally cruel; that is a separate and more serious issue that has to be dealt with individually and more emphatically. They are frequently distracted and detached, and that sometimes has to be dealt with, though I still generally believe the best way to handle that is to let them not learn anything for a time, and point out to them that they have not been learning anything, and maybe they should do something about that. But really, the problem that comes up in every class, every single day, and which requires a reaction from me, a reaction I am VERY tired of giving, is: they make too much goddamned noise. They just need to shut the hell up. That’s it. Otherwise they are basically fine, and usually good.

Or, as my administration put it in an email I recently received:

As we continue working together to create a positive and productive learning environment for all of our students,

Off to a great start. Also, I thought I was teaching them English?

But please, go on.

I want to emphasize the importance of using Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) when addressing behaviors around our SSA campus. One key aspect that often impacts the success of these interventions is the tone we use when interacting with students. At times, incidents can escalate unnecessarily due to an improper or harsh tone. I encourage each of us to be mindful of how we address behaviors, focusing on de-escalation rather than confrontation. A calm, respectful approach can go a long way in turning potentially challenging moments into opportunities for growth and learning. It’s also crucial to remember that our students deserve the same level of respect we expect from them. When we address students with kindness and respect, we not only model the behavior we want to see, but we also build stronger relationships that can lead to more positive outcomes inside and outside the classroom. I’ve included some behavior interventions that can be helpful when dealing with defiant or disrespectful students.

Oof. Okay. First, I hope we all know that the least effective sentence in the English language is “Calm down.” It never, EVER, makes anyone calm. It is much more likely to piss the person off and add that to whatever agitation they are currently going through.

Second, I have to point out that I strongly suspect a particular interaction between one of my fellow teachers and one of our high school students, which happened the day before this email was sent out, was a large part of the impetus that led to this particular email: because that interaction was not positive, and was not de-escalated by the two people involved. So there was cause for some means of addressing that issue.

But — and this is third, but it should be first, last, and every number in between, when discussing how my administration works with their teachers in ways they should not — any particular issue with any particular teacher SHOULD BE HANDLED SPECIFICALLY WITH THAT TEACHER. Don’t talk to me about being calm; I am too calm. I need to lose my temper more often. Know how I know that? My students tell me that. Talk to me about not confronting my students when they misbehave: that is something I have trouble with. Don’t say that to my colleagues, several of whom are extremely good at addressing issues when they rise, and most of whom do it calmly.

Last, and best, don’t do what the email went on to do, and which it does in this first part as well: don’t tell us to be positive and respectful and several other handy pieces of trite advice, while doing none of those things in the email telling us to do them. Pedagogy experts are legendarily bad about this: almost every teacher training I have had in 25 years in this business has been largely about how to keep students connected to n involved with the learning, presented by people who fail to connect us to or involve us with the learning in any way. The most famous example is the trainers who teach teachers by showing us PowerPoint presentations with blocks of text on every slide, which the trainers then read to us verbatim while we are looking at the slides. Every teacher I know who assigns PowerPoint presentations would fail every one of those presenters. I myself just think about how much better it would sound if I read it for them.

So. Here are the specific pieces of advice this email then offered us. Ready? Here is How To Deal With Students Misbehaving 101. With notes by me, illustrating how I would put these nuggets of wisdom into practice. (If I ever put these into practice. [Not bloody likely. Not as they are worded here.])

Here is your hypothetical situation requiring my intervention: one of my students is talking too much, too loudly. That student needs to shut the hell up. Here is how I would say it, adopting my administration’s guidance. [Said guidance will be quoted preceding each example.]

– Stay Calm and Maintain Neutrality
Responding with a calm demeanor can prevent the situation from escalating. Take a deep breath before addressing the behavior to ensure you remain composed.

*Takes a deep breath, then, composedly,* “Shut the hell up.”

– Give Clear and Specific Directions
Sometimes students react negatively due to confusion or misunderstanding. Make sure your instructions are clear, direct, and specific.

“[Student name]: shut the hell up. Shut your mouth, with the words inside. Lock your throat into silent mode. Do not make the speaky-speaky noises. Am I being clear? Shut the hell up if you understand me.”

– Use Positive Reinforcement
Acknowledge and praise positive behavior when you see it. Often, recognizing what students are doing right can prevent future defiance.

“Good job shutting the hell up. Keep it up.”

– Provide Choices
Offering choices allows students to feel they have some control over the situation. For example, “You can either take a break for five minutes or finish your task quietly.”

“You can choose to shut the hell up, or you can accept that you have no control over this situation, and shut the hell up because I told you to. Your call.”

– Restate Expectations Respectfully
Respectfully but firmly restate your expectations, reminding students of classroom rules while remaining respectful and kind.

“I expect you to shut the hell up. Respectfully.”

– Active Listening
Take time to listen to the student’s perspective. Sometimes defiance comes from frustration or a lack of feeling heard. A few moments of active listening can de-escalate the situation.

“I am now prepared to listen to you shutting the hell up. I am actively listening for absolute silence.”

– Have a Private Conversation
Address the behavior in private whenever possible to avoid embarrassment or defensiveness. This can help maintain the student’s dignity and prevent power struggles in front of peers.

*Takes student out into the hall.* “Stay out here. Shut the hell up. Learn to have some dignity, and some respect for your fellow students, and for me.” *Returns to class where silence prevails. Teaches respectfully. Student’s embarrassment, standing alone in the hall while other students walk by and snicker, helps to enforce that their behavior was unacceptable. Student learns.*

– Teach Problem-Solving Skills
Help students reflect on their behavior and guide them in developing solutions for similar situations in the future.

“The problem with your behavior is that you are not shutting the hell up. Can you offer any potential solutions to this problem? Here’s a hint: it rhymes with ‘Butt the shell pup.'”

– Offer a Reset
Give the student an opportunity to reset their behavior without consequence by offering a short break or a moment to collect themselves.

“Let’s reset your volume to zero by shutting the hell up. Feel free to take a short break from talking. Collect your lips together into a single, unbroken unit.”

Look. At least some of this is valuable advice. For teachers who don’t know how to handle student misbehavior. Which is not all of us. More to the point, if all you had to do to teach somebody something they don’t know, and get them to adopt it as part of their pattern of behavior going forward, was show them a bulleted list, then *Takes a deep breath as advised* I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY STUDENTS A LIST OF STATEMENTS THAT READ “SHUT THE HELL UP” AND WE WOULDN’T HAVE ANY MORE PROBLEMS. Also, I would give them a list of ways to write essays and read books, and how not to waste their lives and potentials and their very minds and souls on screens and social media, and a whole lot of things would be a lot better. (I have another list for Donald Trump. I’d really like for him to read my list, and absorb everything it says.)

And if you think I’m exaggerating about the prominence of the doesn’t-shut-the-hell-up problem, let me just say that the confrontation that might have led to this email was started by the student making loud noises in the hallway during class time. So.

I will end this by including the last paragraph of the email in question, which is almost everything I would want our administrators, or any colleague, to do when talking to their peers and coworkers. The only other thing I’d like to see with this is a statement that the administration will be working on these problems with both individual teachers, and all the students, who also clearly need to learn these steps in how to de-escalate a situation and treat people with the respect they expect to receive from those people. And for this whole email to never have happened at all.

Let’s continue to create an environment where respect and kindness are the foundation of all our interactions, and where every student feels valued and understood. Thank you for all you do for our school and our students. I appreciate all of you! 

“I appreciate you shutting the hell up.”

Combat Fatigue

Dusty 1 Comment
Say No To Standing In Que! Reduce Wait Times At Line Queue

(With apologies to those who have seen actual combat, because what I got ain’t that.)

I was going to write about Biden today.

I started the post and everything — jotted some thoughts down this morning, came up with a title (which I will probably change because unless the title is reeeeaaallll simple, I almost never like the ones I come up with. “The Adventures of Damnation Kane,” about a man named Damnation Kane having adventures. Good. “Brute,” about a brute. Nice. “Lesson,” about a teacher. Cool. “The Dreamer Wakes?” Mmmm, feels off somehow.), thought off and on today about what I wanted to write about. I feel bad, because I’ve been putting this one off, but I know that it’s important; and then also because I had the last week off, and I never got around to writing it. Of course, that’s partly because the week of Spring Break is when teachers get all of their life stuff done — I went to the dentist, the hair salon, and the tax accountant, in addition to donating blood, seeing friends I haven’t seen in a while, and doing hours of yard/housework — and partly because I spent part of the last three days grading student work. I could have spent those hours writing about politics instead, but — well, it’s my job, right?

It’s fine, I thought: I’ll write it Monday evening.

And now it is Monday evening. And I am too tired to write.

I’m so freaking tired.

Why, though? It was only ONE DAY. One day of classes — and Monday is my easiest day in some ways, because I have one extra prep period, because one of my classes only meets four days a week. One day, with one less class, after a whole week off?!? Why the heck am I so tired???

And then my wife, in recounting a conversation she had with one of her students today, put it into words.

“Miss,” one of her students asked her after she had snapped at some loud talking, “why are you so mad?”

“I’m not mad,” she replied, “I’m just annoyed.” (I wasn’t there, so I won’t argue with her characterization of her mood, but in my experience, every single time someone says “I’m not mad,” they’re actually mad. And “Annoyed,” for me, is “I’m mad but trying to control it.” So, respect to my wife for fighting back the rage.) And then she explained to the student why she was annoyed. “This? Teaching? It’s just a job. I didn’t get into it because it was some calling, it’s just a job. I should be able to show up and do my job and that’s it, no big deal.

“But you guys — you make everything so hard. Everything about this job is more difficult because of the students, and how you all act. Imagine,” she said, “if you had to go to work at a fast food restaurant, or whatever — and every customer was a problem. Every. One.”

The student nodded in understanding. My wife went about the rest of her day, and then when I came home she told me this brief story,

It spoke to me. Because that’s it: that’s why I’m so tired. That’s why this job, this teaching, is so damned exhausting all the time. Because every customer I have (Or nearly every customer, and I will also say that every one of them has good days when they are easy and even fun and rewarding to work with [when they order the food]) makes every damn thing so bloody difficult.

So picture this. Most people have worked in fast food; I actually never have, but I have sold concessions at a concert hall, and I have worked a register in a retail store, so I get the idea of this.

Imagine you’re behind the counter at a Popeye’s Chicken or a Five Guys or whatever. Someone comes in, bell on the door dings, you say, “Welcome to Five Eyes!” in your bright customer service voice.

They don’t say anything.

They walk slowly up to the counter — they do not look at the menu — and they stand directly in front of the register. They have a hoodie on, and the hood up, and Airpods in their ears. Phone in hand, they stand there, at the counter, in front of the register, and look at their phone.

“Hi, can I take your order?” you say.

They don’t say anything. They don’t look at you or acknowledge your existence. They keep scrolling through Instagram or Snapchat or whatever on their phone.

“Would you like some of our delicious Chickburgers? Or some fried ham?” you ask, naming two of your favorite items from the menu, two of the most popular orders, which you know all about how to make just right, and people have told you in the past you prepare perfectly.

No answer. Still scrolling. And now there is a line forming behind them.

“If you’d like some more time to look at the menu, maybe you could step to one side and consider, and I can help the people behind you. Whenever you’re ready I can take your order.”

They glance behind them, see the line of people waiting, and then go back to looking at their phone. They still have not looked at the menu, nor responded to you in any direct way. They have not yet acknowledged your existence.

Now you’re getting annoyed. “Sirma’am, I need to help the other customers. If you know what you want, I’d be happy to take your order right now.”

Now they laugh at something on the phone. They do not respond to you.

“Ma’amsir, if you could just look up at the menu and let me know what you want — or even just give me some idea of what you feel like eating, and I can help you pick something. Do you want biscuit fries? Maybe some gravy nuggets?”

Their phone rings. They answer it, and begin a conversation. They do not step away from the counter. They do not look at you, or at the menu. They are talking loudly and laughing, though what they are saying is mostly inane: “No, yeah, I know, yeah, right? I mean, for real, like for real for real. Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Now you lean over the counter and stare into their eyes from six inches away. They look back at you when you do it, but their eyes are blank. “Ma’sir’am,” you say firmly, “You need to either order, or move aside.”

They stare at you, blankly. They do not respond. You see, out of the corner of your eye, your manager coming up behind you. So you try to remain calm. “Sma’amir,” you say calmly, though there is a growl in your voice that doesn’t seem right, and your heart is beating pretty fast and you seem to be kind of panting and maybe sweating a little — all of which would be normal if you were on the fryers, but not on register. Is something wrong with you? “Do you want to order anything?” You say it loudly, though also, you think, calmly, and slowly.

“Is there a problem here?” the manager asks.

“They won’t — ” you start, but then the customer cuts you off.

“No problem,” they say. They flash the manager a smile. They look at the menu.

You and your manager lock eyes. “Take it easy,” the manager says to you, “just take their order, okay?”

Flabbergasted, you can only nod. The manager walks away again.

The customer looks back at their phone.

You decide to just wait. They looked at the menu, they came in here and stood in front of the register: they surely want food, food that you have, food which you spend all day providing to hungry people. You can’t tell if this person looks hungry, exactly — but come on, everyone needs food. That’s what you sell here. Why would anyone come into this place if they didn’t want food? In the past people have come in already knowing exactly what they want, delighted and even grateful for what they get, for what you provide them with a smile. You brighten days. You provide vital nutrients, and you brighten days!

Minutes go by. They still don’t order.

You slap the counter. “COME ON!” you shout. “ORDER SOMETHING!”

The kitchen behind you goes silent. The people in line look around the person in front, and stare at you. The manager pokes their head out of the office and glares.

You take a deep breath. “Sorry about that. I would really like to take your order and get you some delicious food. Don’t you want delicious food?”

The person in the front is now staring at you, after your outburst. The phone is now in their pocket. But they still don’t order anything. They just stare at you, blankly. They don’t order anything.

Finally you shake your head. You lean close. “Okay, look. If you decide you want to eat something, then you go ahead and tell me what you want, and I will get it for you. But for now, I need to help the people behind you.” They don’t respond. You lean to one side, and look at the person right behind them. “Next, please! Can I help you?”

The second person in line is wearing Airpods. They are staring at a phone. They do not answer you, or look up.

They do not order food.

That’s what it’s like. All teachers want is to help: we know how to help, we have the help ready to give. Students need the help, and mostly even want the help. And yet they are difficult. All the time. One after the other, all day long. For no reason. Annoying their teachers constantly, just because they don’t think about what they’re saying or doing. Avoiding, at the same time, the one thing that would actually do them some good, the whole point behind school, behind teaching, behind all of it. They frequently apologize, especially when the teacher snaps angrily, or chews the students out for not doing enough work or caring enough about their own education. They say they’re sorry — and then they go right back to doing exactly what they were doing before. Nothing. Annoyingly.

My students want to learn. They should learn. But they don’t. Because they won’t try. I have to work five times harder, ten times, a hundred times, to get them to do the thing they should be doing, and they know they should be doing it; but they don’t.

All day long. Every day. For no reason. And that might even be the worst part: because I can’t explain why they won’t do it. I can’t understand why they won’t do it. Neither can they. I can empathize, because I didn’t want to do work in high school either; but I actually liked learning — and I recognized that I needed to do enough work, to do enough learning, at least to pass and move on.

In other words, when I went into the fast food restaurant, I ordered the goddamn food.

My students don’t. They just stand there. It’s not their fault, and they don’t do it intentionally — but my God, I am so very tired of fighting them just so they can eat a delicious meal.

Sure.

Dusty Leave a comment
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Australian Teachers Share The Frustrating Reality Of Their Jobs

It’s been quite a week.

A few of the highlights:

*Two of my classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and this week we read one of my favorite sections, the two chapters when Scout goes to first grade for the very first time, and meets her new teacher, Miss Caroline. These chapters are the first which show the novel’s dominant theme, the idea of empathy, that you don’t understand someone until you see events from their perspective; Miss Caroline, seen from Scout’s perspective, is a terrible person who treats Scout badly, shames a poor farm boy named Walter Cunningham, and has no idea how to teach or manage a class. But when you see these chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view — she is a 21-year-old woman, this is her very first day teaching, and in addition to several other problems, one of her sweet lil angels calls her a snot-nosed slut. First graders, man. Freaking savages. — you recognize that this teacher has had the very worst day ever. I explain the chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view, which I understand as a teacher, and I show students how she is not bad, she’s just having a bad day. A lot of times in the past, when I’ve taught this, they get it; my students understand how frustrating and soul-searing Miss Caroline’s day is, and they realize she shouldn’t be blamed or hated for her choices, even when she screws up, as she does a few times. 

Part of Miss Caroline’s bad day is that she reads her favorite children’s story to the class — and they don’t react at all, because they are, as Scout puts it, “immune to imaginative literature.” And I look out at my class, half of whom are looking at phones or computers, another third of whom are chatting or spacing out while I talk about this novel, which I have told them is one of my very favorite works of literature, and I say, “Can you imagine what that’s like, to share one of your favorite stories with a class full of students who just don’t care? Who aren’t paying attention? To whom the story makes no difference at all? Can you imagine what that would feel like?”

They couldn’t.

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*Yesterday a student climbed up onto a metal stool in my room in order to unplug another student’s Chromebook, which was plugged into an outlet that for no good reason is about seven feet off the floor, near my whiteboard. The student then called out “CANNONBALL!”, jumped off the stool, kicking it out sideways, landing awkwardly as the stool shot out and crashed into a bookcase.

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*One of my other classes, in reading through a passage from the novel Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, commented “I didn’t think these characters were African-American. They don’t have African-American names.” The names in question were Maud Martha, and Helen. One student pointed out that Helen is a Greek name, as a way of proving to me that these were clearly not African-American names. (I refrained from pointing out that the student’s name is Roman in origin, though the student in question is Southeast Asian.) Another student told me that the activities the family pursue in the passage are rural, country kinds of activities — specifically gathering wood for a fire — and that made them think the characters were White. To which I responded “Because rural areas are only White? And African-Americans don’t gather firewood?”

Did I mention that my principal was observing me that class? He was. His comment later was that I had had “several teachable moments” in the period. (He also said I handled it well, so that was okay.)

*Today one of my students came back from the restroom, started talking to the other students about something (This was, by the way, while I was talking about Miss Caroline and how it feels when students don’t listen to your favorite story), and at some point I realized that what they were saying was that this student, on the way across the hall to the restroom, had seen someone they didn’t recognize outside the school door (Which is mostly glass and is at the end of the hall near my classroom — who needs that “security” stuff?), that my student had let them in, and that the person in question, referred to both as “kid” and “guy,” was wearing a mask, carrying a backpack, and was currently in the bathroom. Refraining from asking the student why IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY they had let some literal masked stranger into the school, I went to the bathroom to see who was in there. There was someone in the stall, but I could only see shoes. So I quickly went to get an administrator to check on the bathroom, and then I went back to my class — where I received the clarification that the student had not let the person in, a teacher had, which almost certainly moved this from “Possible crisis precipitated by a student who lacks critical thinking skills” to “A student went out to a car, with permission from a teacher, came back in, and my student didn’t recognize them.” And the second option is what it was, and a few seconds later the administrator gave me a thumb’s-up on the way back from identifying the person in the restroom as one of our students. 

But it was a fun five minutes.

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None of this is what I wanted to write about tonight, however. (Actually I wanted to write about it last night, but another thing that happened this week is my phone stopped working, so I spent last night ordering a new phone.) What I wanted to write about tonight was the worst thing I’ve dealt with in the last week. One of the worst things I’ve had to deal with all year.

Data Day.

Last Friday was our first Data Day. And the big problem with this particular occasion was that it was our very first Data Day at this school. At least the first one involving my department. To be sure, we have looked at data before: data is inescapable in public schools today. We start every school year with a brief overview of the school’s test data from the year before. Which is all about students who have already left the classes in which the data was collected, which might seem to some people as though it reduces the value of the data.

Some people.

Anyway, we look at data all the time. But I work for a small charter school, which has a hell of a lot of turnover in the staff and the administration, and every year things get a bit discombobulated and confusticated and lost in the shuffle; and so we have never done a Data Day like this Data Day. Unfortunately, those in charge of Data Day thought we had all surely done Data Days before, and so didn’t think we would need specific instructions about how one carries out a Data Day. But since we have never had a Data Day before, we did need those instructions, and we didn’t get them, and so the day was — awkward.

But hold on. Before we even get to the awkwardness of the actual day, I can hear you asking “Wait — what even is a Data Day?” 

A Data Day is when teachers get together in groups and look at the data for our students — in other words, their test scores. This Data Day was scheduled after we gave our first major standardized test this year, a practice ACT. The ACT, a sort of West-Coast cousin of the SAT, has four parts: Reading, English (grammar, that is), Math, and Science. Now, as I assume that all my readers are among the most astute people in the population, so I assume you have noticed that this selection of tests leaves out a few of the usual departments in a high school: Art, PE, foreign language, computer science, ESS (or SPED) — and, of course, history and social studies.

But that’s fine! Even if not all teachers have data and so can participate in Data
Day, the thing to focus on is the subjects which do have data. And lucky for me, English has double the data! And EXTRA lucky for me, this is my first year as head of the English department. So not only do I have double the data — but I get to run the meeting!

Did I mention that my principal was observing my meeting? He was. He did not tell me that I handled this one well. I think I did okay. We had several teachable moments.

But we didn’t have everything. We should have had our individual class data, from the shorter single-subject quizzes we’ve been giving over the course of the semester; we should have all been looking at our individual laptops and comparing our individual data to the school wide data, so we could find where our specific classes were different from the school population as a whole — that is, what are my 10th grade students failing to learn in my class, which the school as a whole is mastering? Those are the areas where I can make changes in my class in order to improve the instruction and the learning in specific skills and knowledges, to help my students catch up. And that was where we were supposed to develop our Action Plan, building SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) so that, when we have our next round of ACT practice tests in December, we can move straight into our second Data Day, and we can see what areas have improved and where we need to keep working, maybe finding new strategies that can make a difference in the scores. That is the goal of a Data Day.

I ran the meeting. Completely making it up as I went along, because I have never done a full Data Day. I didn’t tell everyone they needed to bring their laptops and individual classroom data. I didn’t have my individual classroom data. I had not examined the school wide data previously, and so while I pointed out a couple of obvious things — our students did better on reading and English than they did on math and science (I work at a STEM school, if you didn’t know.), better on English than on reading (which mystified me because they mostly can’t answer a single grammar question correctly — but I guess they can correct grammar on a multiple choice test?), and in some cases better, in others worse, when compared grade to grade. But everything I said was obvious. I didn’t know that we were supposed to create a SMART goal, or how to do that, and I didn’t take notes or guide the discussion or watch the time — or delegate any of those tasks. I did a bad job with the meeting. It was uncomfortable. That was my first Data Day.

So.

You all know that whole thing is a pile of horsepucky, right?

I knew you were all astute.

Okay, let me be clear: the basic idea of examining what my students know and what they don’t know, identifying areas where they have mastered the class content and where they still need work, and then strategizing methods to improve their learning? All of that is fine. None of that is horsepucky. We can get general ideas about how things are going, and we can find some ways to maybe make them better; that’s fine. It is a lot of work, for a questionable reward, and since I am already obscenely overworked, and still behind where I should be, I question whether or not this is the best way for me to spend my time; since I have 300 ungraded assignments turned in on my online education platform, I have a better idea of how I could spend a good couple of hours on a Friday afternoon.

Yup. Drinking.

I grade on Sundays. I shouldn’t. But I don’t have any other option. I’m not kidding about the 300 ungraded assignments, and that’s after I spend at least a few hours working every Sunday, and have done since the school year started August 1. A couple of hours on Friday afternoon, even if I hadn’t used that time as I deserve and gone drinking, would have helped make a dent in that pile — though of course it wouldn’t have eliminated the pile. But Data Day didn’t help at all. In fact it stressed me out so much that I didn’t even get my other tasks finished on Friday: I went home and collapsed uselessly on my couch. I did play some Minecraft, so that’s a win, I guess.

But let’s imagine that I did have some extra time, a couple of spare hours that I didn’t have to spend teaching class or working with students or grading essays. I could have done Data Day. I could have compared the results of a test which the students didn’t care about and didn’t try their hardest on, because they knew perfectly well they weren’t going to get graded on it, and that it wasn’t the official ACT, and therefore this test didn’t give them a chance to get a high score they could use to get into college or win scholarships; to the results of a series of short, five-question multiple choice assessments I give in my class, one for each standard they are supposed to master this school year. Those, also, the students didn’t care about and so didn’t try on. But hey, that makes the comparison more valid, right? The students taking it didn’t care, in both cases! Matching apathy! Also, neither set of tests was designed by me, or related directly to the content I used to teach the standards — none of them are on To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance. Oh, and also, the ACT is not broken down by standard, so I’m comparing a five-question multiple choice quiz on a single standard to a 40-question reading test and a 75-question English language test, on all of the standards taught in all four years of high school, and also quite a few that come up in middle school and a couple that are only used in college or adult life. Because one aspect of the ACT is that it is designed to be too hard, in parts, for any student to get a 100% on. Because the goal is to find the extent of a student’s knowledge and ability, right? If I give you a quiz on what you know, and you get 100%, I have not found the extent of your knowledge: those questions might cover every single thing you know on the subject — or they might only scratch the surface of your galactic levels of knowledge. To find out for sure, I have to make the questions get progressively harder until you cannot answer them correctly. That’s where I can assume your knowledge ends, when you can’t answer the questions any more. Which means the ACT tests, like all similar tests, is intended to get progressively harder until it becomes impossible for any high school student to answer the questions. 

Which means, of course, that there will always be gaps and areas for improvement, no matter how spectacularly I teach and the students learn, because of the way the test is designed. So if I take this concept seriously, that I need to teach my students enough for them to be able to score 100% on the test, I can never be complacent. Ever. I will always have more to teach. But of course, my students will move on out of my class before I finish teaching them; but that’s fine, they can learn the rest of everything in their next class.Right?

Sure.

More to the point, did you catch where I described how different the two tests are? Five questions on a single standard, compared to 115 on the general areas of reading and writing. Also, the standardized tests are given in very short timeframes, because the ACT’s base assumption is that the more you know about a subject, the faster you can answer the questions. An assumption that is so deeply flawed that it casts doubt on all of the ACT results — because of course speed has little if anything to do with knowledge or skill. A genius with bad eyesight or dyslexia or a headache the day of the test will not be able to answer all the questions within the time limit, which is 35 minutes for the 40 reading questions (which are about four different reading passages, with 10 questions each), and 45 minutes for the 75 grammar questions, which is just cruel. Oh wait, sorry: that’s only for the 11th graders. The 10th graders took shorter tests in shorter time limits — 24 reading questions in 30 minutes, and so on. But that’s fine, I’m sure we can compare the two classes and get some kind of useful idea of how much students know. Right?

Right?

Sure.

Here’s the part that killed me. Right at the start, when I’m trying to fumble my way through the schoolwide data we have about the ACT and Pre-ACT tests, and the middle school results from an entirely different assessment which the 6th-8th graders took, we were told to ignore the gaps in the test results that were caused by students who were having a bad day, or who had a headache the day of the test, or who didn’t care and so didn’t try. Because we can’t control those things. We need to focus on the places where we can have an impact, where we can raise those scores. 

Uhh — excuse me? How can we know which areas are lacking because of a flaw in the program, and which are lacking because students didn’t feel like trying their hardest? That’s right: we can’t. Just like we can’t see the specific standards for the questions on the ACT (I don’t think; there might be a way to break it down like that, but I didn’t know it, so.), and we can’t know if the five-question multiple choice quizzes give us good information, either, because in addition to being skewed by student apathy and also student humanity, five questions won’t do a good job of determining what the student knows and what they don’t. You can randomly guess on five multiple choice questions and have a not-insignificant chance of getting them all correct even if you couldn’t read at all. And also, let’s not forget that if a student learns all the material, but then fails the assessment because of a non-academic reason like a disability or an illness or a lack of motivation or a grudge against the school or the teacher or a bad testing environment or a bad breakup or a bad bit of potato they ate the night before which gave them vivid dreams in which they were visited by three different spirits of Christmas — that student did not succeed. They do not pass Go, they do not collect $200, because our system is based largely on high-stakes tests and the ability to pass them. And it doesn’t matter what I teach or how well I teach if a student who fails the assessment, despite knowing everything about my subject, is considered a failure. All of the things that I was told to ignore, because they are out of my control, are the entire reason why that hypothetical student could fail my class. 

But guess who would still get at least some of the blame for that student’s failure. And who would have to make SMART goals to try to improve that student’s test results. And who would have to examine that student’s data, again and again, to find the reason why the student was unsuccessful. But please, keep ignoring the aspects we can’t control, like a lack of motivation.

Right.

Sure.

And while we’re at it: who the hell told educators that we could control anything? Listen, you don’t know how hard I tried today, to make my students learn the lesson of Miss Caroline. And instead they were distracted by the possibility that someone had let in a school shooter — which was exactly where all their thoughts went when they heard that there was a possible stranger in the school, in a mask and carrying a backpack. Because of course that’s what they thought. And I’m supposed to teach those kids? To control their learning? To specifically assess the lessons that worked and the ones that didn’t, and to make adjustments which will ensure all the learning happens exactly as we want it to, which will then be shown clearly on the test?

Let me also say: if I go back tomorrow and try again to teach the same lesson, my students will say “We already went over this yesterday.” And if I say “Right, but you didn’t learn it as well as you should have, because you were distracted,” they will then reply, “That’s okay, we learned enough. We should move on.” And it wont matter how much I try to teach the lesson, how hard I want to reteach it, or whether I know exactly how to make that lesson more effective: it was ineffective because of events outside of my control. The opportunity was lost. We did not have a teachable moment today.

Here’s the truth. That neat, data-driven ideal, where teachers do the math and find the perfect way to help students reach mastery? School doesn’t work that way. Students don’t work that way, learning doesn’t work that way, even tests don’t work that way. None of it is scientific. None of it is precise. There are real benefits to teachers getting together and talking about what works and what doesn’t, and trading ideas and strategies; to that extent, Data Day was a real success. But otherwise? There is no data. Not anything real, not anything reliable. It’s all guesstimates, all gray area. Teachers do things that seem like they work, that seemed like they’ve worked in the past; students seem to learn things, and seem to get grades that reflect their learning. Somewhere in there, real learning happens, and part of it is probably because of what teachers do. But not all of it. And none of it for certain. Data Day is an attempt to pretend otherwise, to pretend that we can capture a mathematic truth about human beings, who are not by our nature quantifiable. And it just doesn’t work.

But hey, maybe that was just this time. All those things about human nature and whatnot? All out of our control. Let’s try to focus on what we can control, and we’ll circle back around in a few months and see what the data tells us.

Can’t wait.

Time For My Annual Tradition

Dusty Leave a comment

It’s Inservice Time again!

That means it is back to work for me.

It is Icebreaker time.

It is time to travel to Phoenix, 120 miles away and approximately 120° Fahrenheit, because my school district wants to pretend that we are all one community — even one family.

It’s time for gratitude ponchos.

This is the time of year when a professional pedagogist who makes ten, twenty times my annual salary (sometimes for each appearance) comes to my school, and tells me why everything I’ve ever even thought about doing in a classroom is wrong, and therefore, if I don’t want my students to fail utterly at everything in life, and if I want to even dream about maybe keeping my job, I will need to change every single thing that I do: because all of it is wrong.

Essentially, this is the time of year when I get mad. Frequently. Vociferously.

And my wife is now tired of listening to me rant about this issue.

So now, Dear Reader, it is your turn.

So this year, when we drove from Tucson to Phoenix to spend time with our beloved school family (Which, if that were the case, seems like icebreakers wouldn’t really be necessary? You have icebreakers at family reunions? Or Thanksgiving?), after we had the icebreaker, we listened to a motivational-speaker-sort-of-pedagogist who wanted us to think of teaching in a new way.

She said that our minds are wired to consider certain weighty moments in our lives as what she called “temporal markers” (Or was it milestones? I didn’t listen too closely.), and said we take these moments — milestone birthdays, the start of a new year, the anniversary of some important occasion — as signals to move away from the past and orient towards the future. She said we give ourselves a chance, at these times, to start over with a blank slate: and that our minds actually promote this, by taking a new perspective, examining what has gone before, and then considering new aspirations. We see ourselves as having closed a chapter, and started a new one; and this gives us new energy, it clears away old thoughts and feelings and gives us room for new ones. She talked about this like it was a very positive thing.

She asked us, as pegagogists and motivational speakers are wont to do, to share with our table partners (Oh — we were assigned tables with random teachers from the other schools, so that nobody was sitting with anyone they knew well, because Lord knows the last thing teachers need to be at an inservice is “comfortable.”) how we marked these moments of change, from past to future, in our classes, in our daily lives. And I thought about it, and I realized: I don’t really do this. I mean, okay, sure, when I had my birthday three weeks ago, I thought, “I’d like to spend today doing the things I want to do for this whole year, so I can start a trend or a habit right now and continue it all the way until my next birthday.” But I didn’t follow through with it. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions — I quit smoking on December 28th, as I recall, five months after I turned 35. I started going to the gym more regularly last May, and stopped around November, and picked it up again in February. I don’t celebrate things happening in multiples of 5 and 10; in fact, the two numbers I think I notice most (Other than 420 and 69, which I always have to notice because I am a high school teacher and I know those are going to get a response) are 42, because of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and 37, because that’s how old Dennis is.

There’s some lovely filth down here…

And in terms of my teaching, I don’t have any kind of clean breaks: when one class ends, I almost always have students who stay after the bell to talk to me for a couple of minutes, which leads directly to students in the next class coming in a couple of minutes early to talk to me. They stay into lunch, they stay after school; some of them contact me outside of school hours. I frequently give extra time for tests, letting them run into the next day’s class; I have been known, even, to continue reading a novel even after the end of the semester when we started reading it.

I don’t tend to break my time up: I tend to blend it together.

This also represents my teaching style: because I think my primary purpose, as a higher-level literature teacher, is to connect things: I want to connect my students to other people, and to the feelings of other people as well as their own. I want them to recognize that historical events and epochs are connected to the lives of people, and also connected to the present, and to our own lives. I want them to see the web of relationships that spans all of our world, and all of our history. I want them to connect art to life, and life to art, themselves to the greatest authors of all time, who were, after all, only human, and were once themselves depressed and horny teenagers.

Nobody more so than William Shakespeare.

So then, when the motivational pedagogist told us that we should create this sort of temporal mind marker with EVERY SINGLE CLASS, so that EVERY SINGLE CLASS was an opportunity for a fresh start, for a clean slate, for a new beginning with new hope and new energy, a chance to CHANGE THE WORLD, I felt — well, a little sad. Obviously I was doing this wrong. Here I am, thinking of every class as connected to every other class, and wanting to get deeper into longer learning experiences, that bleed from day into day, from week into week, from month into month. I like that I have students for multiple years — though I also think they should get a chance to have different teachers, too; I did actually teach one student for all four years of high school, so that essentially everything that young person gained from high school ELA instruction was all from me, but I think that is definitely not the ideal. But I like connecting year to year, idea to idea. I think that’s much of what is missing in our culture and society — connection — and I want to promote it.

But that’s wrong, I guess.

I should be starting every new class fresh, completely discarding what happened in the past and looking only to the future. I guess.

I also thought: My god, how much energy do you have to have to infuse that much new optimism into EVERY SINGLE CLASS?? I work hard enough trying to keep my bad moods from bleeding into the next class, and to change from one specific topic into a new one for the new class; I’m not sure I can close my eyes, ball my fists, and think, “Okay, Dusty: here we go READY TO CHANGE THE WORLD AGAIN!”

But I should be doing that, I guess. Just like I should be at the door greeting every new student who comes into my room with their own special signature handshake, so they know that they are special and individual to me. (Though, for someone to be special to you, doesn’t that mean you have to build a relationship? And remember it, from one day to the next? Would it be better to discard the past every day and treat every day as a new chance to succeed?) I guess.

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Also, who is that person you’re sitting next to?

So then, after a brief break for a brain wake-up call (We played Rock-Paper-Scissors! With our non-dominant hand! Which was way better than just sitting quietly by myself for a few minutes!), the motivational pedagogist moved on to her next topic: direction. And destination.

Where before the center of the analogy had been milestone birthdays — her husband had just turned 50, and I bet you’ll NEVER GUESS what he did for his 50th birthday! (And if you guessed this, you were right!) — this time the metaphor was flying airplanes. And she talked about compass headings, and how if you were off even one degree, out of 360 degrees on the compass, it would, over time, take you quite far away from your destination — in fact, her example was of an airplane that was two degrees off on their heading, and they CRASHED INTO A MOUNTAIN.

SO OKAY.

THAT’S COMFORTABLE.

I’M FEELING GREAT RIGHT NOW.

And how did she analogize this back to teaching and education? Well you see, if you — or rather I, since I was the target here — I focus in my planning and curriculum design too much on what I am teaching, rather than on what students are learning — that’s a bad compass heading. It may be close, it may only be off by a couple of degrees — but over time, those few degrees’ worth of difference will — well, you know.

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Okay: so now, not only am I failing my students because I am not treating every single class like it’s New Year’s Eve and I only get one wish AND IT’S FOR YOU KIDS TO LEARN THIS SONNET!, but also, I am failing because, it’s true, I do often think first, “Okay, what am I doing next class/tomorrow/next week?” I do often think about what I am teaching, rather than what my students are learning.

And my failure? It’s right here:

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But here’s the thing.

I don’t buy this.

Not only do I not believe that starting fresh every single period is the best relationship to have with students, or the best perspective to have of school, or the best way to CHANGE THE WORLD; but I also don’t believe that student learning has to be the center — the course heading — for every single lesson I teach. I don’t believe, at all, that there is a single destination in education that can only be reached by adhering to a specific course heading. Partly that’s because I think of my lesson objectives in a similar way to how I think of classes ending and starting: I like to make connections. Or more precisely, I like the students to make connections. So there is never a single destination for me, it is always connected to other destinations — and since I want the students to do that part of the thinking, rather than having me prescribe exactly what connection they should make and what it should mean to them, I don’t think my lessons have only one possible (connected) destination.

For instance:

I teach this poem sometimes. Mostly as a joke, but also, because it has a useful point in it that I can make about poetry.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

This is actually a poem titled “Reflections on Icebreaking,” by the comedic poet Ogden Nash, one of my favorite poets. When I teach this, most of my students connect it to Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp says it, too, in the remake), and they chortle and chuckle over the scandalous idea of their English teacher promoting drinking! Alcohol! The very idea!

We’ll leave out the facts about how steeped our society is in alcohol, and the fact that I teach high school students who have very little innocence left and certainly none about the existence of intoxicating beverages: and just look at the poem. It’s very short, obviously; Nash’s original only has four lines (Candy/Is Dandy/But liquor/Is quicker), but in those four lines, there are two rhymes, and one of them — liquor/quicker — is really quite clever.

But beyond that, between the title, which in this case provides vital information about the message of the poem, and the specific word choice that Nash gives us, there actually is an interesting point to be made by this poem. First, while my students always think the point is that liquor will get you wasted faster than candy will, I only have to challenge them once on whether or not they think of candy as a way to get wasted before they realize that probably isn’t what the poem is about. Then I focus them on the title, ask what ice breaking is (Most of them don’t really know, those sweet, sweet summer children), and get them to recognize that these are two ways to “break the ice,” to loosen up awkward social occasions. I ask them how candy can do this, and when it is used; they always think of Halloween parties and such, where candy is put out in dishes — but nobody thinks of the doctor’s office, where the child is given a lollipop to ameliorate the pain of the injection; or smokers who chew gum to alleviate their cravings for nicotine. There are countless places where candy is offered, or consumed, in order to help people relax: but Nash has, most likely, a specific social situation in mind, which we can tell because of the second ice breaker he names: liquor. Now, liquor is used to ease awkwardness and uncomfortable politeness in many situations, as well (Though hopefully not the doctor’s office); when I met my new boss this past summer, I made sure to go out with him for tacos and margaritas, even though I didn’t feel like being social, because I wanted him to get to know me better, because he’s my new boss. But there is only one social situation, traditionally, where both candy and liquor are frequently used to reduce awkwardness: it’s dating. For breaking the ice on a first date, a gift of candy is dandy — but liquor is quicker.

And that’s when I make what I think is the real point here: Nash does not say that liquor is better. He simply says it breaks the ice quicker. And it does: it lowers inhibitions, which obviously would reduce awkward tension. But because it does this fast, probably too fast, it can also lead to regret: which might be why your better choice would be candy. Which is dandy. Everybody likes candy.

So okay, that’s a lesson I teach. I think it shows the importance of specific word choice, and of important phrases like titles, and that every poem can have something genuine to say, even if it isn’t anything terribly deep.

So am I off target here?

Have I got the wrong compass heading? Will I miss my destination?

Am I headed for the mountainside?

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See, I don’t think so. I think there are, in truth, many possible destinations. If I can get a student to understand that poems have messages, that’s a victory — that’s a destination I want to reach, and which is worth reaching. If I can get a student to appreciate that poetry uses specific words to create specific meanings, that’s a destination worth reaching. If I can get a student to recognize that references in movies and TV shows can have much more depth and meaning than you would think, that’s a destination worth reaching. And if I can get a student to laugh, and enjoy either English class or poetry or both, just a little more, that’s the best destination of all.

So which course heading is that?

If I’m off by one or two degrees – will I miss my destination?

Do I need, as the pedagogical motivationist went on to say, a sharp focus on every tiny detail of the lesson, always keeping the destination in mind, because a mistake of only one degree would mean that I miss the destination and crash into the mountainside?

No. No to all of it. It’s not true, and in fact it is dangerous and damaging to what education should be.

The purpose of the metaphor, and of the pedavational motigogist in general, was to get us to focus on standards. On learning objectives. On SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound – because that’s how you aim at a specific target, and hit it every time: when the target is tiny, and close by, and simple to recognize, to name, to teach, and to assess whether or not it was hit. And when education focuses, as education so often does, on students reaching the standards, and nothing else, then sure, the only way to teach is to focus exclusively on those tiny little learning targets. And I guess taking your eyes off the next inch you need to crawl might make it harder to reach that target in a timely manner. 

But honestly: if you are flying a plane, shouldn’t you look a little higher up, a little farther out, than the next inch? You may want to keep the compass heading locked on specifically – but don’t you also want to watch the horizon? Don’t you want to keep an eye out for, I dunno, MOUNTAINS YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO CRASH INTO???

Wouldn’t it be a better metaphor to think of teaching and learning as flying a plane, and looking around, observing the situation around you, considering what might be a good place to land – gauging, judging, using experience to guide your assessment of the circumstances based on observations – and then bringing the plane in safely? Or flying wherever the hell you want to go, following your dreams to anywhere in the world they might lead you? Wouldn’t those be good ways to think of the school-plane we’re flying?

I think so. Though I guess it wouldn’t be proper pedamotive gogyvation.

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So here’s my new plan. I’ve thought for a long time that I would be an excellent inservice presenter. I’m good in front of a group of people, I speak well, I have a good sense of humor; and I think I know a fair amount about teaching, and could have some useful things to say to help make people improve as teachers and educators. 

But I would never get hired. Because no administration would want to buy my inservice program of “Let The Teachers Teach Whatever The Hell They Want To Because They Know Better Than You.” That system is not guaranteed to raise test scores, which is really the only reason why administrators bring in inservice presenters.

So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to make the slickest presentation imaginable, about how I’m going to strip teachers of every shred they are clinging to of self-esteem or confidence, so that they will only do what they are told, and will never, ever, argue with their administrators ever again, no matter how inane or nonsensical are the programs and innovations those administrators come up with. And when I get hired to train a staff, I will get the administrators to leave me alone with the teachers – and then I will do nothing but praise those teachers, and honor them for the work they do and the dedication they put into it. I will thank them for everything they sacrifice to try to help their students. I will point out – because I think it’s important to remember – that students are the ones actually doing the work of learning, and that it is goddamn hard work; they deserve praise and honor as well, for every one of their victories large or small. I will help my audience of teachers see that the job of a teacher is to help students find the strength and the courage to keep working, even though the potential rewards of all of their very hard work are very far away and very abstract – and not always guaranteed, or even likely. I would encourage those teachers to talk to each other, and to their students, before they talk to any administrator, or any damn pedagogical expert, when looking for inspiration and guidance about how to create a new and better lesson for helping students get what they need. I would try to give the teachers the self-confidence to try new things, and to experiment, and to be honest with themselves and their students when they don’t know what the right answer is, or if the new thing they’re trying is the best thing: but they should try it anyway, and let students see them trying it, and thus encourage innovation and creativity and problem solving, along with honest reflection and assessment of one’s success. And I will tell those teachers to ignore every single test result, and every administrator who focuses on test results; and I will say that, if they do use standards, to remember that standards are only one small piece of a whole system of education, and they cannot ever be the most important one: because standards are not people. And education is people. Really, it is nothing but people.

And then, I will ask all of those teachers to go on Yelp or Google Reviews or whatever is the Google Pedagogy website (PedaGooglogy? We’ll workshop it.), and give me a five-star review, and lie and say that I helped them realize that they need to focus on nothing but standards in order to raise test scores, and they’ve never been so excited to do just that. 

And then I’ll use those reviews, and my slick sales pitch of a presentation, to go to another school, and do the same thing over again. 

Until I crash into the mountainside.

Late to Work, Work Too Late

Dusty 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And then there are the feedback loops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That’s what procrastination is.

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

It’s prioritizing.

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

Because I have too much shit to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How dare we?

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

Just like us.

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

We’re all doing our best.

A Spoonful of Hatred Makes Education Go Down

Dusty Leave a comment

Sometimes I hate my students.

And that’s actually a good thing.

First, let me affix the boilerplate so as to avoid any whiff of morally reprehensible heresy that goes against the company line: MY STUDENTS ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE YOUNG AMERICANS AND IT IS A JOY TO SEE THEIR BRIGHT SHINING FACES AS THEY GREET ME IN THE MORNING AND I LOVE TO SEE THE SPARK IN THEIR EYES AS THEY LEARN SOMETHING NEW AND I AM INSPIRED EVERY DAY BY THE THOUGHT THAT I COULD BE HELPING THEM REACH THEIR POTENTIAL I AM MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND THUS HELPING TO CREATE OUR FUTURE.

There. Now, as I was saying, sometimes I really can’t stand the little stinkers. I don’t mean because they’re terrible, or because I’m such a cloistered saint that their vileness taints my purity; they’re just kids, and I’m not, and so they can be awful people and I’m not currently awful enough to be able to ignore their awfulness or cover it with my own. I would have done that when I was their age; I was awful, too, no question, far worse than most of them are now.

But my students tell me, outright, frequently, that my class is boring, that my subject is pointless, that I don’t work hard enough or do the right things as a teacher (By which they mean “You don’t do the work for me and then give me an A.”). They lie, they cheat, they steal. They waste my time, and then get snotty with me because they think I’m wasting theirs. They whine, they complain, they try to intimidate and threaten and manipulate me into doing what they want me to do. They are deeply selfish and insensitive to the feelings of others: they are racist, sexist, xenophobic, hypocritical, hypercritical, ultraviolent, lazy on a scale that can’t be measured or even contemplated by those who aren’t themselves on the scale.

And they’re just kinda gross. They smell bad, some of them. And you should see them eat. Ick.

Now here’s the good side of all of that: because of all of those things, I have very little trouble telling them No. It’s real easy with some of the things they ask me. “Can we watch this (probably inappropriate) YouTube clip?” “No.” The best thing with this exchange, which occurs almost daily, is that they have no actual argument. The most common rejoinder is “Aw, come on,” which is probably about as effective as yelling “Hey baby!” at a female passerby: just like that woman never swoons and says, “Be still, my beating heart,” I never say, “Well, okay, let me look up that NWA video.” Same when they say – as they often do – “Can we just, like, do nothing today?” I have no problem at all saying no to that. And not even because I always want to do productive things; I generally do, but of course I have my moments. No, the reason I can always say no to the siren song of sloth is, I don’t want to hang out with my students. If I’m going to flop on my backside and do nothing more strenuous than exhaling, I’d much rather be at home, where my dog and my couch and my coffee are. The last place I want to be is in that ugly, uncomfortable classroom with all of those people whom, as I have been saying at length, I don’t really like.

I’d rather make them work. It is frequently true that I force them to continue learning not because I think it is valuable or even merely necessary; it is, but the reason I keep teaching them even when they are at their lazy-assed whiniest is, because making them work is my revenge. I torture them with learning. I keep reading, and reading, and reading, even when they just can’t take any more. If they really get on my nerves, I will work right up to the bell and even beyond the bell, and then I’ll assign them homework. I don’t have a work ethic: I have a revenge ethic, and the worst thing I can do to my teenaged students is make them think, and make them work.

And, see, that means they learn, which is good for them. And they suffer, which is good for me. It’s win-win.

There’s more to this, of course. (It’s just so much fun to rip on my students, and talk about torturing them with literature. Hey –I just realized that “torture” and “literature” have the same last letters. There’s an opportunity there. Maybe a rhyming couplet? Maybe a portmanteau? Literatorture?) There are serious problems with the company line that most teachers – no, that essentially all teachers – toe – no, that they lie down on, clasp their hands together, and enter into a meditative trance akin to suspended animation, a state from which they will never arise. Okay, that got too weird.

My point is this. Teaching has a required orthodoxy. Teachers teach because they love their students. They call their students their children. They say everything I joked about above, about the future, and making a difference, and seeing the spark – though I more often hear the loathsome phrase “A-Ha moment,” which just makes me want to start caterwauling “Taaaake ooooon meeeeeeeeeee (Take! On! Me!) TAAAAAAAAKKKKKEEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEE OOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNN (Take! On! Me!) IIIIII’LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL BBBEEEEEEEEEE GGOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNEEE!!! AND (mumble mumble I don’t actually know the words to this part but who cares deepbreath) EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

You get the point.

Teachers always, always say that they don’t do it for the money. They do it because they believe in the cause, they believe in the importance of education, in the value of helping young people, of passing on knowledge to the next generation and helping to make our world a better place, one child at a time. I hear teachers talking constantly about what the children need: how teachers are better parents to some of them than their actual parents; how some of them don’t ever get to have fun unless a teacher sacrifices an evening or a weekend to some overnight field trip; how these kids shouldn’t miss this opportunity that somehow requires more effort from a teacher than it does from any of the students whose lives are being enriched. If a teacher says anything different, then we get funny looks. We get frowns and furrowed brows and awkward attempts at segues away from the conversational minefield we just stepped into. I assume we get talked about when we’re not in the room, since teachers – professional busybodies and judgmental critics – are inveterate gossips.

I know because I’ve been getting those looks, and saying those heterodox things, for years. Now that my wife, who is braver, more honest, and less patient than I am, has joined me in teaching, she gets the looks even more often. I think she also gets them worse because she is a woman, and therefore expected to be motherly; I think some of my fellow teachers excuse my anti-student bile by calling it something on the order of “tough love.” My students like me, so surely the smack I talk about them couldn’t be real; I must be exaggerating. Kidding! Oh, that wacky Humphrey! No wonder the kids love his class!

Here’s the truth: not all kids love my class. Some freaking hate it, and hate me. Often (Not always) they are the ones who receive my ill-treatment. (“Not always” because sometimes the very worst little twits like me and like my class. Sometimes kids hate me for entirely different reasons, like how I waste time or teach material they don’t like or find useful. Some of them don’t think I’m funny, even think I’m rude. Can you imagine?) They resent that I don’t treat them like special lil angels, because that’s what they get from almost every one of their other teachers.

And that is, of course, the problem. My students aren’t bad people, not at all; they really are sweet kids at heart, and most of them are bright and capable. They’re just kids: they’re lazy, and entitled, and think much too much of themselves. What they need is a dose of reality.

What they get is teachers who coddle them because they’re special lil angels.

We shouldn’t do it. We should treat students like actual human beings: we should expect them to act correctly, to be responsible, to think and act for themselves in their own best interest. And we should do the same. That’s how we can actually help them to reach their potential: make them work. Make them rely on themselves, rather than doing everything for them. We should realize that at some point those lil angels will leave our school, and they will be around people then who – don’t love them. Don’t coddle them. Don’t think they’re special lil angels and do everything for them. If they have no teachers like me, then they will be hurt and confused when their college professors don’t care about them, or when their bosses insist that they show up on time even if they’re not feeling happy that morning. My boss has never taken me out into the hall to have a heart-to-heart. “You seem down, are you feeling okay? Everything okay at home?” This is not something I have ever heard from my supervisor.

Though I have heard it from other teachers.

I’m not talking about tough love. I’m not talking about love: school is a job, and everyone involved has to do their part, and should be expected to do their part. When teachers are willing to provide whatever a student needs, then the students – and their parents – quickly realize that the more they need, the more they get. I think this has much to do with the rise in special education students – students with, as we say, special needs. That is not in any way to say that students who have genuine needs should be neglected or denied what support they need; in order to do your job, you have to be in a situation where it’s possible for you to do your job, and that is the goal of special education, and in my experience it usually works very well. But there are also lots and lots of students who lay claim to needs they don’t actually need. And teachers provide for them, too, because – well, because we love all of our students like they were our own children.

They’re not our kids. They’re also not our clients – another popular, and pernicious, paradigm for schools (Pernicious because the customer is always right, which again puts too much power into the hands of students who are willing to be demanding, and taking all power away from teachers who are willing to be giving.). Students are actually our coworkers. We teachers have a job to do, and students have a job to do; we need them to do their job, and they need us to do ours.

It’s a lot easier to do that when you kind of don’t like them that much. It’s a natural instinct to want to help your friends, and people you like, especially when they seem desperate – and desperation is a state that teenagers excel at. It’s an even stronger instinct to want to protect and help your children. So when we think of students as children, as our children, and we think of ourselves as their protectors and guardians, then we do things for them that we wouldn’t do for strangers – or for our coworkers. Things that they, therefore, don’t learn to do for themselves.

Sometimes they really do need the help, and when they do, we should provide it. Any decent person should do the same, and as a teacher, we do get to know more of the intimate and therefore terrible details of our students’ lives. That does put us in a unique position to provide help to people who really need it, and we should; and the times when I have, I am proud to have done so.

But most of them don’t need my help. They don’t need my care, they don’t need my love. They need to learn how to write an essay. They need me to teach them. If I hate them a little, I can teach them a lot.

It is also true that the students aren’t the only ones who make constant, unreasonable demands of teachers: the school administration does the same. In my almost two decades of teaching, I have seen more evidence every year that the only thing that keeps the education system working at all is the willing self-sacrifice of teachers. If we didn’t give up our free time, our evenings and our weekends, the work wouldn’t get done. If we didn’t bust our asses, and too frequently shell out our own money, then kids wouldn’t be able to do all the fun things they get to do in schools that keep them entertained, and therefore earn whatever commitment they have to the whole endeavor. (One small example is my current school’s robotics team, which engages a fair percentage of our best and brightest – and which is made possible only by teachers giving up their time and energy and money. Without that team, the school would lose dozens of students, current and potential. Multiply that by every school and almost every fun extracurricular: how often are the popular clubs run by the principal? That’s right. Never.) If we weren’t willing to take on this incredibly difficult and frustrating task for insufficient money, then schools would shut down. All of them. Pretty much at once. Realize that I make probably half of what I deserve, as a good and capable teacher: and realize, too, that my class sizes are already too big. So if we were paid what we should be, there would be twice as many students per teacher – and now the money doesn’t matter, and my capacity for teaching doesn’t matter, because the job simply becomes impossible: and I quit and move to a Caribbean island to sell fish tacos and smarmy haikus. And then there’s no more schools. And then what becomes of the lil angels?

But of course, the orthodox catechism of teachers tells us that we love them, and therefore must sacrifice for them. Administrators know this: and so they ask us for anything they might want of us, with one simple, inevitable, never-fail justification: it’s for the students. And every time they say that, there are teachers who are willing to do it. Always. Spend eight hours after school tutoring students for test prep? Well, they really need the help, we say. Spend a weekend baking for a fundraiser – using materials bought with our own money? Well, some of the kids just can’t afford the trip on their own. Take up campus supervision because the administration cut the security guard to save on the budget? Well, the kids need to feel safe! I know I’m unqualified to be a security guard, and already terribly overworked doing my actual job; but – it’s for the children.

I wish that more teachers felt what I feel. I do think most of them do, and they cover it up; because they don’t want to get the strange looks, and they don’t want to let the children down. Here’s the secret, though: most of my students really do like me, and like my class, even though I am entirely open with them about all of this. I tell my students, as I tell my fellow teachers, that I do this for the money: I tell my students that if I win the lottery tonight, I will not be in class tomorrow. I tell them that they are not my friends, and that I don’t want to be their parent. I tell them that if they fail the class, that is their responsibility; I’ll give them the opportunity to learn, but I will not force them, will not chase them down and hold their hand and twist their ear and drag them, kicking and screaming, into a bright future. I tell them that if they don’t want to be there, they can leave, and I won’t stop them. And they like my class. Because I’m honest. And because I offer them what they actually want, and what they actually need: the chance to be themselves, and to do it alone.

Because I’m not going to do it for them.