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Back to Balance

Dusty Leave a comment

What is education?

I mean it. What is it really?

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

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

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

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

Let’s discuss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong.

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Vedic Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

educate (v.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that’s what I was looking for.

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

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

Bass and Good, p.7

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

Balance Requires Dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Character, self-control, social awareness, culture.

And then: liberation.

That’s education.

More Weight

Dusty Leave a comment

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

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

It’s because we’re tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in 2020, we didn’t have it.

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

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

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

We haven’t gotten it back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Giles Corey simply said “More weight.”

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

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

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

How much more weight?

Justice

Dusty Leave a comment

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

So I wrote it.

Here it is.

The death penalty? 

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

Wrong.

That’s not justice.

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

You know. Justice.

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

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

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

And justice, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Jesus.

Hey, there’s a thought: crucifixion. 

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

That’s what the death penalty is for. 

Justice.

No Pizza For You

Dusty Leave a comment

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

This is one of those essays.

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

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

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

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

So I read them this.

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

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Because you don’t deserve it. 

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

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

Because you won’t fight for it. 

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

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

And you don’t deserve pizza.

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

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

But you won’t even do that. 

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

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

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

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

The ones who can’t be bothered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does anyone have any opinions?”

“Does anyone care about anything?”

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

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

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

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

Have you ever tried?

“Nobody can change anyone’s mind.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

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

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

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

Never? 

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

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

Unless you fight, you don’t deserve pizza.

What We Need In Education: The Need for Education

Dusty 2 Comments

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

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

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

Something has to change.

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

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

Here are my thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idea #1: Age Is Just A Number

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s what we do about that.

Idea #2: Pay students to come to school.

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

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

Bullshit walks. Money talks. Pay them.

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

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

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

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

Idea #3: Education For Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I say we try something new.

What do you think?

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

Dusty 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it sure doesn’t feel like it.

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

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

[Warning: there is cussing ahead.]

We need to take away the goddamn fucking deadlines.

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

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

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

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

Okay, sorry. I’m better now.

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

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

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

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

That needs to change.

I Lost My Job*

Dusty 1 Comment

(*But not really.)

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

What exactly is my job?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except it also sounds like Hell. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is grief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know what this means.

Dusty 2 Comments

When I was six, I was walking through the woods on my grandparents’ property in Washington, and I stepped on a yellowjacket nest. I remember the sensation as my foot came down: pushing through the humus of dried leaves, a moment of resistance, and then I crunched through what I thought was solid ground, and fell lower than I thought I should have, on that foot. That’s when I heard the buzzing: z z z ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz It hit a fast crescendo and then lowered to a purposeful, ominous hum, as if I had prodded a sleeper who did not want to wake and who growled resistance at me.

Then the stings started. One, two, three, each more painful than the last, the infuriated insects stitched their revenge up my leg as I stood, frozen, suddenly unsure of the ground beneath me — was it more hollow still? Would I fall through again? — obeying my training that told me to stand still when bees landed on me because they didn’t want to sting me, after all.

But these weren’t bees: they were yellowjackets. And they wanted to sting me. Understandable, really, since I had just destroyed their house and maybe crushed some of their family members; but that didn’t make me feel good about the fiery needles jabbing into me.

Fortunately my mother was there, and having grown up on that place named for her family, she was familiar with the sound of angry bees and yellowjackets: and she realized this was not a good time to just stand still. She scooped me up and ran. Of course I realize now that she was running to get us both away from the yelllowjackets, but at the time, I was suddenly sure that she was running me back to the house because I was going to die: my father is allergic to bee stings, and even at that age, I knew the potential danger of those tiny packets of venom which I could feel throbbing in my shin — and maybe moving up through my bloodstream? Was this the end?

It was not. It was about to be my first encounter with witch hazel (a name that still feels mysterious and alchemical to me), the rapid soothing of the burning stings, a cookie or two to soothe my burning tears, and the disappointing reckoning of a mere six stings, none higher than my knee. Not enough damage for a good I-stepped-on-a-beehive story, though it’s a damn good indication of my mother’s reflexes and quick thinking.

 

That moment of stepping down onto, and then falling through the ground and into a sudden attack: that’s what 2020 feels like to me. The hollowness of the hive beneath me, incapable of holding me up, echoed in the middle of me as I realized what was going to happen, a hollowness that seemed to swell and expand even as it grew more empty and dark and cold, as if my fear were a black hole inside, swallowing more and more and growing larger with each terrified thought that fell into it: that’s what I feel like inside, right now, and for the last six months. It’s a much slower process, this time, lasting months instead of seconds; but I feel very much as though my reaction is identical: I am frozen, panicked, trying to figure out what to do and coming up with no good ideas, just standing and watching as the danger swirls up around me.

At the same time: I am not just the kid walking through the woods, this time. I’m the yelllowjackets. The hollowness inside me is the hive, and the shell around that emptiness is too weak, and can’t hold up the weight of the world that is stepping on me. And as everything going on around me crushes through me and into me, I lash out, angrily — maybe understandable, but really, useless  — and I sting, and I bite, and I attack. I have never been so short-tempered, so cranky, so bitter, so apt to strike, so apt to sting with my words and my tongue, as this year. I hate it. I can’t stop it. I can’t: I don’t have the strength. That’s what was hollowed out of me. And I can’t just set myself and bear up under the weight: because the hollowness is under my feet, too, and I am being stung even as I am stinging.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just standing here. I have been for what feels like forever.

And I’m so tired.

And this time, my mother can’t scoop me up and run me back to the house for the twin magics of herbal remedies and baked goods.

This time, I might just get stung to death.

 

Probably not. I’m aware that as high as the number of Covid-19 cases is, it’s still only a fraction of the population, and that while my state is not handling the pandemic well, I am taking reasonable precautions that should keep me safe; I will most likely come out of this with an unremarkable tally of suffering. I do not mind, this time. I would very much prefer a half-dozen stings, no permanent scars, no need for a doctor. Just some soothing liquid and a cookie or two.

But I’m not just standing still with my foot in the danger zone; I’m still walking forward through the woods. In fact, since school starts tomorrow and goes to in-person classes in four weeks, I may be stepping onto the hive, and then continuing on into it, like walking down into a hive the size of a subway tunnel, with yellowjackets the size of Shelob. (At the same time: those goddamn hobbits are coming into my home, fumbling and ripping through my webs, and they are goddamn well going to pay for it. Nasssty little hobbitses.)

What precautions do I take then, as I move deeper and deeper into this hive pit? My school is trying to stay on top of things, having offered fully online learning as an option, instituting new protocols — social distancing, mandatory* masks, sanitizing spray to be applied every two hours**, fever checks on arrival — intended to prevent the spread of the disease. I don’t know how well it’s all going to work, though; and I have no idea what to do about that. I can’t quit. If I raise too great a stink, they’ll fire me. I guess I just have to stand there. Maybe the small things hovering around me don’t want to sting me, this time.

*Mandatory here means just what it does everywhere: masks are required until someone raises a loud enough political objection, and/or presents a doctor’s note. Then, not. Hope the virus takes doctor’s notes, too. 

**Said sanitation to be applied by me, every two hours, in between classes. On a side note, the spray requires four minutes to take full effect. Time between classes is four minutes. Hope the virus will wait out in the hall.

The danger, though, is not what is haunting me. Perhaps it should be, but the thing that is building a growing ball of hollow darkness inside me, the thing that makes me feel as if my next step will land on an equally hollow surface that will drop me through and out of the world, while at the same time the weight on top of me punches through my thin outer layer and into the hollow within, is this:

I am tired.

The hollowness inside me is not just fear. It is exhaustion. I am so very, very tired. Tired from fighting, tired from standing watch, tired from holding up others as well as myself. I’m tired of watching the pandemic grow, and watching my country wallowing in ignorance and selfishness like a pig in shit — just as filthy and twice as proud of ourselves — as we deny science, and raise alarms for problems that aren’t real, pointing to imaginary dangers that somehow block out of our sight the very real danger of this virus. I am so tired of being angry about it. I am so tired of fighting with people who smugly ignore every fact and every reasonable thought because it doesn’t make them feel safe, or worse, it doesn’t make them feel strong and fearless. Saying they’re not afraid of Covid, that makes them feel strong and fearless.

It’s as if when my mother rushed to scoop me up out of the yellowjacket hive, I had pushed her down, spit on her (Because the people who think this way are some of the rudest, most inconsiderate, most contemptuous hooligans I’ve ever interacted with. And I teach high school.), and then stood with fists on hips, chin jutted, nostrils flaring, and said, “Don’t you tell me where I can stand, I’m an American. You run if you want to, you and all the other sheep!”

While the yellowjackets swarmed around me.

And of course it’s not only the virus. I am so very tired of racism. I am tired of being ashamed of what people who look like me have done to people who feel like me for centuries. I am tired of confronting the same angry, willful ignorance about the protests or about opposition to police violence. At the same time, I am tired of being treated like the people I look like by the people I feel like — and I am tired of knowing that I have no right to complain about any treatment I may suffer, because my world has been built to prop me up, and whatever I may have to go through pales in comparison to the ordeals of those who are less pale than I. I hate that people tell me I have no right to speak my opinion, to take a stand; that all I can do is get out of the way and let better people take what they have been denied for centuries, because people who look like me oppressed them, which has enabled me to become everything that I am — all of it tainted by centuries of crimes against humanity. Not my own gifts and efforts, but my privilege, I am told, is why I am who I am and can do what I can do: and that means I don’t deserve what I have, and using that privilege to try to help solve the problem earns me a sort of sly sneer from those who know that my actions on behalf of the cause are just white guilt, and really, I am still the enemy,still perpetuating the problem if I do anything other than get out of the way.

That’s how it feels. It’s maybe not true that people working for social justice think that way of me, but — that’s how it feels. Of course, maybe that’s just my white guilt talking. And my white privilege thinking that I should be the one to speak up and fight for the cause: because that means I am centering whiteness in a movement that is not intended for the benefit or the recognition of white people or white suffering. It’s so easy to fall into the same patterns that have existed unrecognized throughout my life; how can I tell what is genuine and what is instilled in me by institutions of oppression and privilege? Is everything about me broken and wrong because of the world I grew up in? Is there nothing that is me? No, I want to say; I am good, I am worthwhile, I want to help and I am capable of helping. It is not right that I get pushed aside and marginalized, stereotyped, included in sweeping generalizations, based only on my skin color, my nationality, my gender —

And how pathetic do I sound saying those words.

I’m so bloody tired of irony.

I want to help, is the problem. I don’t want to be like those ignorant yahoos I fight with. I don’t want to be selfish.

But so many people need so much help.

I can do a lot of it. I am happy to do a lot of it: happy to support my family, my friends, those who rely on me. They are struggling, too, because this year has not only been hard for the pandemic and the riots: it’s hard financially, and crippling politically, and my family has had a series of tribulations fall on us like Biblical plagues, one after another and each worse than the last, mostly medical and due to my parents’ generation reaching the stage of life where things go badly. And of course, I can’t do anything. I can’t go help them because I might infect them, and that would kill them — and that would kill me. I worry about them double, because I realize that, on top of everything else, the pizza delivery man might give them Covid-19, and then I wouldn’t be able to visit them in the hospital while they coughed their life away.

And I can’t talk about this, can’t complain about this: because everyone else has it harder than me. Everyone. It’s not just white privilege, not just male privilege; I am healthy, and have remained fully employed, at a job where I am respected and well-liked, and I am generally well-balanced emotionally. I’m not well-balanced this year, of course, but since I started off having an easier time than most, and we’ve all gone down together, I still have more of my head above water than others do who were half-drowning before 2020. So I have no right at all to complain, and if I open my mouth to do it, the response I get back (the response I should get back) is something along the lines of, “Yes, I know, I’m going through that too — and a dozen things that are worse.”

Part of me can’t stand myself, right now, for complaining that I have it too easy in life to complain. And normally, the fact that I do have it easier than most would keep me from complaining because it would keep me from suffering. And even when I do suffer, I don’t have such troubles that I need to vent, need to talk them out. Normally I don’t need much support.

But this year is not normal.

I need to vent. It helps, you see, even if you don’t see how it could possibly help, even if you don’t know why it helps, talking about your feelings helps. I need that help. I need to say how I feel, even if how I feel is gauche or insufficiently woke. (“See that? That’s white sensitivity right there. He needs to grow a thicker skin, learn to deal with being told what he’s doing wrong. It’s just that he’s never been criticized much before, not in this society built for people like him.” Yes. I know it. But this is still how I feel.) Because people need my support, and so long as I am this tired, and feel these hollows under my ribs and under my feet, I can’t give them what they need.

This is what I need: I need to talk. I need to write. I haven’t wanted to do it, not for months now, for all the reasons I’ve been talking about here. There is too much, and I need to figure out what the hell I’m really feeling; I hate to ramble and blunder and sound like I don’t know what the hell I’m getting at. But one of the difficult Catch-22s of being a writer is that writing is exactly how I figure out what I’m feeling; I usually don’t know what I’m getting at when I start writing, I just get there when I get there, and I have a pretty good idea of when to stop. I have no doubt that this blog is irritating and confusing for people who read it. I expect you, too, are short-tempered, unable and unwilling to put out a whole lot of effort helping someone else deal with their shit when you’re sitting there with both hands full of your own.

I’m sure you’re tired too.

It feels strange to write this, because it makes me feel better, and so maybe I want to share that; but I don’t want to be a bother, don’t want to be a burden.

Which is also how everyone else feels, too.

So I’m just going to say it. If what I’m saying is wrong, please feel free to correct me; but first, I need to say it. Actually, I take that back: if you have something you want to say about something I’m doing wrong, put a pin in it. We’ll circle back around to it later. For now, I just need to talk about how I feel. And I won’t ask people to listen to me, because I know you’re all struggling, too — but it would mean a lot if you did.

We all need help. We all need support. We need to ask for it for ourselves. Just asking makes us feel better: because it validates how we feel. Being willing to ask for help, from those whom you are willing to give help to, shows that you consider yourself as important as they are, as worth helping as they are. It shows them that they are not a burden on you, that they can help even as they ask for help for themselves. And everyone feels better when they can help.

I need help. I’m standing on unsteady ground, in a country that is tearing itself apart, and I’m about to go back to work where I will be surrounded (Virtually, for the most part, but still) by students — who all desperately need all the help they can get.

That’s what made me actually open this post and start writing. That’s really what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of the virus, afraid of what’s going to happen in thousands of schools across the country to hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students; but what scares me right now is the knowledge that those students will come to me, and they will need me. They will need me to listen to them, to understand them, to take them seriously, to help them. They are bottomless abysses of need, just like I was at their age, as we all are in that terrible time of adolescence. They will need me even more now, because their world is on fire, too.

I don’t know how much I will have to give them.

I’m so very tired.

I’m just standing here: hoping I don’t get stung.

Can someone please pick me up and run me away from the swarm?

Or if not that — can I have some witch hazel and maybe a cookie or two?

Thanks.

Salute

Dusty Leave a comment

It’s hard being a teacher.

I had a committee meeting today. (That’s right, even a deadly global pandemic can’t stop committee meetings.) And it came up, more than once, how hard the teachers at my school are working; because, you see, we’re doing distance learning. My school is — lucky? prescient? — enough to have 1:1 Chromebooks, so in theory, we should be able to reach all of our students with new curriculum.

Heh. I thought it would be easy. And in some ways it is: I don’t have to dress fancy (Though I will say, albeit without judgment of others who make different choices, that I do wear pants every day), I don’t have to drive to school and home, I don’t have to be away from my wife and my dogs and all of my creature comforts. As a lifelong struggler with bashful kidneys and public restrooms, it is a great relief to be able to use MY bathroom in between classes.

But teaching online, it turns out, is goddamn hard. It’s a mental shift, and not an easy one, and so it makes me doubt all of my choices, choices that in class I would be confident in. I’ve been doing this long enough and I have enough ability and knowledge to think that I do it well; but the signals that I’m doing it well, which I’m used to getting from my students, are completely missing. And so, for that matter, are about half of my students; because they may have access to the curriculum, but that doesn’t mean they want it, or can actually show up and take advantage of it. So I just don’t know. Is it working? Is it not? Should I change? Today, for instance: one of my usual central methods is to get input from my students. I give them options about what they want to do next when we finish a unit; I ask them if they have any questions or topics they’d like to ask about or discuss before we get to the work I want to give them. I don’t assign them due dates, I ask them how long they think they’ll need to do something, and I let them decide when they want to turn it in. Today my AP Language class finished early, and so I asked them what they wanted to do: get some new material, or end class.

They couldn’t tell me. Two students said they were fine either way; two others said if we ended early they’d be bored, but that they didn’t really want to do new work, either. And the rest of them said — nothing. Nothing at all. For fifteen minutes. I’m used to students not wanting to make decisions; they prefer when I tell them what to do. It’s a lot easier and they don’t have to take responsibility for the decisions. That’s why I make them do it, of course. But usually they come around to the fact that they have to make some kind of decision,  take some responsibility, and then they do it. But today? Nope. They just sat there. I have no idea what to do with that. It makes it very hard to keep trying to figure it out and do it.

So that’s what came up in the meeting: that the teachers are all working as hard as we can. My principal said that hopefully, after all of this, more people will have an appreciation for what teachers do, and maybe so. Though my immediate knee-jerk reaction was to scoff at the idea; teachers have always worked this hard, and people that haven’t gotten that yet aren’t going to. But hey, since there are many, many parents who are trying to fill teachers’ shoes, maybe I’m wrong; maybe they will have a better idea. I’ll tell you, though, our problem as teachers has not usually been that parents don’t appreciate our abilities and efforts: it’s the people above us that are the bigger problem, and I don’t think that’s going to change. But maybe. Hopefully.

The reason I’m not sure that things will change is because this isn’t a simple shift of teaching responsibilities onto homeschooling parents. If everything else was normal, and parents just had to step into teachers’ shoes (Or again, it’s not really parents; though it’s nice to think that there are many, many administrators and school board members and state education department bureaucrats and elected representatives who suddenly have to teach their kids, and I appreciate that thought very, very much), then maybe the sudden increase in the difficulty of dealing with their kids would help to make the point. But that’s not what’s happening here. The world is on fire: all of us are trying to do our best while also running around trying to beat out the flames with our bare, scorched hands  and feet. Parents aren’t just homeschooling their kids, they’re also dealing with working from home, or not working, and all the financial worries that come with that; along with the health worries; and they are also dealing with their kids as kids, not just as students. It’s too much. Now, teachers are doing the same, as all of us are — I’m trying to teach while also worrying about everything from my every cough, to the health and wellbeing of my loved ones, to the long term financial impact of this; because my world’s on fire, too — but the point is, the hell that we’re all going through is not likely, I believe, to translate into, “Man, that teaching thing is hard!” I think the lesson we will all learn is “EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT WAS ABSOLUTE HELL.”

I also have to say that the toughest thing about teaching is not something that homeschooling  parents have to deal with, at least not in the same way. The toughest thing about this very difficult job of mine is going through some tough situation, an ugly class, a troubled or troubling student, and you deal with that, and it takes a lot out of you: and then the bell rings, and they leave — and a new group of students comes in. And in three to five minutes, you need to put away everything you were just feeling and dealing with, and be mentally and emotionally ready to teach the new group, because of course they had nothing to do with whatever just happened; they can’t lose out on their education just because that last class was awful. That’s the hardest thing. That, and starting over again with the terrible class/student/whatever the next day — and the next, and the next, and the next, for the entire school year. I know how trying children can be, and of course they’re even worse with their parents; but you love your kids. I like my students just fine, but I don’t love them. I just have to put up with them. Day after day after day. And keep trying to teach them, regardless.

And you know what? Sometimes I get those same kids back the next year. And the next.

So no, I don’t think that people will have much of a new appreciation for teachers after this — though I genuinely hope we will have a greater appreciation for a functioning government and leaders who understand their role and who carry out their responsibilities — but that doesn’t matter. Teachers will be fine. We’ll be so happy to be back in our classrooms that for at least a year after this, we probably won’t even complain very much — and believe me, that will be a big change, because the only thing teachers love more than our job and our students is bitching about our job and our students. We’ll be okay.

But there’s someone else who is being forgotten in all of this. Someone who is struggling just as much as the rest of us, though for the most part, we aren’t noticing. Some people notice, of course, and some even acknowledge the difficulty; but mostly, we’re treating them more like game pieces that we move around the board. Or maybe livestock, which we feed and water, groom and shelter; but never ask how they’re feeling about all of this.

The students.

As I said, teachers are struggling, but so is everyone else, and with the same things; parents are struggling, workers are struggling, everyone is struggling: and so are our kids. They have all the same worries, all the same fears, all the same guilts and frustrations. They also have no idea how to handle any of this. They don’t know if anything they’re doing is the right thing, and they have no idea who to ask, or what to do with the answers even if they got them. They may not understand all of the financial implications, depending on their age and awareness; but they certainly understand that their parents are worried about things, and that there’s danger, and while they may have the shelter of ignorance and innocence, they have absolutely no power to affect anything, no control, no opportunity to even try and make things better for themselves and the people they love.

As much as I may be struggling with online learning, my students are having an even harder time of it: and just like me, they are afraid for their health, and for their loved ones, and for the world around them that is on fire, and they can’t escape and they can’t put it out.

And yet they’re trying. Just as hard as me, and probably harder, in most cases. Sure, half of my students are not coming to my online discussions or doing the readings I’m sending them; but half of them are. Despite all of their worries and troubles. They’re still showing up, and still trying to pay attention, and learn. Think about that. Think about trying to follow along with a literary novel right now. I don’t know about you, but I can’t pay attention to anything for longer than about 45 minutes, let alone six weeks. And math? Freaking math?! People are supposed to be learning calculus right now? Now?! It’s insane. It’s impossible. I could barely get past my own problems to learn anything when I was in high school, and I had a comfortable, sheltered, privileged life, with a complete lack of the world being on fire.

And yet they’re trying. I have students writing essays. Good ones. Listening to me reading a novel, and asking questions, and raising points of interest, making observations. Good ones. They’re showing up every day — and when they can’t, they email me and apologize because their internet was down, or because their parents needed their help at the family business that day, or because they slept until noon because they were up worrying until 5am.

Sure, they had trouble today making a decision about whether they wanted to end class or keep going, but that’s because making a decision when your entire soul is one giant Rube Goldberg anxiety machine is almost impossible: I shouldn’t even have asked them to do it. I should have known how hard it would be for them to take responsibility for even a small choice like that, when they have so much to worry about already. They couldn’t do it. Not their fault. Just showing up today was enough. I want them to know that I am pleased with them for that, and proud of them for what they have done over the last four weeks.

My students are amazing. They are hard working  and dedicated, and they are talented and brilliant. All of in spite of what they have lost, and what they are losing, and what they are risking, and what burdens they are having to shoulder, right alongside the rest of us: helping with childcare, and with paying bills, and with taking care of their loved ones and keeping people’s spirits up, and trying to figure out what the hell they can do, what they should do, to make things better, now or in the future. They are doing all of that: and they are doing their assignments. They are inspiring. I am so very grateful to them, and so very proud to know them.

That’s what I want people to learn from this, and to remember after this is all over. That as hard  as it is and has been on us, it is as hard if not harder on these kids, who have fewer defenses and adaptations to difficulties, but who are still, still, doing their best. Let’s try to do our best for them, too.

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I am thinking about work.

Not just my work, which, frankly, I wish I wasn’t thinking about; there is only one day left of regular classes, followed by three days of finals — except I’ve already given all of my finals, so that’s three days of nothing — and then the school year is over. My students stopped thinking about school weeks ago if not earlier; I wish I could follow their example. Ah, well, I’m sure after this coming week I will stop waking up at 4am and thinking about school.

Until the next school year starts, that is.

This morning, though I am also thinking about work in general: why we do it, why we consider it a person’s defining characteristic, and why we hallow it. And why my students have such a love-hate relationship with it.

So why do we work? To some extent, of course, work is necessary for survival; life is a struggle, with too much life vying for not enough resources; there’s not another way that life works on this particular planet, that is just, as they say, how it be. When we were primates in trees, and actual predators and prey, we had to work to get food and to avoid becoming food. When we became  hunter-gatherers, it was the same; and we added work required to build a society, starting with a family or a pack and building up to a tribe, a clan, and then, with the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry, a village and a town and a country. Now there’s all that added work to prepare the area for habitation, and then to protect it from those who are still working in the predator-prey field. And, basically, we still do that: we work to survive, and we work to maintain and protect what we have.

The question is, what we have, and what the threat to it is, and whether it really needs this much work to keep it.

We work for more than mere survival. We work to get more than the minimum: we work for personal gain. I don’t just want enough food to keep from starving, I want enough food to be satisfied, to be fat and happy; and I want the right kinds of food. Not just all the squirrels I can catch: I want donuts. And Cheez-Its. And good coffee. And also, I don’t want to eat squirrels. But now  we enter into the realm of abundance: because frankly, if there are limited resources and we are competing for them, and there are people working to survive while I am working merely for Cheez-Its and good coffee, then the survival workers are likely to win, because they want it more and they will work harder. Of course, there are people working to survive in this world while I work for Cheez-Its (And I feel like an absolute heel saying that, but it’s true, so thank you for reading the work of a heel), but we have localized abundance, and localized limited resources; and we have lots of people working hard to make sure that the people with limited resources can’t take my Cheez-Its.

So now we have working for survival, and working for personal gain and abundance. (We also have people working to protect my abundance, but they generally do that work for the same reason I do mine: they just have a different job. Inasmuch as they work to promote and preserve a culture, I’ll get to them in a sec.) I’m struggling to find a way that my working for Cheez-Its is positive, in the face of the fact that people are starving and working for food. I mean, I can’t fix the famine in Yemen, not even if I give up Cheez-Its (I’m not trying to be flip here, but if I changed to something less shallow than Cheez-Its as my example, it wouldn’t change the fact that I am working for abundance while Yemenis starve to death.); but in the grand scheme of things, there can’t be a moral good in working for abundance in a world with people who lack what they need to survive.

But there are still other reasons why we work. Take the one I just left alone: working to protect and promote a culture. People who do that often work without a tangible reward, which means they aren’t working for survival nor for personal gain. Why do they do it, then?

Take the attempts to reshape the national culture. Fundamentalist Christians are trying to re-brand America as a Christian nation. But we are not a Christian nation, not explicitly nor implicitly, not historically nor ideally; so this means, essentially, that Christians are trying to take the nation we have and turn it into their nation. Why? What would they gain from it?  Clearly not survival and not abundance; there is no money in protesting abortion. (There’s plenty in being a politician or a PAC that promotes abortion restrictions, but I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about the people who march with signs, and yell at people outside Planned Parenthood, and write opinion letters and online arguments about abortion and gay marriage.) Do they work to gain a place in Heaven? No, that’s guaranteed to them based on their own good life and good faith. The salvation of other American souls? That also is based on Americans accepting the Christian faith, and unless you think banning abortion and gay marriage will make people see the light of God in church every Sunday, then the attempts to achieve those political goals doesn’t make sense for their faith.

“Because it’s the right thing to do” seems to be the answer that makes the most sense (Unless we accept the notion that socially conservative movements are aimed at the eventual goal of subjugation of the masses for the elevation of conservative Christians. Then it’s more taking of something that isn’t theirs: power. And there’s a different idea of why we work.). Not that I think banning abortion and gay marriage are the right thing to do, but lots and lots of religious people, particularly devout Christians, do think so, and they’re the ones putting in the work to take these institutions (Is that the word for pregnant women in the aggregate? Marriage is an institution; is pregnancy? Motherhood? Womanhood?) under their control. So here’s another reason why we do work: not for survival, and not for personal gain: for morality. And maybe for control, for power.

Working for power doesn’t make sense. Power is, essentially, the ability to gain something without having to work for it. If I have power over my slaves, say, then I can order them to make me a cup of coffee, and I get the coffee without having to make it myself; presumably I also force my slaves to do work that will bring in enough money to buy the coffee. I’m buying myself a life of leisure, a work-free existence. So if I have to work to gain that power, so that I can use the power to stop working, then it’s a wash. The only thing that makes it make any sense is if I can gain power disproportionate to the work I put in, so I work less hard to keep my slaves subjugated than my slaves work to keep me in coffee and Cheez-its. It would make sense if I put in work at the outset in order to stop working after I gain the power I seek; but that requires a kind of power that remains even when I stop working to maintain it, and there aren’t a lot of powers like that. Most power leaves as soon as you stop working to keep it.

So then the people who work for power aren’t looking only for power: they want to wield that power to some other purpose. It makes  sense if this comes back to morality. People who work to gain power over others, so they can force those others to act the way the powerful one wants them to act, because the powerful one thinks that’s the right thing to do: okay. That’s just working for morality at one remove. You could also work for power in order to use that power to gain greater abundance and personal wealth; though at some point the abundance becomes more than you could ever need — Bill Gates, the Waltons, especially Warren Buffett (who is 88 years old), will never be able to spend all of their money. That becomes a circle: work for power, to gain wealth, to gain more power, to — ? Presumably work for moral goals, as the Koch brothers have, as Sheldon Adelson and George Soros do.

Have I missed anything? Is there any other reason we work? Oh, wait, of course: we work for the benefit of other people. I work so I can give my wife food, so I can buy chewtoys for my dogs, so I can afford a house with a fenced yard for my tortoise to live in. (I give my wife more than food, and I do also give food to my pets. Just so we’re clear.) On some level I do these things for selfish reasons, for survival or my own luxury, because I like when my wife takes care of me and when my dogs treat me like a wonderful person — often immediately after I feed them; but I also do work for other people who do not benefit me directly. (I know that many people who fight to end abortion feel they are doing the same thing. Allow me to disagree. I do not think that anyone arguing against gay marriage is sincerely doing that for the sake of other people: it is a moral conviction they hold, and nothing more.)

And here’s where we come to my students. I work hard for them. Not for my survival; believe me when I say I could do a tenth of the work that I currently do and keep my current position, and therefore keep my salary; actually, if I arranged it well, and focused my minimal efforts on prepping my students for tests, I could potentially make more than I do now, because my school has merit pay for test scores, which I consistently ignore in favor of working hard to teach my students. I don’t work hard for personal gain: I don’t get anything tangible from students except the occasional gift of coffee or baked goods. I got a $25 gift card for Starbucks yesterday, but I make $25 an hour or so, and I’ve spend far more than an hour on the student who gave me the gift. (Please know, especially if it’s you who gave me the card reading this, that your gift was much appreciated: far more than my salary.) It’s the same problem as working for power: if I work so I can get gifts that save me work, it’s a wash. In my case, considering the amount of work and the value of my gifts, it’s worse than a wash, it’s a waste.

To some extent I work hard as a teacher for a moral purpose: I believe that education is valuable, and that literature and reading and writing are both valuable and wonderful, and I want to promote those ideas; my efforts contribute to that, I think. But not enough: because for all of my effort and all of my passion, my students do not generally become readers. Maybe they gain some respect for literature and for reading and writing, but they aren’t converted to my beliefs. The other reason I work hard is for their benefit: my students often don’t read well, and rarely write well; I think their lives — not my life, and not necessarily the country or the world as a whole — would be better if they could read and write more clearly, more purposefully, more powerfully. So I try to help them. For their sakes.

The biggest hurdle I face in that effort is, naturally, my students themselves (Also the educational establishment, which would really prefer it if I taught to the test and the skills and standards they have determined to be more important than literature; but that’s their moral purpose for work, not mine, and I haven’t been converted to their views. So, no.). Because the only way my students improve is if they work.

And why would my students want to work?

Not for survival; I hate to think that any of them would be denied food or water or shelter because they didn’t do well in school. I’m sure it happens sometimes, but I would turn that parent in for abuse and neglect, not praise them for motivating their child to learn. Not for luxury or personal gain, not exactly; some of them get money or presents with good grades, but that’s rare at the high school level, and only has influence around grade time: when it’s September and they feel like sleeping in, the awareness that they’ll get paid for every A come January does not get them out of bed to study for that test. The same for the overarching motivation we try to use on them in this country: work hard in school, then go to college (Where you’ll work harder, and buy yourself a mountain of debt which means you’ll have to work EVEN HARDER when you’re out of school) so that you can get a high-paying job. THEN you can work for abundance and personal gain.

You know what? That’s too much work, for not enough reward. The reward is much too distant, and too fraught; because  we all have stories about people who work hard and are miserable, and we share those stories with students. Students see their parents working too hard to earn money, and they are capable of recognizing that their parents may love the work they do, but that doesn’t make it worth the hard effort they put into it. I myself am not a good example to become a teacher: they all know how hard I work for them, and how little reward I get for it. Why would they work hard now, to work harder in college, to work harder as a teacher?

Even my students aren’t that dumb.

Maybe we should rethink this system.