Teaching Hard & Playing Nice
Last year, a few parents and colleagues openly criticized me for not “teaching hard” enough this past year.
Also, it has “come to my attention” (quotes intended, because I didn’t need the next bit brought to my attention — I was already aware)
that I seemed,
how shall I say,
preoccupied?
during this past school year.
I don’t know if it was the metastatic breast cancer
or
the global pandemic
or
the political uprisings
or
the rise of fascism in America
or
the fact that not a damn healthcare org
could seem to get its shit together long enough
to allow me to feel safe & well but then again
every fucking healthcare system in America was busy
being fucking traumatized by COVID & so I understand
this was no one’s “finest” year, so I will be the first to admit
that “yes” I was — as it happens —
a bit distracted from my more traditional
teaching methods
during the 2020–2021
school year.
2020–2021 was a tough fucking year for educators — even those who did not have insane extenuating circumstances like me or people who were having babies or getting divorces or changing careers or losing family members
whether to COVID or not.
Most people who know me — professionally or as a friend “IRL” do know
that I am philosophically opposed to both grades and standardized testing at the k-12 public school levels.
Such means and measures tell us little about who a student truly is and even less about their worth as a human being or what’s best for their general wellbeing.
Having been around in education for a while,
I know people who work in education who believe
— immovably —
that test scores, grades, GPAs say something, anything
about who the young human is.
I have heard actual educators say things about children
that damns them to a life of quiet desperation based on
grades and test scores. So even in a non-pandemic,
non-political uprising, non-cancer year,
I am not a fan of these Racist, Sexist, Classist, Colonial tools
being used upon young Americans who are just trying to figure out
how to do this messy, wonderful, weird, all-too-brief life.
I won’t belabor my more academic/psycho-social thoughts on grades/testing, but allow me to ask: the child who got an F in the pandemic — what did we teach that child?
That they cannot manage in a pandemic?
And if so, that they cannot manage what, exactly? Writing papers? Taking tests? Memorizing useless bits of history?
In America, you can’t even get a “real history” education
— particularly not now in Arizona with the passing of the House Bill 2906 —
so what exactly are we testing them on if we can’t even teach the truth?
Look. Everyone has their reason for going into education.
I wanted to be a college professor, but I ended up working with teens in American public high schools. And weird as it may be, I actually enjoy this work (though overworked, underpaid) because it means that maybe, just maybe, I can be there for a kid who felt like I felt in high school: lost, bored, scared.
Because I was in college before I figured out I really enjoyed learning.
My love of learning was not fomented in k-12
where the focus seemed to be on classifying children
based on test scores and grades and perceived “aptitude.”
I won’t bore you with the long, sad, fucked up story
of why I didn’t do so well academically in my k — 12 years,
but suffice it to say I had things going on “behind the proverbial curtain”
that precluded me from being, say, Stanford bound.
Dig?
Everyone has their reason for going into education.
My reason felt like a calling, and for that I am grateful.
I still love being a student, and being with students who feel, in that moment, happy & safe because they are both & well, I’m addicted to this.
Addicted to life, to people, to language, to rhetoric,
to learning for the sake of learning.
I do not wish, as an educator of teens/pre-teens,
to re-live my middle & high school years
because those years were horrendous for me.
Thank you, but I’m fine where I am now (cancer & all).
I do not wish to lord power over my students — I can discipline when I need to discipline, but I don’t enjoy it — whether I’m issuing an “F” for plagiarizing or shutting down a computer because a student was on YouTube instead of Google Classroom . . .
I do not wish to predict futures.
Unless I see a student who is clearly sliding into a dangerous place — academically, socially, etc — I don’t try to “fix” the kid.
Rather, I try to figure out what the kid needs from me
as their teacher. Because I’m not in this “business” to punish
children. I want my students to go on & think back fondly of their time
& I want my students to go on & think that while I might have not been the most orthodox teacher, I taught them at least one thing about life, or the world, or the English language that is true.
I had a great kid last year. A senior.
We’d never been in a classroom together,
though I suppose his reputation preceded him
because I knew his name from campus “goings on”
over the years.
This kid told me, very matter of fact, that he had no intention
of going to college. He told me this on day ONE.
And this was at a school where most students were either
prepared enough or wealthy enough or both
for college.
“Fine,” I told my student.
“You don’t need to go to college.
No one should be forced. But,” I added.
“You still want to know how to communicate clearly
and discern when someone is bullshitting you.”
(and I actually said “bullshit” in front of American teenagers & no one DIED.)
That’s what rhetoric is about:
text and subtext.
Right? Isn’t that what the k-12 ELA classroom is really preparing the student to do? Know how to command the English language in order that they might articulate a point/an idea/a thought clearly & coherently whether written or spoken & then be able to deconstruct a text (whether written, audio, or visual) just so they can examine it critically before buying what it’s selling:
be it a product, a politic, a job, a philosophy, a religion? These are bigger than “college readiness” or “academic preparedness” these are “basic tools for survival & the foundations of true liberation.” That’s massively important. Simple, but essential to a healthy society.
If a student geeks out on English,
as was the case with one Favorite Former this past year,
and flirts with an English Major in undergraduate — —
that delights me!
And college/uni is when those students should be grilled, tested, graded.
I think a student who leaves with an expensive BA in English should be a Jr. Expert on the subject.
But I don’t need my 17 y/o kiddo, who is struggling to find her place in this current iteration of America, to stress about knowing her pantoums from her blank verse — particularly if 1) she has zero interest in pursuing English at the college level 2) she’s living through a Global pandemic and frightening political unrest and 3) she’s a fucking teenager in 21st century on this psycho planet.
Cut the kids some slack.
Now I don’t teach “little” little kids,
so I do expect those of you who do this holy, sacred, unbelievable work
to lay the foundation so I get to do the higher tier stuff with my “older”
little kids. I always appreciate when a high school senior arrives in my class knowing how to safely wield a comma, but I don’t flip out if they don’t know.
I just make sure they know before they leave my class.
I started teaching in earnest in the early 2000s.
Academia. Adjunct comp circuit, mostly.
Professors were just starting to notice then
that college freshmen coming from the public schools
could not read or think in the way that perhaps
the American generation before (Gen X) could:
fairly well & somewhat critically.
I would argue this isn’t a student problem but an educator problem.
All across this nation, from shore to shore, we’ve let some real creepy, real racist, real sexist, real scary, real stupid people into the k-12 public school classroom, say nothing of k-12 school admin.
If you’re not paying attention to the “goings on” in k-12 schools,
if you’re letting the news distract you with all this bullshit fearmongering around “Critical Race Theory,” let me assure you, if you worry about American k-12 education? “CRT” should be the least of your concerns.
See, people can talk shit, can say that during the 2020–2021 year I didn’t “test” enough, there weren’t enough essays, not enough lectures, not enough surprise reading quizzes, not enough “rigor,”
but I chose (nothing I do with my students is unplanned
— though our deep discussions do sometimes veer — )
a different way this year.
A gentler way this year.
At the start of the 2020–2021 school year,
I flirted with FMLA, with disability leave,
I did not know if my body & soul could take the challenge that was before me. & though I wasn’t always perfect, I think I did a pretty damn good job for a woman teaching on Zoom (for the first time),
with stage iv cancer (for the first time),
during a global pandemic (for the first time).
And I think if you asked some of my seniors, they would tell you they did learn at least one or two things this year.
Maybe not as much concrete learning happened this year as it did in a past year, but times have changed.
America has changed.
The world has changed.
I am utterly okay with the change.
I just hope the winds blow in the right direction.
I welcome the change & if there’s going to have to be a struggle in education between the old, neoliberal, Colonial way of k-12 and a new, healthier, more equitable way of delivering k-12 education,
I’m ready to be a part of that struggle, but the part of the struggle
that makes a case for reform, and beyond “making the case” becomes
the reform that must come to American education if we are to continue,
as a nation, to have a properly educated populace, if we are to stop
lording diplomas from name brand universities & colleges over our neighbors, employees & students. I don’t want to climb the dusty, termite infested ladder
of Colonial systems & practices that I find morally, ethically, & philosophically repulsive. I won’t participate anymore. I won’t humor this anymore. This has nothing to do with my intelligence or my work ethic, but with my understanding, as an American woman with 45 years of living under her belt, most of those either as a student or teacher in American schools, of what is plainly “right” and what is plainly “wrong.”
Yesterday, I had breakfast with one of my dear friends & her daughter (who is a Favorite Former of mine).
We discussed our respective challenges during this past year (there were many between our families). I went on at length about “white people,” before pausing to tell my friends (who are brown) that I am, in fact, aware that I am “white.”
I talk shit against my “own kind.” I can’t help it.
One cannot speak Truth about America without mentioning The Whites.
You may be A White who does not like this fact, but as your favorite white British Colonial character, Polonious, once said “Tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity; And pity ’tis ’tis true . . .”
& maybe you’re a white reader & thinking to yourself
“I don’t love Polonious. I’ve never even heard of Polonius,
so stop stereotyping me!”
To you, I will offer the following words:
“To thine ownself be true.” — That’s Polonius.
Hamlet.
You might have it on a mug
or throw pillow
or welcome mat. You might have
used the phrase to justify acting like an asshole
& one of the things I teach my students
when I teach Hamlet is what utter bullshit that whole speech is
because it’s a man (Polonius) who is a sycophant, a ladder climber, a fool,
who is giving idiotic & hypocritical & borderline sociopathic advice to his son.
Here’s the thing, many people who love to (often mis)quote Shakespeare also believe every child must suffer in American public education the way they suffered in their American public education & they may also often believe that unless a student is constructed in their own academic image (& they are demi-gods in their own minds), the student is worthless.
People like this are often calling the shots in American public schools.
Does that scare you?
It should.
I am an English Language Arts educator.
I know what I am talking about in the classroom.
I know what I am doing in the classroom.
& when I don’t, I admit that I don’t know.
Because here’s the drug that’s come to replace booze:
Truth.
Just Truth.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I am tired of secrets.
I am interested in Truth & the pursuit of
Truth.
What is True?
I suppose that question is the bane of every human life.
How lucky I am that I get to spend most of my days in the company of young people exploring this question as it relates to literature, film, music, politics, history, culture . . . “What is true?”
Or better yet “What is beautiful?”
Or “What is good?”
In the classroom especially, I love the questions that Google
cannot answer for us.
This past year in AP Lit, where
— depending on who you ask —
my students either a) “learned nothing” or b) “were thoughtfully and compassionately educated through a difficult year”
we spent an entire day deconstructing the Western Literary Cannon.
We came at such classics as Romeo & Juliet, The Great Gatsby, & Pride & Prejudice. We asked the hard questions:
in 2021, with all the lit out there, is this still the best we’ve got for k-12 Americans? Really? This is the best we can do for them?
For as sad and dismayed and downright traumatized as I felt as a patient, a voter, and a public school educator in America, this past year,
I also felt hopeful & inspired & open to the possibility of real, meaningful change in American public education:
from a model that was designed to make useful robots of humans, to beat the spirit out of the child and into
a model created with the intent of the student thriving in the life they wish to create for themselves.
I see an educational model, in this country, that is possible, wherein the child enrolled in a k-12 school has happy years. Years where they learn self-worth, resilience, where they discover their own gifts & have adults in their lives who can help them grow those gifts & point them in the direction for how to use and live on those gifts.
Instead, the common k-12 model is designed to sort kids vis-a-vis an archaic, soulless, cold schematic: A — F.
We sort them along this old Racist, Sexist, Classist rubric & we tell them the grades are a sort of looking glass: “Will you lead a live of providence & prosperity or poverty & great tribulation?” Adults play pretend that these grades mean something, anything about the life the child is to have.
I wouldn’t even care if I didn’t know how these grades do, in fact, have actual, material impacts on the lives of the students I serve. So this year, virtually all of my students who came to class, who did the little work I required during the pandemic, got A’s because who am I to put, on the permanent record of a student who may want to go to college (a system still built on the fallacious, ridiculous, utterly mental belief that grades say anything whatsoever about a person’s value, intelligence, or ability) a grade that might harm their chance to have the American life (or ex-pat life) they want to have.
So I assigned little work, graded with freakish generosity of spirit, and missed some classes owing to a flurry of doctors appointments I had to make so that I’d be sure to have enough medication when our insurance lapsed after the healthcare system that tormented me for a year unceremoniously fired my wife over a misplaced comma or some shit, allowing us 72 hours to find replacement healthcare. We were very lucky that my former employer saw to it that an exception was made, and that I was able to get on our school’s — well, lackluster but needs must — insurance so I didn’t literally die.
Neoliberals, the worst kind of American political thinker as far as I’m concerned (I may have overdosed on Marx & Freire, but maybe that’s okay) do not seek real change.
They pay lip service to “progress” and “justice”
because that is the socially correct way to linguistically navigate (mostly white) neoliberal American spaces, but they are utterly incapable or (worse) unwilling to set in motion the very change they claim to support.
All truth demands courage.
Big Truth & little truth both demand
a certain amount of grit, of grief, of letting go,
of discomfort before the reward . . .
& the reward, of course, is real freedom,
real liberation, real life. & I am here to tell you,
as a public school educator in Arizona (I think we’re
just ahead of West Virginia on the teacher-pay scale),
who pays a lot of $$ each month to medicine, insurance,
student loan debt, who does not have a boat:
you don’t need a boat to be happy.
You don’t even need a lot of money to be happy.
You just need people, as our beloved, late RBG said, to kindly take their feet
off your fucking neck.
Yesterday, as I waited for my friends to arrive at the cafe,
I browsed the menu at the front counter.
Coffeehouses, these days, are overwhelming to me in their offerings. Everything is either named for a person or an ancient deity.
“The Phil” —
well, if I want to know what “The Phil” is,
I have to read an entire paragraph only to learn that
“The Phil” is grilled cheese with avocado & hot sauce.
That sounds nice.
If I was a more patient person, I would have read the description
& ordered The Phil instead of the “Granola & Fruit”
which was listed as “Granola & Fruit” on the menu,
so there was no lengthy reading required. *
*But you’re an English teacher! Isn’t that your job? To read shit? Yes, yes it is my job to read shit. But 1) I was not “on the public school clock” while ordering my breakfast and 2) even though it’s none of anyone’s business: I have add & am a dreadfully slow reader. I would have benefited from an IEP as a child, but no one cared about children in the 80s, so boo hoo.
Life goes on.
Anyway, I ordered my granola & fruit & an iced coffee, & while the young woman was preparing my granola & fruit she paused, turned to me, and said, “Can I ask you a quick personal question?”
I hesitated. “I think so?”
“Do you like naners?”
“Bananas?”
“Yes. In your granola?”
“Of course I want bananas in my granola. Who orders the ‘fruit & granola,’ but doesn’t want bananas? Do you like bananas?”
“I love bananas.”
“So do I!” I replied, way too enthusiastically, like bananas were Votes-for-Women or some shit.
Inconceivable to me that any person would not enjoy bananas in their granola.
So I asked her, as she prepared my bowl,
“Who doesn’t like bananas? Seriously, though.”
“Lots of people have really strong feelings about bananas,” she explained.
I narrowed my eyes and glanced around at the patronage;
I’ve worked with young people long enough to know she was intimating,
with her tone, that some asshole patron gave her real grief one day
for putting bananas in the “Granola & Fruit” bowl
(in which one would only assume bananas would be included,
right?).
I am sick of older Americans giving younger Americans shit.
Boomers, Older Gen X-ers (Sarah calls that blurry group between Boomers & Gen-X the “ones who turned left with us on the yellow”),
your kids are not all right.
Not by a long shot.
Be nicer to us.
Thanks!
& I say this as a white American who knows she is white:
White people, stop being assholes in retail spaces.
Just stop.
That kid who put bananas in your granola cup?
She is a Millennial who will likely never see/know the kind of financial wealth & ease of access to quality education & healthcare your
khakis-hawaian-shirt-chin-strap-mask-wearing-ass
has been accustomed to from birth.
I say this with love.
I’m friends with some of you.
I’m related to some of you.
Stop being such assholes to people who are making minimum wage.*
*When my parents were visiting, I saw a khaki-shorts-chin-strap white dude scolding this poor young woman who was working a busy front counter behind plexiglass on a hot day in Tucson & I “buzzed him” like a bee & as I passed his mean ass, audibly called him an “asshole.”
I felt he needed to know this about himself.
No one else seemed eager to tell him.
Had to be me.
** Yes, it’s Arizona.
He very well may have had a gun.
I didn’t see one, though.
Had I seen him packing, I wouldn’t have called him an “asshole.”
So maybe this is why all these rich white guys out here are packing:
it prevents uppity Gen-X dykes like me
from calling these men (and sometimes women)
the assholes they are.
Anyway, both the cashier & the woman who made my granola-fruit-bowl got great tips, I got extra naners, a “namaste” acknowledgement & the best spot in the cafe to visit with my friends.
All in all a most auspicious Sunday.
Play nice, be yourself, you will have a good day.
