Would you care to hear my thoughts on something terrible?
I came across this on social media today. I haven’t checked the authenticity of the quote, but the person who shared it is generally savvy about legitimacy in attributions and statistics, so I’m guessing Sagan actually said this. (Wouldn’t have chosen this picture to accompany my own words, but I’m no Carl Sagan.)
In the quote he refers to “something terrible” that happens “between kindergarten and 12th grade.”
Something terrible — those are Carl’s words, not mine.
Something terrible. Between the ages of five and eighteen.
Hmm.
Whatever could that be?
Could it be that life after kindergarten just, by design, starts getting a little more “real” because you’re a lot more “aware”
and seriously fucking confused about everything,
even the moon. Even if you have the most charmed of existences,
right around seven, that human brain starts kicking in and the questions start coming and pretty much never stop until we die. (Fortunately, some questions CAN be answered. Fortunately, others, remain forever unanswerable.)
So here’s my theory about Sagan’s “something terrible” in K — 12 education.
Why listen to me? You want my c.v.? Mind if I give you the massively abridged version because I’m typing with one eye open (bit of retinal detachment surgery a week ago)? Short summary: I’ve been in this education thing, in some capacity, since circa 1980 and from about 2004 until present, my time in education has been spent as an educatOR not, by definition, a “student.” I’ve taught inside the hallowed halls of little liberal arts colleges and inside chaotic classrooms filled with first graders in Chicago Public Schools. I’ve been “around” in education, one might say.
[Students on the cusp. of an ELA AP Exam: the above paragraph was a lazy attempt at Ethos.]
Returning to Sagan’s “something terrible” I have ideas.
Some of the terrible things are beyond our control as educators: what happens in a students private, home life. Some of the terrible things, however, are fully within our control as educators and we have an ethical duty to oppose every “something terrible” when it rears its head in American education: be it sexist, racist, or class bias or standardized tests. Quit letting bullies and bureaucrats suck the joy from learning, dismantle the true usefulness of knowledge, suffocate the breath of truth.
Quit letting these people ruin education with their useless rules and their racism and their classism and their ableism and their sexism and their petty data games.
Just quit.
Half (or better) of what we do as K-12 educators is help our students figure out how they can be human in a way that is tolerable if not good; we’re helping to raise kids. And, ostensibly, because of our skill sets, we are entrusted with specifically training their young minds on the finer points of stuff like: biology, geometry, American literature, West African music, staging and lighting, color pallets . . .
Of my educator friends — even those, like me, teaching in high schools — most are accomplished forces in their discipline. For most of my friends in education, the work is a joy because they truly love and know their subject area.
What I mean is this:
we help our students learn the basics in our respective fields, yes, but also
if we are k-12 educators we are also helping to raise the child. Maybe even helping them be and stay healthy and connected and know they are loved. I mean, if you don’t love kids, please do everyone a favor and get out of k-12 schools. Really. College is for grumpy academics who teach to support their peer reviewed journal fix. Go there. (Sorry, professor friends, I know you are not at all like that and I’m being over broad/unfair.)
Best case scenario we help raise people we, ourselves, would want to live among because they are health in mind, body, spirit and have half a brain. They are not the kind of people who shoot up grocery stores, or claim Obama is not American, or (may the universe have mercy on us) believe the earth is flat. Maybe we, as k-12 American educators, can help raise up better people than we were raised up to be. I mean, we were raised to be the kind of people who cavalierly voted for a quarter-brained, charmless, b-list reality star wanna-be-dictator. Shit, some of my OWN FORMER HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS voted for the fucker. (You know who I’m talking about, and I should hope very sincerely that you KNOW I never voted for the racist pig.)
So one theory is that we “test” students to death.
Nothing sucks the joy out of learning like a good ol’ fashioned standardized test.
Cram, cram, cram so you can stress out about all of this meaningless bullshit that you will only very superficially grasp all for a test
that you may or may not do well on depending on
how you slept the night before, where you’re at emotionally,
and how well your teacher did or didn’t prepare you to take the test,
expressly.
Then you will get a number that tells you you are either
a) “A good robot who can save money in college by not having to take remedial English” or
b) “A bad robot who must pay money to the college to take a class that they are far too advanced to be enrolled in.”
Joyless.
Having taught AP English for a number of years, I’m shocked — just shocked — that ANY of my former AP students have gone on to study language at the college level (and many have).
In World Literature, where we are not beholden to the AP Curriculum,
my seniors chose what text we would end with.
They chose The Diary of Anne Frank.
(I suggested the book, but they ultimately — earnestly — expressed a real desire to read it.)
We will end this horrible, wonderful, awful, exhilarating, difficult year reading the words of a teenage girl who died before she should have died.
A teenage girl who lived in small quarters and had a bright mind and suffered a terrible fate.
I do think Anne Frank, in America’s 2021, has something to teach us specifically.
(Plus this text will allow me to geek out on some of my favorite literary topics: journaling, diaries, letters, memoirs, creative nonfiction . . .)
What I’m saying is that in AP everyone is stressed out.
What I’m saying is that the state of Arizona is making my students take standardized tests that will impact our school’s funding
and the funding of every single school in the state.
Even in the most idyllic year, students routinely bomb standardized tests (where is the value for them? why should they try?)
and schools lose money.
So this year, who is going to lose the most?
Probably the same schools that always lose the most funding:
schools in poor communities; Black communities, brown communities; Indigenous communities.
The AZ Merit. Two whole days of our school’s time, I think.
For shame on the state of Arizona.
Two whole days in a year when these kids have lost so much.
“Something terrible” — the joy gets sucked out.
That’s the “something terrible,” to which Sagan refers.
Nobody trusts the teachers (shitty, lazy, teachers in the craft “just for the summers off” — admittedly I know almost none of these — get the fuck out of k-12 education; your tendency to treat your job like assembly line work just isn’t cutting it; frankly it’s fucking up our cause).
We overcomplicate the learning process.
The love turns to chaos.
At the k-12 level, we are doing this to ourselves.
Why?
To quote a ubiquitous meme:
“What if I told you . . . students can learn basic academic skills AND enjoy their lives?”
What if the k-12 system wasn’t so damn punitive?
What if k-12 schools concerned themselves with caring
for the young humans they are, like it or not, helping to raise:
what if we evaluated students not merely (or at all) by tests created by some nameless, faceless group of politicians and power grabbers?
What if we made education democratic — not in the sense of the American political party, but in the sense of the theory. What if we let students have a little more say? What if we reevaluated the canon? What if we reevaluated the whole system? Maybe we need to tear some of it down.
I have terrible insomnia. I have had insomnia since I was a small child. My mother recently told me that when I was five she bought me a book that was called something like How to Go to Sleep — not an easy find in the late 70s/early 80s when most children’s literature was like Frank and Hank Duke it Out in Another Shitty Mystery or Penny Got a Dog and Then It Died of Rabies. And they were all written in, like, the forties. Anyway: insomnia.
I bought an AM/PM pill sorter today.
By this I mean a pill sorter with containers for both morning AND
nighttime medications. I’ve reached that level in my own mortality: I have medication for morning AND night.
I should take my pm pills: four melatonin (my cancer surgeon once told me they maybe reduce estrogen levels and estrogen is bad for me so I eat my melatonin in the off chance that this nonsense drug is somehow useful — never puts me to sleep), one cup of “Stay Calm” tea (also bullshit, but harmless bullshit) and if I really can’t get down I’ll take an Ambien but I recently let my Ambien prescription languish at Walgreens because I was awaiting insurance information from our new healthcare provider. Yay, capitalized healthcare! Since I’m out of Ambien until our insurance gets sorted, I’ll be over here, guzzling bullshit tea and thinking about how irritatingly broken American k-12 education has become. You know,
relaxing.
