I felt happier yesterday than I can remember feeling.
I'm sure I've felt that way before, it's just been a long time.
I got to talk to Rachel for a few hours. We talked
about happiness and gratitude and how that all works, and then, obviously, we
got to wondering what that all has to do with teaching.
Before I quit, I remember reading something written by some
other teacher about how all the bullshit seems worth in in that moment where
the lightbulb turns on for a kid. And though of course the lightbulb
thing is a well-known cliche, I was like, "I have no idea what this guy is
talking about." I wondered whether I'd never really taught a kid
anything, and/or if I had, why I didn't take such gratification from "that
moment." I formed a theory that maybe I'm an organizer, an activist
-- not a teacher.
But then Rachel said she's never noticed a lightbulb go on
like that for a kid either. So that was a relief.
We couldn't think of a good metaphor for the teaching
moments that we like, but Rachel had a good example of one: She told me
about this kid in her class yesterday who, thinking about A Raisin in the
Sun, which they had just finished, said, "But it's not Walter's fault, and
it's not even Mr. Lindner's fault. It's about White supremacy."
Now that's a kid trying out some big-ass ideas. But he's not
"getting it" in that sense that the light goes on and he understands
and now that's done. He's a sixteen-year-old kid whose teacher has
facilitated his access to terms like "White supremacy," and he's
trying on that thinking. And he'll have to continue to try on that
thinking, like the rest of us, for the rest of his life. That lightbulb
thing is too final. It's just not like that.
My own favorite teacher once told me that when she got to
Berkeley, where she had accepted a position as a one-year visiting professor,
she was astounded and delighted to find that there were other people in the
world who, like her, just loved "big, juicy ideas." Before
then, she said, she'd tried to keep her love of that stuff to herself, lest
anyone find out what a freak she was. (Are we making kids who love ideas feel
freakish?)
But the way that teacher let me in on "big, juicy
ideas" (which, honestly, is kind of gross to say) made my life
so much better, even in these last few years which have, largely, sucked.
She's the kind of teacher I have always aspired to be.
Another teacher-friend, one of the very few 6-12 teachers
who's been in the classroom for more than ten years whose practice I respect,
quit last week. PARCC testing did her in. (And I don't at
all mean that younger teachers are somehow more likely than older teachers to
be good; I just mean that it's easier to stick around when you don't give that
much of a shit.)
Anyone who's not a teacher doesn't really know how fucking
nuts high-stakes testing makes the adults in a school building act. Kids
are warned within an inch of their lives to turn their fucking cell phones off.
Administrators put up caution tape across hallways to make sure that no
non-test-taking students enter the testing arena. All of a sudden the
school has hella cash to spend on snacks for the kids. So many emails
with rules and rule reminders and rosters and roster changes get fired off.
Big-ass testing manuals (i.e. scripts) with flagged pages show up in
teachers' mailboxes along with a couple more emails in the inbox to read those
testing manuals with special attention to the flagged pages. The
meetings. The tenseness of the meetings. Don't care if there is a
tornado brewing outside on test day, we're having school. And the
poor fuckers who get tapped to proctor the test, woof. Throughout the
entirety of the test, you have to
"actively
monitor" the test-takers. That means hours of
watching kids take a test (a test that, to anyone who knows something about
language and literacy, is very obviously theoretically unsound and therefore a
waste of fucking time -- and so much money and anxiety). In some states,
it's actually illegal for a teacher to read a book while the kids test.
For real, I'd like to see some research done as to the
actual distance wafted by the smell of frantic desperation from public
schools on testing day.
It might be almost funny if I hadn't also seen how seriously
kids take the test. All of a sudden, my hilarious, resistant, brilliant,
bawdy, darling scholars would turn into these silent, #2-pencil-sharpening
zombies. (At least for a little while. Thankfully, there were
always a couple who, after a few minutes, came to the conclusion that
"FUCK THIS" and just went to sleep.)
(Another thing to be thankful for: Andrew reported to me
that this week, all of the girls in his fourth grade classroom, upon finishing
each section of the test, set to work braiding the shit out of their own hair.
He said they all looked bananas by the end of the day. What a great
image. What a relief.)
I went to a talk at Mills College a few weeks ago with Kevin
Kumashiro and Christine Sleeter called "Confronting neoliberalism:
Classroom practice and social justice teaching," and I finally learned
what neoliberalism means. Whereas classical liberalism,
Kumashiro explained, idealizes the preservation of individual freedoms in
balance with the public good, neoliberalism chops off the public good part.
With the focus on individualism and elimination of concern for the social
welfare come obsessions with deregulation and privatization, leading to
deep cuts in public services, attacks on organized labor, etc. In
schools, this means the over-emphasis of easy-(and cheap)-to-score standardized
tests, systems like Response to Intervention that, in the name of efficiency,
label and sort students for “intervention” by their deficiencies in terms of
stated (and often culturally irrelevant) academic and behavioral goals, and
increasing control by White, wealthy business leaders intent on using market
strategies – rather than the input of teachers, students, and families – to
inform their reform initiatives. (In prison this plays out as a
commitment to punishment and case-by-case retribution rather than to
restoration and collective justice; it also plays out as economically-tilted
calls for reform on the basis that we can’t afford to keep incarcerating people
at our record-breaking rates, rather than as significant engagement with the
human rights issues at stake in our country’s prison industrial complex. In
both contexts, Black boys and men, though increasingly people from other
marginalized groups, bear the brunt of these failing policies and practices.)
So the PARCC (and it's equally heinous predecessors) is
essentially a way to makes it easy to pinpoint (and fix or fire) the exact
teachers who are fucking up. (Just like RtI makes it easy to pinpoint
[and fix or incarcerate] the kids who are fucking up.) Once you identify
enough "bad teachers" (and what is a "good teacher," by
neoliberal standards? One who is willing to tow the line? Be an
instrument of the system rather than an intellectual/artist/activist/human?) in
a school, you can shut it down, bring in the businessmen, and start making the
money (on the backs of, most often, low-income Brown and Black kids).
(Ahem, Lucy Calkins, et al., and your Pathways to
the Common Core: I'm not "a curmudgeon" just because I choose
not to read the CCSS "as if they are gold." WTHeck.)
I wonder what school would be like if the adults put as much
energy (and money) into shit that matters as they do into making sure they
follow PARCC testing guidelines to the T (or risk losing funding)? Even
though managing the standardized delivery of the
test across every school in the country is really hard,
it's way easier than dealing, at a federal level, with
the legacy of
slavery that informs the persistence of Black kids getting labeled as failures
by schools. It's way easier than dealing, at a
federal level, with the pervasive racism that informs the defunding of
bilingual education and the Jim-Crow-esque limitations placed on the dreams of
kids who are undocumented immigrants.
But, like, really. What if we spent all this time,
money, and energy on that ^? What if we spent all this time,
money, and energy on engaging kids in big, juicy ideas (that aren't really
testable in a cheap-to-grade way)? What if we took on, with such an
obsessive urgency, the need for every one of us to think seriously about White
supremacy and how it works in our own lives? What if we thought seriously
with kids about "when do you think is the time to love somebody the
most"?
I have more to say on this, but I have to go to work,
selling wedding dresses, because I'd rather do that than play this stupid game
anymore.
Except that, hell, now I'm playing it with the GED in prison.
