trying

Under Drumpf’s administration, I have forgotten what I have to say. It’s like, he makes it too easy:

“Dumb fuck.”

There. Now I feel like I’ve adequately critiqued his foul ass.

I’m also feeling writerly paralyzation because so many other folks are already writing fantastic pieces about what’s going on, and I’ve been feeling like, the best contribution I can make is just to Like and Share.

So I’m sitting down tonight to come up with something because I like how I feel about myself when I’m writing. I like the feeling of trying to wrangle the right words onto the page.

At least a dozen people have told me that I should be writing about the work we’re doing at SQ, but it’s hard for me to get outside of it and see the threads of narratives available for the telling.

In the last year, I’ve edited books for two different friends. They make it look so easy. Five- or six-page Word document? Chapter. Ten chapters in a book. They just do it.

And I’m sitting here feeling like I’ve got nothing to say when I’m pretty sure do.

I’d like to start publishing some stuff online maybe.

There have been several instances in the last few months where I think I’ve smelt a tiny whiff of what it’s like to have my depression lifted off of me. For a long time I’ve been fine, but not able to get excited about anything. The first moment came when I was seeing Hamilton with my Mom in March. As I watched, I kept thinking about a clip from a PBS special about the show where you see Lin-Manuel Miranda bringing his draft to a two other guys, and they’re going through it to edit and build. And I’d get so excited and want to do that.

In no particular order, I want to write about

: How white people need to find a way out of their blind rage at reverse racism without losing face. White people need to figure out ways that help white people better understand historical context and systemic oppression without emasculating them. If that makes sense. White people can get so defensive, and then the conversation feels hopeless because they’re not going to back down because white supremacy intersects powerfully with misogyny and hypermasculinity! We gotta do something about our people for real.

: The implicit pedagogy of Creativity Explored. Our former director called it “non-confrontational advocacy.” We do what we can to bring attention to work created by artists with developmental disabilities and know that when folks experience the beauty of the artwork, they a teensy-bit unlearn ableist and patronizing ideas about folks with developmental disabilities. Sentence too long.

But I think it’s much more interesting to think about the pedagogy of the studio, the teachers’ approach to the artists they work with. The lack of curriculum. The variance between giving artists direct guidance, images to draw or paint, and giving artists the paint they need to create basically the exact same piece that they’ve been making for thirty years. Artists are encouraged as they develop their practice, and artists are supported if they decide not to “get better.” Teachers do what they can to make sure that artists can make informed choices and then follow the artists’ lead.  

Makes me think about how my Mom would always say that they needed to stop plotting to make Conor smarter in his annual IEP meetings. Like, he’s fine the way he is. Let’s just make sure he’s experiencing pleasure – delicious food, sunny days, loud music.

: I’m teaching a class at Mills, Introduction to the Humanities, and we just read Whiteness as Property and the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We’ve been talking about what it means to be human (and the students, graciously, are not rolling their eyes the way I kind of am at myself.) What struck me most this time around was the question of whether our humanity is innately individual or innately connected. I’m just now realizing that I think it’s the latter.

And for some silly reason, I’ve been thinking about how much I like the word “folks,” and how there’s not really such thing as a singular folk. Maybe there is, but it’s a horrible word.

Okay now, I’m going to go watch a few episodes of Insecure.

30

Ron sometimes does this "That's bad --> That's good --> That's bad --> That's good" story thingie at the beginning of his teachings.  (e.g. He fell off the roof; that's bad.  There was a haystack below; that's good.  There was a spike in the haystack; that's bad.  He missed it; that's good.)

That's how my birthday was last week.

I've been feeling really low lately.  I'm lonely, and I'm sad.  I've been spending most of my non-working time at home in my room with the door closed, mostly sleeping.  It's not a great way to deepen the relationships I've started since coming here.  I didn't have anyone to do anything with, not anyone that wouldn't, though I may really like them, make me feel exhausted.  I had a deep, loud cry that morning.

In the afternoon, I went on a gorgeous, hope restoring hike.  As I started it, I got a promising email about a job I've applied for.

When I got home, some of the crappiness had settled back in, and I had to take a nap.

I got up and made an appointment to quick go over to the shiatsu place and get a massage.  After that, I met Neil and Jarlath for a drink and a burger.  I wore my favorite baggy-ass ripped jeans and a new shirt I found at Goodwill that's an exact copy of a shirt my old principal had that I was jealous of.

When I got home, the sad was back.

waking

I'm in the midst of a meds change, and it's been difficult, but I'm hopeful.

Before, I was sleeping about twelve hours a night, and taking a one or two hour nap every day.  That's a lot of sleep, and that's no way to live.  It's just that it's hard to figure out whether I'm sleeping because I'm depressed or sleeping because I'm being sedated.  The two possibilities don't feel exactly the same, obviously, but the element they share is that the only thing that I want to do is go to bed and stay there.

So far, three weeks into the transition now, I am feeling a change.  The last three mornings, I've woken up way before my alarm at 5:30 feeling not tired.  (I'd forgotten what not tired feels like.)

I've taken a cup of coffee and walked down to the beach.  I'm the only one there except for Kimo, an older (than me) Black guy who does tai chi on the upper deck of the beach house from 5:30 to 8 every morning.

Margaret and Scott brought this back for me from their honeymoon.  Kind and thoughtful people.
I love that I can wrap my hand into the mug.  Stay warm that way.

I haven't brought anything to do -- no music or podcasts or reading or writing.  I'm liking that I just get to sit there, being awake.  

gratitude walk

A friend from church posts photos on FB every morning of his "gratitude walk."  Even though it sounds self-explanatory, I keep meaning to ask him what that's all about.

My mood the last month or so has been foul.  I'm going to go to the doctor, but I'm also going to try to do something I know works: remembering to be grateful.

(1) It doesn't matter that my finger is in this photo because it takes me ten minutes to walk to this beach and I do so several times a week.  And it's warm enough to lay in my bathing suit, but there's always a breeze, so I don't get sweaty.  (And I am a sweaty person.)

(2) Most of my time at work is spent with other women that I really like.  And a good enough amount of the time is spent putting on cool/nasty dresses and dickin around.

(3) My new friend Anne is 74, so wise, so funny, and has pink walls in her living room.

(4) I discovered this store in my neighborhood.  It's the Chinese, way better version of The Container Store (or I'm assuming because I've never been there.)  So much symmetry, and so much of things fitting exactly in their right places.  Peace.

(5) Salads in jars.  Put the dressing at the bottom and stuff that won't get soggy on top of it.  Then, when it's time to eat it, shake the shit out of the jar and the dressing gets on all of it.  Game changer for me.  For the last seven years, I've eaten a turkey sandwich, pretzels, and two apples for lunch because they pack easy.  

(6) Jess helping me to figure out what to wear also demonstrates that I am known.  

I really like to feel known.

filing

I came across Anita, a documentary about Anita Hill's 1991 testimony to Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of her.  I was only five then, so I don't have any memory of it, but I'd heard it alluded to.  I'm glad I watched it.

There's such an air of, "Ohmygod why are you making a big deal of nothing," to the footage.  Actually, beyond that, it's like: "You are fucking up our shit by bringing this up! We are White men trying to do right by bringing in a Black guy! Why won't you shut up?!"  Putting her testimony on trial? What? 

(Although watching Senator Hatch come after her was not unlike watching White folks in the media and in local governments attack the characters of the Black men and boys that their police have murdered.  For example.)

There's a scene in the documentary where she shows all the file cabinets in her basement, filled with correspondence she has received over the years.  She randomly pulls one and reads it aloud, a letter of sincere support.  Earlier though, she shares that she has one file cabinet full of insults and threats she's received.

My former principal shared her file with me once.  I only read some of its contents; an anonymous letter shaming her for not shh-ing Black families cheering for their children at graduation stands out in my memory.

I have a digital folder full of screenshots from this whole incident.

---

There's something about filing.  About collecting.  Does cool-headedly putting mean messages aside help to restore a sense of dignity?  Like, in my case, I'm like, "...Hm... Alright, ya fucking asshole.  Noted.  I'll just keep that. shit. right. here."

---

My Facebook feed, perhaps coincidentally/perhaps because August is approaching, has had a lot of stuff about teachers and depression on it lately.  Once I noted the trend, I bookmarked this one and this one.  I take issue with several of the things these dudes have to say, but I'm feeling the need to start filing teacher depression stories somewhere.

PARCC testing: Actually, taking a bath in language might be a better metaphor for learning than the lightbulb thing.

Mama (from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun): There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

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).

Proponents of the PARCC will tout the importance of the literacy skills it tests, namely evidence-based argumentation.  Fine.  Fine by me.  But, in his chapter in Closer Readings of the Common Core, Randy Bomer has a real point when he explains:

(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.