I know there were times where we moved every 3-6 months- into an off-season rental, out for the season, into another off-season rental. Maybe the same school, but new bus, new folks, new place. No roots. No foundation.
I remember vaguely being aware that this wasn't the norm for most people but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it so I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It ended up serving me well when I worked in technical theatre. It was the norm for a job to last just a few weeks or month before you moved on. I got a job a week after graduation and stayed in Greenville, NC to work a job. A few months later I took a train to Omaha, NE with just a duffle to go on the road with a theatre company for a month. Less than a month after I got home I moved down to Atlanta with the same duffle bag and stayed on someone's couch working until I could find my own place. When I moved to Brooklyn on the hope of a job I didn't even tell anyone I was leaving. A friend called a few months later saying they hadn't seen me and I was like, Oh yeah, I moved.
Frequently these moves were not planned, and were more along the lines of "throw everything you own into a black garbage bag we're leaving." I distinctly remember her using both the racist term "Gypsy" for our lives and the REALLY racist term "Puerto Rican luggage" for the black trash bags. When the movie Mermaids (1990) came out, it was like someone was watching us. Mom usually moved us because she suddenly hated her job, people did not appreciate her, or we were in some sort of vague trouble. She didn't quite pull out a map, close her eyes, and randomly choose where we would go next but it sure felt like that.
By New York I got a box sent to me of stuff. It was three years before a friend drove the really pathetic contents of my storage unit up. I remember it was right after 9/11 and he got stopped for driving a moving van into the city.
Theatre was wonderful and miserable. You worked 7 days a week, there were no weekends, no holidays. You'd work a 20 hour day, get all the way up to your apartment in the Bronx and get called to come back in. People were mean, abusive, and awful. There was too much drinking, too much substance abuse, too much physical and sexual abuse. But you were sold a bill of goods that the work was worth it, and you got to the point where you knew you were supposed to be grateful for the job, so you just took it.
It was actually pretty good indoctrination for education.
I think that was one of the allures of going into teaching. Theatre always claimed you were a family but they were, for the most part, short lived families, only existing the length of your summer or 6 or 9 month contract. Teaching seemed like a chance to be a part of a community, to give back, to contribute, to fit, to have a place. I'd never had these things but they seemed like something to want.
The problem is the evocation of "family" and "community" are often the mechanism to get you to do unpaid labor, tolerate intolerable conditions, not strike, put up with abuse. You should not care about pay or working conditions or health, these are selfish things. Instead you should be focused ont he children, doing what is best for students. Completely disregarding that better quality of life and work for teachers means better quality of life and teaching for students.
Teaching is exhausting on a good day, more so on most days when you realize that people like to pay lip service to equity, caring, support, and representation but aren't interested in the actual work to accomplish these things. Just look at the edu celebrities with exorbitant speaker fees that are the headliners at professional development sessions in districts across the country. They speak for 6 hours, the publish books, the sell handouts, and teachers sit through the bullshit their first day of the new semester, roll their eyes, and know it's crap.
Doesn't keep it from being a multi-million dollar industry.
With almost 20 years of teaching, here's what I've learned. You're never going to get the teacher who thinks they're a savior, that their children are trash, lazy, stupid, unmotivated, to change. They are righteous in their beliefs. They will push back against any suggestions or reforms to change the canon or curriculum in any way to better serve their students.
Sometimes you can trick these teachers. If you're willing to do the work, make the presentations, the assessments, design the lessons, you might, *might* get them to adopt them if only because they're too lazy to do the work themselves.
But you're never going to get the racists or the misogynists to stop being racists or misogynists. You're just not. Because they do not see themselves as these things. They are traditional, they have a culture and a history. They celebrate these parts of themselves, they embrace them, they are proud of these things, and they will not acknowledge, ever, the active harm they do to the students in their classrooms every day.
The fix is in.
You might be able to nudge some folks.
You might be able to get someone to see that it's more important that students learn to communicate ideas than memorize arbitrary colonial language rules.
You might be able to convince someone that students should be able to see themselves in the texts they read. That literature should reflect the diversity and variety of our world.
You might be able to convince folks that allowing students choice in what they study and how the demonstrate knowledge is a more accurate representation and better.
But in my almost 20 years of teaching, I can tell you I worked with hundreds of teacher. I never once, across three school systems, in different states, ever met another nudge.
That's some hard math.
And the majority of those other teachers would have told you we're a family. That they cared about their students. That they taught the canon and racists texts, and rapist authors because somehow all of this prepared them for the "real" world.
The last couple of weeks especially I've been thinking about the active harm these people do in a classroom.
I remember after a spate of school shootings high school students not feeling comfortable in one teacher's classroom because this teacher bragged about their open carry license, and students KNEW this teacher hated them, and were convinced if teachers were allowed to carry in the classroom some of them would die.
I've heard students internalize the misogyny of professors who told them what they wrote wasn't really professional, or right, or good, and they needed to find a different, better way to write. Less like them (ethnic, women, accented). More like them (white, Anglo, male).
I know students who reach senior year and have never once had a class read an author where the characters looked like them or reflected their experiences.
I think moments like we're living through- rebellion, pandemic, economic hardships don't change anything. I think they shine a light on the things that are already broken. So the teachers and professors who already think teaching representative texts is "dictating" or "censoring" their individual wants distort freedom of speech. Teachers and professors who claim all opinions, perspectives, writings matter, and should be given voice, would argue against you if you pointed out their legitimizing hate.
I think higher ed is behind K-12 in these things. In the past few years more and more elementary, middle, and high schools are moving towards representative texts, realizing they can use anything to teach skills and they might as well teach texts that are more accessible to their students.
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop first made her oft-quoted and applied speech in 1990. Thirty years ago. Yet we're just now starting to see widespread implementation and application of what she meant.
“Books,” she wrote, “are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.”
“These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.”
But if the light is right, the window becomes a mirror.
“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”
There are still a lot of places that use "diversity" instead of "representation" and consider it a box to be checked rather than a pedagogy to use and evolve. Places where there is one Black author on the syllabus and when a class get cancelled they are the first text cut. There are still places that pat themselves on the back because they teach Things Fall Apart, ignoring the harm done by still teaching To Kill a Mockingbird.
I know a lot of people, especially teachers and those who work in education, especially the last few weeks are wondering if lasting change is possible. Too often have we collectively as teachers been told that something would be a fix, the answer, the solution, and too often has it turned out to be a con job, a checking of boxes, a performative action, a sticker, or t-shirt, with absolutely no work behind it. It's easy to add a Black or Indigenous author to your required reading list. It's easy to say you're a trauma informed instructor. You can sit through a required PD on poverty on the first day of the year. You can say you're not using deficit language to describe your students.
It's harder to have hard conversations with yourself about your bias and privilege. It's harder to accept that you've done active harm to students for years by replicating systems. It's hard to admit that you pushed racist agendas and participated in carceral institutions. That you contributed to the school to prison pipeline. It's hard to not slide back and slip into performative allyship because it's easier, because you're tired, because you need a break. It's hard to do the extra work to Google the shit, to read the hard truths, to reexamine everything you were taught. It's hard to listen to what you have done and participated in, what you have enabled.
And we should all fucking shut up about it. Because it is our privilege to choose, to check out, to not know. Our Black colleagues and students don't get to. They don't get to flee.
Working at a school or an institution where the work seems insurmountable, the faculty recalcitrant if not outwardly racist and misogynist, is hard. Speaking up is hard. Having to throw out syllabi and rethink your readings and scholars is hard. Standing up to administration and people above you and telling them they're wrong is hard.
And again, we should all fucking shut up about it.
I think a lot of these things are harder in higher ed. I think while colleges and universities had brief moments of "wokeness" in the 90s, with the establishment of women and gender, African, and Chican@ studies, an easy box to check- LOOK we have a department! We can't be racist. We have one Black/Indigenous/Chinese/Japanese/Phillipino professor, they head our diversity committee, we CAN'T be racist. We don't see color. All students are treated equally. Of course what these initiatives did not do, could not do, were given no power to do, was to change/alter/tear down/blow up the foundations and structures that created the inequities. So they were doomed to fail, to be cut as soon as the majority of white people stopped feeling like they needed to check that box.
I also think that a lot of these things are harder in higher ed where often the argument against making moves and changing things is "I have academic freedom you can't tell me what to do." But the thing is, academic freedom and tenure is supposed to protect and encourage the free flow of ideas. It's not supposed to hold up and reinforce racist, bigoted, misogynistic, outdated, harmful ideas, texts, statements.
Literally the least we can do for our students is teach texts that accurately reflect the world, our history, and allow for a variety of answers and responses to these things, as there are a variety of types of students in our classes.
Literally the least we can do for our students is provide a safe, non-bigoted space for them to learn.
Literally the least we can do for our students is not actively harm them while they are with us.
In so many cases we're not even hitting the bare minimum mark.
“Books,” she wrote, “are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.”
“These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.”
But if the light is right, the window becomes a mirror.
“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”
There are still a lot of places that use "diversity" instead of "representation" and consider it a box to be checked rather than a pedagogy to use and evolve. Places where there is one Black author on the syllabus and when a class get cancelled they are the first text cut. There are still places that pat themselves on the back because they teach Things Fall Apart, ignoring the harm done by still teaching To Kill a Mockingbird.
I know a lot of people, especially teachers and those who work in education, especially the last few weeks are wondering if lasting change is possible. Too often have we collectively as teachers been told that something would be a fix, the answer, the solution, and too often has it turned out to be a con job, a checking of boxes, a performative action, a sticker, or t-shirt, with absolutely no work behind it. It's easy to add a Black or Indigenous author to your required reading list. It's easy to say you're a trauma informed instructor. You can sit through a required PD on poverty on the first day of the year. You can say you're not using deficit language to describe your students.
It's harder to have hard conversations with yourself about your bias and privilege. It's harder to accept that you've done active harm to students for years by replicating systems. It's hard to admit that you pushed racist agendas and participated in carceral institutions. That you contributed to the school to prison pipeline. It's hard to not slide back and slip into performative allyship because it's easier, because you're tired, because you need a break. It's hard to do the extra work to Google the shit, to read the hard truths, to reexamine everything you were taught. It's hard to listen to what you have done and participated in, what you have enabled.
And we should all fucking shut up about it. Because it is our privilege to choose, to check out, to not know. Our Black colleagues and students don't get to. They don't get to flee.
Working at a school or an institution where the work seems insurmountable, the faculty recalcitrant if not outwardly racist and misogynist, is hard. Speaking up is hard. Having to throw out syllabi and rethink your readings and scholars is hard. Standing up to administration and people above you and telling them they're wrong is hard.
And again, we should all fucking shut up about it.
I think a lot of these things are harder in higher ed. I think while colleges and universities had brief moments of "wokeness" in the 90s, with the establishment of women and gender, African, and Chican@ studies, an easy box to check- LOOK we have a department! We can't be racist. We have one Black/Indigenous/Chinese/Japanese/Phillipino professor, they head our diversity committee, we CAN'T be racist. We don't see color. All students are treated equally. Of course what these initiatives did not do, could not do, were given no power to do, was to change/alter/tear down/blow up the foundations and structures that created the inequities. So they were doomed to fail, to be cut as soon as the majority of white people stopped feeling like they needed to check that box.
I also think that a lot of these things are harder in higher ed where often the argument against making moves and changing things is "I have academic freedom you can't tell me what to do." But the thing is, academic freedom and tenure is supposed to protect and encourage the free flow of ideas. It's not supposed to hold up and reinforce racist, bigoted, misogynistic, outdated, harmful ideas, texts, statements.
Literally the least we can do for our students is teach texts that accurately reflect the world, our history, and allow for a variety of answers and responses to these things, as there are a variety of types of students in our classes.
Literally the least we can do for our students is provide a safe, non-bigoted space for them to learn.
Literally the least we can do for our students is not actively harm them while they are with us.
In so many cases we're not even hitting the bare minimum mark.
I think a lot about Mom, and how her instinct when things got bad, when she couldn't deal, was just to flee, run, start over. It never worked. Not once. Not once did giving up her dependable, solid, benefited job help us. Never once did using what little savings we had to move make our lives better. Because there are just certain things you cannot get away from.
I have stayed in jobs that are toxic, awful, unhealthy. I have put up with abusive emails, shitty behavior, and threats. Like most teachers I put up with it because I think there's a greater service that we do.
In the rare cases where I've left jobs it's always been towards something else- I left teaching in Brooklyn to care for my mom, I left teaching in NC to pursue my PhD, I left teaching in Albuquerque for a full time job at the university level. It's easy when things get hard(er) to question what we're doing. To wonder if any of it is worth it. To think the grass maybe isn't greener somewhere else but it wouldn't be THIS.
The simple fact is while running away is an attractive option (how many of us ran away as children, mini-protests for what we saw as horrific conditions like naps or eating vegetables). Running away, the idea of starting anew, imaging a brand new world is a compelling idea. It's persuasive. Especially when work, this kind of work, and the toll it takes is cumulative. Energy in year 2 is easy. Energy to keep showing up let along speaking up is really hard in year 10 or 1 or 20.
But the thing is, the need for this work does not disappear if you go one town over, or move upstate or across the country. You may very well be able to avoid seeing the need for this work if you move to a charter school, or a mostly white, affluent private school. But the institutional and structural inequities that make this work necessary don't go away just because you've made it harder for you to see it, to hear it, to bear witness.
I absolutely think that people will make these moves comes August. They will continue to teach their classes, their content, in the same way they always have. They will teach with not one consideration for the changes in the outside world. You'll hear more of "X is not political, don't try and make it so." Education programs will continue to teach crap policies and pedagogies and churn out white savior educators. I think individual educators, principals, districts, professors, and colleges and universities will actually do LESS not more in the coming school year because they haven't been doing the work all this time and that looks bad, especially depending on the school you're in. I think they'll do less because starting out you have to admit what you don't know, and where you fucked up before you can even think about starting. You have to read. You have to ask hard questions. Then you have to listen.
I admit I'm as guilty as anyone else of thinking I can't do this, I can't do this here, it's too much work, these people will never X, Y, Z. It can feel lonely, and isolating, and insurmountable to do this work every day, to show up 100% in your classroom and for your students. I fail at this regularly. My first instinct is to flee. I often daydream about throwing Nehi in the truck and starting over, just leaving. But it doesn't work. It never works. Because you can't outrun these problems, these systems. One place may be better at hiding it than another, but scrape the layers a bit and they're still there.
So don't flee.
Don't buy into the propaganda of family or community either.
Be reflective. Build time in to reconsider things. This fall will be hard for lots of folks for lots of reasons. Maybe it's not the time to teach the violent, explicit text if you're not going to be face to face to support your students. Maybe it's the perfect time to dump the rapists, the misogynists, the abusers, from your syllabus. Maybe it's the perfect time to do the math on your syllabus and see how many BIPOC, LGBTQ+, authors and scholars you have.
Build in breaks. As I keep seeing on social media- you're/we're not used to this work. It will tire you out. It's a marathon not a spring. Give yourself time and breaks to keep going. Just know too that being able to do that is a privilege many don't have.
Build in work. Realize this is not one and done work. Form a book club. Set your own reading lists. Follow people on Twitter. Make this work part of your every day.
It's gonna suck. People will not like you. You will be avoided, if not outright dragged in meetings and email. People will actively want you to shut up. They will actively roll their eyes when you go to speak at meetings. The sooner you admit this will suck the easier these things will be. You will still cry at your desk. That's fine, just shut the door.
I don't say don't flee, don't run, because I have any great hope that we'll wake up tomorrow and the world will have been kum ba yah-ed into equity and justice. Bless y'all who do, but it ain't me. I look at the news and totally expect people to choose the performative, not actionable, check the box, superficial options because they will feel comfortable and easy and "normal." But I also know that small moves in a classroom can have lasting effects. Small moves for teachers and small moves for students can do amazing things.
So while I don't have a lot of hope about world peace, I am excited and hopeful for what my classes will look like this fall, this spring, this year. And I'll keep working on my small moves.
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