Not in Teacher School

Even better? You could pick a special teacher and shower them in wipes. Like, did you have a favorite teacher who is still in your town? Bring them wipes. Your kid had a great year LAST year? Bring that fool some wipes. They will be used. Lotta stuff to wipe down in a classroom. Like constantly.

So, I got to follow that case with a class full of beautiful young prople. We were so outraged.

They had graduated by the time the verdict came, so I cried alone at my computer. I hung up on people who thought Zimmerman received justice.

Over the years, I have turned that case into a unit. Each year, I add names to the list they can choose from for their final project, a project about guilt and innocence.

I save articles in a folder called, “Shooting Kids.”

So many names.

It will destroy you if you are paying attention.

Do you remember Jordan Davis? Do you know about Laquan McDonald? How is there ever enough time to mourn Michael Brown? I cannot look at photos of Tamir Rice without tears. I have never taught a kid so young.

Today I began my collection on Adam Toledo.

Because it gave me something to do. It gives me something to do. To chronicle their deaths. To read about their lives. It gives me a way to sandbag against the flood of grief when I let my mind approach what their mothers go through every morning.

It keeps me from thinking about how Derek Chauvin might go free. And how if he doesn’t, we can pretend he was an aberration. We can pretend he wasn’t trained to see a black body as a threat, as something which must be brought to heel. How, even if he is convicted, the system which created him is exonerated. Again.

When will there be justice?

We are all the jury. We all have to go back to our notes.

Mine span almost a decade.

I tell you, this system is guilty.

This guilt is systemic.

And I am GIDDY.

I crave spontaneous interaction with my students. So much is lost when we are all just typing in the chat, which is as good as it gets around here these days.

I miss those goofy days when students say goofy things and we riff off of one another and everyone laughs. Nothing gets done on schedule, but it feels good to be alive, to be together.

I miss when the conversations really get going. When they get heated, even. I miss when someone says something and hands shoot up all around the room.

Remember that?

Remember when we could squat next to a desk and whisper, "What's up? You okay?"

I do. And I crave it.

But these kids? That is not always how they remember things. I've been having those in-the-chat-chats with my students on Zoom and it turns out a lot of them are not as eager as I am to come back to in-person learning.

Today, I asked them why and one girl said, "I just kinda hate people now."

Part of me wanted to say, flippantly, "Same girl!"

But then I realized. She is 17. In fact, all the kids talking about how they would rather just keep going to school online are still that, kids.

Over the past year, they have seen a world without the interaction and drama of high school. And many of them like it. Which kinda breaks my heart.

At this young age, they have experienced something we adults never have. A life without forced social interaction. For some of them? That's awesome.

I fear what we have lost in Covid is much greater than a year of education. I have been fighting to educate. Saying they are behind is arbitrary.

What we have lost is our communal understanding of what it means to live in a society. A whole generation has seen an alternative and some of them are going to feel comfortable in this different paradigm. Some of them are never going to want to go back to the way things were.

They would rather be alone, to have their interactions controlled and curated. Which makes me sad, but who am I to judge?

These kids have not just gone a year without bullies and cliques. They have witnessed a whole world prove to them repeatedly that people don't really look out for each other. They have seen selfishness and hate and inequity in the starkest way and in the harshest light.

And they have learned that what seemed integral and inevitable is not and doesn't have to be.

I think I am that "dark sarcasm in the classroom" teacher Pink Floyd warned us about.

Don't get my wrong, I have loved my students. I have worked with them and worried over them and always, always wished them well.

But...I also have long thought I was pretty funny. I love a good one-liner. And I realize, sometimes those comments have been at the expense of my students. I have used rhetorical questions.I have answered with sarcasm.I have, perhaps, been trying to be cool for an audience of other teachers, whom I would later regale with tales of my cleverness.

But it wasn't cool. I was not funny. I was just mean.

I realized that today when I was writing a comment on a student’s paper. What I started to say was, "Why would you turn in something over two weeks late and not even finish it?"

Then I thought, "Okay, but why might this happen?"And today, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, with so many Americans sick or dead, with so many unemployed or underemployed, with increasing levels of trash and graffiti along the still empty streets of my commute, I realized there are a lot of reasons why this might happen.

So, I erased my comment and said something else. I encouraged him to ask for help.Because maybe he is just lazy. But he made some effort. If I ask rude hypothetical questions and act like a big fat jerk, why would his response ever be to try even harder? It likely wouldn't.

Listen up! You do not want to use gender neutral pronouns? You are a dinosaur. Except you’re not. Because dinosaurs were cool and kids like them.

You don’t want to introduce more diverse authors into your curriculum? You are more obsolete than the Commodore 64. Look it up.

You think Black Lives Matter is a political statement? And, as such, doesn’t belong in classrooms? Go listen to some AM radio. Relax with a refreshing Tab. You’ll feel better.

I always click “return” on your Google Classroom assignments. Even though you have not logged in for a month. 

I want you to know I still see your name. I want you to know I still notice.

Maybe it comes across wrong. Maybe it looks like I want to punish you with every zero. 

But I don’t.

I am saying, “Your work still matters.”

I am saying, “You still matter.”

I am saying, “I didn’t forget you.”

I am saying, “I still love you. No matter what.”

But you will likely never know that. You probably don’t check this email anymore anyway.  

It is lonely in here.

I get kinda sad.

I remind myself it is better than watching people die.

I keep the door propped open and my new fear is when people with germs try to come in. I keep shouting, “Don’t come in here!” to would be disease vortex interlopers, as I frantically mask up, while my class sits in front of screens with their cameras turned off.

Working on my comedy routines. Trying to find new ways to connect. We can do this!

But...

It’s August.

And all around America they are still serious about opening schools.

In March I was with them.

But the spring stretched into the summer into timebeyondmeaning.

The maps turned red.

Bodies in freezers and people posting on social media about “face diapers.”

The ICUs fill up and people line up at Disney.

Everyone knows we can’t enforce proper lines and behaviors in elementary. Everyone knows kids cheat on dress code in high school.

They will not distance. The masks will come off.

Everyone knows it.

Everyone knows schools are overcrowded and everyone knows ventilation is poor.

And everyone knows more people are going to die.

There is no vaccine.

There is no treatment.

There are no good answers, no good solutions.

Kids are hungry and the streets are dangerous and our society is filled with inequities. There are cops who kill kids and parents who hit kids and we are so used to trying to shield them. But...

Now schools are going to hurt them, too.

Please don’t make us go back.

We can be better online.

We can find better ways to feed them.

There are always ways to love them.

Please don’t make us go back.

Fall will become winter and doors and windows will close and fog with germs and we are just supposed to sit in them? We are supposed to put children in improperly spaced rows and make them sit in that?

I know some Americans don’t think distance teaching is real teaching. To them I submit this, which I received right around the witching hour last night:

“I think (my school) should have summer school again because it helps out kids who are almost done and the teachers there don't want to and are not going to give up on you, even when you give up on yourself.”

People get it together now or Christmas is canceled.

And if people do celebrate in December?

January is a culling.

Think about that. Because it’s true.

You love Christmas? Get in the spirit now. Be kind. Be generous. Sacrifice for others.

Forgo the bbq. Wear the mask. Or tell the kids why they can Zoom Christmas this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H2wZg8ICMo

I have watched it a few times now. 

I keep looking for the part I missed. This woman is crying. She has had a terrible experience. 

So, I keep watching it. Because I do not see the terrible part. 

Maybe you can help me?

I am a teacher. Once, while on a walk in the park, I saw a former student. He yelled obscenities at me, among them, “Saggy titty, old bitch!” It wasn’t cool. But I did not cry. 

But she IS crying. Yet no one called her a bitch. No one called her anything, as far as I can tell. 

She waited for some food? This is the trauma she experienced?

I have been out to eat with my black partner. We have gone to restaurants where I had eaten before, with white friends, and had a lovely time. When we went together, we waited for our food forever, while we watched all the tables around us get fed before us. I have even had my food brought to me, alone, while my partner was not served until long after my meal had gone cold. This has happened to us more than once. More than a handful of times.

We did not cry.

In the video, at around 30 seconds, she mentions that she likes to pay for her own food. Yeah. That is how commerce works. But, correct me if I am wrong here, the way she says it implies she is accustomed to having her food paid for, presumably because she is a police officer? Must be nice. No one says, “Oh, you teach hundreds of kids a day, here’s a McMuffin.” If they did, I would take it. I would be like, “Heck yeah! Thanks!” Because it NEVER happens. Yet, this seems to be part of her reality. Maybe that is why she is so upset? Because she is not receiving SPECIAL treatment all of a sudden?

It really seems like that is the thing. She expects, either because she is a police officer, or because she is a lovely blond person, that people will just fall all over themselves for her. That they will say, “Thank you.”

Thank you? No one says, “Thank you,” to people for no reason. Most people don’t say thank you even when they should. For example, in her narrative, she does not mention thanking the poor worker who had to come outside and bring her a cup of coffee. She seems to imply that she was short, if not rude, to this person.

And then she says, most disturbingly, “I know this will all blow over.”

Um, excuse me?

What is “this” that will all blow over? Holding police accountable? Lady, teachers have been being held accountable for a long, long time. There are laws about it in every state, in fact. And you know what we do? GET BETTER AT OUR JOBS. 

If you want this to “blow over” then things are going to have to get better. We are going to have to become a society where people in the uniform you want to take off so you can “chill” do not kneel on the necks of Black people for nine minutes. Do not shoot Black people for being asleep. Do not walk off the job to defend the rights of their colleagues to attack elderly men.

Because, Officer Karen of the Self Pity Department, Black people cannot take off their skin and just “chill.” And the anxiety they feel is steeped in some pretty deep and direct racism. Centuries of it, in fact. So, if you “don’t know how much more (you) can take,” after a couple of days of people declaring that you should maybe treat them like they matter, imagine how Black people in this country feel?

(May She Rest In Peace. May She Rest In Power.)

How once upon a time she buried her face in her baby’s sweet, sweaty curls and dreamed of the life he might have.

How she probably bathed him and rubbed lotion into his soft skin. How she laughed when he laughed. How she must have made his favorite breakfast on his birthday.

How she must have loved him! How well she must have cared for him!

For in his last moments, as his breath was being crushed from his body, he called for her still.

Oh, Officer Chauvin, your knee is crushing so many mamas now!

Those of us in the public sector, teachers and cops, it is our job to preserve the hopes and dreams of a nation of mamas.

But too often we have our knees on their necks. Too often, America, those of us who should have facilitated and protected these dreams, loved them as our own, have asphyxiated them instead.

And this, AMERICA, is why we are burning.

May we rise from this ash. May we remember what we were once nurtured to be.