Education is a poop train

 I stopped being able to grade students, assign numbers, in the summer/fall of 2020; If you think back a year, this timing makes sense. People were dying in unimaginable numbers; others were/are unemployed, uncertain, afraid. And, it wasn’t a hard choice to make, it just became abundantly clear to me that receiving a percentage or a letter grade on an essay would just add more sharpness, uncertainty, and stress into the mix of an already painful life. Great, I thought. I’ve figured it out: I can be a teacher and not grade. This seemed to mean that I could continue teaching about grammar, reading comprehension, and academic writing and feel morally aligned, or at least absolved. 

 When I found out I wasn’t getting more classes to teach at my college in the spring of 2021, I felt great. Like many, I have a hard time feeling my emotions or hearing my intuition; this sense of joy, however, was obvious. I felt like doing the sober equivalent of a keg-stand when I got the nicely-worded and apologetic email from the dean. This was perhaps a confusing reaction. Aren’t adjuncts supposed to be forever clinging onto hope for more classes? To convince others and myself that this was ok—me not teaching or even working—I told everyone that I’d be doing activism full-time. I’m not sure what that even means, but I definitely pushed myself into contortions of my google calendar previously unexperienced: two meetings at the same time...why not? Zoom created a certain amount of magical thinking in our brains the past few years and I wasn’t exempt from it. I promptly decided that I was going to join a pipeline fight, a giving project cohort, and about 17 other projects covering everything from police abolition to class justice (just the manageable things, really). I even wrote a giddy and bizarre blog post about it, in which I document everything I’m doing. LOOK AT ME; I’M DOING THINGS! (apologies to all). 

 I don’t know; even despite my new chaotic schedule and unhelpful ‘I’m an activist’ white-person energy, it felt really good to not be teaching. I liked a lot of what I was doing in the community, even though I was doing way too much to do it well or wholeheartedly. I felt almost guilty to know that other people were in charge of teaching about adverbs and thesis statements; well, actually, I felt bad for them and for the students. All the students. Education at the time, and right now, actually, feels like a massive, ancient train filled with poop heading towards a derailment, crash, or explosion. We ignore the fact that the train is filled with poop and cover up this reality with more testing, numbers, and standards. We definitely don’t talk about the fact that a substantial portion of the poop is actually vast mounds of racial injustice and inequality. Meanwhile, lots of happy white kids fly by on the Hogwarts express on their way to debate club and ice skating practice. (Also, I really like trains and we should build more of them and make them inexpensive and accessible and then ride them more, especially when they aren’t filled with fecal matter).  

 Lots of my teacher friends seem to feel similarly about the poop train, although they might use different words to describe it. My teacher friends are some of the best, kindest, and smartest people in the world. I’m immensely relieved that they are teaching, even if a lot of teaching, to them, might feel like shoveling poop out of graffitied and decaying box cars as fast as they can. One of my friends, who teaches high school math, recently told me about how their school made zero mention of a student who was killed at the end of the last school year. No memorial, no honoring of emotions, nothing. Just, back to school, back to class, and don’t linger in the hallway to hug your friends wearing T-shirts with their dead friend’s face printed on them! Another teacher friend has told me that she actually has less time to prepare than she ever has before, in the second year of this pandemic, in addition to more pressure to teach to the test. My other beloved who is an incredible career SEA (Special Education Assistant) is paid so little that she has to work another job, despite her position in the schools being one of the most physically and emotionally demanding (She almost wishes she were paid a little less so that she would at least be eligible for state benefits.) Of course, this is probably no surprise, but we treat educators like shit. This adds more poop to the poop train. If you want to read more about this reality, here's a great article about how teachers are doing right now, written by Jennifer Gonzalez, who maintains an excellent blog on teaching. 

 Education, in its best or highest form, is such a beautiful thing. There is nothing I enjoy more than learning as a process of growing and exploring. As humans, it seems like we generally enjoy learning and actually gravitate towards it; we want to spend our time understanding the world and ourselves better; we want to stick our hands into dirt, try new things, and see phenomena in new and revealing ways. And, we want to do it with others, in a collaborative, creative, open, and non-linear way. It’s sad and also maybe not surprising that such a joyful human capacity that we all have is being so woefully mistranslated (well, and has been for a long time). Personally, It felt like a step in the right direction to move away from grading students last year, but as I continue to reevaluate my vocation, I am  confronted with the tension of teaching in general, as I approach starting to sub in the public schools and in adult basic education centers. As a white teacher, I am positioned to be an expert in any classroom that I step into. By going along with this normalized, racialized power dynamic, the poop train gains more speed. White people harm people of color, even when we think we are doing the opposite, and especially when we are enmeshed and beholden to the institutions within which we operate. 

I want to teach in a way that honors peoples’ natural, creative, and joyful desire to learn collaboratively, but first, I need to be able to teach in a way that flattens hierarchies and invites everyone in as an equal participant. Is it even possible? I don’t know what any of this means for me, practically, since we can never operate perfectly outside of the structures of power in our society. I guess that we can, however, try our hardest, whether we are working from within or without institutions.