💾 Archived View for welovedyou.xyz › janwen › misc › teacher-intro.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:24:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Al mia nova instruista posto, mi komencas lerni kiel funkcias la sistemo. mi renkontas kolegojn, mi lernas reglojn, mi aŭskultas, mi aŭskultadas. mi eklernis tiu ĉi: aŭskulti estas multe pli malfacile ke paroli. kunportinda leciono por mia rolo.
la unuan tagon, mi ne parolis ofte. mi malsimilas al miaj kolegoj; mi estas komunista transgenrulino, post ĉio.
Principal tells us to dress up for the next day of training. I get all gothed up in deep purple with my highest wedges and i feel divine. someone in the booth at the superintendent's speech played "too sexy" as my building's staff were walking in; suddenly i distinctly felt like i'd been set up to be used as eye candy and felt incredibly gross. I e-mailed the principal about it, then he surprises me in my classroom while I was preparing for the week ahead.
He proceeded to talk an apology at me for about five minutes. He said he wasn't gonna be able to sleep at night with this hanging over his head, so he had to come right away. I don't doubt that, but I don't think for the reasons he intended to get across. He said he didn't choose the music and it's not at all what he was going for but that he really regretted how it all came together. He didn't ask me one question or stop to hear me speak at all. Shakes my hand and leaves.
And at that point I had a thought. Ever since the previous morning when he had told all the staff that they had no choice but to comply with the new law and out all trans kids to their parents, i had been thinking about what I would say to him if I had the chance. Believe you me, the speeches I rehearsed in my head were powerful stuff. Then after he hurried out the room, satisfied that he'd avoided a sexual harassment complaint, I realized that i would never get to deliver that speech. Listening to me is not part of his job. He had conducted this whole encounter at his own pace and on his own terms.
I have to insert this in here because i need to get down some of the insane things that the superintendent said during that speech I got sexually harassed on the way into.
- He asked google's AI if AI was useful for education, and it said yes and recommended him some products. He put this in the slides. This gullible motherfucker asked a company of their products were good and thought it was significant that it said yes.
- He spent like 10 minutes talking about how significant it was that life expectancy had increased since he was born and that the current incoming class would live, on average, to 103. This entails a profound shift in how we educate them, somehow. Because they'll have three careers they re-skill for and they'll need to learn how to be lifelong learners. which is just a dystopian workforce-centered way of describing what we were already trying to do
- Breaking order now but at a different speech this guy said "you new teachers, you're here in this room because you have more courage than all the people that are leaving this profession." oh yeah? it's cause we're special boys and girls? no chance that political economy is involved here? it struck me as so unfair and spiteful to those people who went to school to teach and got their souls sucked out, probably by admins like him lol
- he had this parade of challenges students would be facing in their lives after school that we had to prepare them for, and they were hilariously general ("global issues", "division") except for the "environmental issues" point where he went off-slides and said "you know, we used to fight over oil, but in the future they'll be fighting over clean water". then he just fucking moved on? like hey dude you can't just give a quick shoutout to Impending Resource Wars and then return to usual buzzwords?? how are they going to live to 103?? also the "we used to fight over oil" is SUCH a revealing comparison. Like, yeah, we're gonna bomb the shit out of noncompliant countries in order to get their water. right now we're teaching the students who will grow up to be the drone pilots, i fucking guess
- "You think adventure is dangerous? Try routine. It's lethal." --Paulo Coelho. I don't think he's fully thought out how that quote could apply to school
the whole language arts department got together to talk about curriculum. the admin in charge of such things told us that this year, we were expected to take at least 80% of our course material from this teacher-proof ready-made lesson stash that they had probably spent a huge amount of money to get access to. Last year, I gathered, teachers had used as much of it as was useful to them and disregarded it when they had better ideas. Tsk tsk, says administration. We're focusing on *fidelity* this year. Funny word, that; as if we're cheating on a corporation.
A couple points:
1. For all the firebrand rhetoric they've been deploying about public schools over private ones, it's hard to see at this point how I'm not just an employee of the McGraw-Hill company.
2. The kids hate it. When they know that we're teaching lessons some company shat out, they feel exactly how phony it is. Colleagues told me about how last year, teachers would lift assignments and questions from the resource and dress it up in anew google form to convince students it was original content. I'm not saying we have to reinvent the wheel every time here. you can use other people's lessons so long as you make them your own and tailor them to your specific classroom. That's a different thing than outsourcing the vast majority of your curriculum to a single corporation.
3. I think my plan for this year is to use my first-year-teacher status as an excuse for why I didn't meet my 80% goal. Whoops. I'll get it next time.
4. The thing is, the lessons in this service aren't all that bad sometimes. I just wish that the talented and hard-working researchers that had put them together had been able to do so for the good of humanity and not for their boss's pockets. who knows what these lessons would be like if their creativity was actually set free beyond the contraints of marketability and efficient turn-around times.
Yeah. Another discussion with a colleague: she was worried about talking about free speech during the Fahrenheit 451 unit, worried that some conservative parent would come for her head. She told me that one parent had called for her resignation after a lesson on media bias that talked about fox news. And you know what? I have no doubt that that was a scary experience! I can imagine how i'd take that. Cortisol raising, heart rate increase, wondering what the district will do in response, indignity at the parent's presumption, etc. That would scare the shit out of me and then leave me rattled for a few days at least. And it would probably take some courage to get back up and keep challenging students to think critically. But for god's sake, keep that courage coming. Don't let the right chill you so easy. We don't actually have to worry about offending people with terrible ideas. unfortunately, the attitude i'm picking upfrom some colleagues with avowed progressive commitments is to just allow them to be a de facto protected class.
And yeah, i get it, it's scary for people to threaten your job. that's your bills.you have a mortage maybe. kids or kids on the way. but fuck, how much do we actually have to lose? The planet's warming up. We're approaching our last chance to get this right. All these possessions we're accumulating will mean nothing when we die. A phrase from my old philosophy professor keeps coming up for me: "Are you working on your resume, or your obituary?"
What I really need is a community of radical educators to comiserate and strategize with. I'm not sure how i'd go about finding one, so i might have to create it. we'll see.
as for this job, I don't know how long I'll last in this profession as it exists. The job they're paying me for only has a small overlap with my calling. But I can still do good here. It might not be an unimpeachable moral position to be the most loving guard in the prison, but it's something.