So, Teaching?

I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank post, searching desperately in my various databases – memory, emotion, intellect – for an entrance into writing about teaching. I’ve been teaching for almost 15 years; I have drafts and abandoned essays about my experience littered across notebooks and apps and flash drives; I have published pieces on this blog. There’s plenty to write about, but yet I’m stymied. And I’m mystified.

That’s one maxim of Teaching, in my experience: confusion. Do I sit here with writer’s block – which I don’t believe in – because I don’t care as much as I profess, to myself and others, about the job? Is my students’ apathy, lack of performance, and general struggle to perform my fault, and to what extent? I know the answer to that one, sort of. But that answer isn’t enough to counter the daily fresh evidence against it. That’s what it comes down to: dead ends and no clue how your meticulous plans got you there. Confusion clogs up thought and eats words like a black hole eats matter. Maybe I should just sum up my teaching career so far with the only response that comes easily to mind: WHAT THE FUCK?!?

Here’s what I want to do. In order to break down the whirling, ever-growing confusion, I want to write regularly, to create an ongoing record of my experience. I want to be right, and I want to be wrong, but most of all I want to do. I self-censor like the most enthusiastic totalitarian regime; and I’m more effective. I hand-wring so much that I don’t ever produce. I stifle myself, my thoughts, my emotions, and all I’m left with is the vapid WHAT THE FUCK?!? This sort of response is a nuclear bomb. The emotion bomb is destructive enough. It’s the fallout that lingers and continues the devastation.

Similarly, I want to write dispassionately about a subject/job that feels like carrying nitroglycerin on a high wire. There is a real need for reporting on what occurs in America’s classrooms, for the benefit of teachers and the general public alike. Teaching has become a cliche, and one of the worst kinds: the kind that invites no further perusal (more on that later). Worse, teaching is one of the neglected pillars of our society. Somehow, finally, I feel ready to open the door to my classroom, invite you in, and talk for a while. That’s much better than my daily tendency to flee campus as soon as I’m contractually allowed and seal behind a fortress wall the whirling insanity that is the daily life of a teacher.

Up next: I’ve read a bunch of Nathaniel Hawthorne lately. His voice is still relevant all these years later in an America that doesn’t, but needs to, come to grips with what we’ve created here in this “New” World. Like Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, we need a picture of ourselves to finally see who we really are.

What a politicized gun debate means.

The debate over guns in this country has become politicized. That’s no cliche. As a politized topic, there are two sides using rhetoric as weapons in a war for political power. Rhetoric is not fact. Rhetoric has no connection to what actually happens amongst humans on this earth. So if we discuss the topics that politics dictates, we are having a conversation about politics, not about the real-world solutions to real-world problems. It’s absurd that the ruts of division we’ve carved between and amongst us exist because we’ve allowed the terms of the debate to be set for us. Guns, like abortion, can no longer be talked about civilly without both sides retreating behind their ramparts and hurling sharpened rhetoric and personal insults. It’s not that you hold beliefs that I view as wrong; it’s that you’re a gun nut who cares more about bullets than people or a lefty sissy who doesn’t have the backbone to make touch decisions. Politics is an incredibly inefficient system, wasting energy on the demonization of the enemy rather than the solution to a problem.

Politics is akin to the now ubiquitous Monday morning quarterbacks who make a living off of talking about something they could never do. What politicians do in Washington is my business as an American citizen, but the games they play in order to be in and stay in power isn’t. Believing the right thing, speaking out for the right thing is useless when it’s done in the political arena. Why do Americans shortchange their power by believing in the ephemera surrounding the day-to-day business of living and dying in America? We have a gun problem in America. People with guns will continue to kill large amounts of people not because politicians won’t do anything about it, but because the American people are happy with the disconnect being “involved in the political process” allows us.

For an interesting look at what some other countries do regarding school safety and a jaunt outside our political system:
https://apnews.com/096fe65cf28640d481c641638eb89fc5