Going for broke again
School is back and I think it's gonna be ok
Friends - sorry that I inadvertently took the summer off. Whoops. Happy to be back here with you all!
I know that in most of the country, even most of the world, people are still sipping lime-flavored beer and picking sand out of their butts and attending music festivals and generally dicking around, but here in Oakland, summer is over. Yesterday was the first day for public schools (private schools haven’t started yet, and so when I see parents this week out and about dragging school-aged children behind them, I have the urge to yell “considering investing in public institutions, please!” and then hide in the nearest bush).
My son is now a first-grader, a bonafide big kid. He walked onto the schoolyard yesterday with not a hint of hesitation, all rangy in his slightly-too-small clothes (he chose a tasteful Canadian tuxedo number, natch) with, I realize only just now writing this, his little kid belly all but gone. I know next to nothing about how it went, he is a terrible reporter, and never remembers anyone’s names, and somehow finds it incredibly overwhelming to be asked straightforward questions about his day. I know that his new teacher doles out something called “Cheetah Points,” about which there is much fanfare, and which supposedly might lead to a congratulatory trip to the principal’s office, which is nice, it should be a nice place to go. I know that the school-lunch pizza sauce is spicy, which is only a problem if there’s no chocolate milk that day to offset the spice. I know that the new principal visited his classroom, but who could possibly remember any details about the visit?? My son is not in a class with many of his friends this year, which he does not seem concerned about. I am proud of him for withstanding the spicy pizza, I am nervous about how it will go Friday when he is likely not chosen for the special principal times, I am pretty sure most of my worries about my child’s social life are just about how unpopular I was in middle school.
Now that I have had a few days to process this transition for my little family and assure myself that my son is not, in fact, my 12-year-old self, but a totally separate being that is really good at making friends and also very happy to be alone, I am turning my thoughts to the teachers. This is, apparently, my eighteenth school year as an educator. I left my own classroom fourteen years ago, it was too much for me without enough support and pay and collegiality. On Friday, I helped my son’s teacher organize her library and watched the buzz of people move around this school, this Title 1 school in a district where the pay is the lowest of any large district in the state, where there is constant political turmoil and budget cuts and community violence and enrollment problems and where the wealthy families divest to private schools or only can stomach a small handful of the public schools, the ones with lots of PTA funding, and where many of the middle-class families are being siphoned off by charter schools, but looking at the staff prepping you would think that this was the best fucking place in the universe to be, that this job was nothing but a delight and the new hires are enthusiastic and the O.G.s are too, and I just felt awe and gratitude and I hate that teaching has to be such a goddamned SACRIFICE in this country and why cant it just be a normal hard job but it is and I just fucking love teachers.
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To be fair, our school is also a place where the students are as bright and adorable and hilarious as all children, where a local artist painted a new mural on the lunchyard wall over the summer and neighbors funded and planted new succulents and the Cheer Squad is kind of shockingly good and on it with their routines, and Coach Andre is, as my son says, “a nice guy pretending to be mean” every morning, love-barking at the kids, and federal funding got us a new part-time librarian and the annual Crab Feed fundraiser involves Jell-O shots and I cannot wait to do with them with my son’s teacher, god-willing, if that’s her thing, not that Jell-O shots are anyone’s thing. Well, maybe a few very special people.
I was tooling around on the internet because I am in denial that my work year is beginning again, and my kids, who I have somewhat resented all summer, will now be out of the house most of the day instead of sitting on the toilet screaming “Yabadabadoo!” (my four-year-old recently discovered The Flinstones), and I found this essay by Barbara Henry, the White teacher who taught Ruby Bridges in a classroom alone, for her first year as the sole Black child at William Frantz Elementary School. It is full of platitudes and has much less detail than I would like (what was their morning meeting like? did they go to recess? did they eat lunch side-by-side and if so, what did they eat?) and also the way she talks about how beautiful Ruby was borders on feeling fetishy, but it is powerful nonetheless. She was a newlywed who had just moved to New Orleans and describes her first day on the job, and how she sort of thought there’d be some kind of welcome or orientation or what-have-you but instead she had to walk through an angry mob and ring the doorbell for, as my high school friends would have said (see, I eventually found friends), “the ill minute,” before anyone came to get her. But she doesn’t talk about it like it was a big deal, for her it was akin to realizing there is only street parking or no vending machine in the staff lounge. The teaching was the big deal. That was where the action was. She refers to “the truly wondrous happenings of our successful year,” because Ruby made academic progress and they built a relationship.
In a teacher-education course I used to teach, ambiguously called “Transformative Education,” I began every semester by having the class read James Baldwin’s 1964 essay “A Talk to Teachers” (I got this from my colleague, Lynna). The essay, which is absolutely essential American reading, is primarily about what it’s like to be a Black American in our society and education system, and the imperative that teachers have to challenge the backwards, racist foundations of our institutions. It is, as many have pointed out in the education world, highly relevant today. “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” Baldwin opens. “Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to ‘go for broke.’ ” But it is also about how important the role of educators is, what we can do to harm or heal. How high the stakes.
I know I write some version of this essay every year, because it is a perennial topic. When the seasons change, or announce that they are changing even though the weather stays the same, certain themes appear and reappear. Every year around this time, as a teacher of teachers, I look at my syllabus and ask myself, “does every single thing on this matter, like, a lot??” If it’s not as vital as teaching children, I take it off. Of course, I add new things, because I am a maximalist and because there are always more brilliant takes and pressing themes in the world of schools. Later this afternoon, I am slated to lead my colleagues in a discussion about supporting neurodivergent teachers-in-training, about getting them through the shitty (for some) grad school part of becoming a teacher so they can do their stuff in the classroom. I cannot believe that my students, all of them, but especially the dyslexic, ADHD, disorganized, whatever ones, are willing to jump or crawl through all of these hoops just to teach children. But I can believe it because I have done it too, I drove my Honda Accord an hour north every day after teaching in LA traffic with no AC and sat in class for five hours and when a student comes back and tells you they remember something you taught them or you crush a lesson or help a kid be kinder to themselves or others or tie their shoes for the first time it is like nothing else and it is all worth it. What a lame, tired old thing to say, but there are some things that are tropes because they are true.
I would really, really, really like to right-size property taxes in California and give every teacher in my district a $30,000 raise. (That is a very reasonable ask I feel. It is insane to keep negotiating these like, $1000 raises). I would like to instill, or re-instill (though “re” for whom, exactly?) faith in public schools. I would like to give each of the staff at our school their own Vitamix. I would like to make sure teachers feel safe and can choose what they want to teach their students. I would like to take all the educators I know—my sister Mariam and step-sister Jennifer and step-brother Jonathan and friend Elissa and former-students and former teachers—out to a pancake breakfast.
Teachers are in crisis. And they’re also kind of just, doing their thing, like they always do. Like Barbara Henry and all the less-famous versions of her did.
This morning we brought a bag of peaches from our tree (sorry if I sound like a California stereotype, but I am) as an offering for our Community-School Manager, who is basically a one-woman roadshow of energy and dedication. They’re a little fuzzy, but surprisingly good. I think my kid will make new friends this year, or get really down to business in the absence of them (learning to read, anyone?). I am dragging my feet on returning to work, which is always a bit nebulous and terrifying for me since I left my 9-4 in a school system, but I will muster the motivation, as I always do. Have a great school year, y’all. Yabadabadoo.
Sarah, how can I support schools and teachers?
Mess around on Donors Choose or Go Fund Me and give some back-to-school love to a teacher. Here’s one of our rad special education teachers, or just spin the wheel and make someone’s day. Looks like all donations made today are 50% boosted by the Bill Gates Foundation.
You can volunteer at your local school even if you don’t have kids there! Here’s how to do it in Oakland or look up your district’s website. Might be a little red tape but then you are rewarded by hanging out with people who ask if you are a teenager and give you lots of unsolicited information about their pets.
I love teachers on TikTok and just got into this channel. Here they are complaining about all the acronyms in schools.
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Also, this:
I am obsessed with the new Beyoncé album and this inspired a marathon Beyoncé music-video-watching-session with my kids. They thought the “Hold Up” video, where she heartbreakingly details her husband’s infidelity and her own processing of it and then smashes things with a baseball bat was HILARIOUS. Kids are so dumb, am I right??? Wesley Morris’ review of the album in the Times is just lovely and makes me so happy that a generous and often silly (also brilliant, of course) critic like him gets to be himself on a platform like that. And this collection of arguments for why each of her seven albums is the best is a very fun read. This is my fave right now off the new one, I hope my kid’s teachers go out this weekend and get this wild…
I love this. Thank you. I’ve missed your writing this summer. But glad you took time off! 😊