Teachers, Parents, and Cans Full of Snakes (Part 2)

Two friends try to make sense of the school reopening debate

About this newsletter: I’m Sarah, I have a degree in child development, two children, and no idea what I’m doing. I like to write about it. Welcome.

On August 4th of 2020, my dear friend Courtney did that thing where you put two people on a text thread together to introduce them, which usually ends in a “nice to ‘text-meet’ you” and empty assurances that you will hang out. But the person she introduced me to was Garrett frickin’ Bucks, and though he is many things (anti-racist educator, writer, father, state-trivia lover, Russell Westbrook apologist, ALL CAPS TYPER, Taylor Swift stan), the man is never empty. Half a year later, I find that my most ridiculous conversations (the latest involved the phrase “Pork Extravaganza”), my most heated midnight debates, and my most humbling revelations (I have joined a cohort on organizing white people for anti-racism through Garrett’s organization, The Barnraisers Project and you can too!) come from a man who I have never met, who lives in a state I have never visited (sorry Bucks), but with whom I could not experience more delight, loyalty, and gentle nudging towards a better existence.

I wrote to Garrett this week about the school reopening debates that are peppering our news and social media feeds. Read Part One of this exchange on Garrett’s newsletter, The White Pages, then continue with Part 2 below….

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Oh Bucks, I, too, hate my couch. Since my daughter sleeps in a closet, the living room is her playroom. The couch is never made. The cushions are littered all over the apartment, doubling as landing pads or lovey beds or baby wolf sleds. My husband and I have been taking turns for months sleeping on said couch, because my daughter wakes up at all hours and I'm too anxious to return to sleep once my brain turns on and, well, it might be the only time we're actually away from one another :)

I'm ‘stressxausted’ too. I’m worried about my children and their future, but I guess I see supporting teachers as a clear through-line to securing that future. I've trained teachers for almost a decade, and I've never seen a group so burnt out. Teachers are not doing well, and we cannot do well without them. We need to be recruiting, uplifting, begging teachers to stay. We need to be sending them government checks to upgrade their teaching set-ups, vaccinating them (this is happening in Oakland and it makes me cry with relief on a daily basis - I cry a lot these days…), making sure their students are safe and healthy, sending them Edible Arrangements and standing outside their windows with boomboxes playing Mariah Carey’s ‘Hero.’ 

And I'm worried about parents too. Not just because none of us have received what we are entitled to this year (entitlement has become a four-letter word, but as you point out, it wouldn't be a bad thing if all of us had equal access to it). I'm worried that so many white, rich parents like me have been unravelled by this year, made aware of what it takes to educate children, awakened by the Black Lives Matter movement, but still don't see that the same tools we used to get us here are not the ones we need to get us out of here. People want to go "back to normal" because, if they have money and social status and a dedicated school nurse to attend to their child's needs, normal was pretty great. But going "back to normal" for my school district means buckling under the weight of reprehensible inequity and the harm it does to children and to our civic institutions. And yes, systemic forces uphold that inequity, but individual choices enforce the idea that it is, well, normal. 

Lots of parents are buying their way out of this situation by pulling their kids out of public schools that are closed and putting them in private schools that are open (155,000 Californian parents have done that this year). Those actions are completely understandable to me as a parent, who is so so tired of all this shit, and who also hates every single thing in the tiny apartment I share like a bunker with three other human beings. But just because you can shield your family from the horrors of racial and economic disparity, doesn’t mean those horrors are gone, or are not going to harm you in some way by implicating you in the very scaffolds that hold them up.

It makes me very sad to think that, after finally opening the can on all those frickin' snakes, the privileged among us would just shut the lid, pull out our checkbooks or get on social media and say "there must be a way to get my family some peanuts..." You have taught me, Bucks, not to erect more barriers between myself and other white people, and boy am I, too, on the wrong side of progress so often. But I have to tell you that I am looking around at some of the people who look like me right now and going, "Do you really think your children want to live in the world you’re reinforcing??" 

The brokenness of our education system is awe-inspiring. But it isn’t broken because teachers have hoarded everything for themselves and don’t care about children.  It’s broken because those of us in power broke it, or stood by as it broke and did nothing. I want people to see that the cycle of recrimination and blame will not get us out of this mess, or if it does, we will pay the cost as a society. I want them to turn to the tools you mentioned, problem-solving and cooperation, to get a good, just, outcome for all children. 

If we want schools to reopen, we should not be organizing our kids in protest against their own teachers, or comparing our underfunded public schools to ones with $30,000 a kid and a few hundred students. We should be calling our local public school and asking “What can I do to help?” Getting curious about what the day-to-day lives of teachers in our communities are like. Fundraising. Harassing politicians. Organizing for the next school-funding bill that corporations will be lobbying against with all their weight. Asking our child’s teacher, or even better, a teacher in one of the country’s 20,000 Title 1 schools, what they do when they need $30 worth of supplies. Running out in the middle of the street and yelling "There are snakes in this fucking can!!!!" and then grabbing our swords and joining the fight.

P.S. Your daughter with a bucket on her head is my new emoji. Here’s mine wearing a T-shirt from what was, until its closing last year, San Francisco’s oldest running gay bar. 

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Hey friend,

You ever hear of Benjamin Lay? Definitely a Top Ten Wild Abolitionist Personality. The guy even had a cool nickname! The Quaker Comet!

The brief version of Mr. Comet’s story is as follows. It’s the 1700s. Slavery is an accepted practice across the colonies, with wealthy Philadelphia and Boston merchants profiting mightily from the slave economy. This included many prominent, high-society Quakers (even though slavery was directly contradictory to every single Quaker value). It was a bad deal all around! Fortunately, there were a handful of Quakers who took it on themselves to confront this naked hypocrisy, none more persistently or flamboyantly than Ben Lay. My man spent his entire adult life on a one man street-theater/civil disobedience tour of Quaker meeting houses-- tromping around the snow barefoot and yelling at one, spraying the contents of tobacco pipes all over the other and, in his most inspired performance fake-staging his own death (he fashioned some DIY blood capsules and everything) right there in the middle of a New Jersey Meeting for Worship. He ruled.

I thought about Benjamin Lay as I read your last letter. I mean that as a compliment. What I appreciate about you in this moment is your steadfastness in calling your own community (in this case, white progressive parents) to task for not living up to your purported values. I loved your last couple paragraphs in particular-- a call to stop looking for the laziest possible scapegoat and instead lock arm-in-arm with teachers to demand something better. Holy cow yes. That is 100% the kind of prophetic, appropriately-fed-up energy we need more of these days.

I’m right there with you. Like, unequivocally-- meet you in the streets style.  I also can’t get these  “how do we help folks make that shift” questions out of my mind. I’m trying to parse how to hold a megaphone in one hand (you know, for proclaiming loud and proud “stop the scapegoating… stop fighting just for your kids”) while reaching out empathetically with the other hand. 

In my last letter, I focused mostly on the immediate empathy I have for my fellow stressxausted parents (yes, even those with relative societal privilege). The more I think about it, though, I actually mean empathy in a deeper sense. The reason why we default, again and again, into individual rather than collective politics, is that that’s all we’ve ever been taught (especially as white people). We’re asked to judge our entire self-worth on a set of zero-sum “accomplishments:” our personal career trajectory, our kids’ standardized test scores, our property values, our BMI, our well-manicured lawns (and while we’re at it, our non-scratched-to-hell couches, I suppose). We’re playing the game we’ve been taught -- and that includes identifying friends and foes on the basis of whether they appear to be standing in the way of our family’s immediate needs or not.

Merely admitting to each other that we don’t know how to pursue justice together isn’t the whole shooting match, but it feels like a radically necessary step. And I absolutely realize that parents who are hanging by a thread and are desperate for schools to reopen right now will likely roll their eyes at me for offering what sounds for all the world like a marshmallow experiment. But if ever there was a moment to call each other to play a longer-term game, to give up the temptation of short-term scapegoats in the hope of building life-long partnerships, it’s now. For me, that means simultaneously offering my love and support to parents who are at their wits’ ends AND loving those same parents hard enough that I can ask the kinds of questions you posed in your last letter. Will I spend an hour playing long-distance Guess Who with a friend’s six-year-old in order to give them a couple hours of reprieve? Absolutely. Will I also ask them to toss an email to their kids’ teachers and, rather than haranguing them for raising questions about reopening, ask them what they need? Hell yeah. One hand out, one hand on the megaphone. Spread the word.

You know why I love great teachers? Because they call us into both imagining and making real the most powerful version of ourselves. I shouldn’t be surprised that’s how I experience you in this exchange, Wheeler. You’re one hell of a teacher.

Grateful for you,

Garrett