heartbroken again

     This has been a month of lost loved ones and heroes.  We can lose this month.  

     I know people die every day, hundreds, thousands.  That's amazing.  It seems the majority of them centered around us in January, 2016.  January, 2016 can kiss my ass.

Time to lock up, mister

     Lift your head up, Tom, and look around this empty classroom at North End High.  Man, you're missing the gist.  It's empty because you gave it away, the licenses you plied through eight years of college, then 20 years of bailing your boat to keep kids afloat.  Don't be confused.  You're dry.  No one taught you to drink water.  Drink water.

     You keep one empty milk crate.

     Head like a hovering drone.  Go drink something.

     Stop looking for belongings in this room, like the kid from a large family, grabbing the last potato.  It's not your room.  It's no one's room.  You're marking footsteps and time, but time doesn't know anything.  You could fill as much in a retiring teacher's milk crate as in a missionary's, but at least missionaries have sandals. 

     Just don't look inside that cabinet at xeroxed kindergarten Make-It-Take-it Books, or laminated poem posters, bags of popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, coverless notebooks, all the Scholastic freebies you never tried, either with youngsters or 18-year-olds with LD.  Okay, cry a little bit.  Try to just not look at things.  They take the shape of loss.  Nothing of value till a human picks it up and turns it over.  

     No mistaking orphaned dry-erase markers lying in the white board tray, shadowy printer and cables, butcher paper over dusky books on the shelves, the chrome chairs upturned on tables, the calm floor below, littered with mouse turds.  All kid shouts forgotten, their brags and bitches stilled, their failure fears and hidden hopes flared out the tailpipe of time.  Those poor kids.  And you didn't save them.

     That's gonna have to be okay.  Tom, you're 56, and your flappy white hair is cottonwood fluff on a curb.  Where are your friends, man?  Like the 10th planet, you'll find the sun in a thousand years.

     So many kids, so many laments, graduations, a billion sparks from the grinder's wheel.  Hundreds of souls, caught on a paper clip magnet.  Let them go.  

     You're kind of a hoarder, aren't you?

     Stop picking up, winding that cable, wiping that table.  Shove everything you ever saw from buccaneer Pearson Corp. off the dock.  Shove everything from the university into the gaping dumpster.  Take your shiny master's plaques and backhand them over the railroad tracks.

     It's over, dude.  God, just 20 years ago, you were plucked from methods into that kindergarten, and by Christmas, you danced with kids slamming poems on the ten o'clock news.  Twenty years is not so long.

     Mr. O'Shea, go home now.  We gotta slide the gate shut, kick everyone out, sir.  You can come back tomorrow if you forgot something.

     Okay, no problem.  And that's how you leave.  

     In the North End driveway, a bus rumbles back to pick up a straggler boy whose backpack is hanging open, and his pants sagging down.  The kids on the bus from the elementary school are pointing out the window with short fingers, and howling with their little missing teeth at him.  He's laughing, too.  It's a goofy laugh. 

     The kids are all right.  Your keys are turned in, so get out of here.

     There's a perfectly good Air Jordan by a No Parking Fire Lane sign, a stuffed animal, coins and a pencil driven over, cracked open, graphite pulverized.  

     Shut your eyes, shake your head, see you around, school.

     You rub your hair at the nape of your neck.  The guardian angel rises like steam off your hand through your driver's headrest, into your backseat where your darling daughter used to kick her muddy soles. He sees you need the fluff cut off your hair, plus 100 years of sleep.  The angel drifts on a cherry picker through your cargo trunk and out the back window, rising to the street lamp next to the cyclone fence, across from the football field, peeking at your red tail lights. You hesitantly pump your brakes, flick-flick-flickering at the end of the parking lot, then your tires scrub and scatter pebbles, and you take a long left.  

AngryMan breaks down

     He doesn't know why he's so angry.  He's just filling and emptying and replenishing his AngryMan cup.  Why?  It's easy enough to understand why, when he worked to enable an angry kid to pass two failing classes, fought him all semester, lost every argument, made him alternative assignments, and the kid now mocks him, flaunts the passing grades and says he doesn't have to do a fucking thing now, and that the teacher is old and should go retire.  The teacher goes into his dark home corner, sits on his phone thumb typing out his torrential feelings which just keep volleying, until his child comes over and asks, "Dad, can I have something, like a piece of bread?" and he breaks down.  

Destructo-boy

     Is it just in my blood to destroy?  Sometimes I wonder if I'm trying, at every crossroad, instead of to enhance and ensure success, to undermine and destroy it.  Sometimes I feel a beast inside, sitting on haunches, poised to jump and swat airplanes out of the air, to wipe out fragile things, to wreck everything tender and naive.  I don't do it all the time.  I just, very infrequently, see a chance at bolstering altruistic favor, and I'm tempted to break it, just like a little brat who lacks guns but who fashions them of sticks or Legos.  The hell?  Damn predilections. 

Call me Evangelista!

     I love how, whatever professional development you're at, you're the new evangelist, the new groupie, newly sainted, oiled and anointed.  It's so see-through.  

     I'm sitting in a reading training, dedicated to test taking strategies, an entire day paid for by taxpayers, funding us to explore better test taking strategies in order to pass tests that everyone in Minnesota acknowledges don't matter.  So, despite the fact they don't matter, we're the damn evangelistas.

     Call me Evangelista!  I'ma come at you with all my Post-Its, markers, parking lot posters, all torqued and lubricated with coffee and fatty snacks.

     Yeah, Evangelista!

Poly-chronos

     Since I got up at 5:15 or whenever, it seems I've had multiple conflicting timelapses. Imagine hearing chord after chord pounded on a piano behind you, and demanded to chant the tone and name of each note.  It all sounds fun and challenging.  But I sense a miasma of life going by and I can't retell any of the stories, because my brain is too frail or. Or something. 

Feather hammer

     You're a hammer made of feathers with these lessons, Mr. O'Shea thinks, leaning into pheromone clouds over North End High School's tile floor, gray confetti squares edged with gold, along Minnesota Viking purple-and-gold walls.  He's watching his old brown moccasins shuffle ahead of him, his head feeling tippy, spacey.  My ninth graders read kindergarten to first grade, and I hammer them with fourth to twelfth grade books and articles.  They hate it; it's too hard; they can't do it; I have a feather hammer; they hate it; sit on their iPads, talk through me, walk out; say, fuck this shit, deuces, I'm out.

     "Tom, what up?  Who you talking to?" says a teacher in the staff lounge as he ducks inside the mens' room.

     "Sorry, just my imaginary friend," Mr. O'Shea chuckles, and locks the door, grinding his teeth that again, he's been caught talking to himself.

     But I cannot bludgeon them, he thinks, peeing.  Bluj / un ... blʌdʒən with this feather hammer, featherhammer, further.  He sighs, washes his hands, and doesn't see his wild hair or ginger snap crumbs on his black wool sweater in the mirror.  He's a ghost to himself.

     Just cancel class, Mr. O'Shea.  You can't do it today.  You're ground to a nub.  You haven't planned because you can't work at home, and you can't stay at school because Godzilla might show up and place you on an improvement plan waterboard.

     In wire-rims and lightbulb forehead, he shuffles flat-footed into his classroom just before the bell, feeling like a space shuttle re-entering earth's atmosphere with tiles melting off.  He guilts himself into kickstarting a reading strategy.

     But you know what? he short-circuts.  As the kids say, that shit's dead.  There's no curriculum, Kansas University Strategies-whaty-what, crucial as God, that you can't drop and do emergency classroom surgery.  

     He steadies his breath, sets the projector down, leans back against the white board, staring down at his holey moccasins.

     "What up, Mr. O'Shea?" Rayquan says.  "You look like you gone cry."

     Jasmine shoots over Ray's bow, "Shut up, Rayquan.  What we doing, Mr. O'Shea?"

     "Here's what I'm thinking," Mr. O'Shea says.  "I've been pushing this strategy, pushing this strategy.  Some of you okay with it, can do it, don't mind it, too much.  Aside two people, the rest of you hate it, fight me, sit on your phones, can't try it for two minutes.  I mean, matter of fact, I hate this shit, too.  It's boring.  I get it, I get the research, what they want you to do, in a perfect world, how it's supposed to work.  But it doesn't.  You're not a guinea pig, are you?  You know all they needed to have said?  They should've just gotten books or magazines you feel like reading, and said, 'Hey, the more you read, the better you'll get; the better you get, the more you'll want to read.'  Period.  End of f[__]king story."  He purposely stepped on and clipped his F word, like kids do.

     "Oo, Mr. O'Shea cursed," Younique said.  Kids shifted their feet like pigeons cooing on a telephone wire.

     "F[__]king right I did.  I'm a person, and I get frustrated, like you-all do, if you can't talk somebody into something, and they won't ever listen to you."  He opened his mouth to stretch his lower eyelids, to blink at the ceiling, prevent wetness from leaking.  He blink-blink-blinked.  Kids glanced at each other.  Seven of nine had their phones or iPads out, earbuds in, videos playing.  James and Younique were swaying to music, James actually rapping along to his.

     "Listen.  Just be quiet a minute.  I'm going to call this a Come-to-Jesus talk, meaning either get serious and deal with me, face the fact I'm the one writing your grade, and you need every single English credit, or else get the f[_]k out.  If you're staying, do the writing warm-ups, the vocabulary, read the inside-class book with me, read your outside book, write about it, and oh, a little homework.  Not much homework.  Do this, get a little better at reading, get your credit, be done with North End High School.

     "I frankly don't see why anyone would keep coming to class every day without a pencil, clowning, sitting on their phone, doing jack, hating this, fighting me every damn day.  If you don't like it, talk to your case manager, change your schedule, get the f[_]k out, and don't come back.  Why sit in here?  I wouldn't sit in here."

     Jasmine asks, "How can I get out of this class?  I mean, why do I need to be in here?"

     "You're in here because of your score on that timed START test, and we're going to have that test again next Wednesday.  If you get to page two with a few mistakes in three minutes, you'll be around fifth, sixth grade level, and there'll be no need to stay in this class.  You can get out, and you know what?  That'll be great, huh?  You should be kicking ass, trying to get out of here.  Who wouldn't?  I know I would."

     "He said 'kick ass,'" Billy says, covering his mouth, stifling giggles.  Mr. O'Shea, do you know the character, 'Kick-Ass'?"

     "Because it is boring, Mr. O'Shea continues.  "Reading is hard.  It's boring, and hard to get good.  I mean, I'm not trying to make it boring.  But it's not boring after awhile, after you've got skills you can use to destroy big books with this reading weapon."

     "I wanna destroy these books right now," Billy says.  "Like a Jedi with a light saber."

     The other kids cock their faces at Billy's ambiguity.

     "All right, that's good enough for me," Jasmine says.  "Let's do this."

     "Do what?" Mr. O'Shea asks.

     "Whatchoo think, bro?  Get on with the reading, because I need to get my booty out this class."

     "Well okay, then, turn your books to page 47.  Swear to God, we've been on this page since last week."

     For one class, he stopped talking to himself.  

     Rayquan stared at Mr. O'Shea's nappy wool sweater, and pointed:  "You got something."

     "Something... huh? Oh, thanks," Mr. O'Shea brushed the crumbs off himself, then turned to the white board, and reached under his glasses to wipe away water.

Dear Charlotte

     A trans student tried to kill himself at Juju's school yesterday.  Lord, please let him survive.  Lord, please reach out, hold, and protect all children feeling alone right now.  The shocking speed of social media, 10 minutes, at which I found out over a student's Twitter during 7th period at Como Park, 3 1/2 miles away from Central High School, the same period in which EMTs responded, astounds me.  A girl in the locker room, and another girl outside the lockerroom at her locker, didn't know what happened.  Given another circumstance across town, I could've used Twitter to respond almost as fast as 9-1-1.  Lord have mercy.  So many thoughts stampede.  I pray this child will survive.  I don't think he will, given the uncorroborated rumors.  The impact on school safety, the impact on kids who know crucial things before adults do.  How do we manage it, before it manages us?

++++++++++

Then the update.  A robo-call from Central informed us last night that this student succumbed to suicide.  It was a night of more tears in our house after a day of tears at my cousin's funeral, but tears that reached as far as the dark windows, in our little steel-sided house, tears that didn't seem to storm heaven because heaven wasn't listening.  Heaven, if you're listening, please send some mercy.  Lord have mercy.  Lay down some little blessings for us to see, because God knows, we need it.  Or maybe God doesn't know.

Only the spider knows what's in his web.  Only s/he knows the reverberations of news around its world.  I'm thinking and feeling in circles, Venn diagrams of souls.  One wonders if an angelic Charlotte could reach out from her web and touch the web of this poor family suffering in the gigantic empty space of their child.

Please God, if you're listening at all, or Charlotte?  Reach out and help them.  Extend your loving arms and protect them.  Pull and draw these webs of life and cover them with comfort.

That's all I got.

~30~

Is she coming?

     "Is she coming?" Jean Davis whispered at her special education colleague on her phone cradled against her shoulder, glancing up at the classroom doorway, shushing her high school students for the umpteenth time, and down at her desk, piled high with rolling hills of papers, plastic racks, standing wire files, Woodcock Johnson psychological evaluation easels, wobbly old projector, extension cords, and a desk drawer that wouldn't shut. 

     "She never came," Lori Jensen answered, her students now gone to lunch, her room empty.  "She never came.  I know, right?  This effing dude! she sets us up to be observed, emails out the schedule instead of usual, popping in unannounced, clacking on her high heels and iPad, what she's gonna be looking for, all that realness and relevance, fidelity whatnot, 'scholar' shit.  And she never shows!  She's an effing creeper!"

     "Well, she never taught a day in her life.  What do you expect?"

     The "creeper" administrator from downtown had put in a year as speech therapist for Holy Angels Catholic High School in Minneapolis and was then hired as an intern administrator in Saint Paul, and promptly enrolled in a Phd. administrator program where her dissertation would study the disproportionate representation of black boys in special education.  She was partly credited, two years before, for the policy that violated student rights by injecting every kid with disabilities, no matter his or her reading level, into regular education English classes.  The mandate took kids whose individual plans had been written by entire teams of master-degreed psychologists and specialists, some kids reading like kindergartners, some yanked 60% of their day for violent histories, and jammed them together with regular kids, to read Macbeth and write senior papers that would take months to research, regardless of whether they'd sat in a regular education room in seven years.  Meanwhile, the administrator for English learners had done the same thing with kids who could not speak English.

     "She" was still in Mr. O'Shea's class, a room of seven kids, whispering with students about their learning processes, about Mr. O'Shea's expectations, their college plans.  O'Shea's reading lesson ground to a halt as she whispered in front of him, then bobbed like a bee to another sunflower kid, hunkered down, and whispered with that kid, pointing to posters, asking if the kid felt represented.  Mr. O'Shea hadn't chosen his lesson.  His curriculum, spliced into scripts by Pearson Learning, couldn't be altered for "danger of fatal mutation," so he stopped, leaned back against his white board, pushed his bottom lip up over his top, inhaled, held it, and waited for the conferences to end.  He would not exhale for weeks.

     After 35 minutes, "she" cracked a crocodile grin, wiggled her fingers, "Bye-bye, scholars," and dropped her face flat at Mr. O'Shea.  "Make an appointment with me and your principal at your earliest convenience."

     "Excuse me?  Can I ask what the topic would be?"

     "I've read your emails.  I'll let you know."

     He sucked in his breath some more.

     The email hours later explained that he would be meeting to discuss his future at North End High School.  

     He told his colleagues.  

     Jean said to him, "This effing woman."

     "What da fk?" Lori cropped herself, apoplectic.  "F -- What the hell she wanna discuss?"

     Mr. O'Shea didn't know, but he knew he wouldn't sleep till it was over.  He discussed with a union steward, and decided to go into it guarded, but alone.

     After "she" cancelled, the school secretary set another appointment a week later.  He kept holding his breath.

     When he finally walked into the office with venetian blinds, his face ashen as Pompeii, and sat down across from the two women, his principal and district supervisor, he told them the scripted material was 5-6 years over the heads of his readers.  She asked him for data on his "scholars"' progress, "because I'm sure you have the data."

     He said, "I do; it's the START test you told me to give."  He pushed papers toward her, and she waved the sheets away with fingernails.

     "I don't need to see that," she said, "because I'm sure you have other measures."

     "I do, in my gradebook right here on the iPad, but I'm telling you, all the articles and books are too hard for them."

     "Your scholars are making progress.  The data will show that, and they're all going to be successful.

     "Well, they're drowning now," he said.

     "Your scholars are making gains.  I've guaranteed it.  They are all going to succeed.  The question is, are you going to be the one?  Because they will make it in spite of you, or because of you, and the question is, will you be the one who takes them there?"

     O'Shea nibbled on his lips, chose not to say she was nuts, held his breath, and said, "Um, I guess."

     "So good to hear!  So good to hear!"  The two women looked at each other.  His principal smiled but rolled her chair back several inches.  Crocodile cracked a grin with so many teeth, a shore bird could've skittered inside to pick the teeth clean.

     He had cowered, ears flat, like a bad dog on a rug.

     O'Shea drove home with streaming eyes and old Rage Against the Machine ripping out his car speakers.

     The next day, the special education department of 16 members met after school.  They buzzed and laughed till the Crocodile clacked in on high heels.  They would be engaging their whole selves in a fun activity of talk, movement, and realness around the cognitive disabilities room, which had plastic green accordion walls, and built-in risers from its former days housing the school choir.

     She read a poem.

I am from a neighborhood where 
police beat and choke
young people
I'm from a mother who does drugs

I'm from a father I never knew.

     "I just like it," the Crocodile said, "but I can't take the credit.  You-all will get a couple minutes to write your own, and really go deep, go down where you live."

     "Oh my god," O'Shea whispered.

     She handed Post-It notes and markers around the room.  Lori pumped her eyebrows at O'Shea.  "Nice Post-Its.  Better than ours."  

     "Better markers too," he said.

     Once the supervisor had allotted writing time to the roomful of multiple-master-degreed professionals, she smiled beatifically, nodded with fluttering eyelashes from left to right.   

     "Here's the fun part!" she said, swooping arms upward.  "You get to stand up and shake out your arms at your sides.  Come on!  I'll press play on my little phone.  The speaker won't do it justice.  I'll play some dance music, and you get to walk around till I stop the music, you freeze, find a partner, and read your "I Am From" poem to this new person."

     The special education department averted its eyes, no contact.  Most remained seated.

     "Oh come awn!  What's the matter with you all?  Y'all starting to make me wonder.  Get up, everybody.  This worked so well at the elementary school today, it was so cute.  I'm waiting.  You-all making me wonder.  You making me wonder."

     O'Shea pictured hogs stumbling around a greasy red killing floor.

     After her activity, and some dire Powerpoint, when the group resumed talking about a kid whose test records had not yet arrived from Alaska, she waved her fingernails goodbye, flashed her teeth, and off her lap sailed her iPad to the floor with a clunk.  

     "Oh my," she said.  As she lifted it, glass shards remained on the tile.

     Staff looked away, focused on kids, how to tell a mother that her daughter soils herself, any nice way to broach it.  With riveted thoughts on a kid, the group doggedly avoided watching the Crocodile pick up iPad glass.

Teaching James Chance

     "Guys, get your notebooks out," Mr.  O'Shea told his reading class, a group of seven tenth and eleventh graders hovering between kindergarten and second grade proficiency.

     "I got a question for you," James Chance said.  Chance was a rock solidly built senior admitted onto the class list to recapture a failed English credit and place him closer to graduating in June.  He clenched his jaws, smiled through a gold grill affixed to his bottom plate, and slowly opened his three-ring binder with contempt, calibrating his annoyance.  "How you got me failing in study skills class?"

     "We're talking about reading right now; I can talk to you about that at end of class," Mr. O'Shea said.

     "Well I wanna know right now, how you got me failing a fucking study skills class.  Can't nobody fail study skills, but you got me failing it."  With a finger, he slingshot leaves of his notebook briskly from right to left, each making an audible "wisk."

     Mr. O'Shea gently wove through the class, feeling Chance's charge run up between his shoulder blades.  Never mind that in study skills, James refused to do a credit analysis sheet, refused to practice note taking, to do homework logs, or to work on his English or algebra.  He typically put a finger down on a sheet, and scooted it away from him, calling it "fucking stupid."

     O'Shea, faced with sophomore and junior boys cackling in awe of James, tried to direct the class to use time to make up work on an outside book assignment, while James volleyed again.

     His shoulders bounced, and he chuckled, "That is fucking slow."

     "Look James, what do you do in skills class?"

     "Listen to my music."

     "You got that right.  You don't do homework logs.  They take you one minute out of 45 minutes.  You don't do your algebra."

     "I ain't doing shit.  You acting fucking slow."

     Mr. O'Shea turned and squared up with James.  "I don't appreciate your language, or you calling me 'slow.'"

     "I didn't say you slow.  I said you acting fucking slow."

     "Really?  You talk to your mom like that?"

     "If she need to be, I'll tell her she slow."

     "Wow," Mr. O'Shea said, shaking his head, trying to get the younger boys in the class to stifle their gratitude for James' mighty takedown.  James said he needed to take a break, Mr. O'Shea told him yes, he did need to take a break, and James gathered up and headed out without a referral slip or Mr. O'Shea's phone call to administration.  Because the unfolding of this incident featured no breakdown, no snapping point, no ejection, but continued negotiability, and because level one defiance is now handled in-class alone by teachers, and hallways are a moonscape for staff but a funzone for kids, Mr. O'Shea pondered for a hot second.  He could try the duplicate paper referral form for behavior enabling specialists.  He could try the announced but dropped online form, he could ignore everything and keep teaching, he could call home and enlist the parent's support, and he could look ahead to the next day.  What would that bring?

     "Hello, Ms. Chance?"

     "Yes?"

     He told James' mother that he'd been called "fucking slow" five times in class today.

     "Mm-hm," she answered, no judgment in her tone.

     But he added that if she needed it, James would tell her she, too, was "fucking slow."

     "What?  Oh, he did?  Thank you.  I'll be speaking with him."  There was such weariness in her voice.

     James is valuable to the class, grown, mature, more intelligent than anyone, he told her, and that all he, Mr. O'Shea cares about, is James making it to June, finishing high school, and launching his career.  But when Mr. O'Shea slid his cell phone softly back in his pocket, he remembered that this boy had spent much of last year locked up for attacking a stranger on the light rail, wherein he'd done a cartwheel and stomped the man's head against a curb, leaving the man in a coma.

     Mr. O'Shea didn't often rattle, but he wondered now, what he'd done.

Ball bearings bumping

     I sat in the back corner of a 200-or-so union meeting up by the Mt. Airy projects tonight, back by the railroad tracks, all of us crammed oysters and sardines onto metal chairs, wearing unforgivingly rough, cotton red solidarity shirts (what are they made of:  burlap?), and it felt weird to be a participant instead of my typical observer.  To remove your coat, your elbow would take out six or seven innocents.  

     My ball bearings of unity rattle and scrape so noisily.  It's weird to sit among the faithful who can apparently find the proper graphite to lubricate the ball bearings in their mindsets of unity.

     I roll, I ask questions, I grope for commonality.  I asked my neighbor, "What do we want out of all this?"  She said, "What do you mean?"  I said, "What's our end goal in negotiations that will keep us from striking?"  She said, "Well, if they meet our demands."  I stopped because the top of the list includes colliding abstractions such as improving building safety and reducing inequities which don't sound conflicting, but the push on equity is to press every teacher to accept his/her white supremacy, and few teachers want to denigrate themselves any further as racists... while they watch chairs and blood go flying.  These are untenable priorities.

     I remember, with every machine, sprocket, or wheel I've disassembled to examine its faulty bearings, I've been told, "Don't pop the balls out; you'll never get them back in."  I've never been able to make ball bearing repairs.  I'm bad at small talk and group-think.  I used to watch my Great Uncle Ted, (d.1975?) talk with other adults, and he seemed herky-jerky at small talk.  He would claim he understood his partner's perspective, but he didn't.  Nope.  I watched him.

     The fucking life of a misanthrope.  I don't know how to be the good guy.  The good guy lays down his misgivings and pulls his shit together.  He closes ranks around his sisters and brothers, and shuts up.

     I don't know how to be the good guy in the struggle.  I will try, and try some more.  But there's either something wrong with me, or in my union fighting for safety while demanding supplication to the Kool-Aid, "I'm white, so I'm a white supremacist."

     The wheels turn just fine, but you can hear that one ball bearing scraping around.  It's just getting by the tight spots.

Salt in my eyes

It's nothing, it's nothing.

What are you talking about?

I just yawned.

Nothing, nothing.

Got salt in my eyes.

Wind in my face.

Dust in my nose.

Tickles.

Nothing.

There any Kleenex?

Let me just-- I'll be back.

This salt.

I ain't crying.

Oh my gosh.

It's allergies.

Yes, in January.

New Year's Day Manifesto While Peeling Potatoes

     This just kept brewing and bubbling in my head as I peeled potatoes today for tonight's meal. 

     I want to preface by saying that I don't fully understand or appreciate that we have a business end and a political end to our union, and so, much of what I say is probably ill-informed, taking the leadership to task for functions that aren't their purview, but I ask, "Why aren't they?"  Why are they knee deep in political work that doesn't help the classroom?

     I've always admired the strength and grace of crew members on their long racing shell-kayak-thingies, their coordination and incredible teamwork, all their oars dipping water and rising in unison as they fly by. 

     They can only get it done together, I imagine, and anyone off-sync drags down the whole team, so I wonder why WE as a teaching membership, and our union, are so out of sync with each other. 

     This picture pops before my eyes as we're discombobulated, eyes off the ball, not working to crush unfair employment practices, to stop administrative bullying and threatening tactics, dictatorial and stupid initiatives that disregard staff buy-in, staff input, and strip out morale.  

     We're not nearly as afraid of kids as we are of our administration located at 360 Colborne St.  I've had two kids on my caseload PPC'd (transferred) to me for bringing pellet guns to school, and although a high powered pellet can embed itself under an inch of flesh, I was never really afraid of them.  

     Countless more staff are beaten down by 360 than by any 16-year-old slamming our heads against tables (Central situation).  When our sisters and brothers think about quitting from administrative torment, we wonder if our altruistic reps are representing us.  Are our reps repping us?

     This crew team image pops into my head constantly when I see social media flouted by our representatives for political agendas.  Our students are encouraged by our tech department to use social media too, and students use it wildly to promote beat-downs, to sell drugs, even brag about whoring trains (paid sex lineups) going on in buildings.  Classroom management has spun crazily out of control.  I don't understand the flogging of political work supporting Black Lives, voting rights, teaming with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, challenging banks' unfair lending practices, all very admirable work, but it takes our eyes off the ball about teachers.  

     Teachers.

     The Saint Paul Federation of -- what?  Of who?

     This image occurs to me when our representatives work to win political battles that do nothing to serve staff needs.  

     I acknowledge there are injustices to overturn, for instance that it's true and good to help convicted felons, who have served their sentences, to regain their right to vote, but explain how that good work enables us to bargain at the table with the school district. 

     I picture Keystone Cops all running around banging into each other. 

     So how can we keep supporting this myriad of political initiatives?  Is there some sort of reputation being built that serves the union but doesn't serve us? 

     What is our real labor work, and why aren't we laser focused, Death Star focused, at supporting teachers?  Working to stop banks' unfair lending practices doesn't do a damn thing to restore justice in our hallways, or discourage a kid from bringing his pellet gun to school, or using his iPad to promote a beatdown. 

     I don't know about you, but I'm concerned and concerned and concerned.  We've got REAL BATTLES to fight, and they're in our hallways; they're not out at a Black Lives Matter rally at the Mall of America.