Sunshine and Other Elusive Things

Today is a beautiful day.

 

I didn’t know that, of course, until 3:30, because my work space is a cinderblock square with no windows, located in the middle of a cinderblock hallway.  Sounds like a prison, yes?

I only knew that the sun was shining and the weather was warm after hearing it from other people who had ventured outside.  So my students and I decided to explore a surprisingly nice February day in the Midwest by going outside to have class.  What we discovered (which is something I already knew, but tend to overlook) is that our outside perimeter has no place to sit and commune or read or discuss.  We all sat on a concrete sidewalk by a parking lot in the back of the school.  There are no benches.  No seats of any kind.  Don’t get me wrong, the experience was far better than being totally Vitamin D deficient, but having ANY sort of semi-comfortable gathering place outside would be a bonus. 

We could have gone to the front of the building, where there are a handful of concrete benches, but there’s no quiet out front – just cars and noise and surveillance cameras.

Even INSIDE, the school provides no place for people to find solace.  The library has comfy chairs, but the comfort ends there.  The benches at the ends of the hallways are made of hefty metal mesh.  The benches in the commons area of the school are all concrete.  Repose is elusive there.  It’s as if the school is saying, “here’s a place to sit, but we don’t want anyone to get too relaxed, so here’s some concrete”.   

Oh, and there is no teacher’s lounge or even department commons – those rooms look and feel (and smell) just like the rest of the building:  industrial.

My old school had a senior lounge.  And a junior lounge.  And an outdoor amphitheater for things like reading Shakespeare out loud, in the sun, to recreate a literary and personal vibe. 

Since when did public schools become part of the prison industrial complex?  No wonder the kids just want out all the time.  We should let the kids OUT, not lock them in.  We should encourage high school students to graduate early, if they have all their credits.  We should encourage kids to schedule a late start or an early release, so they can get a job or get more rest or go for a run or just LIVE THEIR LIVES outside of an antiquated zone of containment.  How else can we expect them to function as proper adults once they graduate?  Yes, some kids need the whole eight hours, five days a week – but not all kids need that. 

High school students dislike regimented school for a reason:  they are being treated like cattle.  They are just learning to cheat (or “use all their resources” as they like to tell me), because they don’t have time on a daily basis to do homework for seven or eight different classes every day.  When students have found an app on which they can simply hold their phones over a math problem, and the app does all the work for them (steps included), they aren’t learning anything!  (Well, to be fair, they’re learning how to differently navigate the operational systems of their phones.)  I’m just saying that people of ALL ages need time to just breathe in the air and figure out who they are, independent of a million rules, all designed to regulate their behavior. 

Try to remember being 16 or 17 or 18 years old, and acknowledge that high school students are among those “huddled masses, yearning to be free”.

For Robin

I’ve been lost.  Cyberspace and whatnot.  My brain is too busy with superficial nonsense to properly write.  No one really cares if I’m absent or not, but Robin does. 

My problem with writing is that there are roughly a million thoughts running through my head at any given time, and committing them to written words is difficult.  There are many, many things on my brain right now, so I’ll just puke some of them out:

1.      Has the news media been taken over by The Onion, or am I crazy?  (It’s quite possible that I’m crazy, so don’t worry about judging…)  America has turned into one of the dystopian novels everyone is forced to read in high school!  America 2018 is social satire, but for REAL!  What in the bloody fuck is this president (lower case p) of the United States of America?  Did people actually go to a voting booth and check the box by this dumbass’s name?  He is quite literally the worst person at the wrong time and in the wrong place to make America great again.  What a childish moron.  I understand that descending into personal attacks is the argument of one who’s losing, but … AMERICA IS LOSING RIGHT NOW.  We are regressing, Retrogressing, actually.  I truly believe that DJ Trump is a Stalin-esque psychopath. 

a.       P.S. Donald, if you were in Russia, you’d be in a Siberian prison camp (and don’t think your butt-buddy Vlad wouldn’t put you there in a heartbeat).

b.       And if you were in North Korea, they’d put your entire family in a camp (not that you seem to care about any of them).

c.       Oh, and Melania?  I feel you, girl.  Get the fuck out of dodge while you can.

2     Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  Florida.  Unbelievable.

a.       ANOTHER school shooting.  As a high school teacher (for 20 years), and a parent (for 26), I can say with personal experience that school shootings are a fucking travesty.  I remember watching Columbine on TV.  I remember watching the raw footage from the school cameras, and the kids filing out with their hands up.  I remember watching that poor kid trying to climb through a broken library window (after he’d already been shot) and basically throwing himself onto the police and firemen below him, while he was essentially bleeding out.  He knew what was up.  He had probably just heard those other two fucking murderers shoot each other over in the library book stacks.  He wanted the fuck out of there.  Immediately. 

b.       Carnage.

                                                               i.      Oh, but two decades later, how many school shootings have happened?  As of today, since January 1^st, 2018, there have been 18 school shootings.  2,281 people have been killed by guns since the beginning of 2018.  And America does (essentially) NOTHING about it.  We talk about stupid shit and then do nothing.   17 more human beings murdered, while they were trying to go to school.  Gunned down in cold blood by a boy who needed help that just isn’t available to people like him.  Not in America.  Give him a gun, right, but don’t him any access to mental health.  In America, you have to fucking murder people before someone pays attention.  How fucking sad.  How embarrassing. 

1.       Until … Emma Gonzales opens her beautiful mouth.  Bless you, baby girl.  Maybe you’ll be a catalyst. 

c.       Carnage, Part 2.

                                                               i.      As a society, we should be surprised that there aren’t MORE school shootings in America.  We force these kids to attend school for 8 hours a day, surrounded by other hormonal human beings, and make them ask permission to use the restroom, and suspend them for not attending school (an obvious irony).  What. The. Fuck.  (And then add on athletics, and clubs, and band, and activities … some teenagers are strung out.)

1.       (And then some of them are totally alone.)

                                                             ii.      Every day I see a school shooting “situation”, even though no one has a gun.  Everyone in the building wants out, all the time.  My school is built like a prison.  I have no window.  I have no idea what’s going on outside of the four walls of my classroom.  But, if (god forbid) a school shooting happens in my building, I will absolutely, 100% of the time, open the door for a student who is trapped in the hallway.  If I get shot, well, I get shot.  I don’t go to work because it’s a job – I’m trying to mentor the next generation of human beings.

d.       So  … let’s stop shooting other people right now, okay? 

                                                               i.      And let’s take a minute for the brave, young, sad, broken souls who are newly engaged in the political process for the first time right now, even though they aren’t even old enough to vote. 

3.       Last, but not least:  Mother Russia.  Yes, that makes me sound like a communist , but Russia has a coherency that America will never have.  They are being taken as fools by an oligarch, and everyday Russians suffer every single day.  They are not better off than Americans; they are simply better trained to suffer. 

a.       We are America.  There is no need to suffer.  As a country, as human beings, let’s get our shit together.  Let’s help people who suffer from mental illness.  Let’s get the guns out of everyone’s dirty hands.  Let’s have some common sense about the reality of teenagers being able to walk into schools and kill whomever they want in a short period of time.  Let’s not make school teachers shoulder the burden of being teachers, police officers, counselors, social workers, substitute parents, and subsidiary circus acts who are trying to teach a life subject area.  As a teacher, I’m tired.  I love my students, but I have come to mistrust the very foundation of my government job. 

b.       Our children, our teenagers, need us. 

Let’s remember that these little motherfuckers are going to take care of us when we are older, so let’s show them some respect.  Let’s just SHOW them how to be better, rather than demanding untaught skills from our students, our children, their friends, and the entire next generation.  Don’t tune out.