Back to School Changes

I was messaging this morning with a teacher friend, someone I used to work with who moved on to a different school a while ago. Being that it’s mid-August right now, of course we covered the topic of what we had ahead of us in the coming school year. 

Things change for teachers in some way every year. From one perspective, this can be good, since it keeps the job fresh. Speaking as someone who has reported to the same building on the first day of school for a quarter of a century now, changes can sometimes be a good thing. 

However, when I refer to changes I mean things like maybe being reassigned to a different classroom, or perhaps a new grade or curricular area, or having to adapt to a new schedule. New people join a staff, new policies are put into place. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you show up on that first day to discover that you have a new set of chairs that are the appropriate size for the two oldest grades in the school. 

These days I’m not thinking so much about those kind of changes, the procedural or organizational or cosmetic. Not the resources available to me, both in capital supplies and the collaborative willingness of colleagues. I’m thinking more about how I’m supposed to keep my students engaged, and how I can convince them the things I’m teaching are important, while it can seem on any given day how our society and our world are in the midst of consistently building turmoil.

Last fall, following Election Day, I had a student come in from recess crying hysterically because someone had told her that the newly-elected president wanted to kill all the black people. 

Our president is currently engaged in back-and-forth posturing with the leader of an emerging nuclear power. A nuclear power, for God’s sake.

The travel ban, which first wasn’t called a ban by the administration but then finally the language evolved to a level where they admitted that’s what it is, most likely would have kept the families of some of my students out of the country, if the timing of their lives had been slightly different.

Last night hundreds of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting incendiary language and carrying torches. In the south. Today, when other groups rallied together for a counter protest, violence erupted, someone used a vehicle as a weapon, and lives ended.

People who dare to go online and express beliefs contrary to sexism, racism, homophobia, or any other set of ideals that would see one group marginalized in favor of another, are too often threatened and subjected to personal attacks. 

Now, the kids I teach are of the age where they are more concerned with which NBA or NHL teams are playing on any given night, or when Taylor Swift or Chance the Rapper will release a new song on YouTube, or what the title of the next “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book will be. Consequently they usually don’t show up in the morning looking to debate with their classmates on any of the points made the night before by the guests of The Rachel Maddow Show.

This doesn’t mean they’re ignorant, though. Not all of them. Some of these kids are surprisingly well-informed. Even more of them think they are, but only have a cursory knowledge of what’s happening in the world. These are the kids that seem to have the most questions. 

I’ll be back in front of my classes in less than a month. There are a lot of issues floating through the ether these days, and those kids are going to be grabbing onto pieces of it. It will at least be partially my responsibility to help them understand what’s going on in the world, how it might affect them and the people in their lives, and what they can do about it. 

Of course at the same time I’ll need to make sure they feel comfortable and safe while at school, and all of their basic needs are being met, and, along with that, do my best to help them end the school year with multi-digit division strategies in place and an understanding of why the Order of Operations works the way it does. 

I’m anticipating a lot of changes ahead of me this year. I can only hope I’m up to the challenge.