In 1992, diploma fresh in hand, I packed my car and drove from California to Mississippi to take my first job as a high school English teacher. I joined a wave of young idealists who believed we could renew American society through progressive public education via programs such as Teacher for America or the Mississippi Teacher Corps.
Or so I came to understand. Typically, my draw was more mythic or romantic. Faulkner and history pulled me south where I was seeking some elusive understanding of our true national identity. I landed at Ole Miss among teaching cadets with varied backgrounds and goals. Some were Southerners, black and white graduates of Mississippi state colleges and universities making lifelong commitments to teaching careers; others were arriving from the Peace Corps, Ivy League colleges, etc. filled with the fervor of reform and racial justice. Like everyone else, I wanted to change the world through teaching; I just wasn't immediately sure yet of my place or how. (First I had to survive.)
Over my three years teaching in Mississippi with mentorship from Stanford historian of education David Tyack and political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, I gained context. In our young faith in public school reform as a lever to transform society, we were participating a long and very American tradition on the progressive flank of the battle for societal reform; to our right, corporate school reformers (led at the time by the first President Bush) aimed to privatize public education. Whatever one's agenda or vision, our shared faith that changing schools would change society united us as Americans, even as our differences frustrated effective change.
As Professor Tyack lays out in Tinkering Toward Utopia (with Larry Cuban, Harvard Press), reforms of the last century mostly revert to the durable "grammar of schooling" we recognize as "real school" – graded classrooms, divided disciplines, single-teacher led classrooms, etc. Held in interlocking economic and political structures, college entrance requirements, and cultural expectations, schools have a way of resisting willful re-design. Stagnation serves an underlying logic that eventually makes reformers moderate or leave the field, as I did.
Twenty-five years (gulp) after leaving the public school classroom, however, I went back. I took a long-term sub position at a Vermont high school this January (2020). I was beginning to question the reasons I left and whether I'd made a mistake. I wanted to catch up with the field, dip a toe, see if my older, more moderate self could fit back in. Long-term, I was forming a vision of getting re-credentialed and teaching abroad again or back in Mississippi, maybe after the kids go to college.
I found the "grammar of schooling" predictably, if disappointingly, in tact, easing my re-entry. I was assigned first period tenth-grade English, a full-circle return to my first job. I gave writing and reading assignments. We had posters on the wall. Class discussions and poetry recitations, etc. In this middle-class, mostly white rural community, racial and cultural diversity were more theoretical than lived. Class differences were apparent, but behavior wasn't a challenge. This teaching wasn't going to change the world, but I was satisfied trying to serve the status quo as a substitute for another teacher's curriculum. I was here to learn and catch up for now. I enjoyed the chance to share a frame of reference with our oldest son, now a freshman at a neighboring high school. It was all manageable, predictable, and so extremely normal.
Until March 13.
The governor's order to shut down all schools came so quickly, I never returned to the classroom. I was running a fever the last day the kids attended to gather their books, so I taught remotely from the class TV, directing our last in-person reading of Romeo & Juliet from the wall like Big Brother (fittingly, as one of the book groups was also reading 1984 at the time). As I heard the bell ring through my laptop speakers, I waved goodbye to my students, their images glitching as they slung their backpacks, checked phones, and disappeared from view, my ground control going off duty.
In an instant, we were thrust into outer space. School without gravity. Tables and chairs drifting away. Pencils and chalk floating like so many pieces of space dust. Time itself, as theorized, became relative. "Sychronous" or "assynchronous" instruction? That was the question. My first instinct was to tether. Our social bonds must hold us, a web through the Web, friendships and book groups and text chains, whatever it took. Our temporal bonds too, through daily poems and morning messages reminding students of today's date, routine group and individual meetings. "Remote," "virtual," "live" instruction ~ a rich time to explore the force of language to shape reality and reality to re-shape language. Our microcosm mirrored millions of other teachers and students adapting new methods, "meeting" via Google, sharing screens, peering into each other's bedrooms, questioning the old curriculum's relevance to the new world that will emerge on the other side of the pandemic.
May 31. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth a white police officer put his knee to Mr. George Floyd's neck, taking his life in 8 minutes and 43 seconds. Already the virus was disproportionately killing black and brown people through the compounded factors of class and secondary health risks. Broadband was revealed as the new railroad tracks dividing school children. It's all too much. Protests broke out in the streets, despite the risks. Until black lives matter, none do.
How to teach to this moment? More to the point, how to learn from it? Do we have the luxury of tinkering toward utopia? Or is that crashing we hear daily the sound of our civilization collapsing?
Amidst the wrenching pain, I feel moments of relief. Finally the underlying logic serving stagnation is laid bare. Public schools have limped along, holding together the order and rebuffing change, because they serve the status quo. Individual's efforts, leading to individual successes but inevitably to individual exhaustion, were doomed to fail. The enduring "grammar" of schooling serving the order of race and class hierarchies would always be stronger. Those who benefit from it most will keep in place, whatever their rhetoric.
But the pandemic is cracking that order, from the college admissions game down to the subterraneous footings of our economy. I never imagined I'd live to see seismic shifts of this magnitude. Do we live to work or work to live? What is the value of human life? How do we teach toward a meaningful and sustainable existence on this planet for all living beings?
I won't return to the formal "classroom" (virtual or physical) in the fall. I don't know what I will do next. I don't know what kind of education will matter most for my own children, much less this entire generation, when the future of our country and the planet now seem impossible to predict. The storyteller in me doesn't know what story to seek, to tell, what's true. I don't know whether anything I think matters, like this post for starters (though I hear Rabbi Finley – "everything matters" – and keep trying). I don't even know how to wrap up this post.
So for now, I will remind myself that learning begins at the edge of the unknown and go join the boys to explore this day.
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