The Fall is Going to Be Ugly for Teachers (and Uglier for Low-Income Families)

Thanks to the plague and remote learning, teachers are more online than ever. Many of us are open that we’re figuring it out in real-time. I think this public reflectiveness is a strength of our profession. There’s no Teachers Going Gradeless or EduColor Movement equivalent in nursing. It may happen but I don’t see #ArchitectTwitter arguing about the merits of natural light or #DentistTwitter debating filling materials. 

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve reflected on my voice as a teacher, especially now that I am abroad. I've been thinking, online and off, about how the outbreak impacts my former students in the US. I spent a decade at Lincoln, own a home in the neighborhood, and I intend to eventually return to the community. My passion for the Lincoln Family hasn’t diminished with distance. A recent highlight of my quarantine was jumping on a Zoom call and surprising 30 graduating seniors who I taught in ninth grade and would have been back in my class this year. It felt like reconnecting with family. We discussed their college decision making, my life overseas, and the uncertain fall ahead. 

This fall teacher-community relations are going to be messy. Some of the strongest pushback I ever received on teacher Twitter oddly was when I suggested that publicly counting down the days until breaks was a bad look.

That tweet popped into my head this week while chatting about August and September. Parents are already tired of their kids. The additional $600 per week of unemployment benefit sunsets August 1. As “the economy opens up” [sic] I foresee exasperated parents. If schools don’t re-open, I expect to hear “I have to go back to work, why don’t they?” If schools do re-open, I expect to hear teachers who have concerns about returning to work called “selfish” or “lazy.” I expect budget cuts by state legislatures and layoffs by districts. I expect the raggedy talk show host in your local market—in Seattle/Tacoma it’s Dori Monson—to go on and on about “greed” and “they already had summer off” and the like. I expect to see the President of the United States weaponize all of this to attack teachers and their unions. I expect to see a second wave of the virus.

 All of this is out of our hands, but we need to gird ourselves and at the same time be circumspect about what we communicate to the public about our work. There’s a transitive property to most teacher advocacy: things that are good for teachers are good for schools and things that are good for schools are good for students. While this is true (90% of the time), I expect to see struggling communities understandably switch into “I ain’t tryna hear that” mode. This is a time for student-centric language and advocacy. Instead of “I don’t feel safe returning to work” we need to talk about why throwing the doors open to an 1800+ student high school is likely unsafe for students. Instead of ranting about the shortcomings of online learning platforms, we need to talk publicly about how those problems impact our most vulnerable students.

 Maybe you’re smarter than me and have already sorted all of this. Maybe I needed to hear this myself. But while 1000 Americans per day are dying from a pandemic, our communiques should be reflective of the immediate struggles of our students. My choice is to focus on what’s best for my most vulnerable students and their families, both here and back home. This is a hard time for us, but it is likely even harder for many of the students we teach.

A Shanghai Travelogue: On the Merits of Dumplings, Debate, and Democracy

I have history with Zhōngguó, the Middle Kingdom, enough so that when word got out last winter we were departing the states, many people assumed we were China-bound. In 2018, we hosted two Chinese exchange students: Bob and Wong. I got a dose of being a dad for a moment; it cemented for me that I’m not cut out for parenthood. In the summers of 2014 and 2015, on the invitation from a visiting professor, we went to Chengdu in Sichuan Province to teach Chinese students in a summer program. I taught a blend of US history, American college culture and knowledge, and some theater. Each time before we began our teaching, we flew into a different city and traveled overland for three weeks. We spent time in Beijing, Xi’an, Hong Kong, and Macau. 

After our second trip to China in 2015, my school hosted a visit from President Xi and I hosted him for a lecture in my Government class. He spoke to my students via a translator -- it was surreal. If you think an urban high school is a stressful place, toss a phalanx of armed Chinese and US Secret Service into the mix. I’ve opined on that experience previously, but I continue to be struck by a line in his talk: “If you want to time travel, go to China. Go to Xi’an and see the Terracotta Warriors to understand the world 1000 years ago. If you want to go 500 years in the past, go to Beijing and see the Dragon Throne and the Forbidden City. But if you want to see the future, go to Shanghai.” 

Last week I took up his offer and made my third trip to China. As chaperones, I and a colleague accompanied a travel team of thirteen students from our school’s Model United Nations Program to Concordia International School for their Model UN conference, heretofore, CISSMUN. For the unfamiliar, Model UN is the international school equivalent of US high school debate. Over three days students… rather delegates... researched and wrote resolutions on various topics that they presented to committees to be debated, amended, and voted up or down. At this conference, there were committees on human rights (HRC), world criminal justice (ICJ), global health (WHO), economic and social matters (ECOSOC), and disarmament. Students took on roles representing various states. The conference had over 1000 delegates, from over 75 schools all over African, Asia, and Oceania. It’s a fascinating environment, an ocean of pant-suits and blazers. It felt like the NFL combine for aspiring lawyers, diplomats, and NGO workers.

CISSMUN was hosted by Concordia, a Christian K-12 international school, in an expat enclave in the city. We took an overnight flight from Abu Dhabi and landed in Shanghai at ten am. Y’all, Downtown Shanghai is Blade Runner. At CISSMUN, students did homestays with local families (awesome), so I was relieved of the usual hotel bed checks in the evening (more awesome). In my off-time, I checked all the usual Nate boxes: small talk about politics, knife-cut noodles, beef noodle soup, Shanghai dumplings (xiaolongbao), and several wanders through unfamiliar neighborhoods while listening to podcasts.

I was struck by the nature of my students’ task and how they rose to the occasion; Model UN is an amazing way for students to learn about the world. Writing resolutions requires regional specific knowledge, an understanding of recent history and international law, and the ability to present your findings in an organized, compelling manner. I had several students in my delegation who are veterans of MUN, including several who chaired sessions and were main submitters of resolutions. I think it is such a smart way of preparing students for life in an increasingly complicated world. 

I especially appreciate the skill-set they are developing when contrasted to the HS debate experience. No shade or smoke to debate coaches out there, but Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson are champion debaters. In a debate, students are often competing, rather than cooperating and sophistry is rewarded because a person willing to lie or make stuff up has an innate advantage over a person making evidence-based arguments. In Model UN, students all have a laptop in front of them. They fact-check each other in real-time and will pounce on non-sense and resolutions lacking evidence. On day two I watched a student from Hong Kong, with an Australian accent, representing Argentina, demand specificity on a human trafficking resolution, while sipping a juice box -- like a boss.

China’s human rights record is notably complicated (and the fact my student from Pakistan was unable to obtain a visa was a frustration to me). But on this trip, I heard Chinese students talk about the importance of tolerance, defend religious freedom, and call for protection of human rights. They overtly addressed their country’s domestic politics. Like my American students and my students in the Emirates, they want to build a more just and equitable future for their states. I can mess with that.

Rethinking Social Studies for an Uncertain (Likely Dystopian) Future

With depressing regularity, since the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, I've felt a tug to blow-up large chunks of planned lessons¹ because of a morning indictment, Congressional hearing, or some norm-shattering tweet. On the days that I do, I set a timer for ten to fifteen minutes and we talk through the scandal du jour. In these moments, my students are always more engaged. They ask incredibly thoughtful questions and then groan loudly when my timer goes off to end our conversations. 

Each time I say to myself, this is how school is supposed to feel. 

No one asked me, but I believe that in teaching, particularly in Social Studies, we're overdue for a revolution in the skills and dispositions we seek to endow students with. I support the Common Core State Standards and C3 Framework, but you can drive a Kenworth Truck through the gaps they have and replicate in students' collective understanding. Standards are important, but standards are also why nearly every US 11th grader can explain the broad contours of the Industrial Revolution, but they're largely oblivious to the role of labor movements and government regulators in taming its greatest excesses. I think it's worth questioning aloud whether the current skills front and center in most Social Studies classrooms -- reading and note-taking, summarizing, answering multiple guess and short-responses -- will meet students' needs in an uncertain near-future. For the record, I believe the answer is "the hardest of nos."

I've opined previously about my leveraging of controversial police shootings and the lack of meaningful law enforcement oversight to engage students about civil liberties in my Government class. My classroom practice is imperfect, but I enjoy learning and thinking aloud. With that, here are some avenues I intend on pursuing this school year, an instructional to-do list:

Do a better job teaching media literacy. If I ever write a book, there will be a profanity-laced chapter detailing my experience visiting Istanbul last week, during the flare-up between the Turkish Military and the Kurds. Seeing events unfold first-hand was my 2,000th recent reminder that we have to do better with teaching students about navigating media.

Here's a recent example, below are two widely used graphics about media sources. One is imperfect, the other is arguably educational malpractice. If students are emerging from our classrooms believing that Vox and Breitbart are just "presenting opposing viewpoints" or worse "equally reliable," we're doing them a grave disservice in the name of "objectivity" and that's a terribly bad look.

Created by @vlotero, follow them on Twitter and use this

Never, ever let me see you put this in front of students

Emphasize the importance of local activism. Trump isn't why US cities are increasingly unaffordable to live in; he's not why people in Washington State can vote at home in their jammies, while black folks in Georgia stand in line for hours; the President isn't why low-income black and brown students attend increasingly segregated and decreasingly equipped and funded schools. These are outcomes of local governments. But how much time do we spend intentionally teaching about school boards, city councils, and state legislatures? Small groups of organized people, especially young people, can make a meaningful impact on local issues and campaigns. But they don't know that if we don't teach them and show them replicable local examples.

Modernize and contextualize teaching about the mid-twentieth century. The civil rights narrative you likely received in school was something like this: "the US was founded, there was slavery, it was bad. Then Lincoln freed the slaves and they were happy. But the South was still mean, but MLK came along and had a Dream and now we're all equal." Similarly, we essentialize World War II and the Holocaust: "Hitler was bad. He tried to exterminate European Jews, but the US Army won the war and freed them." We owe students better. Students need to understand the history of state repression in the US and the rise of fascism elsewhere. We need to mine recent history for lessons for today: Why was the civil rights movement successful? What are some unresolved civil rights issues? How can we apply our understanding of the civil rights movement to issues facing disabled people and the LGBQT+ population? Similarly with World War II: How did Hitler come to power? What institutional or societal checks failed and allowed his rise? How do we prevent violent authoritarianism in modern times? How can we effectively respond to modern fascist movements in the US and elsewhere?

I could go on². These are the kind of questions students should be grappling with and interrogating in class. 

Let's be real. Teaching Social Studies and living in 2019 is really weird. This historical moment demands more responsive models of teaching where we teach students about our complex world (our assigned task). But we also must teach them how to navigate what will certainly be an uncertain near-future (what they will really need). We're already leaving them with crumbling infrastructure, a warming planet, and mounting national debt. The least we can do is give students the skill-set necessary to navigate the (bleak) future we're leaving them.

--

¹ I currently teach AP Government & Politics (college-level civics) and Global Studies (a survey of history, geography, and economics) at an International School 

² Actually, I did on a recent episode of my podcast

This post originally appeared on the blog of the National Network of the State Teachers of the Year