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.

Casting My Primary Vote in Washington State from Abu Dhabi

As a government teacher, I have spent many a class period explaining the intricacies of the party nomination process and the Electoral College to young people: safe states, swing states, the 23rd amendment (look it up), proportional representation versus winner-take-all, why Iowa & New Hampshire go first (no, there’s no good reason), Super Delegates, contested conventions, etc. This school year, as a government teacher overseas, the number of questions I been asked has grown exponentially. Many of my students are not US citizens and have only a cursory understanding of the US system. Others are citizens, but their parents have worked or been stationed overseas their entire lives. 

One day in class, we had a discussion about the Electoral College and a student asked “why don’t people living abroad get Electoral votes? There’s more of us than there are North or South Dakotans.” The correct answer to my student’s question is that people living abroad are supposed to vote in their home states, under their state’s laws, which vary widely. After explaining that however, it occurred to me that I had no idea how many US citizens lived abroad. So we paused class and did a quick deep dive, (I love moments of spontaneous learning). We learned that according to the State Department, nine million US citizens live abroad. To put than in context, that is more people than the population of any of the states that had a primary before Super Tuesday. If Americans abroad were a state, they’d be the tenth most populace state — slotting in between New Jersey and Michigan. 

We also found out that although folks living abroad don’t get electoral votes, they do host their own primaries and are allocated delegates at the National Conventions.

Fast forward to today: I got a text from my wife asking “Do you want to leave work at 4pm or do your want to go to the library and vote?” Our school is a polling place for the Democrats Abroad Global Primary. As you may know, I have been following the elections back home closely but had not actually cast my ballot yet. I always try to hold on to my ballot, just in case my preferred candidate does something crazy like drop out after Super Tuesday. I am registered to vote in Washington State, but as an American living overseas, I have a choice of voting in my homestate or in the Democrats Abroad Primary where 21 delegates are up for grabs, (but not in both). So we downloaded, printed, filled out, and submitted our ballots to the Pierce County Auditor electronically this afternoon in about 10 minutes and thanked the folks from Democrats Abroad on our way out of school. 

Some timely reminders:

• Ballots in Washington State are due Tuesday. If you reading this back home get your ballot in — we vote by mail — there’s no excuse.

• If you are live abroad and are reading this you also have until Tuesday to cast a ballot in the Global Primary. 

• If you have friends and family living abroad, give them a nudge and make sure they cast a ballot. 

Events in the US are too dire and tumultuous for a group of citizens the size of four West Virginias or sixteen Wyomings to sit on the sidelines.

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.