I’ve sat in this mental place mulling the choice. It came across my Facebook feed in an almost clandestine way:
NC teachers are planning a walk-out on May 16, the first day of the new legislative session.
The day of my students’ AP Language exam. In the past, this simply means a day where my students would be off-campus at CPCC and I would have a couple of free periods to catch-up on grading Grad Papers. But last year, the planets shifted and we began testing in the Penthouse Suite of the new LA, which means…at times…I’m floating to other classrooms. But more importantly, it offered me the opportunity to see my students before they tested. To look them in the eye. To wish them good luck. To give them a high five, fist bump, sharpened pencil. To shepherd the straggler back to the fold. After a year in which they have patiently endured my teaching, it is, to be blunt, a rewarding personal interaction: a culmination of a year’s work.
So, I hesitated to buy in, hesitated to join the political fight that had been brewing since the recession, since Gorman slashed CMS. My students were prepared for the test or not by this point, but I wanted to look them in the eye once more, to show them that I was there for them, one last time, in their corner.
But the pull of the political moment spoke to me. I reflected on the year of work together. Teaching isn’t just putting texts in front of your students, mindless exercises of reading comprehension. Words have meaning, we argue, and our actions are judged against these words by teens with a keen nose for hypocrisy. In a class where we often dig deep into questions of morality, education, and the good life, I had to wonder how my students would interpret my choice. It kept leading me back to one basic question.
What Would Thoreau Do?
In American Lit, Thoreau is my jam, and all my kids know it. I regale them with how I wooed my now-wife by road tripping to the promised land on a small pond. More than any author, the Concord Curmudgeon divided the classroom into rancorous dissent. I vigorously taught “Civil Disobedience this year: many got on board with my devotion, but just as many critiqued him as meaningless, overly-idealistic, and a victim of his own piety. Nevertheless if we are going to evaluate the value of an American political protest, there is really no better place to start than the words penned by Thoreau almost two centuries ago.
First, it should be noted, that Thoreau reviled the idea that he have ever had the obligation to petition the government to make his life better. A forerunner of minimalists worldwide, Thoreau strove to live so simply as to have the freedom to thumb his nose at politicians with impunity. Even as he excoriated the government for allowing his taxes to support slavery and a questionable war in Mexico, his solution was to withdraw from the government, not to petition its redress, hoping that by his example, others would do likewise, forcing the government to come around to his principled point of view by means of starving the beast. Though Thoreau often employed himself as an educator, whoring out his labor to the government, relying on its bureaucracy and absurdity for his bread and beans would be about as anti-Walden as you could get.
By this reading, the idea of driving to the state capital to agitate the legislature to give me a raise and improve my working conditions and—most importantly—improve the educational conditions of my students, would seem the absolute antithesis of self-reliant living. He says, “If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.” It would seem the most Thoreau-ean thing to do would be resign my post, hoping the “genius of my logic” would inspire my peers and students to do likewise until the government capitulates.
Perhaps I’m not that free yet. Unlike Thoreau, I’m not free of obligations. No public educator is. My wife and I talk about how even one day disrupts our tightly planned syllabi. My colleagues and I debated whether it was acceptable to sacrifice instructional time. We justify our importance by our obligations, to our families, to the families of our students, to the students themselves. Being a teacher, my by nature, puts me in an entangled web of obligations, some that motivate me to speak up, others that motivate me to keep my nose to the grindstone and keep working in relative obscurity.
And of course, there were the kids who I had supported all year long, waiting for that last word of encouragement, an obligation I vacate by not showing up to school.
But on this I returned to Thoreau, and his indictment to the political class and the majority of his peers. Politicians, he claims, are cowardly in their inability to make strong stances and advance society. Like the Sophists of ancient Greece, they take stands only when they are politically expedient. Doing nothing but the status quo, or—even worse—succumbing to the political corruption of large-money interest in politics, becomes easy if the population does nothing but gripe to their friends, never taking any action to let the politician know where they stand. While he finds the politician contemptable, he saves his ire for his neighbors, who talk a good game but do little to support that opinion. “What good is it to have an opinion and possess it merely?”
Throughout the last 10 years since the recession hit, we have grumbled and griped about the condition of education. Once, in a fit of anger, I even penned a letter to the editor of the local paper. It got me some pats on the back, but changed little. It was a scary time to be a teacher as all schools were instructed to shed positions. The experienced double-dippers, the young and promising, the contentious rabble-rousers were all trimmed. The economy was tanking, we were worried about our jobs, we soldiered on doing more and more with less and less, grumbling to each other as the class sizes rose, the testing cabal grew, the incentives for young intelligent people to join the profession dwindled, the transfer of public funds to private interests slowly stole money from the public schools.
Thoreau’s biggest gripe with his neighbors was that they would bluster all day—“see that the government should try to send me to Mexico”—and yet would resist the easy actions to let the government know where they stood. He argued that one man standing in his convictions was a revolutionary act, one that could potentially spur others and start a revolution. We are at a point where the political time is turning, and perhaps the zeitgeist for recovering those losses—for ourselves, our students, and our society—is upon us. Certainly, there is no time like the present, as teachers, principals, superintendents, and even some legislatures are observing strikes across the country, beginning to speak with a unified voice, showing solidarity for change, for putting muscle to our message, for making our politicians prove that their fawning over educators is more than just lip service, that their degradation of public educators—the very people of the front line of the future of our society, the people they want to arm, they people they claim will make the most difference—is unjust and counterproductive to a harmonious and healthy society.
As for my AP students, we are fortunate. Unlike some systems that threatened to punish their teachers, whose politicians called them “thugs” for their fight, our system and school worked together to re-prioritize and accommodate. It’s amazing what we do. So, I get the privilege to look my students in the eye next Wednesday as they take the test they’ve worked so hard for. Hopefully when they do, they’ll know that they are more than a number, that my effort for them had weight beyond a test score, that my words were more than an empty reading exercise, that I have shown them in a crucial time for potential change how to build “action from principle”, a simple act Thoreau deemed “revolutionary” and capable of “changing things and relations.” It is a small act, but one if we all take is the mover of mountains, a small but important step in building a better society.
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