On Being an Ally

I'm not sure how to say this without being blasted, but I'll try:  I might understand a little piece affecting Rachel Dolezal decision to present as black rather than be a white ally.

I just have one story.  It was about ten years ago.  I had just finished reading The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and was floored by it.  I couldn't believe I had never heard of her before.  The story is compelling, and it's a good length to offer to high school students.  I was curious if anyone else had tried teaching it to that age level, so I searched for forums where it was being discussed.  Then I unwittingly threw myself to the wolves by suggesting that I'd like to teach it in an English or history class.

The others on the forum were black, something I didn't think necessary to consider until they got very angry with me:  how DARE I consider teaching a book about a black experience when I'm white?

It was all kind of familiar because I've been in the middle of discussions about men teaching books about women - is it possible that men can understand the female experience enough to teach it?  Women can teach books about men because the subordinate group always knows about the dominant group.  Canadians know more about the U.S. than the other way around.  But I contend that it IS possible to look at life from an alien perspective.  It can't be done arrogantly, however, but must come from a place of respect and acknowledged ignorance, read charitably.  Like you can't really get Plato without an understanding of what Athens was going through at the time, we sometimes have to do extra research around people's environment and history to really feel their stories and understand the logic of their ideas.

I'm game to do the work, but I was so strongly dissuaded by this one black community, that I tossed the book aside believing I'm not worthy to teach it.

So it went untaught.

It's a double-edged sword.  If women think men shouldn't be teaching women's experiences, then, since most English profs are men, we might not have books by women on the syllabus.  And then we'll complain about that.  And if people of non-white heritage don't think white people can teach their stories, then they won't be taught - not because teachers don't care about those stories, but because they're afraid of doing it wrong.  And of course it's a problem that this part of the world is dominated by white men, and whites in general, but that's what we've got to work with right now.  Having the stories out there, taught by allies is one way to eat away at the system.

I know there are feminists who don't believe men can be feminists, but I'm not one of them.  I think it's important to get dominant voices (male voices) involved in the cause to help us get anywhere.  Similarly I think environmentalists have to approach big businesses as potential allies rather than threats.  I believe in intersectionality; I believe we can't undo the oppression or exploitation of one group without getting at them all.  Sexism, racism, LGBTQ issues, ablism, poverty, environmental destruction - it's all so clearly interconnected.

But, back to Dolezal.  I don't condone what she did at all, and I think she's got bigger issues under the surface there, but the one little piece maybe I do understand is that it can be hard to be an ally of a group you don't belong to.  People don't always trust you to speak for them if you haven't lived their experiences.  But I'm not sure we have time to do it any other way.

OITNB

I read some review somewhere of the first episode of Orange is the New Black on the weekend before I dove into a marathon session of the entire season.  It suggested that the reason people like the show is because it actually shows real relationships between real women.  The context is divorced from most viewer's experiences, but the conversations are similar.  And we rarely see that elsewhere.

No spoilers.

Okay, sure.  It's nice that it's a show about women, for sure, and the dialogue is fantastic - especially between Big Boo and Pennsatucky.  But I don't relate to it because of the conversations and relationships, but because of the individual experiences.  I can relate to the experience of not having my little one with me on Mother's Day, or being trapped with some slime ball "friend" and hoping to find a way out, or watching someone getting away with crap because they're good at playing the system.  Those are universally frustrating and heartbreaking situations.  And the peek into the background of each character individually gives us a three-dimensional understanding of their motives and beliefs and longings - and their development of various coping mechanisms to deal with the world.

But beyond the personal, this season gets into privatization - how it works, how to try to stop it, why we can't win - so well that it could be mandatory viewing for a unit of one of the courses I teach.  And, at the same time, it gets into faith - why we crave it, the need for totems, and communal belonging.  And, as always, it gets into the injustices of the world.  Sometime jerks win, and good guys lose, and vengeance feels good even when it feels a little bad.  And we don't ever know people as much as we think we do.  We just barely know ourselves.

You don't have to be a woman to connect with that.

On Measuring Well

In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates and Protagoras argue over the language Protagoras uses to explain what happens when, as he describes it, pleasure overtakes reason and people make horrible choices.  Socrates insists that it's not pleasure that overtakes reason, but ignorance.  Here's some key bits of the passage:

They maintain that there are many who recognize the best but are unwilling to act on it. It may be open to them, but they do otherwise. Whenever I ask what can be the reason for this, they answer that those who act in this way are overcome by pleasure or pain or some other of the things I mentioned just now...  

He sets out the problem, and questions how something can be a pleasure if it causes greater pains and deprive us of future pleasures *coughclimatechangecough*.  And he explains the problem like this:    

The same magnitudes seem greater to the eye from near at hand than they do from a distance. This is true of thickness and also of number, and sounds of equal loudness seem greater near at hand than at a distance. If now our happiness consisted in doing, I mean in choosing, greater lengths and avoiding smaller, where would lie salvation? In the art of measurement or in the impression made by appearances? Haven't we seen that the appearance leads us astray and throws us into confusion so that in our actions and our choices between great and small we are constantly accepting and rejecting the same things, whereas the metric art would have canceled the effect of the impression, and by revealing the true state of affairs would have caused the soul to live in peace and quiet and abide in the truth, thus saving our life?' Faced with these considerations, would people agree that our salvation would lie in the art of measurement? ... 

What would assure us a good life then? Surely knowledge, and specifically a science of measurement, since the required skill lies in the estimation of excess and defect... 

...when people make a wrong choice of pleasures and pains--that is, of good and evil--the cause of their mistake is lack of knowledge. We can go further, and call it, as you have already agreed, a science of measurement, and you know yourselves that a wrong action which is done without knowledge is done in ignorance. So that is what being mastered by pleasure really is--ignorance...

"The required skill lies in the estimation of excess and defect."

The entire dialogue has Socrates questioning Protagoras, a sophist, if how to act, or virtue, can actually be taught to people.  Socrates is skeptical.  But then he argues that since being virtuous is contingent on knowledge, and knowledge can be taught, then virtue must be able to be taught.

The fact that this very behaviour has been on trial and discussed and debated for thousands of years and still we haven't found a solution makes me skeptical that it's teachable.  Not to mention the fact that people can know right and still do wrong, as Plato outlined in his Republic during a later period of writing, so people need to be made to do what's right under threat of punishment or exile for the benefit of society as a whole.

So we're horrible at measuring current pleasures against distant pains.  But even if we could, we enjoy doing wrong too much for knowledge alone to lead us down the right path.

Lovely.

We've been over this for thousands of years, yet we still value unfettered lives that lead to unspeakable tragedies, which we call evils, over some measure of restraint which could provide some current deprivations but lead to greater pleasures later.  That which we call the good.

So it goes.

Upset Them at Your Peril

I wrote this back in 2014, but waited to retire to publish it.

Professor Edward Schlosser wrote an interesting piece in Vox about, in part, the power his students have to call the shots these days.  I can attest that it's at best, defeating, and at worst, absolutely terrifying.

First of all, to clarify, my students are typically a delight, but the current system is fostering behaviours that are a serious concern.

I have had some students, 15-19, insist that we have to do something fun on their birthdays.  When I rejected their proposals, it might take several days of arguing at the start of each class before I can convince them it's really not going to happen.  I have to help them get their head around the amount of learning that would be lost if we went off-curriculum every time it's someone's birthday.  I have to help them get their head around the fact that there are other people affected by the decisions we make.  But I also have to, unfortunately, sternly reinforce the novel idea that I alone get to choose what we do each day based on the curriculum guidelines.  They don't get to decide because they might choose what's most fun over what's most educational every day.  Some people are outraged by that reality.

I have had a few students blatantly rude to me, even lying about me to a VP.  When that happens, I call home to discuss the seriousness of it.  In the past few years, calling home has become a growing part of my job, even for kids over 18, for work unfinished, for absences, for work of poor quality, for any questionable behaviour.  There's no point when it's up to the students to take responsibility for themselves and find a solution to their own problem any more.  It's all for the parents and teachers to work out together.  We're treating them like children for longer, and they're responding by acting like children longer. Anyway, sometimes when I call home, it's reinforced that the student has a condition that makes them behave like that, and I'm negligent for not reading their files thoroughly (even if I have).

Then my question becomes:  if someone does something horrid, but it's due to a condition, is it still his/her fault?  With whom does the responsibility sit, or do we just accept bad behaviour because people can't help it anymore because of all their conditions?

It's the Of Mice and Men problem.  If someone's out of control, but can't be helped or stopped, what do we do with them?  But beyond that dilemma, to what extent are we creating these conditions so our kids get special treatment, because I'm not sure it's unusual that about a third of the kids in my school have some kind of documented problem we must accommodate.  By law.  This sometimes means test, exams, and even the literacy test is read aloud for them, and someone writes down their answers, and they're considered literate.  A ridiculous number of high school grads can't actually write for themselves anymore.  They don't have to learn how.  They have to be given scribes - their own personal adult to read and write for them.  Learned helplessness anyone?

Tra la la.

Anyway, it might not seem like such a horrid thing, lying about your teacher to admin, but it could cost me my job if the VP believed some of her stories.  That's a huge concern these days.  It can just take one student to undo decades of work in a career.  Just. One. Student.

I have had some students says bigoted or racist things in class and interrupt the class with loud and lengthy rants. It would be rude of me to interrupt (although I sometimes do anyway). If I send someone to the office, they'll come back minutes late with a form for me to fill in explaining what I could do differently to ensure that they're able to stay in the classroom next time.  And they often have a condition causing that behaviour, so we have to be understanding.

And on the student portion of that form, if there's no pre-existing condition, how often do they write "Distracted by personal problems"?  That's the  get-out-of-work-free excuse of the day.  When I was in school we used, "I had a female problem" to death.  What stops us from telling them they have to do the work anyway?  And if the problem is really serious, they might have to write-off the term and try again later.

I have a condition. But I started school in the 60s, and I was told by my mom to try to fit in so the kids don't tease me too much.  I wasn't entirely successful on that front, so I got spit on and beat up a bit.  And I got chalk whipped at my head by teachers for being such a space cadet, zoning out in class like that.  Weird.  Clearly it's NOT the case that I think any of my students deserve that kind of treatment - at all.  But it IS that case that I worked twice as hard in school as the normal kids to overcome my differences because of the attitudes of parents and teachers - and larger society - at the time.  The bullying and violence aren't acceptable, but that attitude might warrant a second look.

I spent a year one-on-one with a guidance counsellor working on basic eye contact with people.  My default is to look at my shoes when I talk - still, but I got much better at making myself lift my chin and look right at people. Whether or not it's comfortable for me to do that is inconsequential.  I was made to take responsibility for how I behave even though it's harder for me to behave "normally," and, because of that pedagogy, I could interact with other people and get my work done as well as most by the end of high-school without ongoing one-on-one support for each assignment.  That kind of support makes sense in the early years, but at some point shouldn't people have to be able to show they can do the work on their own?  I mean, Helen Keller learned how to read and write, and she had a condition or two to overcome.

Now just suggesting, "I think you can write this short quiz on your own in the classroom instead of going to Learning Services," is enough to get a teacher in trouble for not adhering to the student's IEP.  And if they fail the test, we give them a make-up test.  And if they're in the midst of failing the make-up, we might get a call from their scribe because the student doesn't have a clue, and he can't study because he can't find his notes, and he would be uncomfortable asking another student for notes.  And we might even be asked by the scribe if she could just tell the student all the answers, and have him repeat them back to her for her to write down, and then I could take off a few marks because of this special accommodation.  Really.

We're running within a system that drives that kind of rationalization.  If a student fails, it's because the teacher didn't do everything possible for the student.  If students refuse to work or pay attention in class, at no point is it because the students are lazy or maybe even, dare I say, too weak academically to do the work assigned.  Those are horrible things to say even in the face of slothfulness bordering on the absurd, and suggesting either will get the teacher a meeting with admin to discuss inappropriate behaviour in the classroom - the teacher's inappropriate behaviour.

Students today will need to have their behaviours excused forever.  We make accommodations for them rather than get them to learn the skills necessary to better work within society.  They're not being asked to make significant efforts towards monitoring and altering troubling behaviours because that would upset them.  And upsetting people is mean.

This is a startling short-term view - yet another testament to Plato's belief that we are woefully unskilled at the art of measurement: being able to determine the value of things unaffected by their distance.  Near events are given far greater importance than distant events, which is why we have an environmental crisis, a political crisis, and a crisis in education.

I had a conflict with my 10-year-old yesterday because I wouldn't let her see her friends or go outside until her room was clean enough that she could escape from a fire without tripping on toys.  I'll have you know that I am the meanest mom ever!  But I can accept that title because it'll be better for her in the long run to learn how (through punishment of deprivation of all things) to maintain her room now.

My daughter has a whole host of conditions by today's standards, but she still has to clean her room.  Because of OCPD, to name but one, she can't just tidy a bit; she has to take everything out and put it all back in.  I can see why such a routine task is so onerous for her, but she has to figure out how to deal with her own reality.  Being unfettered by chores because she struggles more isn't an option in my house - except, of course, when she completely wears me down.  But, theoretically, if made to clean enough, she might find a way to rid the perfectionistic nature of her cleaning, or she might just tolerate losing lots of playtime to cleaning.  (Yes, we use CBT too.)

We have to take a long view with kids.  And, luckily, my daughter's shrieks of injustice went unheard by any authority over me.  She might have called F&CS, but they're pretty backlogged, so I was able to do the right thing by her.  I had to tolerate some tears and tumults over the course of a morning, but we both survived.  But too many of us are too thin-skinned or sensitive or something to plug our ears and wait for the crying and tantrums and excuses to end and the work to begin.

But at school, we have to keep them happy during each class or the teachers will be the ones to suffer the consequences.  We can't make demands of them.  I've dumbed down the readings I use because parents have complained about how difficult they are - because they don't learn to really read in school anymore: by that I mean close reading of complex essays.  Nothing may be too difficult because it might be hard on their self-esteem if they can't do it.  And struggling with the challenge of difficult work isn't their forté.

And somehow that's okay.  We are accepting to a fault.

Most worrisome, I have had some students take issue with my lessons because of the "ecology bullshit" I discuss.  During one class a student  demanded that I stop talking about this immediately, and I told him, lucky for him, I was finished with the topic, and we moved on.  Climate change upsets people, so we shouldn't discuss it in school.  For some reason, genocide doesn't upset any of the kids, so we continue to show them the most gruesome videos without complaint - so far.  What I had discussed was in the curriculum, so I felt pretty safe, but it still gave me pause.  Like Professor Schlosser, I worry that I'll teach something that one student can successfully argue shouldn't be taught or said in a classroom, and I'll be gone.  Is it just me, or does that feel a little like a means to keep teachers from really teaching anything controversial of importance?  And I don't write under a pseudonym, so I'm pushing the boundaries a little here - maybe more than is wise, but it's important we turn this around.  But I have a condition that makes it so I don't always understand what's acceptable, so it's okay, right?

Clearly this fear teachers face will not make our education system world-standing, nor will it make our students responsible, well-educated adults.  It might mean classes are more entertaining and less unsettling, challenging, and provocative though.  But getting students to enjoy school and getting students to enjoy learning are two different things.  It's the latter that should be our goal.