For the majority of my teaching career, my primary course has been government, whether the Maryland course in Local, State & National Government, or Advanced Placement US Government & Politics.
In the past I have had my doubts what I was teaching, most notably at the time the Military Commissions Act passed the United States Senate.
But that pales compared to where I find myself now.
This year I tech at a high school in Prince George’s County Maryland that is traditionally very low performing. We have serious issues about behavior and attendance, and we draw from a community that is heavily lower middle class or lower, and our population is almost all not White non-Hispanic. I have my share of homeless kids, kids living with only one parent, kids not living with either parent. We have a significant share of students who are English Language Learners, including relatively recent (in the last 5 years) arrivers in the US. Things also get complicated by interruptions to instruction from mandatory testing (we are in the middle of PARCC tests, which hit ALL tenth graders, which is the grade in which students make their first attempts at passing government.
But all of that pales compared to the impact that Trump — and his Republican enablers — are having on my ability to have my students learn about government.
Some of my students are undocumented. Many more have one or more parents who is. The insecurity they feel because of Trump is palpable. They wonder why they have to learn about a government that does not care about them.
All schools now go through lockdown drills. We had a real lockdown because of a threat on social media to shoot up our school that eventually turned out to have been made by a 14 year old who was one of our students.
Two of my five government class (I also teach one music class) are at the AP, level although probably ½ of the students are overmatched by the amount and depth of the material (we this year do not have the honors classes which would be more appropriate for them). The material on the AP exam is usually from 3-5 years ago — that is, they may have to answer “Free Response Questions” (somewhat like essays) based on what was true of our government then. For some of my more perceptive students that could be a problem, because they are aware of how different the government is now — no filibusters on any Presidential nominations, the fact of all the judicial vacancies that McConnell created in Obama’s last few years (well beyond Merrick Garland).
Most of my students do not watch news, although I made my AP students watch a variety of networks (including one program each from MSNBC and Fox).
I do not know of a single student who is supportive of Trump — there may be, but in a school that is more than 80% African-American (and most of the rest are Latino) those who are supportive would be reluctant to publicly express it. Then again, the County went for Clinton by 88.4% for Clinton to 8.3% for Trump, so the entire environment is anti-Trump.
My task is to try to persuade my students to learn about government so that they can be empowered to participate and make things better.
And yet they get hammered — the increase in overt racism, the increased killings of unarmed Blacks by police who do not get prosecuted, the rhetoric of Trump.
Put all this together and it would be discouraging enough — the kids don’t think they will have any impact, so why should they learn?
Then here I am as their teacher, a man approaching his 72nd birthday in just over 3 weeks (May 23). I do not lie to my students. If they ask if I am optimistic about the future, I have to admit I am not.
If the Dems do not take back the Senate, the Judiciary is going to be poisoned by Trump appointments for several decades. Can you imagine even GW Bush nominating someone like Wendy Vitter who refused to admit she supports Brown v Board?
Between executive actions by Trump(eg DACA and the Muslim Ban and the attempt to ban transgender military personnel) to cabinet level officials gutting things like environmental regulations and lawsuits against discriminatory lending practices and discriminatory school suspensions and seeing the shrinking of areas that had been protected as monuments, to pushing coal and offshore oil dirrling, etc. etc. — and knowing we will see yet more attempts to gut ACA, to privatize even more imprisonment, to privatize the VA, hell, even to gut Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing about trying to roll back not just Roe v Wade, but possibly also Griswold v Connecticut — it is hard to be optimistic.
I have no idea what will happen with Mueller’s investigation. What I do know is that the Federal government as a force for good both at home and in international relations has already been severely dminished, and we may be looking at real catastrophes — even more shifting of wealth to a narrow slice of society, less accountability for wrong-going whether criminal or that is should be subject to tort claims. As for climate change ….. Scott Pruitt is still there because he is doing the President’s bidding, and far too many Republicans (and a few oil and coal patch Democrats) are refusing to see the major international crisis this represents.
I have not been blogging recently, because I really felt there was little I could say.
Perhaps the thing recently that has most begun to give me hope — besides the fact that we are doing very well in a variety of special elections, even though that is insufficient — started in West Virginia and has started to spread quickly: it is that my compatriots are taking the risk of protesting and speaking up, not merely for decent wages, but for appropriate resources for our public schools.
Each morning I use Facebook to look back at what I have written/posted on that date in previous years. Some of what I wrote was prescient. Some of it was very good writing (I am surprised how good).
I am too old to run for public office, even for my local school board.
I no longer have the energy to be an active campaigner while I teach full time, as I did in 2006 in the Webb for Senate campaign (against incumbent George Allen).
I can still teach, albeit I am not the teacher I was before I “retired” for the first time in 2012.
My wife, who although doing well still has a cancer that is not yet curable — I need to devote more of my time and energy to her than I did even 6 years ago, before she was diagnosed (January 27, 2013). There are places we want to experience together while we still can. That becomes more of a priority. Having no children of our own we want to do more for nieces and nephews.
Recently I explored going to an independent school in DC. They invited me in, I taught a sample lesson, attended other classes, talked to a LOT of key staff. Even though the students applauded me, I did not get the position. It would have been only 4 classes a day, with 12-18 students in each. Instead I presume that next year I will be back where I am, teaching 6 classes, probably averaging at least 25 students, meaning I will have more than 150 on my rolls. I expect I will again be teaching government.
I do need an income, and I am paid very well. But I know I am coming to the end of the road as a classroom teacher in a public school setting. It is too demanding, and I begin to feel as if I no longer make enough of a difference to justify the demands of time and energy.
Even though I am somewhat diminished as a teacher compare to 2011-2012, and even though it is a much more difficult setting than the school in which I spent 13 years, neither of those is the reason why I think next year might well be my last.
I teach government. I no longer know what I am teaching, as I have watched our political system deteriorate, that rights hard won are now being taken away, that progress made on justice, on the environment, on financial regulation, are all being dismantled.
Tomorrow I will return to my classroom. I have only a week and half to prepare my AP students for the AP exam, and most of them will miss at least one of the every other day classes. Shortly thereafter all will sit for the state test.
I am not really teaching real content for the rest of the year. I am preparing them for tests, then I will turn them loose on a project on which I hope they can have fun.
I will continue to watch what is happening politically. As the summer approaches perhaps I will have more time to offer observations, commentary, argumentation.
Might it be from the perspective of one depressed — and angry — about what is happening? Probably. Remember, as a teacher I spend more time with adolescents than I do with adults during my waking hours. I look at what is happening, and worry about the world we are leaving them.
So forgive this bloviation. It will probably not get much attention. Perhaps that is appropriate. Perhaps just as my effectiveness as a teacher has clearly diminished, so has my value as an online commentator, agent-provocateur, general noodge.
Make of this what you will.
But know this
1. I absolutely believe Trump and those around him committed conspiracy to violate lots of laws — election laws, campaign finance laws, computer crime laws — without which even Comey’s October letter and voter suppression would have been insufficient to defeat Clinton
2. Mitch McConnell is the foulest human being in Washington DC — so many ways in which he has polluted the American political system during his career
3. Too many in the media are unwilling to accept their culpability in creating the crisis in which we now find ourselves, both as Americans and as citizens of the world.
That depresses me.
That enrages me.
But that will NEVER shut me up.
At 72, I care less about what happens to me than I do what will happen in the future, in the world that hopefully will continue to have a human future even after I am long gone.