That will be for others to decide.
First from my role as a teacher — you may have noted how little I have written about teaching in the school where I began this Fall. That is because in many ways this has been my most frustrating teaching experience ever. Right now, with 4 class days left to go until the end of 2nd quarter, I have some 38% of the students on my rolls failing. Now that is deceptive, since almost 1/3 of those are students who basically do not come to my class. I have regularly reported them to administration, and attempted to contact parents through the messaging system in Blackboard, but the contact information for too many is not accurate. And I am sorry, with that many I do not have time to be tracking down accurate numbers and making phone calls. I have five students on my rolls that I have never seen, and one who introduced herself to me in the hall the 2nd week of school, is often shown as attending other classes, but has never been in my room. I cannot teach them if they are not there.
As for others who are failing? It is beyond comprehensible to me that students can sit in a class for 90 minutes and then not turn in work, even when they can work with other students to help their understanding. Others abuse the system that allows them to turn in work late, which they then rush through or copy from others, and thus do not learn the material, and thus fail the assessments that are 40% of their grades.
Meanwhile our school is still down one administrator, with two of five slots being filled by retired administrators who have come back to help us. We are down two security guards on most days. You can imagine what that means — yes, we regularly have kids who come to school and then spend the day wandering the halls.
I teach government. As bad as the instructional environment may be, that is the least of my worries.
Last night spouse Leaves on the Current and I went and saw the Spielberg film ‘The Post.’ I have clear memories of 1971, when the Pentagon Papers issues broke, first appearing in The New York Times. then in the Washington Post, and then in many other papers.
I remember the SCOTUS decision, by only a 6-3 margin, which basically reaffirmed a principle established previously in Near v Minnesota, against prior restraint, that case serving as a key precedent in New York Times v United States.
We are again in an administration (again, a REPUBLICAN administration), that is demonstrating hostility to the Press. Onedoes not have to wonder how much of that was a motivation for Spielberg and company making this film: Spielberg has made that clear, as one can read in this article from The Guardian, from which I quote the following:
But The Post has an added quality that some earlier Spielberg movies may have lacked: an uncanny topicality. That is not wholly coincidental. The director first read the script for The Post just 11 months ago, deciding instantly that he wanted to make this story of a Republican president at war with the press – and he wanted to make it right now, assembling screenwriters, crew and A-list stars (including Streep and Hanks making their first film together) in a fraction of the usual time.
“The level of urgency to make the movie was because of the current climate of this administration, bombarding the press and labelling the truth as fake if it suited them,” Spielberg tells me, recalling the sense of offence he felt at documented, provable events being branded fake news. “I deeply resented the hashtag ‘alternative facts’, because I’m a believer in only one truth, which is the objective truth.”
So The Post shows a silhouetted Richard Nixon pacing the White House, while we hear the disgraced former president’s voice – taped on his own, notorious recording system – as he tramples on the first amendment, seeking to use the might of his office to hobble the free press. No one needs to mention Donald Trump for his shadow to loom over this movie.
Clearly the response of the audience in the theater where we watched, at Tyson’s Corner Mall in Fairfax County VA, Virginia’s most populous jurisdiction, where Clinton beat Trump 65.3%-29.1%, reacted in a way consistent with that voting pattern. There seemed to be allusions in the film to our own time, to which the audience reaction was almost uniform. And certainly one of the stars, Meryl Streep playing Post publisher Katherine Graham, has her own well-documented issues with Trump: after she slammed him in her Golden Globes remarks in 2017, Trump responded by labeling her, the most honored and respected American actress of the past half century, as “overrated” as you can read here.
I remarked to my wife on our way home to Arlington VA, where Clinton defeated Trump 77&-16.9%, that given the makeup of the voting membership of the Academy I would not be surprised to see “The Post” win Best Picture, even though an arugment could be made that other films were superior examples of the craft of movie making. Both of the stars, Streep and Tom Hanks, have two Oscars, so it is possible the film could win and neither of them would.
I titled this piece as being about random thoughts.
And yet the the two things about which I have written are in fact strongly related.
Remember, the primary course I teach is Government, at both regular and Advanced Placement levels.
In the past I would see students who were passionately interested in the subject because national government news is our local news in the DC area.
I am not seeing that. Oh, it is clear, in a school that is about 85% Black students with almost all the rest Latino I have to have a student say anything positive about Donald Trump. We are in Prince George’s County, where Clinton defeated Trump 88.14% — 8.41%, so that is not surprising.
But it is also that they have trouble understanding how anything with the government has anything to do with them.
Except my Latino students, many of whom are from families affected by DACA or TPS, and thus very concerned about what might happen to them or their families.
It is a Sunday morning. I have no papers left to correct or grades to enter this weekend. I do need to plan for what will happen in my classes.
In theory it is possible the government shutdown COULD be over, at least temporarily, by the time my first class on an A day starts at 9:15 on Monday. I am inclined to think not, but in a sense it does not matter. I need in my five government classes to try to connect students with what is happening around them. That means I will need to discuss DACA and TPS, the Government shutdown, and also the attacks on the media that is critical of Trump, the status of the investigations into Russian meddling, and a lot of other related issues. That will include looking back at the election, in part because more than half of them will be taking an outside assessment that deals with the electoral college probably this week, or if not the week thereafter.
On a different, but related, topic, I have made arrangements that should take a lot of financial pressure off of us were I to teach in this school for at least one more year. I wrestle with the frustration. I wonder if this is the most productive contribution I can make to America and the world in the time left to me. I wonder when I will have time for the reading, writing, and reflection I would like to do. A part of me would like not to have fixed employment so I could again have a dog, although I worry that at my age I might outlive a canine companion unless I adopted an older shelter dog, something more difficult with two senior cats, both of whom need regularly attention for medical issues.
It is a Sunday morning. In less than an hour I will head to the Quaker Meeting House for an hour of worship, possibly most of it in silence, more likely at least in part with remarks to some degree driven by the events around us. Because of our viewpoints as Friends there are very few if any adults in our community who would have voted for Trump, and a great deal of concern for what is happening. I need the support of being in that community as much as I need the sense of community I find here, even if at times I write far less than has been my wont.
I am 71. My spouse turns 61 a week from tomorrow.
If you ask me my greatest worry it is this — Will we still be living in a functioning liberal democracy at the end of this year? I have my doubts.
Which is why I have to take time to reflect on what it is I do with my time, my energy, my money.
What is my responsibility to the society in which I find myself?
What are my responsibilities to my spouse?
What must I do and not do to be consistent with what I believe?
I teach.
I read.
I write.
I reflect.
Is what I do sufficient?
I wonder….
The picture I chose for this is a sunrise. But looking at it, is that clear?
At the end of the Constitutional Convention Madison’s notes recorded the following:
Whilst the last members were signing it [i.e., the Constitution] Doct FRANKLIN looking towards the Presidents Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.
And I wonder again .. what kind of sun would Franklin now see?