How long will the strike last? Maybe forever, kid.
Yesterday was not a great day.
In my 2nd period, a kid who is late every day asked me, gleefully, “So we’re going to be off school for a month?”
My union, the Oakland Education Association, is going on strike starting tomorrow morning. We’re asking for fair wages, smaller class sizes, and more funding for special education. West Virginia teachers went on strike yesterday and won within a matter of hours; Denver teachers went on strike and won after three days; LA teachers were on strike for a week and… our Qween there has been sharing her disappointment with their strike’s results. (Because, yeah, she still has class sizes of 40+ because she doesn’t teach English or Math.)
When that 2nd period kid asked me if we were going to be off school for a month, I felt an intense twinge of irritation and assured him, “No, it probably won’t last very long at all.” I took a sick pleasure in crushing his dream.
Actually, I spent most of the day annoyed with kids unsettled — some happily, others anxiously — by the impending strike.
WHY THO.
Driving home last night, I wondered how I might shift things around in my head and in today’s lesson plan so that today would be better. That kid and his sheepish grin, and the twist in my gut, came back to me. Why didn’t I just jump into his joy with him, start dreaming up with him a whimsical month “off”? — Or how about two months! Six months! It coulda been a playful moment where I joined his side in the everlasting, imaginary battle between kids and teachers. It woulda done no harm to fantasize with him about gobs of time with no school. Instead, I used the interaction to entrench myself on the sensible, boring-ass teacher side.
It was just a small, throw-away moment, but it hurt me and stayed with me until I worked out that I’d unconsciously slipped back into the carceral mindset that my years teaching in prison and jail helped me to recognize.
At a conference my first year teaching, an academic whose work I admire mentioned in the question and answer part of her session that she has a “gut-check” when it comes to decisions she makes in the classroom: Will this make kids’ worlds bigger or smaller? What I’m calling the carceral mindset is the one that makes you feel happier the smaller the cage you put humans under your charge into. The carceral mindset makes your teacher-ego swell when you can get the kids to submit and behave. The carceral mindset makes you happy when kids learn but more so when they’re quiet. The carceral mindset made me want to promise that kid that his ass would be back in that uncomfortable seat sooner than… well, sooner than he’s hoping.
Taking on the carceral mindset requires that I disconnect from the kids, that I ignore my reverence for their exquisite, messy humanity and my own. That’s what makes it different from the mindset necessary for empowering kids (and myself) by teaching and modeling purposeful academic discipline — a liberatory mindset. When I take on a liberatory mindset, I join in solidarity with the kids and critique and complain about the same boring, often racist and other -ist inadequacies of their schooling that they do.
At the very least, when I am deliberate about maintaining a liberatory mindset, it’s easier to have a dang sense of humor. Today, I’m going to (1) have a conversation with the kid about why he’s late every day. I’m going to genuinely ask, consider the implicit motivations in his response, and reflect on how I might make getting to class on time a more compelling notion. Because I do want him to want to demonstrate the discipline it takes to get here on time and ready to learn. And then, I’m going to (2) tell him to ask me again when I think the strike will be over, and I’m going to say, “NEVAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!”
