“Best of Times . . . Worst of Times”

The 2022-2023 School Year Ends

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us . . .

—From the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

Book inventories that turned into book bans. Great students. Intimidation to stay quiet about racism and homophobia. Great students. Being called reprehensible names in the media and by politicians. Great students. Watching colleagues quit. Great students. Facing down a hostile state legislature and governor hellbent on destroying public education.

Great students.

This has been by far the strangest of my seven years in the classroom. Teachers have been under enormous pressure and stress, much more so than normal. I’ve already mentioned some of the biggest challenges we’ve dealt with. I’ve left school some days with a sinking feeling that public education could be doomed. 

The Politics of Intimidation and Liberation

But I have kept going. I’ve been to Austin several times to lobby for teachers and public education. I testified after a 12-hour wait at a public hearing, speaking out against school vouchers. I called and emailed legislative members telling them what teachers are going through. I asked state reps to vote against vouchers, expanded charter schools, and the banning of so-called “obscene” books.

I was on book committees at my school that decided the fate of whether great works of literature should stay in our high school library. The most notable would be The Bluest Eye by Nobel-Prize winning author Toni Morrison.

I attended the trans lives matter protests at the Capital. I have transgender students and transgender friends, and the state government has designed legislation to not only hurt them, but erase their existence.

There were victories, even if they were only moral. The solidarity of the protestors was inspiring. We helped shut down negotiations on the bill that would ban all transgender health care for people under 18. Eventually though, we had to face the final result: the bill passed. It is now being challenged in the courts by the ACLU. 

The Fight for Democracy

Our American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has done an excellent job this year making teachers and educators politically aware of the stakes we are facing. The union’s Respect Us / Expect Us campaign pulled us together from around the state. This is all despite our state's deep hostility towards organized labor. 

This fall, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD is facing a school board election that, if it is anything like the one from 2021, will be nasty and bitter in a manner that school board elections have never been before. 

AFT is working with local parent’s groups that support public education to build up a force that can ensure the four seats up for re-election are filled by decent, caring people. Ones that support public education and want what is best for the students. Not ones dedicated to shoving their extremist ideology down our throats.

The Best Job There Is

Despite all of these challenges, I have had an amazing year where it matters most: in the classroom.

My students are some of the most perceptive and socially engaged I’ve ever had. The image about Generation Z being lazy and staring at their phones mindlessly all day are essentially tone-deaf stereotypes. Students are awakening and paying attention to the societal forces that are shaping their lives. 

After reading my student’s writing and talking with them, I sense an intense frustration with the world as it is, especially regarding technology. I show students videos where computer programers and tech people explain how they work. They study the brain and design ways to hijack people’s limbic system and addict people to their phones. Their biggest target? Teenagers and children. 

One of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever heard a student say was in a discussion about the future. A young woman said, “I hope that in the future our kids are not as addicted to technology as we are.”

No Words 

I started with part of the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, quoting some of the most famous lines in all of literature. The lines that stick with me the most are “it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us . . .”

The “winter of despair” were those days when I felt that the powerful forces aligned against us were winning. A specific example: I helped monitor and watch students take the five-hour English II STAAR test. Despite most of them finishing after two hours, they were still required to sit at their desks for another three hours, until the test was officially finished. They would not have a lunch break that day until 1:00, six hours after they arrived at school. Some slept. Others stared straight ahead, their faces stony, cold, even blank.

What can educators expect next year? I’ll point out that House Bill 900 did pass. This will essentially remove all LGBTQ+ characters and themes from all books in school libraries. It’s even designed to intimidate bookstores and vendors into not selling books to schools. 

Hope

But I want to end by focusing my attention on “the spring of hope.”

As this generation gets older, they will fight the bigotry, racism, and hatred represented by the major forces in our state government. They will fight to protect LGBTQ+ people. They will fight to ensure there are no more Uvaldes. They will fight to ensure that school districts stay democratic. Not run by the fiat of a dictatorial governor.

Young people have everything before them. The future we are approaching does not have to be all doom-and-gloom. Yes, there are major, unprecedented challenges we face as society. There is a outsized minority of extremist right-wingers in this country. They are doing everything they can to curtail freedom and impose a system of racial, religious, and class-based domination over the whole country.

But I have hope that the youth of today will replace this interminable, intolerable present, the “season of Darkness,” with a future that gives birth to a new present: the “season of Light.”