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Tightly squeezed into a round table during a week-long Common Core
institute, I float in and out of semi-conscious paralysis reminiscent of the
last time I was called to jury duty. After what feels like hours (which could
very well have been mere minutes), my body shifts out from under the blanket of
limbo-ness and lands into a wild wave like spasm of irritability, which quickly
escalates into anxiety then disgust. The descent is fast and my internal organs
shake as if I’m going down on an old rickety roller coaster. I look around to
find cool eyes and eager faces and wonder if I’m on the verge of a nervous
breakdown.
It’s a drone of a lesson that transports me into a
first-world-third-world classroom where students (probably high school) are
desperately trying to cope with the onslaught of eight-hours a day in front of
a supercilious, factory style TA (teacher professional in training) in an
oppressive school designed to fix (sorry, I mean save) poor students.
Common Core Dissonance 101. According to the online Oxford
dictionary, dissonance arises in the event of a tension or clash resulting from
the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.
Education ≠ education.
After all, CCSS is supposed to be about critical thinking,
embracing multiple pathways for problem solving, collaboration and other neatly
defined career ready/21st century skills. Yet somehow these
elements are strangely missing from the institute.
I escape the room with my smart phone in hand desperately texting
with my now clumsy fingers due to the aftermath of toxic brain shocks. I see a
big round clock in the corner that tells me how much time I have. I’m on the
job, I think. While my mind races over a number of plausible excuses that could
get me out of the next module I think about all the young people who cut class
and hide themselves in bathroom stalls. I consider slipping out the back door
but aware of my current identity, I choose the bathroom. I wash my already
clean hands hard and take stock of my feelings. As I do, feelings slip outside
of me all over the floor like rogue Slinkys and I get down on my hands and
knees desperately trying to shove them back into the neat color coded box I
kept them in labeled F.N.P (Future Novel Project) I think I do a good job but I
get the feeling later I must have left hope and joy on the floor. I leave the bathroom
thinking hard. I lean inconspicuously against a wall and breathe deeply.
In my breath, I watch my life’s work float out of my head like a balloon.
It hits up against the glass ceiling and bounces as if there is a wind
somewhere keeping it high. That’s when I ask myself, What am I becoming?
No one will argue reading multiple sources will help a child draw
out deeper meaning on a topic or that rigorous, collaborative tasks are better
than closed answers and multiple choice. It’s not the common core, I fear, it’s
the how we are doing education in this country. It’s the internal mechanism,
the co-option of terms like social justice and equity, the taking over of
buildings and rechanneling funding. It’s the business of selling a product that
will sell well because it is a monopoly, it’s complexity separating teachers
from the real world of students, it’s demonizing unions, the normalization of
segregated thinking always thinking black and white, reducing children to data
bytes and ruminating over and over again, what we should do with kids in
poverty as if kids in poverty are drowning and we have some magical special
sauce that can save them. It’s the business of orchestrating and commoditizing
human beings.
But none of that matters.
I slip back into the class, my footsteps pillow soft. The drone
flies under my radar like a radioactive field and attacks every cell in my
frontal cortex. Our robopresenter creates complexity and mystery around topics
that should be simple, practical and open for shared inquiry. She is a
robomagician. I’m struggling now to live in the narrowing parenthesis of my
mind, that safe space between yes and no that I told myself could protect me
from being at-risk, or worse yet, implicated. A tiny echo reminds me that poor
people are exempt because we are concerned with survival and that’s different.
Maslow is so far away and I can hardly remember the research behind it, or maybe
there was no research and it was all a figment of my imagination, that thing
called self-realization.
I fight for my imagination by focusing on the robopresenter who
literally transforms into a doll made of metal. Her blank stare, the repetition
of her words, the inability to respond emotionally to her audience all makes
sense now. There is some fun in this for a while. Then I whisper to a colleague
and we share a second of freedom, but it doesn’t last long. Robopresenter is
driven entirely by inputs and streams of data and she zooms in on us. I pity
her and admire her at the same time, her ability to memorize. How boring it
must be to be her. I disconnect by dehumanizing her further and this separation
allows me to extrapolate meaning from what otherwise might have been a void. I
want to live and she is death so I hate her.
Robopresenter says, we need to dig a little deeper. Her hand curls
up in a half ball as if she is digging into soil that is magically floating in
the middle of the conference room. We’ve been digging deeper all day but
I find nothing. The emptiness of digging when you know there is nothing to find
is so much worse than hopeful digging or not digging at all. Every word,
activity, tool, is an illusion. New education talk snuffs out truth, like
Styrofoam snuffs out sound so that you can’t even recognize it anymore.
Why are we building more and more layers that separate teacher
from the child? I see this monstrous wall that prevents any true meeting of
human beings. Why do we create so many barriers and obstacles for teachers to
love students? What might happen if teachers saw their students as children,
like their own, with nothing between them but deep love and commitment to their
well being?
It’s been a few hours, days now. I look down at my hand and
instead of veins, I find tiny wires curling up through my forearm that reach my
shoulders that begin to push back like a soldier. The new wired nerves in my
neck stretch my mouth into a smile and I watch my arm raise. Oh, dear. Am I? Am
I a cyborg? Robopresenter calls on me. She is pleased with my active
participation and we make eye contact for the first time and there is a
twinkle, a knowing. I thought she was dead but in this dimension she responds
differently. I’ve entered her world. When did I step out of that safe space
called, yes and no?
I admit, the rumble in my guts has subsided. I feel better now. My
teacher compliments me. Other students in the room nod and I am feeling the
warmth of belonging. My sore ass and fragmented brain begin to re-wire
themselves so quickly that now my buttocks is equipped for several more hours
of sitting. My brain is elastic and stiff, greater toxic retention and
stored with passivity complex.
I am an educator of the new age, getting paid to unlearn
everything I’ve ever learned about learning. I am learning to think differently
everyday. My life’s mission is to save children, teach them that struggle and
hard work is productive. We have to work doubly hard if we want a ticket
into the American dream. I am a teacherhero who with the Common Core under my
belt, can undo hunger and shoot PTSD in the face until it’s annihilated.
I am a warrior.
I feel better now.
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