There are at least three. It remains to be seen if they'll break this camel's back.
Last straw the first: summer school. They unexpectedly called me in to sub after the Spanish teacher's disappearance. If you're like me, you're imagining some glamorous and dramatic adventure that swept her up, a la Carmen San Diego, but most likely it was simple incompetence--or that most damning word in the administrator's lexicon, unprofessionalism. Or simple carelessness, her not thinking during the interview (she was the only applicant, so the interview was a total formality) that it would be a big deal if she told them later that she wouldn't be able to be there a few days out of the program. Those few days happening to be right at the start. But then she did tell them, or just didn't show up, and from there it sounds like the problem snowballed, as such things do. To the point where I now have a (temporary) job I never even applied for.
So for the past couple of weeks, I've been paid to sit in an overly air conditioned room in an enormous, mostly empty school building, from 8 until noon. For some reason, I'm paid four and a half hours a day. It must be that new math they're teaching. There are never more than four students in the room, and frequently there's just one, or none that show up. They work on their computers, while I work on mine.
And darned if summer school isn't just a microcosm of the whole public educational model, whose exquisitely tuned, theoretically efficient machinery is either abetted or undermined at every turn, smoothed along or stymied, by the craven kowtowing or blessed intransigence of actual human beings. What this comes down to, in short: the only requirement is to pass a test (that's the state of the curriculum). The test can be retaken (that's credit recovery and summer school). The test doesn't change (that's the reduction of teacher to technician). I can talk the student through what questions they missed on the test, and they can retake it as soon as they're ready (that's...well, actually that seems OK. Actual human interaction, even if it is mediated by a miserable situation not of our own making. That sounds like life). This all is the logical endpoint of the public school model. It's a way to recoup credit, without actually learning. I can decry it, but I have no recourse but to go along with it, in the position I'm currently in. It's the inevitable and natural end result of a system too big to fail, too expensive to break, too hollow to believe.
Last straw the second: The Carpenter and the Gardener, by Alison Gopnik. If summer school is a strong push, this book is just as strong a pull. Gopnik presents discoveries in the science of child development since Piaget, woven into a coherent interpretive scheme of liberal education, grounded in wide reading and deep in fiction and philosophy. There's a particularly interesting thread of the classical and romantic, going back to Isaiah Berlin, and a call for a fundamental shift in values and structures, mindful of the picture of human nature that emerges. There's a dearth of religion, per se, but a rich well of philosophy, including plenty of good sources to help think through two of my favorite themes, play and reading.
And her writing is so clear, sensible, and fluent across all these domains. It makes me think about folding this shambling, self-indulgent mess of a blog into more hands-on projects, re-purposing some of it as books and essays which would be decent to present somewhere people might actually see them. Instead of writing endless notes to no one, to put time, and maybe even some money, where my mouth is, and just open a school. I hope Signum Academy will fit the bill. But meanwhile, Gopnik's insights on children and grandparents, of all things, have me looking around again at ways I might be able to do some read alouds and discussion groups back at Spark or at some of the senior centers here.
Last straw the third: Todd Eklof's Gadfly Papers, and the surrounding tempest in a teapot. Similar to the recent furor over the drag queen story hour and endless debates about homeless people in the public libraries, but this one hits a little closer to home for me. I feel like his situation could well have been mine, if people read or listened to the things I have to say, if I were ever in a position of authority or had at least some degree of public notoriety. I think it's partly wise and mostly lazy of me not to have sought such a position, but who knows, I might still get there someday. And in the meantime, I'll certainly weigh in with what I think about the whole kerfuffle once I hear from him on Sunday and read his book. Personally, of course, I respect and feel for him, and for those hurt by the things he wrote or the way it's all been handled. I hope we may all make sense of what happened and learn from it. And it's looking like that might well involve me finding a new church.
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