LSG

               A few weeks ago, I walked out on one of my classes.
              My strength as a teacher has never been policing my students. I don’t expend much energy directing traffic to the bathroom, monitoring furtive behaviors, punishing disruptions beyond verbal redirection. I’m slow to anger. I find goofy antics funny. But my greatest strengths have allowed me to get away with this: I meet students in shared humanity, as partners in understanding and repair of the world. I love digging into the complexities and challenges of literature, art, democracy, or politics, and have been, as a result, able to immerse students in discussion and questions that have tended to engage them. I don’t have lunch detentions, but the critical mass has been with me. Had been.
              After a few weeks of lessons and work time, research presentations or essays were due in my college-in-the-high-school course. Several essays had come in fourth period, but none of the presentations were ready. A student came to my desk before the bell and told me I’d misled them all about our online submission due date, which occurred that morning before school, and not midnight, as he presumed. I asked when my assignments have ever been due at midnight—all year, every assignment has been due right before school. Well, it was confusing, he said.
              When class started, I asked who was ready to present, and indeed, no one was. The student raised his hand and said, I think what this means is that we should have an extension because...
              Stop! I looked at him intently: Before you go on speaking, be very careful about what you’re about to say.
              But he wrinkled his eyes and continued: I was just going to say, you have to understand that you’re not the only one giving us work.
              I looked at him. I shook my head. And I left.
              I took an exasperated circuit around the building, hot with students’ languor and their easy faith in me, and, in relation to this project, ruminating too over a seeming lack of curiosity and civic interest.
              I returned after a slow walk to a few kids waiting at the door. Inside, the air was buzzing.
              When the tumult died down, I turned to the student asking for a class extension and said, Do you want to try that again? And he said, What. What did I say? I turned to everyone else and told the class, You all need to do some talking together, and I left again, this time, in clear didactic purpose.
              When I returned, I asked what they discussed. A few students said they had plenty of time for research and preparing the slide decks and that I must be annoyed how they’d used their time. A student who’d only just arrived suggested it wasn’t what the student said but the tone in which he’d said it. The loudest voice said, Why can’t you just tell us what we did wrong?
              So I told them. I want you to be excited to share what you learned, I said. I want to see some urgency, and some nerves. I want you to be upset that you weren’t ready for each other. I want to see you looking forward to what your classmates have been passionate about. I want to see your curiosity, your light, your accountability for yourselves and engagement as a community that’s had eight months of intellectual growth as a group. I want to see you take sincere responsibility for your learning. And yes, I want you to own what’s yours. You weren't ready: What did you do and what didn't you do when you realized you wouldn't be ready? I left you to talk, because I want you, you together, to unpack and address what’s wrong here—you, as learners and as a community with a stake in what happens in the room.

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              I know students have been hobbled by Seattle’s more than a year in remote education. I suspect that recovery has been slowed by our district’s compassionate response to the unique challenges this pandemic has posed for our students, as well as the justice-minded recognitions that finally reached the white mainstream when our nation mobilized—in their masks—around the 2020 murder of George Floyd. These more equitable grading practices, restorative justice approaches, and recognitions of historical trauma have not typically been joined to the infrastructure needed—training, people-power, and above all, time—to support this community-, dignity-based response; and the result is instead a relaxing of standards and consequences: in our school as elsewhere, it’s the privileged kids that exploit these while others further fall.
              I wonder if the dual response that swept the nation since the pandemic—the justice-minded recognitions in blue states, and, in red states, rage against covid protocols and the “awokening” of America—have resulted in two distinct disasters playing out: a permissive relaxing of consequences in blue states, exacerbating chronic absenteeism and poor executive functioning and behavior, and in red states, censorship of literature, history, and dialogue, threatening the health, safety, and collectivity of more than one generation.
              But I also believe that our students have endured a cataclysm at least equal to that of the pandemic—their phones. The surgeon general has written about it. Teachers and districts around the country have contended openly with it. My own district is suing social media companies about it. And the National Center for Education Statistics reports that 77% of schools prohibit phone use for non-academic purpose—and even in those schools, teachers are in a constant battle of wills. My high school is not one of those with a school-wide prohibition. Our principal says she is protecting teachers from possible lawsuits in the event that a confiscated phone is lost or stolen.
              Nevertheless, at the beginning of the school year, every day, I spent five minutes at the start of each class, making sure students had placed phones in their assigned pockets at the front of the room, hunting the missing phones, demanding trades of power banks for handsets, standing and waiting with my hand out with the same two or three kids every period. Even though invested time did not, as I’d hoped, speed up this start-of-class routine—am I not annoying or scary enough?—I was pleased by what came of the five minutes badgering: Students were collectively looking up and focused on what I was saying, participating in discussion with one another, engaging in the content and skills of the class. It was the sun clearing the utter despair of a room where too many were huddled over phones or laptops and turned away from each other and from me.
              The day a student refused wasn’t the day I lost the fight. She said she had a doctor’s note. The note said she had ADHD and that her phone helped her concentrate. It’s a whole thing, she said. Ask my mom about it. She’ll explain. Eagerly, I contacted her mother, certain no parent and no doctor would approve such logic. But the parent backed her daughter, referred to the doctor’s note, argued ADHD conferred special multi-tasking abilities, and was, finally, deaf to my panicked dread that one kid intently scrolling would break my whole policy.
              The day I lost the fight came soon, though, and here’s why. In the course of our exchange, the parent carbon-copied our principal; after touchy exchanges about race and racism to which the principal was silent, when that particular tension was resolved, she suddenly spoke up to celebrate us: Good job, team! But here’s how I took it: She saw my desperation to maintain the phone prohibition and she heard the mom assert it didn’t apply to her daughter—and my principal did not intervene to back me.
              I stopped fighting the kid. I could have kept fighting, I know—but I felt helpless and alone, professionally exhausted. And within a week, the other phones came out.
              For so small a slight as a principal trusting me to manage my business, I gave in? Yes. I was run-down already, already believed myself undermined—by the number of unsupported and mismanaged students with special needs as a percentage of my 162 students; by the number of exceptions we were expected to offer every assignment (encouraged modification, example: thesis, notes, outline, workshopped sample, draft and 3-8 page essay replaced by three unpolished sentences) and exceptions to every classroom rule (demanded modification, example: consequences for repeatedly throwing food across the room at a student’s head replaced with reminders about no-food-in-class). I felt undermined already by inefficient and often absurd demands on time outside the classroom and, even more, by systems and bosses deaf to practical instructional needs to meet such challenges. I felt demoralized by the meetings styled as professional development to address these challenges and provide “tools” to meet them, because the tools they provide us are always actually a variation of “do more”: more communication; more conferencing with kids, parents, and intervention teams; more individually tailored instruction and assessment; more research into existing counseling, assessment, and disciplinary data. I’ve come out of these meetings recalling Animal Farm’s Boxer saying, “I will work harder.”
              All of this is existentially and professional perilous; and for this reason, the actual motto I’ve adopted for the year is “Let Shit Go.”