Ends and Beginnings

               Much of teaching last year was dispiriting, as it had been the two previous years following the return from Covid. A year ago, I met with a financial advisor, who showed me that my half-pension, half-401K plan is pretty much garbage even if I put a bunch more years into teaching—and only a little more broken were I to leave the profession far sooner than that—in three years, say, after I’d served over 30 years. Tin handcuffs! I found this incredibly liberating. And so, all year, unlike most of my coworkers, and especially the department heads to whom I’d passed the sputtering torch, when confronted by nonsense at work, nothing keeping me, I was able to live up to my professional goal for the year and Let Shit Go.
              Despite this attitude and relentless encounters with the absurd, the end of the school year was triumphant: I felt connected to students and our work together in ways I hadn’t since before the pandemic.
              I attribute this both to Letting Go and choosing a moment to ratchet all the way back up.
              Leading up to the two-week visit from the South Africans in late March was full of stress and panic and agonizing interactions with a dozen people from the district and our principal and nurse whose goal, it seemed, was to discourage us from ever, including on a weekend day trip, meeting our students outside the walls of my classroom. Here was Shit I could not Let Go because 16 visitors and many here were deeply and joyously part of this, and so, I experienced the kind of torment I can’t even describe because it’s so boring and bureaucratic. One morning, I was exasperated to the point of career danger, and I announced to my program team that I could no longer serve as its teacher leader in the next year.
              But for now, towards those two weeks and through them, I stayed dialed all the way up.
              When the South Africans came, we were there to meet them at the airport; they shadowed students in classes and paneled discussions in others; homestays and neighborhood social pods were active and successful; we had a weekend retreat in a forest; we volunteered at a garden run by the Black Farmers Collective; we toured the Wing Luke Museum and the Chinatown International District; we jointly led games and discussion in an elementary school; we attended the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Garden on an anniversary of forced internment, and we heard from a Suquamish storyteller on the reservation. Students and visitors spent as much time with each other as their sleeping schedules would allow, and I was learning and loving my own guest, Mimi (an experience I detail here). It was a rich two weeks that blotted out everything else; and when we came to the tearful, weeping end, I was on a high, knowing I had put my all into what would probably be the last, big thing I led as a teacher. My last big thing.
              Having done that, I really could let go. Mimi raised the stakes of my teaching, and I came out of the experience relaxed and sincere. The program students and I had arrived at a mutual trust and affection and the thoughtfulness of a community that had experienced risk, growth, and grief together.
              Meanwhile, I finally arrived at some mutuality in my other classes, too, in part because I stopped fighting for attention and attendance and just leaned towards those ready to engage together.
              About a decade ago, my father-in-law said he believed schools should just teach to those wanting to be taught, which is what I found myself doing at the end of the year. At the time, I had said to him, Yes, while that would save schools so much time and money, many kids come to schools with attention and skills fragmented by life circumstances entirely outside their control that nevertheless put those students at high risk of difficulty at school. Those students need the interventions and care of educators even more than those prepared and ready to focus. I still believe this.
              But by the end of the year, and with so little help from my school forthcoming, I put myself first: I taught to those ready to engage, without policing or case managing. And I enjoyed it. Students in it with me enjoyed it. And those other students? Didn’t notice I’d let their shit go.
              On the day of the final exam for the program class, I told them how much their there-ness meant to me. And at the end of the period, I received hug after hug from students, and some tears.
              We had one more moment together—what we call the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, in which we introduce the incoming group and celebrate the outgoing. As a master of ceremonies at our community evenings, I keep the timetable tight and limit my own talk to introductions; but this was my last moment as the head of the program, and I decided to spend some attention on myself.
              I was secretly anticipating my retirement from the school after 29 years of service in the school that graduated me and all three of my daughters, and was fearing the hollow, life-defeating anticlimax of the school’s failure to recognize who and what I’ve been in those three decades—something I’d seen too often from hallowed old vets who’d been given a little speech and faded away or worse, ended their careers in angry sick leave and received no speech at all.
              At the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, I honored myself. I spoke to what was meaningful to me about the program, how it fostered the kind of community big and loving enough that students within it were willing to risk vulnerability and ignorance, and therefore depth of commitment, compassion, and learning. And I said that as much as the program means to students, it means even more to its teachers, who put their all into creating a meaningful experience just so we have one place where we know it’s  possible: What we do with you all represents what learning can be, what school can be. As an idea, and as a reality, it has saved some of us teachers. It’s the torch we light for ourselves. I told the community what I put in, what I took out. You can watch my speech here.
              And when I was done, I had the reception I knew would sustain me even were I to experience a couple more years of teaching frustrated by distracted students and obstructive administration and a hollow institutional goodbye at the end of them. Students, parents, alumni, and community members stood in line to hug me and give their recognitions.
              My sincerity and heart have been the best of my teaching. I hope to give them unobstructed entry this next year and what, after that, may be my final year teaching.

End of 2023-24 school year letters to students, administration

June 24, 2024

Dear BLT, RHS Admin, PTSA, absolutely anyone who might be able to do something about out-of-control smartphones in our building,

               I was cheered last week to learn that Hamilton and now Eaglestaff middle schools have decided to purchase Yondr pouches to secure student smartphones for the school day. I have been longing for exactly that at Roosevelt, or at least for an admin-supported policy that will not leave individual teachers to battle alone against students who can hardly help themselves. I am writing to plead for help with the phones.
              I started the 2023-2024 school year with a strict phone policy that demanded learners store their devices in designated pockets at the front of the room. I purchased multiple chargers to power 16 phones there. For a month and a half, the difference in the room was a revelation: to have students’ heads up and listening and interacting with each other, like an actual classroom—and not what it had been the year before (and what it came to be again), when I would have to fight to get heads up, fight for collective focus, fight for students to hear each other and tune in to class discussion, or to try instead to teach to rows of stooped bodies signaling boredom and disdain.
              Five minutes at the beginning of every period were spent chasing phones into the pockets at the front of the room. I thought if I invested the time and energy at the beginning of the year, students would fall in line, and most did, but multiple students, in every period, in every grade, continued to need chasing and arguing. The urge to get on their phones was simply too overpowering. Because our attention, time, and strength as teachers is strained so many ways, despite how much was gained by my daily efforts to keep phones away, I finally got tired and gave in.
              I know there are teachers who’ve figured out how to keep devices away. I also know many more teachers—nationally, too, a cacophony of frustration—are as desperate as I for a more systemic response.
              The case against phones in schools is being made around the country, and I’m sure you know it: social media are algorithmically induced to get eyes on screens, to provoke a slurry of anxiety and fear and desire that sell products, to amplify bias and abbreviate beliefs; and smartphones expose students to bullying and comparison and social pressure, at great time and experience cost. Meanwhile, notifications are designed to return nearby phones to hands and studies repeatedly demonstrate they succeed, even as they ding ding ding ding ding a student’s focus into pieces.
              From my teacher’s point of view, phones turn students into classroom zombies: Teenagers can’t multitask nearly as well as they think they can.
              Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation argues that two mammoth changes needed in schools are affordable and within reach: one is about more unregulated play; the other is for schools to lock up phones, all day, including during lunch. At the price of a third of a textbook per kid, $30 (and Hamilton’s PTSA said they received a hefty bulk discount lowering the price more), we can get our kids back.
              Get us those magnetic pouches, or advocate for a muscular, administratively supported school-wide no-phones policy. I’d prefer the pouches, to avoid the hourly battles over phones; to keep kids from grabbing their devices and wandering the halls to check them; to prevent all those meet-me-in-the-bathroom gatherings that have been happening this year; to get them to interact with each other in healthier ways in their down time. But I’d settle for an actual school-wide policy supported by administration.
              I’ve been teaching for a month and a half shy of 29 years. Teaching has never felt this stupid. I repeat the image from above: Vying hour after hour with the dispiriting arrays of silent bodies hunched over devices. I implore you—help us. Don’t leave teachers alone with this soul-crushing, career-dimming battle over phones.

David Grosskopf

June 20, 2024
Dear Margins and Centers students,
 
              I’ve been receiving a few emails from students because there was a scored reflection on the day of the final, and the missing points will help them get to an A- or A.
              15 students showed up to my 2^nd period Final. 11 came to the 4^th. In both classes, we finished the documentary about the battle over Arizona’s Ethnic Studies programs, did a little writing, had lively discussion about learning and schooling, and shared in a gratifying note and moment of closure.
              One of the things we discussed after we finished the documentary is a moment the politician John Huppenthal reflected on his visit to Mr. Acosta’s classroom: “My visit there wasn’t a typical day: it was more a discussion that took place. I wasn’t seeing anything that represented a typical day whatsoever.” At another moment, he condemned the Raza classes for reading “the Marxist” Paulo Freire, just as we have done. But because he didn’t actually read the Freire, Huppenthal didn’t understand that “a discussion” is a purposeful and, yes, typical element in the Raza classes: Critical thought and active engagement with the living world that recognizes our human dignity—it happens through dialogue, not through repetition of memorized facts and proficiencies; and the intellectual community that engages in such dialogue together not only challenges, refines, and energizes our ideas, but draws from our strength together, because 1) the best learning happens when we’re not defensive or exhausted but feel safe enough to be challenged and supported enough to get things wrong, and because 2) we build collective power and joy as a community in conversation.
              Another thing we discussed during our final was a national survey that suggests 70% of teens are bored in school most or all of the time. In second period, a couple students signed out and came back when the conversation was over. Another couple students texted and chatted and pointed to their phones, until I thanked them for the illustration and then asked our class if their actions were cause or effect of their boredom. Students in the room said “Effect.” Watching all year, I think that’s a snake eating its tail.
              So, how do these things fit together—skipping the final but seeking the points, Huppenthal not understanding Freire, the bored teens in all of our nations’ schools? All year, too many students have too often checked out of the essential element of our class—who we are and what we build in community and conversation. Marginalized issues and marginalized voices and marginalized people: silencing and mistreatment call for witness and justice. Sometimes you are the center of groups, sometimes the margins, and very often you are both—and either way, it’s community and conversation that leads to empowered and compassionate understanding and action.
              Our final didn’t have points—not many of them, anyway. But it featured the best and most important thing that we do—discussion—and used as its vehicle the documentary Precious Knowledge, a mirror to what, why, and how we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing. But if you could have joined us for the ending and chose not to because you could afford the points, or if you spent the time on a device then clocked in for the points on the little journal reflection, your grade might not have been hurt. But you failed the final exam.
              As the year has gone on, our conversations in class have become better—more thoughtful, more lively, more useful. I love learning from you and cherish the kind of energy, risk, and growth that’s possible in a group, which is what makes a classroom rare and special, and a reason I love being a teacher.
              If I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and you peaced-out without a word, I hope you have a restful summer.

David Grosskopf