Tag Archives: anger

Yoda, the Dark Path, and the High Ground of Education

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It is hard not to like Yoda quotes. The reversal of sentence order captures your attention as much as the pinched voice of the pointy-eared, green-toned little Jedi.  More importantly, the wisdom of Yoda cuts through much of the blather of oblong thinking. 

Yoda said, “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.  Consume you, it will…”.  And, with those words, the threat the pandemic and pandemic politics poses for the future of public education is called out for what it is – a dark path.

While Yoda struggled against a dark path that led to an evil galactic empire, we struggle against a dark path that erodes our optimism and belief in a better future.  There is a narcissism down our threatening  dark path.  Its use of manipulation, distortion of information, and denial of criticism is anathema to public education.

The dark side is doom-sided thinking of negativity characterized by the following statements.

  • The future is bleak and will not be as good as the past.
  • Some people get all the breaks and some people get none.
  • Anger trumps all emotions and arguments.
  • Leaders at all levels fail to understand and meet the needs of the public.
  • All data but my data is suspect.
  • Self-interest is the only interest that matters.
  • Rules only are important when you want them to be.

As educators, our schools are at ground zero of much of the angst.  School boards are under attack for closing or opening schools for in-person learning, providing a remote learning that appeals to some children and is rejected by others, and masking or unmasking of students and staff in school.  On each of these three topics, boards face angry parents and community no matter what the board decides.  Adding to the difficulty of having any kind of school day, student achievement across all grades and subjects displays pandemic gapping.  Academic achievement has fallen.  Fine arts programs that require personal, in-person teaching are stymied by remote education, quarantining, and masking.  Theater and concerts are performed to empty houses and shared virtually.  Athletics are constantly interrupted by quarantines, positive tests of players and coaches, and cancelled contests.  Two years of pandemic and counting and the difficulty faced by teachers and school leaders only grows. 

The high ground of school that keeps the dark path at bay was, is, and will continue to be built upon the aggregate of these statements. 

  • Education is a human necessity.
  • Public education is a community’s obligation to its children.
  • Education opens opportunities and reveals future options.
  • Content knowledge, academic skills, critical thinking, collaboration, socialization, and intellectual curiosity are the six enduring outcomes of public education.
  • Teaching changes lives.
  • Public schools require the trust of parents and conversely parents require the stability of public schools.
  • Public education is the pillar of our society that stands the test of time.  When it fails, our society will fail.

The brightest image of our high ground is the face of a child.  Innately, children want to learn.  Every child has a curiosity to understand the sounds and sights of their world.  A brain never stops processing what a child experiences and school learning provides tools for understanding.  I once cringed at the person in a school meeting years ago who would throw down the conversation-ending line, “Well, I am here for the children.”  As if to say, no one else stood on the side of children.  Today, “I am here for the children, and we provide each and every child with an education for their future” are words we need to say over and over again.  These words do not end conversation.  They open discussion of new possibilities and future options.  I am here for the education of children is a high ground that defeats the adult-centered dark path. 

What Do I Need To Know To Feel Normal About School?

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Newton taught us for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Our science teachers demonstrated this by applying a force to a pendulum at rest.  The pendulum swung in the direction of the applied force, reached the apex of its arc and then swung back in the opposite direction of the applied force past its normal resting point on an opposite and equally long arc.  Inertia eventually caused the pendulum to return to rest in its normal, perpendicular resting position.

The pandemic defied Newton.  The new normal of the post-pandemic at rest will not be in the same position we observed as pre-pandemic normal.  To put it bluntly, schools of the future cannot be what schools were in the past.  The forces unleashed by the pandemic not only moved the pendulum of the school in a multitude of wildly swinging arcs but relocated the center point of where the post-pandemic pendulum of the school will come to rest.  Reactionary forces have not equaled initial forces of change.   The descriptors of school normalcy are being rewritten and we must understand the location and realities of our new normal.

We must find our ability to be normal with the following descriptors

Facts and evidence are propositional.  When the national leadership repeatedly declared facts to be false and falsities to be true, people questioned the truths they could trust.  Questioning is never wrong, but unquestioning acceptance of untruth is.  Fact bashing went beyond political banter when the rewriters of facts and truth carried this strategy from partisanship into declaring the pandemic a hoax.  Almost 900,000 dead Americans later, we are still arguing whether covid is a health crisis or a conspiracy.  New normalcy will not rely upon universally held and evidence-based facts.  In the new normal, more than ever before people will align self-selected facts with what they want to be truth.  Evidence will not matter to those who will not believe it; all facts are propositional to the purpose of the speaker.

The concept of leadership is frayed.  From President to principal, a first response to what leaders say is growing to be either distrust or rejection.  The first face of this growing public response is “Who is he/she to tell me?”.  The second response is to look to others for different ideas.  In both responses, the key issue is “what has the leader done to improve my condition in life, including school life?”.  Leaders, because they are central figures, are blamed for every lessening of daily conditions.  Whether measured in popularity polls or in voiced support and action aligned with a leader, most measures today disfavor our elected and appointed leaders.  Instead, anti-leaders with oppositional messages and proposals garner the support of adults and students who feel disconnected from daily decisions.  In the new normal, representative leadership will be more and more difficult.    

Distancing will be more than physical space and remoting will continue.  The air-born spread of a respiratory virus caused social distancing to be our protocol for keeping space between us and potential covid carriers.  Mentally we moved through the first two years of the pandemic within six-foot bubbles to diminish the possibility of catching covid from the breath of others.  Bubbling affected more than where we stood.  It put distance between family members and friendships, collaboration and collegiality at work, and children and their best friends.  It became a psychological and emotional distance as much as a physical distance.  When schools returned to in-person teaching and learning we enforced the protocol of social distancing.  We now observe a new normal that lacks the proximity and close sharing of the pre-pandemic.  In our new normal we are not close to one another in any facet of our interactions – we remain at arms length and will not achieve the same levels of personal connection we once held.  No touch.  No hugging.  No one in our personal space.  No closeness.

Children in remote education and adults in remote working learned that aspects of working independently of place and others are okay and preferable to being in-person.  In fact, some will never return to the school or office or workplace because they can work remotely and they enjoy being remote.  Coincidentally, Sunday church attendance increases when parishioners can attend remotely.  Go figure.  Educationally, introverted children prospered in remote education without worrying about the eyes and words of their peers.  In the new normal, we will remain distanced from one another.  It is more comfortable.  Demands for remote and independent teaching and learning will increase.  We will mange a hybrid of remote and in-person living.

Personal demands rise above social responsibility.  Greek philosophers discussed the relationship between freedom and responsibility and perhaps every generation must find its own balance of these two values.  We observe that the pandemic has deepened and widened the chasm between what many Americans accept as their role in the commonwealth of their community, state, and nation.  It may be that the threat of pandemic death only made the tear in our social fabric greater.  Or, it may be that the pandemic gave us excuses for a further erosion of community in favor of personal demands.  Or, it may be that pandemic fatigue wore down a sense of community and people are expressing personal wants that have been repressed for two years.  Whatever the reason, pandemic protocols for the good of the many are coming down.  Masks are off.  Travel is on. Large groups are gathering.  It is not because we think the danger of covid is past.  We no longer want to follow protocols that intrude into the life we want.  In the new normal, individuals will satisfy themselves more than they will honor behaviors recommended for the common good.  They will attack sponsors of community responsibility.

Anger is weaponized.  Peter Finch’s character in “Network” (1976) yelled “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”.  He weaponized anger against his employer in seeking personal revenge and resolution.  Government at all levels today is confronted with angry constituents in the pandemic, some like Finch’s Howard Beale.  Board meetings have been disrupted and threats made.  By no means is this universal across the 430+ school districts of our state.  Yet, even civil board meetings experience seething anger in those who disagree with a school’s pandemic protocols.  Whether real or perceived, anger affects the people who are elected to govern when district residents are covert in their demands.  If Newtonian law holds, there will be equal angers rising to confront the force of voiced angers.  Our new normal will be measured and tested by how it responds to anger; angry people about something will seem an everyday experience.

Once waived, it is difficult to reinstate a rule or requirement.  An unenforced rule is not considered a rule.  In our state the length of a school year, hours of required instruction, truancy laws, definitions of school attendance, parameters for home schooling, requirement of homework, use of college admissions testing are among many long-standing school rules and standards that were were waived in the early pandemic.  Just turning on a computer at home qualified a student to be counted as present on a school day.  Does it matter?  In September and October 2021 regular student absenteeism and tardiness are real challenges.  Three days of school attendance out of five is as much as some students will commit.  Soft accountability told many parents that strict attendance and completion of assignments may not matter and in 2021-22 families extend weekends into three- and four-day weekends.  In the pandemic, school day and school year were determined by resistance factors not educational goals.  In the new normal, we will continue to struggle with apathy toward rules and standards, many of which were waived in the pandemic. 

Lowered bars of expectation set new levels of acceptance.  Remote education will haunt school expectations for some time.  At the start of remoting, we credited logging in, seeing a student’s face, some level of participation, and submission of some work on an assignment.  “Some” counted. Remoting led us to make assumptions about what children were learning and some were not learning.  Being remote, we did not really know.

The return to in-person teaching and learning displayed many children whose grade level and subject knowledge and skills were below to well below where they could have been if there were no pandemic.  No duh, eh!  Children in art, music, second language, technology ed, business and marketing, and computer science, to name a few, experienced remote learning on an individualized basis divorced from studio, rehearsal hall, laboratory, and community-based experiences.  They learned but not what they could have or what their next grade level or sequenced course or graduation diploma required.

Academic testing profiles slipped.  Some children in above the 75th percentile slipped to above the 50th.  More worrisome, the number of children below the 25th percentile increased.

Schools everywhere face the compensatory challenge of raising the level of each child’s education to non-pandemic levels.  “Thelma And Louise” (movie characters) taught us “you get what you settle for”.  In the new normal, we cannot settle for the level of educational achievement our students have gotten thus far in the pandemic.  In our normalizing, we must reinstate high expectations for each child’s education, and we must work diligently to raise the current level of each child’s learning achievements toward pre-pandemic standards.  This goes for reading levels, skill in playing the saxophone, throwing ceramics on a potter’s wheel, solving quadratics, and milling a tool on a lathe.

Decline of teaching as a career.  Nightly news tells us weekly that the unrelenting pandemic demand on medical responders, nurses, and hospital workers is causing a personnel shortage in their profession.  More are leaving and fewer are entering.  This also is true of schoolteachers.  The trend line of new teachers entering the profession has been in decline for more than two decades.  Pandemic demands topped off teacher struggles with increasing demands for educational accountability, partisan-divided support for public schools, increasing class sizes, and flattened salary compensation.  The result today is even more administrators and teachers leaving school and the classroom and even fewer entering.  State legislators try to increase teacher numbers by diminishing the educational preparation for a teaching license and approving alternative and easier ways to be licensed.  Districts posting for school administrator and classroom teacher positions for the 2021-22 will be pressed to find new applicants let alone highly qualified applicants.  Normal in the post-pandemic will be schools and classrooms with younger and less experienced administrators and teachers and a constantly revolving door of these.

The transition of the pandemic to endemic provides other challenges.  Each of these will also contribute to defining a new normal, that place where things will seem to come to rest and be less volatile.  That place will be nowhere close to the pre-pandemic normal.  It will, however, be our new reality.  Buckle up.  We have work to do.