We have no idea what is going on, but whatever it is must be scary

I came across this excerpt from a longer magazine article and it seemed to connect with our current bizarre arguments in Douglas County:

From The New Yorker, here’s Margaret Talbot on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her ideological allies: “The America of 2022 is quite plainly not a country where citizens’ ability to worship freely is in jeopardy. Nor is the nation on the cusp of canceling gun rights. Yet the conservative justices often act as if they were alone in a broken elevator, jabbing the emergency button and hollering for help.”

Yes, this is from an opinion piece and this quote does not include the sorts of evidence that a an academic persuasive essay demands, but it captures the confusion and angst that many Americans must feel right now.

The default for everyone -- no matter where they lie on the political spectrum -- is to search for the worst case scenarios, for the furthest stretch. Many choose phrases like "...could result in..." or "...the end result of x may be y."

Douglas County, as I have mentioned several times in this blog, is among America's richest counties. It boasts a very strong school system with all sorts of private and charter options. It's about as homogeneous a place as you can find, with 87 percent of residents being white and nearly everyone having plenty of money.

But DougCo, somehow, has become a joke in which the wealthy battle it our over nonexistent problems and go off the deep end at the drop of a hat. 

There is no war on Christianity, for instance, unless it is a civil war of attrition as most churches shed members in droves. No one with any power or influence seems interested in anything that might decrease school shootings, much less take away any of our national arsenal of over 300 million guns. No public school teachers know much about critical race theory and no one teaches it, whatever it might be.

Republican leaders seem determined to push disagreements and fears as far as they can go, and to even contemplate compromise is a sign of moral flaws (and that applies to both ideological extremes).

A prominent local Republican is George Brauchler, who (of course) has a podcast and often is a right wing radio guest. He was one of the first to call for publication of the names of every DougCo employee who had called in sick a couple weeks ago protesting school board overreach. He's a lawyer and former district attorney, BTW, but other lawyers confronted the school board with the threat of lawsuits if a single employee suffered harm due to such publication and the board backed off.

Brauchler himself did not file the freedom of information request for those names, which mostly reminds us that the rich and powerful prefer to find others to handle the messy detail work. He's a chickenshit, to be coarse but accurate, but that is hardly unusual.

Soon the local school district will have yet another superintendent, and the radicals in the majority evidently have someone in mind who runs a local charter school. They can and almost certainly will ram her selection through, no matter what. Might makes right, right?

But that person stands no chance at all of being successful in the long term. Much as most of America will never be able to quite trust Amy Coney Barrett due to her rushed nomination and confirmation, most of Douglas County will always suspect that the new super is a puppet -- or worse, that the entire fiasco was planned all along to make certain a person who is not a staunch public school supporter can further disrupt the schools. 

Get enough rich people together and they can create their own schools. Public education is for losers.

Coaches, directors and advisers don't get to 'play the game'

A school media adviser will always be in an awkward position, being both a student advocate and an employee of the school district, possibly a parent and often a community member, but also someone whose role may be to help young people critique adults. 

And that doesn't include the many additional roles, beyond classroom teacher or even media adviser, that occur when adults and students spend many hours somewhat informally together, working toward a common cause.

A lot of personal counseling goes on during those after-school sessions working on completing a deadline. There's music and food and goofiness and the occasional tears or anger. 

There is a reason coaches and advisers and directors often develop stronger relationships with their students than, say, a math teacher who just teaches. One reason is that they are engaged in some sort of performance that will be public... not the sort of thing that we think of as connected to math class.

The adviser is in charge but is not the editor. We call it "student media" for a reason. If an adviser wants to become a journalist, that is certainly an available option (though that choice carries its own risks and a likely pay cut). Problems occur when advisers begin imagining themselves as journalists and forget that they are teachers first. 

This is not much different from the situations theater directors and athletic coaches find themselves in. Much of their work with students occurs during concentrated periods of time, prepping for a game or a show. 

In most cases, theater directors do not perform with their students. Athletic coaches never perform with their athletes. It is possible that the directors and coaches might be able to perform better than their young charges, but that is not the agreed upon relationship.

It would not be surprising to find that a media adviser might be the strongest reporter, writer, page designer, video editor, proofreader, etc., in the media lab. It would also not be surprising to find that a freshman English teacher has a much stronger grasp of the "light and dark" imagery in "Romeo and Juliet," as an example. 

What would be surprising in that case would be the teacher writing the "perfect" essay that all students should aspire to though none could rival, and then sharing that at the end of the unit. "Look at how much less you know than I!"

Occasionally in my early years advising I would become exasperated with some students not making themselves available for certain reporting that I deemed essential. For instance, the yearbook needed photos from Prom but most students were more interested in actually living their big night than acting as a reporter. So I might spend a few hours shooting photos. After all, what kind of yearbook would my students be creating if we didn't provide much coverage of a big event?

It took me some years to come to grips with what athletic coaches and musical directors know instinctively: if I, the adviser, cared more about complete coverage and excellence than my students, something had gone wrong. The book wasn't a student yearbook anymore, but something else... something at least partially "owned" by me.

Of course, it's impossible for coaches, directors, advisers or teachers to disconnect our emotions from the performances of our students. There is a pride that comes from helping young people produce something beyond what they thought they could do, and that pride has little to do with "wins" or awards.

Occasionally, some excited football coach will leap off the sideline and make a tackle or otherwise get involved in the game. They even had to create a rule to cover this after a coach tackled a guy returning a kick-off, the runner having evaded the tacklers only to be blindsided. The TD is awarded anyway and the coach kicked out of the game, if you are interested.

There is no such rule for media advisers. There are lots of ways they can complete some tasks necessary to publish, and most of those will be invisible to the public or to administrators. 

But the students always know.

Extremism eventually burns out, but it may take time

Unless teachers and parents make extraordinary efforts, most students who choose to become part of print and online news programs in high schools tend to be more progressive than their peers, or at least more interested in prodding and pushing against the status quo.

That is important for any newish adviser to know from the start of a career, and good for even the most veteran advisers to remember.

I bring this up because school boards are in the news (and that is rarely a good thing). In Douglas County, the politics are raw and unavoidable, with the latest development being that the district will be releasing the names of the over 1,300 teachers and staff who called out sick a couple weeks ago, causing schools to close for the day. Evidently, this was prompted by someone requesting this information and a nearby district in the same situation about eight years ago was ordered by a court to do the same thing.

In Jefferson County, those names were released after a similar work stoppage soon after several radical board members were recalled. A recall election can't be held until officials have been in office for at least six months, so that may still be in DougCo's future. Based on current tensions, it would be shocking if there were NOT a recall election this June.

Also this week: San Francisco voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members, with the major complaint being that those recalled were too focused on social justice issues and not focused enough on getting kids back to "normal" school. But the "winning" side ended up being Chinese-American parents who objected to some schools being forced to bring in more minority students. Lowell HS, for instance, is a high performing school whose students are overwhelmingly Asian or white. 

The California district was also the object of some derision as the board spent lots of time and effort on renaming schools whose namesakes had some sort of objectionable past. And in the midst of the pandemic, so less. 

Asians are not a numerical minority in San Francisco, and they value the extra push, so to speak, that a challenging school like Lowell can provide their children. The issue of education excited a lot of Chinese-American voters, a group that does not always engage politically, according to several news reports.

Circling back to my original point, that journalism students tend to be a bit more progressive than their peers and their communities, a true challenge is finding ways to protect excited students from getting too far into the weeds while balancing their free expression rights and not dismantling their idealism.

Extreme views, however satisfying and even honored by some, are usually reined in by reality. The truth is that for every Douglas County, where politics and a regular back and forth between reactionaries who would be fine with the public school system becoming completely privatized and with moderates who value public schools and supporting new ways to be more and more inclusive in our schools, there is a San Francisco, where some school leaders may have become distracted from the basic goal of supporting students and the teachers who help them develop.

A school media program that gets out ahead of the community risks losing readers and risks narrowing it coverage and its curiosity.

The editors of the school paper probably chafe at some of the "old" ideas they see in their communities. They are eager for change and they may be fine with stirring up trouble. "Stirring up trouble" is not a bad goal for news media, BTW, but there is danger for the teacher advisers who find themselves in a weird gray area: Not journalists. Not outside readers. Not members of the administration. 

I will get into this tension that advisers must negotiate in my next post.

A bluish state still suffers from basic disagreements

Colorado is similar to most other states, with a clear urban-rural split and lots of nagging problems that resist quick solutions.

Crowded, often crappy roads. Homelessness without any clear solutions. Poverty gnawing at large numbers of citizens. Sky-high housing costs. Gun violence in cities and soaring suicide rates in rural areas. Ah, modern life.

In today's news we find that the state just passed 12,000 deaths due to Covid, though the public health rules are being phased out. Much as those mostly elderly and vulnerable Coloradans have been phased out. And folks around here seem ready to join the national push to "put the pandemic behind us" and act normal. After all, now we are back to the very young and the very old being the primary victims of the virus (no who really cares?) and our stagnant vaccination rate reflects the national split on vaccinations beyond the ones we all are quite used to (polio, chicken pox, measles, etc.). 

There is a bill moving through the state legislature to ban carrying weapons openly within 100 feet of a ballot drop off box. Predictably, the committee vote to advance was all seven Democrats approving and all four Republicans voting no. 

Significantly, the bill does not ban concealed weapons, but you can't have everything, can you? The bill seems like a no-brainer, joining a list of other prohibited expression and action near voting locations. Nobody can seriously be in favor of allowing blatant intimidation as a polling place, can they?

I don't care how well-trained or reasonable people are, armed civilians lurking around the drop off box I use to vote sounds like intimidation. Republican plans to assign their foot soldiers to "keep watch" over their neighbors is the very definition of fascism and it's just another example of not trusting, well, anyone in this country.

Another story today announced that an obscure election official from Grand Junction will run for Secretary of State. Unfortunately, Tina Peters has been charged with a variety of offenses and continues to rage about the 2020 election results. As with many in the Cult, she argues that the election results are somehow incorrect though she can not reveal any evidence. 

At this point, Cult members who still listen to this stuff are lost to any sort of reasoned democracy. On the other hand, the more radicals the Cult supports in the coming elections, the better for Democrats (perhaps that is mere naïve hope). 

Our country school board continues to disappoint, rushing to create a process for hiring a new superintendent, which would be the fourth in just six years. Chaos is the kindest way to describe the current state of debate in Douglas County, the sixth richest county in America.

The problem with the recently fired district leader boiled down to him supporting the previous board's choices on masking -- that really IS the job of any superintendent -- and on tearing up the district's equity policy as part of the struggle against teaching Critical Race Theory in county schools.

Hardly anyone knows much about CRT, and certainly the four radical right board members have no idea. They were elected, however, by lots of white people who are terrified by almost any discussion of topics they don't understand or don't agree with or just want to ignore. 

Not a good time to be a history or journalism teacher in these parts. Not a good time to be a teacher in general, I suppose, since the board majority has increased a conflict between professional educators and hobbyist politicians looking for some air time on FOX and conservative radio.

But most current teachers will NOT leave the district, I predict. Starting over in another district is much more complex than signing a new contract. And most county residents will not really understand what is going on and not really care unless they have children in the schools here. 

One thing we never have to worry much about in America: the rich will be OK.

Sports are comforting because we keep score, not because players are perfect

I have often noted in this blog the abundance of "bad" news out there. In fact, most news you will encounter today will be negative in some way. 

I listened to a recent church sermon about how harmful perfectionism can be to our self-esteem and our spiritual health and everyone will immediately agree with that sentiment... before returning to the battle to be perfect in some area or for some project.

This past weekend included high stakes basketball games, the Super Bowl, and the Winter Olympics, not to mention all sorts of other contests all across the world and one thing that makes sports riveting is that most contests result in a winner (and a loser).

Athletics always involves a lack of perfection -- even the best quarterbacks throw errant passes and even the finest skier miss gates -- but the good news is that sports offers those clear winners. It may not have been perfect, but the LA Rams are THE world champs. Olympic bobsledders MIGHT have gone a tenth of second faster, but the fastest time gets the Gold. 

I was judging a national high school editorial writing contest last week and I was asked to choose first, second, and third plus a handful of honorable mentions. I thought the editorial I chose as the winner was clearly better than the runners-up but I would never claim that it was "perfect." In fact, it's possible that some elements of the winning piece impressed me so much that I was willing to overlook some clunky transitions or some unconvincing support for its claims. 

Suffice it to say that it was "the best" among the entries, just as the eventual 3A girls basketball team that wins the state tournament will be "the best" despite enduring turnovers and missed shots and assignments. The team that scores the most points wins and takes home the trophy. 

The previous year's champs may have been far better as a team by almost any measure, but sports offers the sort of clear "winner" that most of life does not. 

For instance, can we even imagine what "winning" over the pandemic would look like? Is the very word "winning" unsuitable when over 900,000 Americans have died from the virus? Most of us are resigned to an uneasy truce in the war against the virus, much as we have long done with the flu.

But history does record "winners" of wars, though we could philosophically claim that no one wins when thousands die in the contest.

One could argue that more damaging to most people is the yearning to "win, whatever the cost" rather than perfectionism. 

Perfection is the sort of desire that Plato was talking about when he argued that perfection DOES exist but only in an idealistic sense and that all of creation is striving to return to or otherwise reach that "perfect Form."

Some top athletes are driven to shave just a few more tenths of a second from their times or increase their shooting percentage by a point or two. I'm not sure that is what drives them crazy. 

But a person who is driven by wanting to be recognized as #1 or the world champ or the gold medalist or the highest paid or the most admired... THAT can and does make people nutty.

'If I don't like it, nobody gets to like it'

There has been a recent increase in calls for certain books to be removed from required reading lists, from certain grade levels, and even from entire public libraries. Each case has its own twists and turns and many times there could be room for discussions over exactly what age ranges seem appropriate for certain books.

The Tennessee case of Maus being removed from the 8th grade curriculum in one district is an example of the tension between "anything goes" and "best sources for topics" and paternalism... and exactly WHEN certain topics and narratives should be introduced to children.

There is a difference, of course, between outright censorship and making considered choices about what is read or not read. No one could possibly read everything that is available but most would agree that adults should have pretty much unlimited choice in their reading, even if many of those choices are abhorrent. 

My knee jerk reaction to reports of book banning is to get upset and start quoting the First Amendment. My "head" tells me that censorship rarely works very well in the long term, as we see Maus now at the top of the best-seller list on Amazon, for instance. But my "heart" has a tough time with the censors, assuming that book banning is ill-considered and that the would-be censors have rarely read the books in question.

There are many in America -- and this is quite common among Republicans -- who believe the public school system is not something to be celebrated and fully supported. Many desire more control over what children read and discuss and study. 

It is certainly possible that the rise of book challenges is an ominous skirmish in the efforts to "blow up" the public schools and dismember a major part of state and local governments. 

But there are times when I think about WHEN to teach certain important texts. The first example that springs to mind is "Romeo and Juliet," often taught in English 9 classes. I have done so myself and the experience rarely goes well unless the teacher is willing to devote extraordinary time and effort to the play.

The thinking may be that ninth graders are quite close to Juliet's age (not quite 14) and can therefore make stronger connections with the play's emotions. That doesn't hold up well, though, as hardly any ninth graders have experienced the kind of all-consuming love that R&J experience. And connecting with Shakespeare's language? Ooo boy. Not a chance.

Ninth graders CAN connect with a film version of the play and the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version featuring Leo and Claire can go over very well. But English teachers want students to appreciate the language and poetry and themes and imagery... leading to many students becoming turned off to Shakespeare just before they might start handling more complex literature.

I have taught R&J dozens of times to all sorts of students, but my personal experience is that it wasn't until I was in college taking a "Complete Works of Shakespeare" course (we read all 36 plays in one semester!) that I began to really appreciate the artistry and the influence of the play.

We had studied the play when I was a freshman in high school and it made no impact at all. The 1968 Zeffirelli film made a lasting impact, helping me better connect with the lovers and the social commentary and even the poetry, and when I found myself teaching British Lit in the early 1980s, I gained a new appreciation for the play and was surprised to find that this play essentially invented the concept of romantic love in the western world. 

Bottom line: I'm fine with teaching "Romeo and Juliet" to high school students but favor waiting until they are juniors or seniors. There are numerous options to teach reading and analytical skills to freshmen and most are much more accessible. But I would enjoy a discussion that delved into other options.

It's not censorship to advocate for a particular piece of literature to be taught later in school. It IS censorship to demand that a particular book can never be taught (with burning books that alarm us the next step).

I continue to hope for more reasoned discussions about books and curriculum, but am not holding my breath.

It's more fun to shout and burn.

We respect and honor educators whenever convenient

Republican state representative Tim Geitner has introduced a bill in the Colorado House (HB22-1066) that would require all public school educators to post the following:

• A list of the educational materials that the local education provider uses for each grade, subject, and course
• A copy of each survey, nonacademic assessment, analysis, and evaluation distributed to students
• A list of the devices, programs, and software that the local education provider uses that collect student biometric data
• Information concerning the professional development requirements for educators whom the local education provider employs.

"Educational materials" includes written curriculum plans. It also requires each school district to develop a policy on teaching controversial issues (no definition that those) and a process for citizens to report, well, anything that bugs them.

I know. I am broadly summarizing this catch-all bill that has almost no chance of passing. But it's interesting to note that exerting greater control over schools, curriculum, and classroom teachers has become a key issue for Republicans across the nation. 

Were I still teaching high school, I would question each general bullet point of the bill as well as the motivation behind all the seemingly laudable calls for "transparency." I am not against transparency, as you might have noted in yesterday's post.

But transparency needs to go both ways. For instance, Rep. Geitner and his wife homeschool their two sons, which is fine, but which makes me think that here is another "sideline observer" taking some shots at public education. Behind each bullet point is a blatant lack of trust on Geitner's part with the message clear: teachers are getting away with something.

There is so much in this bill that captures the zeitgeist of unrelenting criticism of teachers and schools from a large percentage of the community, but one objection I have is about this idea that lesson plans (I assume that is what some "educational materials" cover) must be available to everyone.

I never found detailed lesson plans to be helpful in my own classroom, though I certainly had extensive plans and rationalization for everything I taught. When pressed, as in the case of an administrator conducting a formal evaluation of my teaching (a truly pointless exercise that requires everyone involved pretending that one designated period of one chosen day is representative of a teacher's performance, while also pretending that the former P.E. teacher, now turned administrator, has deep knowledge of the subject matter I am teaching), I could write out a lesson plan without much effort.

Most of the time, however, my syllabus and constantly evolving weekly plans guided daily teaching, and most "lesson plans" resided in my head. I like being prepared but found that teaching became much more fun when I learned to let go of tightly controlled classes where the outcomes were predetermined.

Honestly, everyone sort of "gets it" that a lot of school consists of students writing, speaking or demonstrating exactly what the teacher wants and expects. The longer I taught, the more I valued being surprised -- and the surprises were not always pleasant. Journalism classes are ideal for providing surprises, but I found that mainstream English classes did not have to turn into "call and response" activities.

One of my favorite sports commentators was Frank Deford, now deceased, who shared a radio essay on some aspect of sports on NPR each Wednesday morning. As I often say, sports is about far more than wins and losses and statistics, so non-athletes were not excluded. 

I often would listen in the car on the way to school, note his use of rhetoric or argument or narrative storytelling, and decide to share his essay with students.

Once in the office, I would go to the NPR website and download the text of his commentary, reformat it in InDesign, and print a class set of copies. It helped when I had first hour free to provide some time to do this, but the entire operation took about 20 minutes depending on how busy the school copy machine was.

I usually had no time to prepare much of anything specific about that essay but part of the fun was that students and teacher would discover and question and expand and question on the fly. We were off-script and I never knew where the discussions might take us.

My AP Language and Composition classes and I would read the commentary aloud, together, pausing to discuss everything from a challenging vocabulary word to clever syntax to Deford's unique "voice" as a writer (as a reader, as well). In the biz, we call this technique "interrupted reading" and I used it all the time, no matter the course.

Yes, students COULD have listened to the same commentary on the radio as I, but a truth of schooling is that if we expect students to devote the same time outside of class as we, the teachers, do, we are doomed to disappointment.

In the unlikely event that Geitner's disingenuous call for more transparency would pass, I guess I could write down something like: "If Frank Deford's NPR weekly essay contains teachable references and writing strategies, Wednesdays might begin with a 15-minute discussion of said essay. Parents interested in the essays themselves are invited to listen to NPR or read a PDF of the essay on my class website."

In actuality, that is exactly what I did.

But do we need a law to standardize logical classroom management? If not, what underlies this sort of bill?