I have said many times that writing is a solo profession with an audience of one. Some may get published, some may self publish (which includes Blogs and other Newsletters) and some may write as hobby and hope that more will come of it; regardless, FEW make real money and have real success.
In today’s market there are many obstacles and with that the largest is finding an Agent and then in turn a Publisher who will accept the manuscript. And that is when the real work begins, no, not the writing but all the rest that accompanies this project. And with that a book may find an audience and that is a double edged sword that have found Author’s canceled before they ever began. The push to write in an authentic voice in today’s view means you have a very small voice in which to make loud. It is stupid and defies any concept of imagination, creativity and of course connection. You should never write blind as in that you don’t write about what you don’t know in which to challenge legitimacy of the subject but you should be able to write characters and stories that have many other voices that you have heard and want to expand upon. It is a responsibility and duty to ensure that authenticity of a voice and that is where Beta readers can lend a hand if not a voice to ensure that; however, it is not to censure. To not permit one in which to try to add character, tone, and variety for a Writer is essential, and anyone attempting to do so is to say the least I believe professional jealousy. Good writers write and they do so with intent and obligation. Do I need to be an Opera Singer to write about a Mystery that takes place at an Opera? No. But I do need to familiarize myself with Opera, the language and the stage behind the profession in which to allow authenticity and accuracy. Then allow the reader to make the connection and in turn always challenge writers to do better, but again it does not mean abusing and demeaning them for them pushing boundaries. We need more of that, not less.
I had never heard of this project and here he is just across the river and again proving my point that no Author can write without another job to make the ends meet and the pencils there in which to press to the page. This is the real business of writing, the side hustle.
The side hustle that keeps a literary author’s career afloat
Tony Tulathimutte’s writing workshop, Crit, reels in eminent guest speakers and helps launch the careers of new authors
Isabel Slone The Guardian Wed 31 May 2023.00
The list of past guest speakers at Crit, the writing workshop that author Tony Tulathimutte runs out of his Brooklyn apartment, reads like a veritable who’s who of 21st-century literary greats. Jonathan Franzen, Hua Hsu and Carmen Maria Machado have all popped by as guests at the eight-week course. And while Tulathimutte describes himself as “literally just some guy” on his website, he’s won an O Henry award, and former students like Beth Morgan and Rax King have gone on to earn lucrative book deals and win highly prestigious prizes.
Tulathimutte, 39, founded Crit in 2017 after winning the Whiting award for his first novel, Private Citizens. While he had previously taught courses at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Massachusetts, and led workshops for indie companies like Sackett Street Writers, these gigs came and went. Running his own school seemed like a more sustainable way to make a living while maintaining his career as an author (Tulathimutte announced the sale of his second novel, Rejection, earlier this year). According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, writers and authors earn on average $69,510 a year, while an alarming Authors Guild survey showed that its members drew a median income of $6,080 in 2017, down 42% from 2009. “I figured if I could get enough applications coming in, running my own class would be more stable [than waiting for invitations],” Tulathimutte said.
Crit accepts nine students per session. They meet twice a week (Wednesdays and Fridays) over the course of two months. Spots cost $800, netting Tulathimutte approximately $30,000 per year. He supplements his income by accepting freelance writing assignments and visiting faculty positions. He is currently a thesis adviser at Brooklyn College.
In the six years since Crit’s inception, Tulathimutte has managed to build not just a successful side hustle, but a thriving community of writers. He hosts book swaps, parties, even a dedicated Slack channel where alumni can chitchat, form casual writing groups and perhaps land a connection to the agent or editor who will launch their career.
What was the impetus for founding Crit?
I just thought I could design the class I would have wanted to take. Most MFA programs function more like book clubs or discussion groups, where people are reading your work and giving feedback. I try to do formal pedagogy in the class, so I came up with 16 lectures breaking down different aspects of craft and process, such as “What is plot?” or “What is dialogue?” Students find the career-oriented class especially of interest because [practical matters] very often get neglected in the academy. It’s the last class of the course and it goes on indefinitely. My record is 11 hours and 45 minutes.
Why is it important for you to teach practical skills like money management?
Most working writers I know slap together a bunch of different sources of income. On the side I take visiting faculty gigs, pitch articles, freelance as a novel editor and writing consultant, and shoot author photos. Plus, there’s the very occasional windfall from book-related things like speaking engagements and selling foreign rights or film and TV options. I teach students how to cobble together different income streams to create something workable. Usually I talk about whatever grants, fellowships, residencies, contests, funded MFAs and other things I think are worth applying for, but I’ve also talked about Roth IRAs, eligible tax deductions from writing income, speakers bureaus, negotiating freelance rates, loan forgiveness programs and so on.
Does it feel harder to make a living as a writer now than it did in the past?
It’s definitely harder now, with so many media companies and publication venues folding and ever fewer places to publish book-related content. But if it was ever easy, I missed it. I’m pretty sure wages have not kept up with inflation since the 70s.
Crit students have landed 12 book deals to date. What about your classes gives them a competitive edge?
I don’t claim to be some kind of kingmaker, I just try to run as good of a writing workshop as I can
Tony Tulathimutte
I think that a lot of my students would have succeeded just fine eventually. I could point to some writers and say, “I introduced them to their agent,” to others, “I made X and Y notes on their manuscript,” but who knows if that increased or decreased their selling prospects. I don’t claim to be some kind of kingmaker, I just try to run as good of a writing workshop as I can.
Do you have plans to scale?
I have a friend who says all writing workshops are pyramid schemes. That’s why I’ve been steadfastly refusing to grow. I do not ever want to run the kind of writing workshop where I’m skimming off the top of somebody’s labor. I’ve had offers from people who wanted to teach a poetry class or a nonfiction class, but that would mean more unpaid labor for me, which doesn’t really make sense.skip past newsletter promotion
Instead, I’m growing the company in a completely different way, which is by encouraging my students to form groups and keep on meeting without me. Even if they don’t find a match in the group they attend Crit with, very often they’re able to find their way into a different writing group in the Slack channel I maintain or through the parties I throw. It’s not going to improve the business’s bottom line, but teaching writing is this really personal thing.
What kind of challenges have you faced nurturing the business over time?
It’s not any one particular thing, it’s just having to do everything yourself – marketing, recruiting, designing the curriculum, teaching, writing feedback and recommendations, holding meetings, booking guests, throwing events, keeping the books, editing query letters and fielding random requests for advice. Starting an LLC seemed complicated but I just hired a service to handle it for me for about a thousand bucks.
How have you managed to get the word out?
In the beginning, my only marketing strategy was to ask a couple of my more famous friends, like Jenny Zhang [and] Carmen Maria Machado, to retweet me. The slight bump in visibility was enough to get a handful of people signing up for the first few classes. After the first year, the balance shifted to 50/50 Twitter and word of mouth. Now it’s almost entirely word of mouth.
How do you manage to convince people like Jonathan Franzen to visit your class?
I email them. That’s it! Two-thirds of the guests are friends of mine or someone I would run into at a party. Jonathan Franzen was a massive get, obviously. He asked me to moderate one of his book launch events for Crossroads in 2021 and after the event I asked if he’d like to guest and he said yes. I just figure there’s no harm in asking and if I get a no, there’s nothing wrong with that.
One of the things you teach is ending writer’s block. What are your strategies?
You think I’m going to give that away free to the Guardian? You’ll have to sign up for the course.
The Writer’s Strike is now entering week two. The average writers salary is approximately 51K using the information on Indeed. That is amazingly low. Most Writers are freelance meaning they have no Benefits, no job security, no health care, no anything. Writers are visible, invisible and some are unionized and with that they have a contract that guarantees some of those average benefits most do not have. When one thinks of a Writer many images come to mind but the idea of a scribe like Bartelby, is not the predominant image. (If you have to look that up you are not a Writer).
I have not passed the picket lines in Manhattan as I have simply had no need to to into Midtown but I hear it is quite the celebrity sighting. That again is a very poor misrepresentation of what writing is and the fame quotient. I don’t see Richard Patterson or Stephen King taking to the street as they are again a different kind of Writer and while King was very vocal about the merging of publishing houses, that little attempt at consolidation may be back sooner than later.
Writers are employed in Journalism, Television News, on Game Shows, Reality Shows and yes even Award Shows. They are often covered by different contracts, wear different hats which enables them to move into production and therefore not considered solely a writer. We have famous writers, Tom Hanks, we have famous Doctors who write, Oz is one. They are often actual writers and often they employ Ghost Writers who do the heavy lifting. I have already written about the CBS Doctor and his problems but I also just finished an essay by Prince Harry’s Ghost Writer, J.R. Moheringer, in The New Yorker. And with that another essay in the WSJ by the Writer, Richard North Patterson about how he had trouble finding a Publisher for his current novel. And not one but two Opinion pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post about the problems that Patterson discusses about being a creative writer in a time of deep discussions on writers, their creativity, their own history and of course their style and type of writing about subjects that are not always in their “lane”. In other words really write what you know and if you don’t know either don’t write about it or do some heavy lifting to find one who can assist your research and development of characters and plots that are not about well I guess “you.” So in other words if I wanted to write about young people with different backgrounds, ages, education and experience than I, I guess I would have to hire or consult with one of every type in which to get a full picture. I see, one person of one color, one gender, one sexuality, one religion, one disability, one of every color the rainbow also can speak for all the respective members of said group effectively. One man’s story is apparently all men’s stories.
We are now down to excusing versus accusing the same single brush sweeping all stories clean.
The rise of revising published books to meet a new standard, of pulling older books in which language, characters or even the Author’s own history has come into question is now being added to the list of books and subjects being pulled from Libraries and classrooms as if to literally white wash a type of story, a subject that may “offend” and with that almost all of it seems to be coming from White men. They are clearly thin skinned. As for Moms for Liberty they clearly don’t read and with that have a larger agenda on their mind that what books their kids (if they have any) read. And reading is fundamental and this requires doing so between the lines.
To be threatened by a book means you are well easily led. And with the rise of Cults of late I suspect that is the new Karen’s project du jour. If you can’t beat them join them. The Q’s and MAGA wearers are now freedom for liberty and with that they mean denying all of liberty for anyone who does not follow the script. You know stay in your lane but in this case they have all the lanes. Why are those who scream FREEDOM the loudest are the ones hell bent on denying it for others?
When I point out the parallels between the two distinctions of parties, that Liberals are trying to be all things to all people and are the ones behind removing To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn and revising Roald Dahl, I am countered with, “But DeSantis is behind much of the book and curriculum banning.” Yes and I also lived and worked and taught in Tennessee this is not new, see the Scopes Monkey Trial on that. Feeding the flames with paper over wood, is there a difference?
Most people do NOT read. Those who write do. And with that the list of books and Authors we love and loathe are long. Some have read all the “classics” and some have read none. Does it matter who is a better reader or writer? No. I say this at the Opera, find what you love about the production and focus on that. Opera’s are too grand a thing to be able to see and hear all the notes, the nuances, the gestures. You stick with it and will be rewarded with a story or a song that changes it all for you. Not all swings are hits to use a baseball metaphor.
As the Writer’s strike continues they all have stories to tell and many are already worried about the long range of what their profession will become with the rise of AI and in turn the push to do less with less. We no longer have Seasons of Television, we have streaming, we have more what used to be call mini series now as a normal part of what comprises television. And with that we have a great deal of Reality, that is frankly now the most repackaged, rebranded shit that exists. Got a Housewife? I got them all over the globe, I got them on Ultimate Girls Trip and I got them on spin offs. How many Below Deck’s are there, I have lost count. From Survivor the OG, to Big Brother and Amazing Race we have more that seem to find and use the same casts over and over again. Even new shows take those from former shows and we feel like we are Traitors if we do not watch let alone care. And yes folks they script their own characters too.
So in other words everyone is a writer and will be as there can be no Writers of multiple genres and styles unless they have studied and can prove worth. Science Fiction? Well you better I guess be a Scientist. Romance novelist? Well that could be a former contestant on the Bachelorette then. If we are all to stay in our own lane and not imagine and create the writers room will be the size of an Auditorium in which to make sure all voices are heard. God that will be loud. And little will get done. We have a problem and like many in invisible professions, some will get noticed, some will get the rewards and the acknowledgements but most like Bartelby, are just doing what they do and hope they do it well enough to get some respect and some reward. That latter is a broad meaning.
I am writing this to try to understand how to cope the two days I work with an Addict. I work only two days as by day three I am exhausted dealing with her. It is watching a train wreck over and over again and I can do nothing. Let me make this clear again – NOTHING.
I am Subbing in an Autism classroom, we are down to two Students. One who is fairly functional and the other who is somewhat communicative but also highly ticked. He has the fluttering hands, the occasional body jerking and goes inward for times. I have not had any issue gaining his attention and he can read and do math, particularly math quite well. Both boys are actually lovely boys and I am privileged to know them. There are four other full time rooms with differing students and levels of ages and spectrum skill sets. Only one room is a full time classroom that the kids flow in and out. I have been in all of them and with that have met almost all of them. One is missing and has been since the fall out incident with the Teacher in the room I am currently in. I don’t recall him and with that am still not sure what transpired that led this Teacher to be on leave. One Teacher is also on leave for an incident but he is in the building but not in his classroom, another is on Medical leave. So of the Full Time Teachers, a total of six, three are out. There is one full time Sub in the Health room for the Teacher on Medical, no permanent roster and has no Teaching license, he is a raging moron and that is a compliment; there is no full time Sub in either permanent class with me being the one at least consistent presence so on the days I am not there I have no clue who is in there with the Aide. And that is the problem the Aide.
The Aides accompany Students to each class, to lunch and the buses when they arrive to and leave the school. These are all high school aged kids and the class ages are divided by room and with that a new Student arrived this week and another withdrew. Who is in charge in the Department is unclear and the Teacher whose room I am in is the sole Crisis Manager in the building when one of the Students have a meltdown. I worked with him one half day when the Aide was absent and I met him, spoke to him and he was alluding to the problems in the Department with regards to the other Teacher’s sudden leave situation. I did not think he was having an problems and did joke or now perhaps not say he was seen as a White Male Supremacist and that put him in a challenging spot. There is one other White Male Teacher in the department and I have subbed for him and in turn I realize now why he keeps his head down and his Aide supports him and likes him. I heard her say that to another Aide and she is the only one willing to admit that there is a problem, so they are laying low and out of this. Politics are always a problem in Education and this is no exception.
Which brings me to this Aide (I call her Mania) Her friend is the Aide (Whiny) running the classroom next door where the Teacher who has been accused of some type of verbal abuse. She is a whiny self involved individual and when I covered the room earlier this school year it was my first encounter with that Department and with her. Another Sub was there and I was there for only the morning and the rest of the day into the mainstream portion of the building. To say relieved would be half of it. The other young man that was there has since moved on and may no longer be Subbing, but being in that department without any skills or familiarity with Special Needs, no real direction or instruction, regardless of the department or especially the department, you are fucked without dinner. Over the year I have kept it light and friendly as I passed in and out and then came the Health room. That was when the Teacher left sooner than anticipated and the scheduled Sub was not available. In other words he did not want to be in a room where the plans were not set. He had them for the weeks/months he was assigned and these two earlier days did not exist; So, in that a man who is never absent suddenly was. And in those two days I met them all, the Aides who came in and out and the remaining Teachers. A motley crew to say the least. I have never actually met/spoken to the lone Teacher left, the one man hiding in the corner who I had covered for when he had Covid. But the overall climate is not healthy, the dismissive nature in which I was treated was enough as I pulled out my ass actual health lessons and taught all the classes. In the interim I was running between other classes to cover other rooms in SPED and the building, that is the sub shortage. It its utterly disruptive and challenging in the best of times, running between four flights of stairs and rooms to simply take attendance and just sit there. It makes me hate myself every single day.
But with the Autistic kids I feel I need to be better and do better so I teach. It was noticed and with that the single Aide of the one lone Male Teacher left, informed me that I was in fact a good Teacher and appreciated it. This from one of the many in schools who are underpaid and under appreciated and this compliment was duly noted. Sadly it did not last. The current Aide (Mania) also was positive and generous, but since this time now with this woman these past few weeks I feel utterly exhausted with her and her behavior. At first I thought it was just her personality and then after she told me of her car accident I realized that she should not be at work, it happened only recently (unclear exactly when but it appears to have been during the pandemic and when schools were closed) and with that has a metal leg implant and struggles with walking and I suspect also Traumatic Brain Injury. And with that she has the perk of addiction to pain meds.
Thursday, after three days (I worked on Thursday as a half day, paid for full and the start of Vacation so I felt it would be fine. I was wrong) it was as bad as any day and with it my fear of here addiction was finally confirmed. Tuesday was a day of moving furniture and announcing how things were with the third Student having withdrawn. His desk had still the permission slips for the field trip the day before to the park for Autism Awareness Day. His family did not speak to her or pick up his work, his books or clear out his locker. He just simply was withdrawn, not just from the school but from the district. She informed me that she did not know why but that all his work must stay in the desk for “legal reasons.” Really? I immediately collected what I knew of and banded it together and put it on the Teacher’s desk. The custom being that it can be forwarded to the family, the new school to see what he was doing and how he was being graded/evaluated/assessed. She seemed relieved he was gone, he had clear problems with her and she with him and I assume the family realized that the full time Teacher was gone so they chose to remove him and with that WISELY so. Her systemic abuse of him and mockery of him was hard to take and it had spread to the other rooms with equal verve. The fourth boy who was there in the afternoons no longer came in electing to remain in another room and that left the two. Her direction of rage is now to the boy with the more obvious disabilities. She alternately brags how much she has reached him and in turn alternatively dismisses him and his family. There is endless trash talking and other directives that in the midst of her rants consists of anyone who disagrees with her. It explains why the week before the Vice Principal pulled me and another sub covering aside to inform us to be visible at all times, to do lunch duty and bus duty. These are the two areas where the supposed issues and conflicts occurred and with that I had never done them before and funny she did not care that many times I covered multiple classes, up and down stairs, no prep nor often a full lunch as I had to drag my stuff from room to room, try to fit in a bathroom break and ensure I was following the right schedule as SPED and Main are on two different ones. So sure, I will be as visible as possible. I did it once and then immediately took the next two days off. Not putting myself or anyone at risk. The aide in this room is however doing that and to herself thanks to her dependence on pain meds.
It is less about Race as the Teacher on leave is Indian descent, recently promoted to lead after another Teacher left at the end of the previous school year. There is confusion or a lack of explanation as how he was promoted as you still need a license but this is an issue that may be why suddenly the problem. I will say I have met and spoken to him many times and he is deeply annoying but not in a way that I feel he needs a “time out.” The other Aide (Mania) in my room has been in that room for years and knows the Teacher and is Latin but I don’t think they had any conflicts that contributed to his leave but then again she and that neighboring aide are the only two who communicate daily with the poor me mentality, so this is a coincidence right? But the allusions made that day when I subbed for of all people, Mania, by that Teacher I am now subbing for resonate with me as I watch his Aide’s mood swings and behaviors. Tuesday was hyper all Morning, telling me the plans, actually teaching the boys, moving furniture, followed by an afternoon when the pain meds were hauled out. Wednesday she admitted she took too many the day before and now feels exhausted. So I took over with the lessons I made and she spent the A.M. trash talking with some one who came by the room; Who and from where I have no clue as then she departed leaving me with the boys and her alone. By lunch she had to rest her head on the desk. I did partial lunch duty that day but in reality I took them to the Cafeteria and went to a coffee shop by the park they visited on Monday to get a needed caffeine fix. When I came back she was up and felt better. The kids had Health which she takes them too, and I simply refused to do her job again, and this meant I was finally alone for a few moments. She came back and with that said she was doing better asked me about the coffee where I got it and where it was. She then left to the next door room and said that she was going to go there after vacation with Whiny as she was too busy to do it sooner. (She is not doing it ever, this is a work relationship of sheer necessity) I do find it odd that Mania seemed to not know the neighborhood as she endlessly reminds me that she has been there for 26 years and used to walk to the river at lunch. Meaning literally towards a mall, across it, across light rail tracks then a road to the waterfront, a 20 minute or so walk on good days. I do feel that this is another memory tied to abuse. She endlessly talks about the past, her being a Teacher in NY before moving to the district in Jersey City and somehow is now a Teacher’s Aide. The stories often circle back to the present, about how fit she was and the accident changed her and that he was uninsured unlicensed driver who left them broke with medical costs. The anger is genuine and the pain real. That much is certain. Then in true addict fashion we go on a rant about the day ahead and what “we” are doing. It is a lather rinse repeat cycle of crazy. But the consistent factor is the vagueness on the actual accident itself. She is up for retirement and that same day of pain med fun times (Wed) the District Reps were there to assist those taking retirement. She forgot but she is retiring after next school year so that seems odd to process paperwork now. Unless she is planning to retire in December. This is a common thing that happens as the reality is that it doesn’t change or benefit you to stay through the school year itself you are not given “more” money. It is calendar year cycle and that is why many Teachers do not return after Christmas Break. This is a unique weirdness to municipal work in Education.
By Thursday “we” were wobbly and confused, telling me she was feeling drunk and losing balance. Shocking, no, not really. It was half day and I had planned Easter themed readings, coloring and Winne the Pooh movie. She had said that the Ice Cream from the money I gave her to contribute to Autism day – 10 bucks- was being saved for Thursday. Her buddy, Whiny, told her Wed was going to be the no work day (normally that is the last half day) and asked to have it then but she refused as she said she wanted to save it. I had been told by her that Wed we were having a free day, and also no more use of laptops but that lasted barely half a day so I just quit listening. It is why Wednesday I went forward with planned lessons. Funny that it was the same day a District person was there and witnessed me Teaching. It was in that conversation she hauled out her script, she trashed other Subs, the Department, the school and all while I am trying to teach and I can hear it all. I have told her repeatedly how Subbing works and horrid the gig is and that again it was forgotten or whatever lost in the miasma of her addled mind. I keep thinking can it get worse? And yes, it can. As anyone familiar with drug dependency, mental health issues there are many more problems than one realizes, it is akin to walking on a mind field. Today as the kids colored and watched a movie she did best coloring the work I had made for the kids, the ice cream never appeared as she never bought it or did and kept it. She had shitty candy and continued her abuse the one boy for having a lollipop earlier. Love that mixed message. Well it was given to him by another Aide in another room at 9 am, and it should not of, but then again there is no one in charge here at all. Watching her abuse this boy is in and of itself enough but her own behavior makes even the most damaged of children seem normal. Imagine being scolded and reprimanded every few minutes just for being you?
Thursday night I went to see a production of Drinking in America. This is a 30 plus year old monologue series written by Eric Bogosian. It was starring Andre Royo (formerly of The Wire) and was revelatory. Mr. Royo made this dated material absolutely contemporary and relevant. What was the offshoot was the fact that the 9 men he portrayed in the throws of addiction made me feel I was in the classroom with the Aide. It was 90 minutes of true education in the vise of entertainment.
I write this to heal myself. A couple of weeks ago after my first three days I had not put the puzzle pieces together and spent hours sleeping, canceling Opera tickets and sheltering in place. Now I had no issue putting together a weekend of activities and joining the living. I leave for Tosca in few moments as I close this piece knowing that in about 10 days I will be back for two more days of whatever or whoever I walk into. I had mentioned to the Secretary on Thursday how it was a mine field and she acknowledged that. On Tuesday, another Sub who had no afternoon classes was standing in the hallway when I finally pulled him in to my room during my prep asking if he needed help. He was told to hang out there if he was needed. This was new. Normally you go to the Library or the Teacher’s Lounge and wait it out. He was told to come to the STAR rooms with no direction nor anyone to report to. Not shocking as again there is no one in charge and frankly shitty communication so hence I make my own calls about what I will or will not do. So during our conversation I assigned him that room next door and bus duty and bathroom duty. He said he has subbed in the school for years, since 2017. Really? Great they were closed 2020 -2021 and so you have been here like all the rest not a lot. He runs a Sports Communication program or something and works during the classes, I have seen him and he does nothing more than take attendance and yell if the kids get too loud. This is is classroom management and he has no interest, but what Sub does? (I explained to Mania that anyone can be a Sub with fingerprint clearance, she says she is going to do it when she retires. DEAR GOD) With that as his skill set, he actually thinks he is good at the job. Okay, then. I said there is no management issues and that it would be good for him to meet and work with these kids. He disagreed and said he would not come back to the school if they put him in these rooms again. Okay, then. I truly think I need meds.
Addiction is crippling, to the individual, to their families/friends and to those with whom they work. In this case it is not just the adults, it is the children. The endless comments by the varying staff regarding down to the two remaining students when their rooms are bursting and the new Student who enrolled has refused to enter the room I think is quite telling. I do believe Autistic kids have a second sense that attunes them to those who are toxic. I had nor have any problems with the supposed challenging ones and that the other day the same Boy she claims is tracking back actually asked me politely including please and thank you over some simple requests. I wished the Vice Principal who berated and instructed me on my duties had that much grace. She failed to introduce herself nor ask me who I was in which to establish a proper professional communication. Hence the failed direction to the Sub standing in a hall and why I simply directed myself to take on what I will and will not do and the schedule. But it is the only think I have left is respect, first for myself.
I have no answers or even methods of coping. The reality is that AA says to take it day by day. I have no truck with that program and in fact feel it is a suit that needs some tailoring as it is not a size that fits all. With that I know what brings me joy and I have to remind myself that it is what matters. So go find Joy this Easter Weekend.
We are Nation formed under the protection of this singular very first Amendment in the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
How we have come to understand that is that pretty much anything you say and do in public forums is protected and covered by said Amendment. It can be a Big Lie or it can be a Racist Trope or it can be just dumb or all of the above. And with that there have been challenges to this Amendment and one is happening right now with regards to the Dominion Lawsuit against Fox News. But there are many other challenges to the idea of what this critical law means with regards to the concept of free speech. I urge you to examine the varying concepts here at Cornell Law that breaks said variations down. And with that I move onto why I am writing about this subject.
As a Writer you are protected by this Amendment regardless of what you write about. This is often particularly applied to Journalists but it could be one that relates to anyone who writes in the same vein of non-fiction where the speak of current issues, express an opinion or discuss a person or persons whom they disagree or dislike. I can think of the issues that surround J.K. Rowling as one said example. Her professional voice is one through her work of Fiction but her personal opinion is through her own time and right to express said opinion. Does one color the other? Well there is no apparent references or illusion to her beliefs and opinions regarding Trans Women in Harry Potter novels, but her other works of Fiction under her pen name have. The recent editions being made to Roald Dahl’s work was largely due to the late Author’s own views and that they may be perceived as having undertones that reflected that and that they were in and of themselves dated derogatory remarks. The use of the word Spazz in lyrics by both Beyonce and Lizzo another where they had to amend and edit the use as it was offensive to a group of the population, despite that the fact it was not the intent of the use of the word. And well we have the use of the word that begins with an N, throughout much of historical literature, in fact me writing it out is a big no. Well someone needs to tell those Artists who write Hip Hop that it is offensive! You own but if I sing it, what does that mean? Again what is the message here and how is it being used is what should matter and the intent behind it. Well that requires thought and we don’t, we react and we respond with emotion it is way easier. And with that I am sharing an article from The New York Times about a Law Professor at U of Penn who well I would definitely call a Racist but also just a plain nasty Bitch. Her views and statements about “others” is fascinating given that she is in fact Jewish. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot here and ask her about anyone expressing similar views about that Culture and those who have taken on that as their Faith. How is that working for you when I flip that mirror I often right about?
Her job is not protected by the Constitution but by Tenure. This is a state of employment guaranteed to only one class of worker – Academia. That one enters the profession seeking to educate in Colleges and Universities, but they are protected to teach and offer ideas to Students without fear of termination should said materials offend or distress the Students. With that Professors ensure that Tenure is secured through the concept of publishing research on topics or issues related to their field of study. That is why most Universities have a small Publishing firm affiliated with it and in turn often publish other works that may have a connection to the school or a subject that is associated with academic teaching. Publish or perish is the motto in higher education and with that speaking and fees associated is a critical essential for many Authors of any kind. The more you are seen, the more you are read, the more you earn. How is that working out for you Authors. The new avenue is now Podcasting and with that it is like walking into a Barnes and Noble to find the one that matches your interests but there are many Academics doing this and with success.
The story of the Law Professor is fascinating as she is out there, just out there with her incredibly disturbing views and ideas about Black people, Immigrants and Gay folks. She also think Women need to be in the home, the exception I assume is her. I have no problem with this walking Bitch stick of a human saying any of this. Would I sit in a class and listen? NO. I have to pay for it and with that I have choices and if her classes are electives then it is my choice to attend or not. The issue then falls down into how she grades papers and reviews work. Are there ways to avoid bias and prejudice in grading work? I can say that yes it is possible if you don’t have any sense of the individual writing, the work is anonymous or is reviewed by another and there are clear rubrics that have been established that shows how the work met or failed to meet them and in which are all clearly available before the assignment so you can again do what I have written about before, write the work for the Audience and edit and revise it so that it meets the standard and not yours. An example of this would be writing about Redlining, a practice that would fall into a Law Schools curriculum of what – CRITICAL RACE THEORY Redlining was an urban developmental tool in cities to Redline areas of towns that would eliminate any housing owned by Minorities. It also affected Insurance policies and other credit worthiness that often prevented home loans and other personal loans and led often to the deterioration of neighborhoods that later came into issues around Eminent Domain and the bulldozing of these areas for public projects. See Robert Moses on that one. And if I was in this Bitch’s class I would turn in a paper that defended this and of course thought it was a great plan. Easy A right there.
With that in mind I am not sure who is taking this Woman’s classes, White Supremacists? But they are also Anti Semite’s so that would be awkward. And since there is Free Speech I would love to work with her and call her a Cunt to her face every day and throw in a few derogatory Jewish slang phrases in there and see how that works out. So now this argument about DeSantis and his issues over Liberal Education start to hold water but does that give him the excuse he needs to take over public education? This is a slippery slope. Tenure on the idea that you should be able to teach subjects that can make you uncomfortable is essential to learn and to grow. You can always leave or find another Teacher or way to earn the needed credit, and with that that is the option you should pursue not have a Teacher/Instructor fired as they had the audacity to Teach you say, Frankenstein and compare him to the marginalized classes. A poor analogy but that happened in a High School in Seattle and led the Principal to be removed as he did offer that option to a Student but it was not enough to calm them. Hey again you don’t have to like your Teacher but if they truly bother you ask to transfer and move on and out. People do need to eat and later come back and speak with them about the lesson. For the record it happened at least one other time in Seattle Public Schools with a Teacher about Social Justice and that was years before the subject drew attention. Shit don’t stop stinking.
The issue is less about Free Speech but frankly one of Tenure and how that the protected class are enabled and coddled to the point that they are allowed to run havoc and draw negative attention over their personal views and not the subject that they were hired to Teach. All while impoverishing many who are teaching part time and traveling between schools in which to make a living. Something is not right here and that too needs to change for the better of all. Try panels of hiring committees, annual reviews and of course Contracts in which to terminate when the Panel feels that the Professor has crossed a line of proper discourse and professionalism. Again not because its about one it needs to be of many. And this Bitch has crossed many.
UPenn Accuses a Law Professor of Racist Statements. Should She Be Fired?
Amy Wax and free speech groups say the university is trampling on her academic freedom. Students ask whether her speech deserves to be protected.
By Vimal Patel The New York Times
March 13, 2023
Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.
Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.
All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax?
The university is now moving closer to answering just that question. After long resisting the call of students, the dean of the law school, Theodore W. Ruger, has taken a rare step: He has filed a complaint and requested a faculty hearing to consider imposing a “major sanction” on the professor.
His about-face prompted protests from free speech groups, which cited one of tenure’s key tenets — the right of academics to speak freely, without fear of punishment, whether in public or in the classroom.
For years, Mr. Ruger wrote in his 12-page complaint, Professor Wax has shown “callous and flagrant disregard” for students, faculty and staff, subjecting them to “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.”
The complaint said she has violated the university’s nondiscrimination policies and “standards of professional competence.”
Her statements, the complaint added, “have led students and faculty to reasonably believe they will be subjected to discriminatory animus if they come into contact with her.”
Professor Wax has fought back, arguing that the university is trying to trample on her academic freedom.
Universities want to “banish and punish” anyone “who dares to dissent, who dares to expose students to different ideas,” she said on a recent podcast. “That is a really dangerous and pernicious trend.”
Professor Wax did not agree to interview requests, but at a time when scholars say their speech is under attack from the left and the right, many free speech groups, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, PEN America and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have criticized the dean and said that Professor Wax should not be fired because of her public statements.
“Academic freedom cannot be a privilege of those who only espouse prevailing views but a protected right of all faculty,” the Academic Freedom Alliance wrote in July to the university’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, arguing that the school should end the process to sanction Professor Wax.
But for many students, her public speech, which often mixes public policy with insulting broadsides, is the point.
Students have asked: Aren’t these statements relevant to her performance in the classroom? Don’t they show the potential for bias? And does this professor, and this speech, deserve the protection of tenure?
Dean Ruger, who declined an interview request, seemed to embrace these concerns by including a litany of Professor Wax’s public statements in his complaint.
Free speech groups acknowledge that some personal discussions with students — if true — could be deemed abusive, and are not protected by tenure. But they have winced at the dean’s inclusion of public statements in his complaint.
Professor Wax is a test case of academic freedom, “right up on the line,” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
But, she said, “We have not seen any evidence that it crosses the line.”
She added, “Academic freedom has to protect the Amy Waxes of the academic world, so that it can be there for the Galileos of the academic world.”
Building a Public Profile
Professor Wax cut an unconventional path to Penn law school.
Raised in an observant, conservative Jewish family, she received a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a medical degree from Harvard.
On a podcast, she said she realized medicine was not for her, and in 1987, received a law degree from Columbia University. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, she argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court. And after seven years at the University of Virginia, she joined Penn with tenure in 2001.
Though Professor Wax had been a subject of debate for years, student demands for sanctions began in earnest in 2017, after she co-wrote an opinion article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. She argued that many of the country’s social problems could be traced to veering from 1950s norms, like getting married before having children, respecting authority and avoiding coarse language.
The article said “all cultures are not equal” and lamented “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”
After some students called for her firing, conservative media rallied, allowing Professor Wax to spread her views across the conservative firmament over the years, including writing for The Wall Street Journal and appearing on Tucker Carlson’s daytime show on Fox Nation.
Along the way, her rhetoric grew more extreme. She has described some non-Western countries as “shitholes” and stated that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men.”
Speaking with Mr. Carlson last year, she said “American Blacks” and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people.
On a recent podcast, she said, “I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
She has also acted as something of a provocateur on campus.
In 2021, she invited a white nationalist, Jared Taylor, to a class and then lunch with students. She argued that he was an appropriate speaker for a seminar on conservative thought, according to a grievance she filed against Dean Ruger this past January and obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. Mr. Taylor has said that “when blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Throughout, the administration had supported her right to speak and took significant action only once, in 2018, in reaction to her comments on a podcast about affirmative action, when she said that Black students at the law school do not perform well.
“I can think of one or two students who’ve scored in the top half in my required first-year course,” she told the host, Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University.
After some students objected, Dean Ruger disputed her data and took away her first-year course. She did not have a right, he said, to violate confidentiality about student grades.
Professor Loury, a Black economist known for his contrarian views, agreed in an interview that disclosing confidential student data to make racial comparisons would be unacceptable.
But, he said, Professor Wax did not do that — she was just engaging in “loose talk.” Perhaps, he said, a teacher should not discuss students that way.
“But violating privacy?” he said. “I think that’s a stretch.”
‘Finally, an American’
Many students, especially Asian, Black and Latino students, have described a series of what they say are racist incidents involving Professor Wax.
According to the university complaint, after a series of students with “foreign-sounding names” introduced themselves, Professor Wax commented that one student was ‘Finally, an American.’” She added, “It’s a good thing, trust me.”
In an investigator’s report obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, a student alleged that while repeating language used in a 19th-century case, Professor Wax said “Negro” in such a “snide and smug” way that the student left the classroom. And in the same report, a student said that in 2014, when discussing an eyewitness, Professor Wax said, “He was a Black man” with a “distasteful” tone. “She spat it out of her mouth,” the student said.
Mr. Ruger’s complaint also outlined an alleged interaction between Professor Wax and Lauren O’Garro-Moore, a 2012 graduate, saying that Ms. Moore was a “double Ivy” — attending Penn and Yale — only because of affirmative action.
In the complaint, Ms. O’Garro-Moore said she was “stunned” and wanted to cry but did not. Ms. O’Garro-Moore, saying she could be a witness in the hearing, declined an interview.
Some of these personal interactions may not be protected by tenure. And Ms. Wax has denied making many of these statements, including the “double Ivy” comment.
“In what class?” she asked on Professor Loury’s podcast. “What was the lesson? What was the context? Nothing is supplied” — echoing critics of the complaint, who have said it is vague and lacks transparency.
Students are often accused of being oversensitive, but Professor Wax’s colleagues have shared their own uncomfortable moments with her in public forums.
Tobias Barrington Wolff, a Penn law school professor, said that he once sat with her on a panel where she decried same-sex relationships as self-centered, selfish and not focused on family or community, according to Dean Ruger’s complaint.
Professor Wolff, who is gay, said that it was “striking she would choose to hold forth that way with me sitting there.”
Disagreements with Professor Wax, he added, make you feel that “you are a fundamentally debased human being.” Professor Wolff did not respond to an interview request and it is unclear whether he supports sanctions.
Even Professor Loury, a strong supporter of Professor Wax, has a story.
In 2011, he gave a talk at Penn law school in which he argued that too many Black people were in prison.
During the discussion, he said that Professor Wax, whom he did not know, raised her hand and said: There are not too many Black people in prison, there are too few.
Afterward, Professor Loury wrote an email to an event organizer, stating that her behavior was “openly hostile” and that he felt ashamed he did not respond forcefully enough.
Professor Loury, who frequently laments the oversensitivity of college students, said he would not send such an email now, because her comments were an opportunity for vigorous debate.
Even so, Professor Wax was “being performative,” he said, and “seemed to enjoy it a little too much.” He recalled, “She’s got this snarl on her face.”
Free Expression for Whom?
In 2017, after Professor Wax had published her piece about 1950s values, Jonah Gelbach, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, organized an open letter signed by 33 law professors, rejecting her views about cultural superiority but affirming her right to state them.
He said that Professor Wax tried to pressure him to retract his letter, writing in an email that if he did not, she would publicize the negative online responses at an upcoming talk.
He declined, and she went through with her threat. In her talk, which has been viewed almost 40,000 times on YouTube, she portrayed him as a crusher of speech and an “anti-role model.”
Professor Gelbach, now at the University of California, Berkeley, said the encounter revealed how Professor Wax uses speech as sword and shield, portraying herself as the victim of cancel culture, while also trying to create “a safe-space bubble of protection from others’ reactions.”
Still, he does not support sanctions for her public statements. “I view Amy as both a scholarly embarrassment and a toxic presence at Penn and in the academy generally,” he said, but added, “She is nevertheless a tenured faculty member at a university, and I do not support university sanctions for public expressions of horrible views.”
The University Acts
In late 2021, on Professor Loury’s podcast, Professor Wax warned against an “influx of Asian elites.” He pushed back, suggesting that Asian engineers and computer scientists bring value to the United States.
“Does the spirit of liberty beat in their breast, Glenn?” she shot back, arguing that Asians tend to be “more conformist.”
Dean Ruger denounced her comments but once again resisted action.
A petition, started by Apratim Vidyarthi, who was then a student, demanded an investigation and stated that it was impossible to believe that Professor Wax would treat nonconservative, nonwhite students fairly. It garnered more than 2,500 signatures, including about 800 from the law school’s current and former students, Mr. Vidyarthi said.
Mr. Vidyarthi said that he and other students of color would not feel comfortable or safe in the two classes she continued to teach, on legal remedies and conservative thought.
Ty Parks, the advocacy chair for the Black Law Students Association, said having Professor Wax on staff sends a mixed message about the school’s commitment to inclusion.
“When we walk into the building of the law school, we see a portrait of Dr. Sadie Alexander, who was the first Black woman to graduate from Penn law,” Mr. Parks said. “Then down the hall, you have a professor who is a literal white supremacist.” (Professor Wax describes herself as a “race realist.”)
Mr. Parks rejected the argument that students were censoring her politics.
“We have conservative professors in the law school that I don’t agree with,” he said. “But they’re not making harmful remarks that are clearly racist. They’re not crossing those boundaries.”
Two weeks after the petition, after arguing for years that Professor Wax’s speech was protected by academic freedom, Mr. Ruger said he would begin a disciplinary process.
What Should Tenure Protect?
Many free-speech advocates say that Dean Ruger’s complaint overstepped by including the professor’s public statements.
Jonathan Friedman, an official at PEN America, said the idea that off-campus comments can lead to an investigation “is concerning.”
Those who want heavy sanctions, he said, “have to think about how the same powers can be wielded in other ways, against other professors whose comments can be deemed offensive or hostile.”
And some professors say her interactions with students are enough to warrant punishment.
“There’s a bright line between ‘I don’t like affirmative action’ and ‘You, African American student, only got in because of affirmative action,’” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn history professor who had previously defended Professor Wax against calls for punishment.
The latter comment, if true, he said, is “singling out a student for abuse.” But students question the professor’s free-speech protections. Andrew Bookbinder, of the university’s Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, said Professor Wax was using tenure to be intentionally offensive in ways that do not further academic speech.
The process playing out at Penn, he said, “is the system working.”
“It’s not like a group of students has voiced their concern, and she’s been terminated,” Mr. Bookbinder said. There will be a hearing, he noted, with “her fellow tenured professors, who will surely hold those same protections very dearly themselves.”
There is one thing that secure people of wealth and knowledge can do is that they can do whatever the fuck they want. They have the leisure of being. I just read a great article on Black Women and the move to the “Soft Girl Era.” And I think Women who are of many Colors, who do not have the privilege of security can relate to much of what is said in this article. How many Women during this Month dedicated to Women understand this paragraph:
On the other end of the online spectrum is an approach to a delicate work-life balance and saying “no” to things that don’t bring us joy or fulfillment. And it is this side that I relate to most. More than the material opportunities to find ease, the soft life era relates to our efforts to set healthy boundaries, our ability to be introspective, our openness to ask for help and the prioritizing of our physical and mental well-being.
I use the Karen in 946 to truly demonstrate what a Cunt she is as there is no excuse for her abuse of me and her husband threatening me over a single late night error in judgement on my part. I of course blame Chris Rock and will slap him across the face the next time I see him. The show is now on Netflix and fast forward to the SLAP and then go back and listen to the rest of it, it is not funny. But that aside she is a sick troubled person who is living in a small apartment working from home, doing both child care and her job, her husband is in law enforcement so he must work weird hours and then a dog as well to care for. I would have lost my mind in pandemic year one but she was also pregnant and that was the fist sign you do not have your shit together. I do question anyone who thought that was a good idea with the strains on medical care already bursting at the seams and the concern of giving birth in a hospital or contracting Covid. Yeah you stupid. Sorry but not sorry, that is how I feel and again I am seeing it play out in the Children, they are a hot mess. Good luck with that Karen. And that applies to many women who are not finding balance or are through drugs and alcohol and abusing others in their path, the trickle down economics of rage.
Now she has White Privilege, she does have day care that she takes the brat to and can at times pass off care to her spouse. I have seen her barrel down the stairs in the building as if on a prison break and hysterically walk the dog or baby as if she is just one step from committing a mass shooting but I also suspect there are legal drugs involved or if not should be. Her mental health has imposed herself on mine and with that I had to make great strides in resolving how to handle myself while living in the building. Why should I move, the lone woman who doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone other than herself. Folks that is not Narcissism it is just being honest and taking care of oneself. I have long abandoned the idea of a Partner in life and if I wanted Children I would have had one. I don’t. I have had many, just other peoples and I am good.
So that is my Soft Girl time, my privilege to be introspective and to set boundaries. I called it “No Compromises” and with that I have violated it and quickly self-corrected. Now I am attempting conversations with others more as experiment to see if I am right and with that I am right in my belief that these encounters no longer satisfy or satiate me as they once did. I don’t have to be rude but I can stop them if they proceed to a point of no return.
And with that I had to try to figure out why I sucked at interpersonal relationships and decided that my self worth and view were a type of Narcissism and that I found pleasure on being alone. My Parents were utterly dysfunctional and we had an open door policy that had many a character wander in and out and all of them were fascinating and delicious. The ones that may not have been I am not aware of as they were never there enough to recall or note of as I reviewed the hundreds of photos in my collection during the pandemic. Any of those I could not I tossed and with that I kept those that mattered. Names fade, but memories of times do not and I can keep the good and while not forget the bad I can toss them in the trash heap with the rest. There you can either recycle and in turn release them and just let them decompose in the pile. Good things can rise from a compost heap and fertilize new growth. And life continues.
But with that I looked at Marriages that I knew – my Parents, their friends, Gay, Straight and everything in between. I saw ones that lasted and some that did not. Children that grew up and families that grew and grew apart. Some deaths of both young and old and some I have no idea what happened and you move on. Did I learn anything? Yes, that all relationships on some level are transactional and ones of convenience and others of need or desire. That can be sexual or romantic or even true love although frankly I don’t actually recall any of those. And that may be why I have tried and failed enough to realize I have never had role models or individuals who were not as dysfunctional or understood enough to give a damn and try to teach or at least be willing to accept me as I am. And since that time I have come to realize NO ONE does. There are again exceptions to the rule but when half of American marriages end in Divorce you wonder if that is not even accurate and the number should be higher. I suspect when you are wealthy and able to travel have a successful work life the time at home and with the ‘other’ declines enough to make it be a marriage of one. Mine certainly was as when I married to a road warrior the happiness I had was with my beloved dog, Emma. 18 years together she was the longest relationship I ever had and have neither inclination nor desire to replicate it.
When I read this story about a Philosopher in the New York Times I thought about my Philosophy courses in College and realize what a compliment they were to my Sociology ones. I elected to Major in Sociology and when I returned to Ed School (the biggest waste of money and time in my life, Western Washington University was horrible to me and many late in life students as they knew we saw through their bullshit and in turn were a preview of what schools were really like) I took English as an additional Major as I was “told” it would make me more marketable. In Washington State Sociology Degrees at the time enabled you to teach under the broad category of “Social Studies” so hence I taught History. And over the years I met many Teachers who fell for that same bullshit and what it meant is you taught two subjects often with numerous preps that befalls you when you are first year Teaching. It truly is a mugs game and I have shitloads of regrets but little I could do to change that now, it was a different time.
With that I am not enthralled with higher ed either as they are a cluster fuck of equal proportions that you find in K-12, just with even more letters following their names in addition to being a “protected class.” You can see why many GOP are moving away from allowing this at State Universities not realizing Universities have been doing it for themselves for decades with Part Time Professors and Adjuncts. Add these to the controversy over many former Writers/Journalists who now Teach in Academia as an example of what Colleges are doing to attract students. Or they can just sell off their art collection.
Below is an article on such an Academic who is apparently well known and well liked on her campus. She is a Professor of Philosophy who writes, lectures and yes a podcast. With that her recent work is about the Marriage of the Minds. And as I read it once again I found myself agreeing with much of the premise made but then out comes the Autism spectrum diagnosis, the bizarre fashion sense and the whole Student-Teacher dynamic that when Men partake of it we seem to run amok in a power play scenario but not when it is with a Woman. It is the same folks.
And with that the essay is about Marriages and what they are comprised of when two people do decide to unite, raise children and either remain or terminate a marriage when a third party enters the union. This case it became a multi family home, hers. Her ex husband remained in the home, their children and her new spouse, now a Professor as well, and their new child. The family home is unique as frankly I am not sure I could do quite that and I have no problem in unique housing but would I date a Man living in the same home with his ex, her husband and all of their children? Is this is a Polyamorous situation? It is not but it is co-dependent and dictated by her. She is one weird lady who seems to think being Autistic is the reason or not. Again why is anyone getting diagnosed with a disorder when you have a career, education, not one but two husbands and are successful? Hannah Gadsby did the same and frankly who wants to hear from her again? She is another whose last tour was not as funny as she was once, as it seems to have made her the butt of her own joke. It is not our business and what purpose does it serve? Are you going on disability or looking for a excuse not an explanation for why you are an Asshole? We need to learn that boundary thing and what is appropriate to share with others and when not. My honesty in life, my directness really bothers people, so if I cannot be myself with others I choose to change my behavior which in turn changes who I am. That is a compromise and when it fits the Tailor will come and I will wear the suit, otherwise no. This blog is an example of such. When I write about Children, Women and go against standard norms and tropes I can tell I have hurt the feelers. Well again, we all should agree to disagree. Like or don’t just allow those to have the contrarian view.
There is an irony that of of all things Callard teaches Philosophy which can be the most exasperating of studies and the most fascinating. It is much like the Bible, one awash with contradictions and aged beliefs espoused by Dead White Men. Psychology is another where the women are overshadowed by men, ever hear of any of them ever? Yeah, me neither. At least in Sociology and English I found numerous scholars and studies by Women. That and many not White. See no regrets on that count. My Ed classes had one Woman, she was White and a Lesbian the rest of the courses all taught by older White men who were former Public School Teachers and all what? Assholes. I was a Feminist when I was born, that much is clear.
I have come to also learn that in interpersonal relationships we look for a reflection of ourselves as we are or think we wish to be. And with that it explains why we pick those who seem so different from ourselves as we believe it compliments us, and in turn they last and either one eventually does change (that is the compromise thing) but in a symbiotic way, so yours or theirs parallels your own and if not the relationship finally implodes. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
As my Mother used to say, “The first thing you love about a person will be the first thing you hate about them.” And with that the mirror that you hold in front of you towards that individual is now turned away and with that Snow White pivot the Witch finally sees herself and it is not pretty. It truly explains many parent/child relationships as once that mirror finally breaks the bad luck hits for years to follow. We want clones and with that the rise of AI may accomplish that. Again men creating sex dolls is not a possibility it is a reality. Consent, not needed, I own you and I made you bitch. Hmm again back to the Parental scene, yikes!
So I have reprinted the article below for you to judge on your own what kind of situation, scene or experiment this is and ask if this is what our new world and the future of family will be and are when we evolving? We keep the old with the new and then immediately blame something extrinsic, like a disorder in which to excuse and explain why we simply don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else. and in turn justifies our behavior. Yes as an Adult it is sort late, the cat out of the bag or the barn, door and horse. But if it gets you more money and fame or whatever then have at it. I sure don’t need any, but hey. And that is the privilege of being. You can do/be whoever you are and make it even more so. And do nothing for anyone coming up behind you. Well I made it this far and what the hell my boots did not even have straps! And yes it matters what your Race is. What your Economic class is. What your Gender and Age is and more importantly where you live. It matters.
Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds
The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human.
By Rachel Aviv The New Yorker March 6, 2023
Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard’s office hours every week to talk about Aristotle. At the last session of the quarter, in the spring of 2011, they discussed Aristotle’s treatise Metaphysics, and what it means to be one—as opposed to more than one. “It was the sort of question where I felt it would be reasonable to feel ecstatic if you made some kind of progress,” Arnold told me. Agnes was the only person he’d ever met who seemed to feel the same way
Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, but she is also a public philosopher, writing popular essays about experiences—such as jealousy, parenting, and anger—that feel to her like “dissociated matter,” falling outside the realm of existing theories. She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. “How has it come to pass,” she writes, “that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?”
She was married to another philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, Ben Callard, and they had two young sons. To celebrate the end of the term, Agnes had made cookies for her students, and she gave an extra one to Arnold, a twenty-seven-year-old with wavy hair that fell to his shoulders, who was in his first year of the graduate program in philosophy. As Arnold ate the cookie, Agnes, who was thirty-five, noticed that he had “just this incredibly weird expression on his face. I couldn’t understand that expression. I’d never seen it before.” She asked why he was making that face.
“I think I’m a little bit in love with you,” he responded.
Agnes had felt that there was something slightly odd about her weekly sessions with Arnold, but she hadn’t been sure what it was. Now the nature of the oddness became apparent. “I think I’m in love with you, too,” she told him. They both agreed that nothing could happen. They leaned out her window and smoked a cigarette. Then Arnold left her office.
The next day, Agnes and her sons flew to New York to visit her parents. Ben had gone to Philadelphia to see his mother, who was recovering from surgery. On the plane, Agnes said, “it felt like I was having a revelation in the clouds.” For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had access to a certain “inner experience of love,” a state that made her feel as if there were suddenly a moral grail, a better kind of person to be. She realized that within her marriage she didn’t have this experience. If she stayed married, she would be pretending.
When she landed, she told her parents that she had to get divorced. “We didn’t think it made any sense,” her mother, Judit Gellen, said. “We had seen Agnes and Ben a couple weeks earlier, for a long weekend, and it seemed like everything was great.” Agnes’s sister Kata Gellen, a professor of German studies at Duke, said, “I love Ben—who is really generous in every sense of the word, an impossible person to dislike—and I just felt like No, this can’t be right.” Of her marriage, Agnes said, “There were no problems. We never fought. We just got along really well. We talked a lot about philosophy.”
The next morning, she took a train to Philadelphia to tell Ben, who specializes in the philosophy of mind, language, and mathematics, how she felt. “We talked for an entire day,” she said. “I was approaching him with, like, ‘Here’s what happened. What should we do?’ ” The conversation felt so honest that she realized she had probably never felt so close to Ben in her life. He encouraged her to take time before making a decision; she agreed to try therapy. But the next morning Ben called and said that she was right: they should get a divorce. “I think we both trusted each other enough in that crisis moment to listen to the other person and take seriously what they were saying,” Ben told me. “So, to that extent, it was connected to millions of other conversations we’ve had. She was just showing me the same things she had seen. Once I saw them, it sort of clicked, and everything became very clear.” He described Agnes as “the least complacent person I’ve ever met.”
Agnes was extremely upset that the divorce would harm their children, but she felt that the alternative was that she would become a bad person. “I thought that I would become sort of corrupted by staying in a marriage where I no longer felt like I was aspirational about it,” she said. Her friends and relatives suggested that she just have an affair, but that felt impossible. “It’s like you have this vision of this wonderful, grand possibility, and then you decide to just play at it, treating it like a vacation or something. It seemed like a desecration of that vision.”
Agnes and Ben shared a divorce lawyer, and their divorce was finalized within three weeks of her introducing the idea. Ben said, “I think to an unusual degree Agnes sort of lives what she thinks and thinks what she lives.”
Agnes and Arnold struggled to do their work. Almost every day they went out for coffee together and had long conversations about philosophy—which felt like the real work. (In accordance with university guidelines, they had declared their desire to have a relationship to the chair of the philosophy department, and Agnes recused herself from academic authority over Arnold.) Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been prearranged for her benefit. If she and Arnold were taking a walk together and she craved a croissant, a bakery would suddenly appear. If she needed a book, she would realize that she was passing a bookstore, and the text she wanted was displayed in the window. She thought that this was now her permanent reality.
Arnold said that, the first time Agnes’s sons came to his apartment, “I remember watching them play on the furniture and suddenly realizing: this is the point of furniture. And with Agnes it was the same sort of thing: the world of a relationship has all sorts of furniture in it—the things you do and say and all of the conventions. But with Agnes, for the first time, I felt like it had some kind of point.”
News of the divorce reached her students, and Agnes worried that they would feel disoriented or betrayed. That term, she had been invited to be the keynote speaker at an undergraduate conference for philosophy students. She decided to give her talk about what had happened to her. It was titled “On the Kind of Love Into Which One Falls.” Ben read drafts of the talk in advance and gave her feedback. He and Arnold sat next to each other in the front row.
“Six and a half weeks ago, I fell in love for the first time,” she began. “You did not think I was a person who would subject her children to divorce. You did not think I was a person who would be married to someone she had not fallen in love with. You are not sure whether you know me anymore.” She told her students that she felt she had a professional obligation to clarify the situation. Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an inside account. Her experience had prompted her to reinterpret a famous speech, in the Symposium, in which Socrates, whom she considers her role model, argues that the highest kind of love is not for people but for ideals. She was troubled by Socrates’ unerotic and detached view of love, and she proposed that he was actually describing how two lovers aspire to embody ideals together. True lovers, she explained, don’t really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved because neither of them is happy with who he or she is. “One of the things I said very early on to my beloved was this: ‘I could completely change now,’ ” she recounted. “Radical change, becoming a wholly other person, is not out of the question. There is suddenly room for massive aspiration.”
After the talk, a colleague told Agnes that she was speaking as if she thought she were Socrates. “I was, like, ‘Yeah, that’s what it felt like,’ ” she said. “I felt like I had all this knowledge. And it was wonderful. It was an opportunity to say something truthful about love.”
In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” Rose describes marriage as a political experience and argues that talking about it should be taken as seriously as conversations about national elections: “Cultural pressure to avoid such talk as ‘gossip’ ought to be resisted, in a spirit of good citizenship.”
Agnes views romantic relationships as the place where some of the most pressing philosophical problems surface in life, and she tries to “navigate the moral-opprobrium reflexes in the right way,” she said, so that people won’t dismiss the topic as unworthy of public discussion. “If you’re a real philosopher,” she once tweeted, “you don’t need privacy, because you’re a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep, even in your dreams.”
Jonathan Lear, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, said that Agnes approaches every conversation as if it were integral to her life’s work, as it was for Socrates. “She’s attempting to live a philosophical life, and this includes taking responsibility for the very concept of marriage,” he said. “Part of what I take to be her bravery is that she is looking around, asking, ‘Hey, I know all these couples have gotten rings and gone to the courthouse, but are they married?’ One thing you can do with that question is forget all about it and find some deadline to be anxious about. Or you can really hear the question, vividly. That’s the place where philosophy begins—with a certain anxiety about how to live the life that is yours.”
Agnes’s work, which won the 2020 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement, searches for ways in which we can become better selves than we are. She writes philosophy columns for The Point and the Times, and she will agree to a podcast with essentially anyone who asks, regardless of that person’s politics or credentials. She also has her own podcast, called “Minds Almost Meeting,” with Robin Hanson, a libertarian-leaning economist with whom she constantly disagrees. “I think you are insulting the human race in your book,” she told him in one episode. In 2018, when she accidentally got pregnant, she gave a speech about misogyny at a conference of the Eastern American Philosophical Association, then told a room full of philosophers that she was considering having an abortion. “I am pregnant, and I don’t know whether I want to be,” she said. “Your shock is, of course, why most of those women don’t talk about it; still less does anyone confess to being, at that very moment, engaged in the deliberative activity of weighing the value of a future human life.” (At a Q. & A. session with two other panelists after her talk, no comments were directed toward her. Not long afterward, she had a miscarriage.)
Arnold saw Agnes’s first book, “Aspiration,” which she began writing the year after they met, in part as an attempt to make sense of their experience of falling in love. In the book, which was published in 2018, she describes how philosophers have often scoffed at the idea of self-creation. Nietzsche dismissed the idea that a person could “pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.” But the book argues that people can embark on a path toward a destination, a new way of being a person, that they can’t yet see or understand—a process that she calls aspiration. When aspirants make decisions, they are guided by the possibility of a future self that does not yet exist. They imitate mentors or competitors, risking pretension, because they understand that their current values are deficient; they haven’t made room for another way of seeing themselves or the world.
Arnold came to see the idealism of the early weeks of their relationship as the first stage of aspiration. “What we had was an imperfect vision of something, but it pretended to be clear,” he told me. Within a few months, they saw that in many ways they were incompatible. “Most people, myself included, would have met the realization with the thought: How could I have stepped into this with such naïveté, with such childish blindness?” he said. “But her instinct was to trust that initial experience.”
Agnes and Arnold married a year after her divorce, at a chapel on campus. Ben gave the toast at the rehearsal dinner. By then, Agnes recognized that she’d oversold her understanding of love to her students. At the time, she thought she’d achieved more than she had. Nevertheless, she said, she’d had enough of a glimpse—a “foretaste of future knowledge”—to reorganize her life in such a way that a future self would “look back and be, like, Yes, she was on her way.”
A few months into their relationship, Agnes and Arnold had a bad fight, and she came across a copy of Cook’s Illustrated that Ben had given her for Hanukkah years before, inscribed with a loving note. She remembered that she had been happy at the time. “I was just, like, Wait a minute, maybe I’m just doing the same thing again. The veil was lifted with Ben, and now it is being lifted again.” But she was consoled by the idea that she and Arnold were philosophical about their relationship in a way that she and Ben had not been. Agnes, who was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, felt that she and Arnold were trying to navigate the problem of loneliness—not the kind that occurred when each of them was in a room alone but the sort of loneliness that they felt in the presence of another person. Most couples struggle with a version of this problem, but it often feels like a private burden. For Agnes, it was philosophical work, a way of sorting out “what one human can be to another human.” It seemed to her that Arnold had come to her with a question: Is it possible to eliminate the loneliness that is intrinsic to any relationship, to be together in a way that makes full use of another person’s mind?
Agnes has generally avoided speaking publicly about being autistic, in part because she worries that people will find it preposterous for her to use a label once closely associated with people who are nonverbal. But she feels that the diagnosis helps her understand her immunity to the pull of a certain received structure of meaning. In addition to the philosophical underpinning of her marriage to Arnold, there is perhaps an autistic one, too, in that most of us learn to ignore all the subtle ways in which we settle and compromise, based on our received sense that this is the way relationships work. Agnes never assumed that those social conventions inherently made sense. The period during which she and Arnold fell in love felt like proof. It was, she said, “the first moment when the world says to you, ‘That can be possible.’ Nothing can be more important than that. Every other little wrinkle and confusion—it’s, like, whatever. Forget it. Set this aside. This thing is possible. And that’s amazing—you’re right to be taken in. Even when you start to see, Oh, he doesn’t quite live up to the ideal, you owe them the very existence of the ideal in you. You owe them your projection. They pointed you in that direction.”
Marriage takes many shapes, but a common one is a downward-sloping line. It begins at the top—the intensity of falling in love, feeling seen and heard in all your fullness—and the rest of the relationship is an attempt to hold on to the ideal without the attenuation’s becoming too terrible. Joan Didion called this phase of marriage “the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.” But Agnes saw her relationship with Arnold as a kind of ladder. They were on the bottom step, attempting to climb the ladder together, in pursuit of a shared ideal: the right kind of mental dependence. Her thoughts felt like “mushy dots,” but, through conversations with Arnold, they had started to solidify. “It was only then that I felt I could settle on things and start to complete a thought,” she said.
Agnes and Ben shared custody of the children, who moved between their old apartment and a new one that Agnes shared with Arnold. On Agnes’s nights with the children, Ben would often come over and have dinner, and they’d talk about philosophical questions together. Ben approached Arnold with openness and warmth. Arnold told me, “He could have gotten really upset and done a bunch of destructive things—perhaps I would have, and I’m quite sure plenty of other philosophers would have—but it would have been useless destruction, and Ben had the foresight to see that you shouldn’t do what you will later regret.”
Agnes got pregnant shortly after getting married, and she and Arnold moved back into the apartment that she had shared with Ben. It seemed unnecessarily burdensome for the oldest children to bounce between two homes, spending half their time away from their youngest sibling, a brother. “We wanted all three children to have breakfast together,” Ben said. Agnes noticed that people who had once urged her not to get a divorce were now pushing her to distance herself from Ben, to make a “clean break.” But she and Ben were still dependent on each other in ways that she didn’t want to ignore. They saw no reason to separate their bank accounts. They never stopped talking about philosophy. Ben took on a parental role with the youngest boy, Izzy, assuming a roughly equal share of the child care. When Agnes’s best friend, Yelena Baraz, a professor of Classics at Princeton, visited, she was struck by how happy the children seemed. All of them had “genuinely gained a parent,” she told me.
Jonathan Lear, Agnes’s colleague, said that, when he first learned about the reasons for her divorce, he was reminded of a passage in Bertrand Russell’s autobiography. Russell describes how he went bicycling one afternoon and, as he was riding along a country road, realized that he no longer loved his wife. “Something similar happened to Agnes,” Lear said, but instead of bicycling back and severing ties, as Russell eventually did, “they spent their life happily together—all three of them. To my eyes, it’s a beautiful, mutually supportive creation.”
When I told a friend about Agnes’s home life, she said that she was reminded of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, about a utopian city where everyone’s happiness depends on the suffering of one child, who is locked in a dark cellar, abandoned and starving. My friend suggested that Ben must live in the metaphorical cellar, sacrificing himself for the good of the family—an interpretation that, on some level, made sense to me. I had noticed, among my friends, that some of the most successful marriages involved inequality, and clarity about it: one person sacrificed more than the other, and it was O.K. Agnes told me that this interpretation was wrong. “That is a really common interpretation of our situation, and I’m struck by how common it is,” she added.
In an e-mail, Ben explained that he understood that people assumed that he hadn’t chosen the situation but was merely enduring it, but this was false. “Agnes and I are close friends, and we have a lot of respect for each other,” he wrote. “But at this point neither of us can even imagine being married to the other person. I have moved on, just as she has.” He continued, “We may well stop living together once the kids leave home, but until then we are all having a blast raising three (now two) sons together.” (Their oldest son had just left for college.) He said that the two oldest boys were like sons to Arnold, and Izzy was like a son to him. “I count myself very lucky to know Arnold,” he went on. “A few years ago he and I camped in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, and in the middle of a freezing night we went to a clearing in the forest and watched the International Space Station shoot across the star-filled sky. Next year, we are co-teaching a course on paradoxes.”
Agnes hosts a popular late-night conversation series at the University of Chicago called “Night Owls,” in which she and another scholar spend up to three hours debating a single subject, like sacredness or death or organized violence. About eight years after her divorce, she and Ben held a session called “The Philosophy of Divorce,” which was attended by hundreds of students. Agnes, who always wears bright colors, wore a dress with psychedelic swirls. Ben, a slim man with a boyish face, sat beside her, wearing a gray suit and holding a typed sheet of questions.
“Is it possible for a good marriage to end in divorce?” he asked.
“I think it’s possible for a good marriage to end in divorce,” she said. “In a lot of ways, I think we don’t see our marriage as a failure.”
Ben nodded. He said that when they finalized their divorce the judge asked if there had been an “irretrievable breakdown,” and if they had tried to repair it. As if, Ben said, “there’s this thing and you were trying to do it, and it’s broken, and it’s failing, and it’s bad to fail, and so it’s bad, and so we should see if we can try to save it. And I’m worried that that’s a kind of fallacy, that we have an overly formal conception of what failure is.” Agnes listened with her hand over her mouth, as if restraining herself from jumping in with a thought. “I was going to ask Agnes this,” Ben went on, “but I’ll just throw it out to the group: Is divorce a failure?”
“A moral failure,” a student suggested. “Not living up to your promise.”
“I guess I just think more generally, like, we shouldn’t always be avoiding those sorts of failures,” Agnes said. She described marriage as “a promise not only to keep loving the person” but to “love them a lot, at any given time,” and it’s impossible to commit to that in advance.
Throughout the event, Ben seemed to recede. He kept pulling the discussion away from his own life toward increasingly academic problems. It was a testament to his generosity that although he didn’t seem to feel comfortable with the project—he told the students he was an “under-sharer”—he was doing the best he could, because Agnes wanted to show their students how philosophy could apply to the most consequential decisions of their lives. Ben told me that the process of becoming a well-known public philosopher, as Agnes has, would “ethically devastate a lot of people.” He went on, “For most of us, having fans and followers feeds terrible things in our soul. But Agnes doesn’t have that. She’s changed very little, as far as I can tell.” She seemed immune to the damage, he said, because she saw each reader or audience member as a potential interlocutor, another person who could challenge her thinking. “It’s not that she lacks interiority,” he said. “It’s that she has a low view of the significance of that interiority.” As she saw it, thinking is not something that one person can do alone. It takes two people to have a thought.
For Christmas last year, Agnes and Arnold and the three children went to Pennsylvania to visit his family. Agnes couldn’t stop coughing and sneezing. About a week earlier, she’d had a severe allergy attack, brought on by a cat, and the symptoms hadn’t subsided. One night, she was making pita bread, coughing every few minutes, and Arnold was sitting at a table in the kitchen, grading papers on his laptop. They were sharing the same space, but Agnes felt as if they were in two separate worlds. She was reminded of a line from the Icelandic novel “Independent People,” by Halldór Laxness, which she had just read: “Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other—there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.”
The next day, when I visited Agnes and Arnold at his parents’ house, she told him that, while making the pita, she had felt as if they were out of synch. She wished he had put down his laptop and talked to her. She was aware that something more purposeful could be happening, and the lack felt tragic. “He’s not paying attention to what I want him to pay attention to,” she said, of that moment. “He’s not interested in what I want him to be interested in.” She recognized that he had to grade papers, but she was still annoyed. “I’m, like, why didn’t he do the grading earlier today?” she said. “I bet there was lots of time today when he was wasting time.”
“That’s probably true,” Arnold said. We sat at the kitchen table, and he dipped the pita into hummus he had just blended. The boys were at the mall with his parents. “Also, the thing with the coughing and the sneezing is funny, because you’re clearly suffering in a pretty serious way,” he told Agnes, “and you have been for days. And, at this point, I’ve just faded it out. I just don’t hear it anymore.”
Agnes said that in moments of disconnection she repeats a little mantra to herself: “It’s fine—you can do this on your own. You can figure things out on your own.” But she knows it’s a lie. “I almost have a feeling of pleasure, like a sick pleasure, as I placate myself with the thought,” she told me.
I asked Agnes and Arnold if they still felt that their relationship gave them the capacity for radical transformation, as Agnes had told her students. “I think there was something right in that vision,” Agnes said, “but it has been so much harder than I thought it would be. To change—but also just to be in love, like, to relate in a really loving way to another person. It’s like once you start trying to do that you come up against all of your limits.” In her marriage with Ben, she hadn’t been aspiring toward any particular ideal, so her flaws didn’t feel as painful. “I think I never realized how fundamentally selfish I was before I met Arnold,” she said. “I’m just really not able to be much less selfish than I am.”
Arnold said he had never expected that he could become a new person. “For me, it was more, like, meeting Agnes was the experience of finally not going to waste.”
“Nothing about you changed, but you became oriented towards what was important, in some way,” Agnes explained.
Their marriage had ended up being more asymmetrical than they had expected. “Your entire philosophical career is a discussion of our marriage, in one way or another,” Arnold said. Agnes agreed. If their marriage was a kind of play, she was the central character, and the author, too.
A common refrain in their fights was whether Arnold, who became an assistant professor in 2021, should aspire to more. Agnes felt that he could write an extraordinary book about Aristotle, but he was content to read the texts and share his interpretations with his students. “Arnold fundamentally sees life as, like, you’re supposed to find a place of contentment,” she said. “And his way of doing things often shows up to me as: he’s not working hard enough. And my way of doing things often shows up to him as: she’s incapable of being happy.”
Arnold clarified: “The source of my question is: What is the aim of work? It has to be something that’s not work. Aspiration can’t be infinite, as much as you would love it to be, because at some point you have to get to the value that you are supposed to be aspiring towards. And, once you’re there, that’s who you are.”
Agnes had just finished a draft of her second book, which fills in what she considers to be a significant omission in her first book: the degree to which aspiration depends on other people. The book examines the ways in which Socrates recognized our vulnerability and neediness and incompleteness. His greatest insight, Agnes believes, was that people are intellectually lonely—they live under an illusion of self-sufficiency. Dialogue was the only way out of their natural state. And yet the people who took up Socrates’ work, developing the field of philosophy, struggled to keep that insight in view. They went off and came up with theories on their own. Perhaps they thought that Socrates secretly possessed his insights all along, that he didn’t need other people to answer his questions, an assumption that Agnes thinks is misguided. “He was not doing this from a position of strength,” she said.
One chapter of the book is about Socratic love, and it builds on the talk Agnes gave her students in 2011, when she first fell in love with Arnold. She repeats the argument she made about Socrates’ vision of love as a kind of ladder, two lovers aspiring together to the same ideals, but she also contemplates what it means when the “company of the person one once chased with breathless abandon loses its thrill, the frequency of both sex and vigorous conversation decreases, and living together becomes a matter of routine. This supposedly ‘good case’ is, in its own way, also far from ideal.”
As their youngest son grew older, and there were fewer urgent distractions, Agnes became aware that marriage is a thing that can die. She described the experience as “persistently ignoring the thought that there’s something wrong. You just turn away from something and then keep turning away from it, and eventually you can’t see it anymore.”
Her parents, who emigrated from Hungary when she was four, were united by a shared sense of struggle; they were trying to adapt to a new culture, with little money or command of the language. The structure of marriage suited them well. Agnes felt that she had imported the conventional trappings of marriage without evaluating which features remained relevant. She worried, she said, that she and Arnold were “losing the spirit of marriage for the sake of the convention.” They labored under the shadow of the transcendence of their early romance. “I’ll be, like, ‘Why can’t we get back to that?’ ” Agnes said. “And Arnold will be, like, ‘That was never there.’ He is offended by my attempt to go back in time. And I feel like he is taking away the foundation of our relationship and telling me that our lives are built on a lie.”
After seven years of marriage, they watched Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” a portrait of a couple as they struggle to understand the limits and possibilities of their relationship in the course of a decade. “It’s extraordinary that two people can live a whole life together without—” the wife’s mother says. “Without touching,” the wife answers. The couple divorce, but their relationship continues, without the distance and artifice that marked their marriage. The ending is not widely viewed as a happy one, but both Agnes and Arnold felt that the couple, through their divorce, had discovered how to be connected to each other in a real way. Agnes is planning to write her next book about the show, as well as about what she calls her “philosophical marriage.” The show clarified her feelings of estrangement. Until she met Arnold, she said, “I didn’t realize how lonely I was. You don’t see it. It’s like the air that you breathe, but when you see that you can be relieved of it there is this weird way in which the relationship exacerbates the loneliness.”
For Agnes, loneliness was the experience of having thoughts she wanted to communicate but felt unable to, because she knew that her words would come out wrong or be misinterpreted. Whatever she said would be a distortion of what she was feeling. “And that experience is almost a kind of madness—the experience of not being able to settle on a view about how anything is,” she said.
I told Agnes that once, when asked to share an inspiring quote for a friend’s wedding, I picked one from Rainer Maria Rilke: “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” In hindsight, my choice seemed silly, and I guessed she would agree. “Yeah, it feels like a way of reassuring yourself that some of the flaws in the relationship are actually really beautiful,” she said, adding that this is “why Socrates thought the poets didn’t know what they were talking about.” The ineffable wisdom they wrote of—inaccessible to others, because it was so mysterious and private—sounded to Socrates a lot like ignorance, she said. The idea that a marriage should hold space for each person’s incommunicable core, she believed, “comes from this pessimism where it’s, like, Look, at the end of the day we know we can’t really help one another, so the best thing we can do is not interfere too much.”
Arnold aspired to rid the marriage of loneliness, too, but he defined it differently from Agnes. “For me, togetherness is something like: imagine being with somebody where it would never occur to you to say anything but the truth,” he told me. “There’s no strategy, no attempt to get anything.” He continued, “Whereas Agnes’s loneliness is a barrier between two people, for me loneliness is almost like an internal problem. How can I manage to find reasons to tell the truth? Or how can I make contact with the idea of being honest?”
Marriage is “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The whole point of marriage is repetition.” Agnes and Arnold felt that they had entered marriage without clearly thinking through what the institution was actually for. For many couples, marriage ends up being about making a family, and, when it fails to meet other needs, the couple lovingly and generously lets it fail. But Agnes was uncomfortable with the prospect of a relationship that had lost its aspirational character. She wondered what it would look like if she and Arnold integrated new romantic relationships into their marriage. They would all keep talking about philosophy, but with fresh ideas in the mix. They asked each other whether it would violate the terms of their marriage if they became romantically involved with other people. “We didn’t think there was any good reason other than the usual conventions of marriage to answer that question with a yes,” she said. They referred to their new agreement as the Variation.
Agnes was struck by how bound by convention she’d been when she divorced Ben. “I was almost saying something like ‘Look, I left my husband for this other man, but he’s the one person—the one and only person—and I promise I won’t do it again.’ ” It was as if she had been unconsciously trying to justify a kind of social dogma: that you can love only one person at a time.
Agnes said that sometimes colleagues tell her, of her relationship with Arnold, “I’m so glad it worked out.” She finds that form of thinking alien. “It’s a very narrative, novelistic approach to my life, and the only area of my life that I see in such a progressive way is the pursuit of knowledge.” The proof of success or failure is her insights, she said, not the plot of her life.
After our conversation in Pennsylvania, Agnes said Arnold worried that they’d given me the impression that their marriage was a success story. At the time, I had expressed that, if cooking pita alone felt tragic, then things seemed to be going well, but I had perhaps overlooked the way that tiny kitchen conflicts can expose relationship fault lines that feel elemental. When we talked again, I asked them about the ways in which they weren’t as happy as they appeared to be. They spoke to me on Zoom from Agnes’s office, which she had turned into a kind of magical kindergarten: bright stars, circular mirrors, and L.E.D. lights hung from ropes wrapped in yarn of different colors; the walls were covered in fabrics featuring flowery blobs; a table had large polka dots. “It’s not like this thing that we do, which is constantly talk about philosophy, is a happy activity,” Arnold told me. “It’s just as difficult and problematic and fraught an activity as what I take it many couples would do together.”
“I guess I would go even a little further than Arnold in saying that this territory is pretty often painful,” Agnes said. She was sitting at her desk, wearing a pink dress with large llamas on it. Arnold had pulled up a chair beside her. “There are certain reliable circumstances that will make it non-painful,” she went on. “I can tell you exactly what they are: it’s when Arnold is explaining Aristotle to me.” She felt that no one could explain anything as well as he explained Aristotle. He was always patient, never defensive; his interpretations weren’t tied up in his own ego. “The way we first got together was by talking about Aristotle,” she said, “and yet I just thought, Well, yeah, but that was incidental. I could have been teaching a class on anything. It turns out, no, it was actually really important that it was Aristotle.”
In her marriage with Ben, Agnes had never wondered whether the relationship was going O.K. But, with Arnold, she said, “we’ve often had the kind of stress and struggle of, like, is this working?” She continued, “In that way, it’s a less happy relationship than the one I had with Ben.”
She added that, when she and Arnold fought, they could rely on Ben to provide an objective perspective. He would try to think through the problem from both of their points of view, rather than reflexively offering validation. (She said that she does the same for Ben when he discusses his own relationships.)
“The phrase coming to mind is ‘immaculate divorce,’ ” I said. “A divorce without grief or sorrow or pain.”
“I actually think that’s a pretty good description,” Agnes said. She had been taking notes throughout the conversation and wrote something down. “This has come up in conversations where we’ve had dark moments and Arnold is, like, ‘Look, if we have to get divorced, we’ll do it correctly.’ ” No one would feel trapped, morally or practically. She imagined marriage as a “bundle of services”: along with love, there’s security, friendship, child rearing, financial support, and assistance with one’s work. “Arnold is sort of saying, ‘Look, we can unbundle it.’ Marriage has a lot of stuff packed into it, but if you knew what job each bit was doing, then, if you lose the marriage you could still potentially reconstitute the bits.” She added, “The only barrier to our getting divorced is our wanting to continue to be married.”
In an episode of “Scenes from a Marriage,” the wife comes to ask the husband to sign divorce papers, and he, realizing that he is bound to the marriage in a deeper way than he’d known, locks his wife in his office and then strikes her in the face. Agnes and Arnold’s marriage was set up so that no one would ever feel locked in. But Arnold also identified with the husband’s blind panic at the prospect of losing the relationship that has given his life meaning. “It’s not that we live without that feeling,” he said. “It’s that we are trying to manage that feeling.”
“So it’s like we’re always breaking up?” Agnes asked.
“No, it’s like the philosophy-is-a-preparation-for-death thing,” he said, quoting one of Socrates’ most famous lines. “Maybe our marriage is a preparation for divorce. The thing we’re trying to do is approach that fact—that another person could be so deeply tied to the meaning of your life that, without the relationship, life might feel meaningless.” He was uncomfortable with how dependent this made him feel, and he thought he should somehow overcome it. According to Aristotle, “Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.” He was striving to fulfill that ideal. “It’s something that I’m aiming for, and it’s something that I don’t have yet,” he said.
“I think a lot of our fights boil down to Arnold thinking he’s already arrived at the final condition where he doesn’t need me anymore,” Agnes said, “and me trying to point out to him that he’s not as great as he thinks he is, so that he can see that he actually does still need me.”
Arnold smiled slightly, his eyes cast down.
“And that actually is a way of understanding how marriage is a preparation for divorce,” Agnes went on. “It’s a preparation for the time when you won’t need another person in order to think.” She said that maybe that would be the title of her book about marriage: “Marriage Is a Preparation for Divorce.” She had written the line down in her notebook.
“It’s this idea that we want marriage to have a point,” Arnold said. People talk about the aim of their careers, but they don’t use that sort of vocabulary for marriage. “When Socrates says that philosophy is a preparation for death, he’s very clear that he doesn’t mean you’re supposed to commit suicide. It’s just that there’s some way in which philosophy could stand up to the task of making you able to deal with death when it comes.”
“The corresponding claim,” Agnes said, “would be that somehow the project of marriage would make you capable of being alone.”
Sometimes, when Agnes discusses her marriage with Yelena Baraz, her best friend, Baraz gets frustrated by her philosophical approach. Agnes said, “I’m, like, O.K., what is jealousy? Am I entitled to feel it? Is there something I’m getting right in feeling this way?” Baraz wants to comfort her. “I feel like she’s treating herself as a guinea pig or a case study,” Baraz told me, “and I want to relate to her as a person I care about who is in distress.” But Agnes is impatient with the “let’s-get-through-the-next-fifteen-minutes kind of approach. The way that I think about it is: there’s no other time when you could understand this thing. Devastating problems in your life can also be interesting, and they can interest you as they’re happening to you and as they’re causing you intense pain.” When Baraz tries to look for a cure, “I’m, like, No,” Agnes said. “This is my chance to understand it. This is the time when we can be serious about our lives.”
Agnes eventually wants to write about unconventional family arrangements like hers, but she has also noticed that when people write about such topics they are both celebratory and defensive, as if they were trying to put a good face on it. She doesn’t want to draw conclusions until she can “grasp the real thing in all its tragic splendor,” she told me. When I asked about the nature of the tragedy, she sent me a list of sixteen points. “However many people you have, it is never enough” was the first point on the list. “One is not enough (this is part of the tragedy of monogamy), but neither is two, or three.” She went on to describe how differently she and Ben and Arnold dealt with their fears of aging and death and their unspoken wishes for their children; the realization that honesty is often brutal and intolerable; the understanding that passion is unsustainable. She felt as if she were constantly trying to open their eyes to the tragic aspects of their lives, and they weren’t seeing it. There was also the problem of equilibrium: each relationship settles into its own patterns, a set of interlocking arrangements based on each person’s insecurities and needs, which become nearly impossible to alter, even more so among three. “So many things get ‘let go of,’ ” she wrote, “rather than really resolved.”
I asked Agnes if there was a version of aspiration that takes the form of becoming a person who accepts what is good enough. Life is fragile and terrifying, and so much of it can be taken away. Can you aspire to know how to fully inhabit a relationship, a life, that feels like a plateau? “I think grateful acceptance can be loving, but I think exacting demands can also be loving,” she responded in an e-mail. “Marriage has an amazing PR team, for 2 decades it has been continuously telling me, ‘This is good, this is how it is supposed to be, this should count as enough, lots of people don’t get this much, you should accept this and move on to other concerns’—and I feel increasingly emboldened to say, ‘No thanks, I’d rather keep working and searching and striving.’ ” ♦
Tonight begins the move to Daylight Savings Time, where we turn the clock forward. Meaning longer days and of course more challenges with regards to how that affects us physically, emotionally and financially. I find the longer days much more taxing as the costs to heat or to cool rise. But I do laugh as frankly the move to South and to the better weather regions is showing that it is the most insane and least affordable option in which to undertake. But in all honesty it is as if we are all turning our clocks backwards and the South is bringing that to fruition. They said they will rise again, and yee haw they certainly have!
Floriduh, which is my new name for the State as you have to be a raging idiot to move there continues to fight for its quest to be the most extreme participant in the contest between Governors of Republican led States to be the most Conservative aka Facist. I still lean to Tennessee as the current Anti Drag Law is so vague, so poorly written it literally outlaws many Halloween costumes. This is the contest between a bunch of White men who can be the biggest asshole with right now the loudest, Ron DeSantis, is running a close number one. But that is because he has his “woke” eye on the White House, but to ignore Governor Abbott of Texas and Lee of Tennessee is at one’s peril. Missouri is not far behind, Arkansas with the wonderful former Trump Employee, Huckabee-Sanders making sure that no one is using LatinX as the standard bearer name regarding those of Latin descent. But in very blue Connecticut they are not having it either. Next up Cisgender. That will show them Mx Lindsay Graham!
While Florida is busy burning, banning books and curriculum they are ignoring how the State coming after Ian is struggling to recover thanks to Insurance companies denying and downgrading claims. Well get your big boy white boots on there Rhonda and help them! But to the people of Florida, to Tennessee and other states moving in the same bootstrap nations, YOU ELECTED THEM. Not just the Governor but the majority of State offices that have in turn enabled if not encouraged these hate laws into passing. So you did this to yourself. It is called Self-fulfilling prophecy. Some education there for you.
My personal favorite story of the week is the spin on January 6th and the framing of that message from the King of White Supremacy, Tucker Carlson, spinning it as Tourists Gone Wild. Irony that as his emails/texts regarding Trump and the “stolen” election are anything but flattering; actually saying in one that he hates Trump’s guts. Well go figure and welcome to the club.
Then we have another milestone, the third anniversary of Covid. This is usually marked by a gift made of Leather. Oh lord let’s not let the GOP know that brings all sorts of Gay connotations to mind. Well whips and chains ,aside the Republican investigation into this has stumbled on the conclusion by the Department of Energy and the CIA that is was a lab leak. Again for many, myself included I did think it was just sloppiness that led a worker into the wet market with a special treat attached to a shoe or garment and then in such a perfect breeding environment it was a delightful take home treat to the family. China’s endless secretiveness and their initial denials about what was transpiring in said lab regarding Gain of Function research is a clue that not all was what it was claimed to be. Do I think Fauci and his own NIH role in that was another coverup? No, but it was a contributory factor as again funding this and denying you are is not helping matters. This was written in 2021 the fall of our season of discontent and I feel that little has changed when it comes to understanding Covid, its origins or even how to combat it. The vaccines have not stopped the spread and it is “believed” to prevent serious illness or death and that is again a hard to measure factor, but Big Pharma made Billions. I had the first two vaccines, stayed largely masked and had one booster. I contracted Covid in September and with that took Paxaloid and recovered in a week to the day. I was all over the map that week with varying symptoms each day a new treat but never truly ill enough to seek medical care. We do know now that most deaths were elderly and those with health risks, such as Asthma, Obesity, etc. So with that the question remains how will we handle the next pandemic. Well sure as fuck not like this one.
The current economy aside it is a confusing one. The runaway inflation that seems to have the Fed giving literally mixed signals, while job growth is continuing at a record pace the same while layoffs as well as a Bank closure in the Tech Sector seemingly contradicts this is again a head scratcher. You cannot solve a New Math problem using Old Math techniques and there are many factors here that now must be considered. The Global Economy, the shutdown of China and the shortages that enabled if not allowed prices to rise and some of it gouging. The war in the Ukraine now at over a year and its affect on Europe cannot be ignored. The ongoing political struggles in Africa and Israel are lending to further confusion. Do I think it is bad? Yes and No. What I think is that this is a massive reset and this is the “new normal.” For now. The rich are still very rich, the working poor still poor and facing massive evictions, foreclosures will also rise trust me on this, and repossession of cars another; all of this , along with rising wages but failed tax credits, the cost of health care, child care will level those out and we are back to square one. I have yet to factor in the Immigration net role of those who have made it here, versus those leaving by choice or by force with the H1B1 tech workers and their Visa’s expiring if they do not find another job when laid off. That too will be a must watch in the year ahead. And yes it is just still March, talk about Madness!
As I move into a new week I am hoping for a wearing of the green in a way that will change my outlook and enable me to have a better perspective and outlook. The weather has been coming in like a Lion the last two weeks and with the Amateur Night of Drinking happening on Friday I am not sure the week will end on a high note. Well for some.
And with that I conclude with an article about Education. As I have written about for quite some time my experience in Education and my observations moving about the Country and finally realizing how bad it is, here there and everywhere all at once, I used to beat myself up quite a bit about my work and place in this institution. I have been numerous times been proven right but again this may be the most significant work to finally prove to others how bad Teaching and Schools really are. And no the solution is not Charters or Vouchers that is kicking the can and just re-gifting, it is about a system that deprives well Educated individuals the opportunity to earn a living, have a great work-life balance, bring Children a well developed learning plan and a place to learn not just the Three Rs, but find social skills, athletic ones, learn diversity and acceptance and tolerance of the differences of others – be that of Race, Gender, Culture, Sexuality and more importantly Abilities. That last one is the key and we often overlook this when we speak of the broad concept of diversity.
I hate my job and I have said many time it is not the children. The adults are horrific and that includes Teachers, Aides, and more importantly Administrators. The fish stinks from the head and that fish is well passed the three day sell by date. I have not known one in my entire 30 years, I have heard of one or two but actually met them? NO. And I will say the same with Teachers, the good ones are few and far and nowhere between. They hide in their classrooms, you do not see them much and have few words to offer than Salutations. It is a profession where one keeps one head down. This week walking in the snow and rain the lack of Teachers was so severe that I had to cover numerous classrooms over four floors. I went to each, dropped the rosters for the periods I was covering, opened a window a crack and the doors also open to ventilate, then left my coat, gloves and warm gears on a seat next to the desk, nicely folded. As I roamed the building, leaving each class early so to make it down the stairs, back up the stairs and somehow fit a toilet break in there I returned to the last room, the doors slammed shut, the jambs missing and my coat thrown on top of a bookcase, my gloves and scarf shoved beneath, the rosters missing and all the windows closed. Gee thanks. Oddly this Teacher forgot his laptop and came back to retrieve it and asked me how my day was. My response: “It was until I came in here and found all my personal belongings thrown about and the roster missing for attendance otherwise the same.” He walked out without a word. Two Students informed me he is a well known asshole whom no one likes and it explains also why during the middle of the day I will get a sudden switch in plans and must cover for him as he often leaves midday claiming long Covid. Okay fuck off then. I then went to the office and said, “My Tummy is bothering me so I won’t be here for the rest of the week, see you Monday.” And I walked out. And I came home to read about this Teacher of the Year. And thought about Teachers who were murdered by their Students or attempted murder, not via a mass shooting but by direct assault and thought, they will never be Teachers of the Year. One murdered for tutoring an angry kid, another for bad grades. I have said repeatedly that Children learn this at home no school can compensate or even remotely repair this damage.
So with this I am looking forward to reading this book and hope it comes with a trigger warning alert on the inside cover. I suspect it will be traumatizing but for me at least somewhat exonerating.
An inside look at the brutal realities of teaching
In ‘The Teachers,’ Alexandra Robbins tells the stories of educators and their successes, stresses and burnout
Review by Melanie McCabe
March 8, 2023 The Washington Post
Anyone contemplating going into teaching might be dissuaded after reading Alexandra Robbins’s latest work, “The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.” That is not a disparagement of her book but rather a testament to its scope, accuracy and unflinching honesty. Never before have I read any work that so clearly depicts the current realities of teaching in America’s public schools, a subject I have followed closely as a recently retired teacher with 22 years of experience.
It isn’t that Robbins fails to shine a light on the considerable joys and rewards of working with young people. She herself took on a long-term sub gig in a third-grade classroom and writes movingly about the impact these students had on her life. And the book abounds with heart-tugging stories of students struggling because of a disability, an emotional issue or a situation at home, who were able to make a breakthrough or considerable gains thanks to the teachers profiled in the book. It is impossible to read about these students without being drawn into their stories and the efforts to reach them: Eli, a bright but volatile student whose mother shows little interest in his schooling; Zach, a selective mute whose past trauma has kept him from speaking to adults; Robert, a boy on the autism spectrum who finally achieves success by passing a state exam. The hope of experiencing moments like these was what attracted me and my former colleagues to teaching.
But the realities of teaching in 2023 are considerably different from when I entered the profession in 1999. Robbins notes that pressures on teachers began to shift in 1983, with the publication of the Department of Education’s report “A Nation at Risk.” Not long after, teachers found that their jobs now also required the management of high-stakes tests and the incorporation of new pedagogical practices and curriculum. Over the years, teachers were required to takeinstruction in social-emotional learning and accept an increase in mandated compliance training to monitor for neglect and child abuse. A sharp surge in school shootings brought a significant rise in lockdown drills.
As the duties placed on teachers piled on, no extra time was built into their day to manage them. Robbins cites several studies revealing that as teachers struggle to keep up, forsaking their evenings, weekends and lunch hours, the result is often burnout, exacerbated by “inadequate workplace support and resources, unmanageable workload, high-stakes testing, time pressure, unsupported disruptive students, lack of cooperative time with colleagues, and a wide variety of student needs without the resources to meet those needs.”
The result of these pressures is depicted in brutal detail in Robbins’s reporting on three teachers. There is Rebecca, an elementary-school teacher, whose high expectations of herself and lack of support from the school system have left her so exhausted that she is unable to manage any kind of a social life. She startsthe school year with plans to begin online dating and get involved again with musical theater, a pastime she has forsaken, but school demands on her time have her working straight through most weekends, making her plans all but impossible. Further complicating her life is a year-long mystery in her classroom: One of her students is stealing Rebecca’s possessions, as well as her students’, and she has devoted herself to trying to get to the bottom of it. She finally discovers the culprit, a girl named Illyse, whose mother agrees to get her daughter into counseling.By year’s end, Rebecca resolves to give up the social life she attempted, at least for the short run, and concentrate only on teaching, which takes all the energy she has.
Penny is a sixth-grade math teacher who struggles to maintain her high standards in the midst of a toxic workplace environment and the breakup of her marriage. Her school’s faculty is cliquish and unwelcoming, and Penny often draws the ire of a few women who see her as a threat. Penny seems to succeed with students the others can’t manage, and her colleagues’retaliation is to make her life as miserable as they can. As if this weren’t stressful enough, Penny spends much of the year sick with recurring respiratory infections caused by unaddressed mold in her classroom. Her complaints about it are ignored.
Especially unsettling is the experience of Miguel, a middle-school special-education teacher, who is teetering on the brink of leaving the profession because of the excessive requirements placed on him without adequate time and resources. His previous school year was a nightmare of abuse, with his students frequently attacking him; every few months he had to get HIV and hepatitis tests because of student bites. Complaints to a district administrator resulted only in Miguel’s being told, “That’s part of the job.” Ultimately, Miguel sued the district because of permanent disabilities caused by the attacks and won lifetime medical care.
Teachers nationwide endure similar scenarios and are leaving the profession at an alarming pace. Robbins reports that demand for U.S. teachers outstripped supply by more than 100,000 in 2019, while graduates from teacher prep programs plummeted by a third between 2010 and 2018. Along came the pandemic in 2020, and a serious teacher shortage became dramatically worse.
At first, when schools moved to online instruction in the spring of 2020 and parents saw firsthand the hardships teachers were enduring, plaudits poured in for the educators showing remarkable commitment to their profession in a difficult situation they had never trained for. Virtual teaching took much more time to prepare, execute and evaluate. And because students were often not required to turn on their cameras, it was a lot like teaching into a void. But as time crawled on and schools remained closed to in-person instruction, parents became critical, even angry. The hostility parents leveled against teachers was astonishing. In September 2021 alone, 30,000 public school teachers nationwide gave notice. Between August 2020 and August 2021, Florida’s teacher vacancies surged 67 percent, according to a count by the Florida Education Association. In 2021, California’s largest district, Los Angeles Unified, had five times the number of vacancies as in previous years, according to Shannon Haber, a spokeswoman for the district. The number of retirements skyrocketed, and I joined the exodus.I was within a couple of years of my target retirement date, but I left earlier than planned because of the mounting stress around the pandemic and an ever-increasing workload. My colleagues who remained have said that the 2021-22 school year was unbelievably hard.
One of these colleagues, who was named 2019 Teacher of the Year by my school in Arlington, Va., spoke recently before the school board to detail how her experience highlights some of the inequities facing teachers. Based on her careful record keeping, she stated that she expects to work a staggering 454 hours outside of her contract hours in any school year. “My job is impossible to do well in the time you pay me to work,” she told the board members. “I couldn’t even be average in the time you pay me.”
Almost every page of my review copy of “The Teachers” is marked with my comments and exclamation points as I encountered situations and circumstances remarkably similar to those I experienced myself. This is an important book that will come as no surprise to the nation’s teachers. But for those who seek a fuller understanding of what educators are coping with these days, it should prove invaluable. And for those who most need to read it — those in a position to effect change in the lives of conscientious and talented teachers who are considering abandoning the profession — one can only hope that its message will be heeded before it is too late.
This week the CDC came out with a study that had SHOCKING results, young girls are deeply suffering from trauma. Wow that is up there with some of their more idiotic studies of late. This is not new, Girls aka Women or whatever new noun/adjective we have come up with have been troubled for years. But thanks to Social Media and 24/7 access to Cell Phones and endless screed of information it has gotten worse. They used to just prank phone call you, send you hate mail, literally in the mail, pass notes or ice you and not invite you to things. I was that “Girl”. Best thing that ever happened to me as the pack of Mean Girls I knew, NOT ONE ended up happy or sane. Well that was what I heard the few years after I graduated, I lost contact, moved on an out and I have never looked back. I don’t have a single thing left from those days. Who in the flying fuck sits around perusing their old yearbooks, reminiscing on the “good old” days gone by? I sure do not.
The movie and later the musical, Mean Girls portrayed these young “innocents” as predators. Not the type you are accustomed to when we think of this word, but in the same vein as stalking, planning and enacting an attack. This happened in a New Jersey town where a young girl was attacked brutally by school mates and the video of it put on TikTok where all violent bullshit seems to go down of late. She killed herself as a result of the “shame” and the schools reaction at the time was to say the least – disinterested. Yeah okay. This is what bullying is and does. It makes those who have been either victims or perpetrators of it immune to it. “Well I made it through, so toughen up.” Okay that did not make it right then it does not now. Again add to this the endless filming of all this bullshit, loading it on to the interwebs and then everyone anywhere all at once can see it and in turn laugh AT it and ultimately you or feel rage. Then the dogpiles begin and nothing changes except a girl is dead. I refer back to a neighbor who is moving to Chicago as she cannot stand the “Jersey” persona. I get it, I really do. I have, however, lived in Nashville, this I can handle. And yes I thought of suicide quite a bit after being in the schools here and my encounters and they were too reminiscent of Nashville and with that I have since reconciled it as it is here, there everywhere all at once. Seattle was no different, in fact it may be worse now. I did not last one week in San Francisco and went to retail so there you, one pink collar job for another. Nursing must be a real fun time which is why I often write about the Medical Industrial Complex but it is a subject in and of its own. But if anyone thinks I would go to Florida and walk in a school you would be nuts, there is ground zero for crazy shit and its coming to a town near you. So kids are bad now, just wait. And there is more coming.
There is the viral video of the girls at the Hot Dog Vendor stand in LA. They are of course idiots and likely drunk but hey “girls just want to have fun.” And there more sites, articles, blogs and information about girl on girl bullying than the Vendor has hot dogs. We have numerous stories about how Women have introduced other women and girls into violence. I think of Ghislaine Maxwell as one. But there is usually one woman as the “beard” to men. NXVIM. Or the Sarah Lawrence Cult that had a girls father systemically abuse and exploit fellow classmates. Now on HULU. I cannot think of a cult that did not have a Woman who was a strong presence. Other than Scientology, and that is a “religion” and we all know that is a whole different kind of cult. But there is the usually women right at the top, or heavily focused on women such as the Yoga and Fitness nutfuck ones. I love that Pyramid Schemes for women are MaryKay, Avon or Tupperware and Men almost all are money/investment ones. Gender equity there folks!
But what is distressing is that almost all Male Violence has some component of women involved, It starts often in the home with problems with one’s Mother. Sandy Hook or Uvalde come to mind. But there are those who are prompted by lack of dating, the “incel” bullshit or the breakup of a relationship, Domestic Violence and other family issues that lead to mass shootings or acts of violence and again directed to Women. I do think there is something to the Oedipal Complex. Hamlet anyone? So with that why are young girls such raging Bitches. Well again just ask Mommie Dearest. I am not sure Men are doing this level of damage alone and exclusively. Daddy’s Little Girl? I get a whole Ivanka/Donald vibe there and again that is all deeply Freudian. I do think it is ironic that her husband is a raging moron, thinks he is smarter than he is, the wealthy son of a corrupt Father who even went to jail for his duplicity. Wow there is something to that idea that Girls marry Men like their Fathers.
I have my own theories why Women are raging Bitches and that is of course the lack of equality when it comes to work, to choice and of course MEN. Let’s face it Men are fucking raging maniacs. (And yes this is a generalization but to be frank I have met FEW to NONE that were good folks but I know they exist) They are obsessed with sex, money, power and with that if it is not their dick they are flinging about they find the best surrogate a gun and do it with that. Bullets or Jizz we are all pissed on at some point. And the sheer level of gun violence these past two months puts as at over 40 shootings this year. This does not include the immense amount of violence, some with guns, some with Uhauls, Swords, pushing and slashing people and other means of doing harm. All of it by men. All of it.
But this is about the Girls and the way they do harm to themselves and in turn others. Do I blame Girls and Women for this? No and yes. Women are culpable in how they treat others and with that they are largely the primary care givers to ironically Boys and Men. And with that again here goes the misdirected anger. I do see how the Female Teachers and Instructional Assistants treat the SPED students when I am in those classrooms. Folks it is on average, just average. But on average I don’t think the Women Teachers and Admins I have encountered are fantastic human beings at all. Sadly few are all that and it explains the problems in schools. Boys smirk and Girls roll their eyes and that is the only Gender distinction I can note when I see disregard and dismissal by Students toward Adults. It is why I love SPED kids as they are all out there with emotions and I do believe that is the real problem, the raw display of it that makes Female Teachers uncomfortable. And had that 6 year old in Virginia had a Male Teacher or there were more Male’s present in that school that shooting might not have happened. He has true issues that needed a strong male influence, role model and perhaps his outbursts would be managed better or at least believed. Again that school had a Male Administrator who was fired, but the Female Assistant who handled all of the complaints, never did a thing. I wonder if this was again racial or gender related. This too is a major problem when it comes to these issues. Here is where the expression “color blind” needs to be put to use and with that I truly believe a Man would have been believed. Period.
Pink Collar jobs are the problem here and why again they are pushing boys back believing that they need school later. No they are just more confused and annoyed and need some male influence in which to identify and associate with. We need more Male Teachers in Elementary schools that are not just Music and PE but standard classroom Teachers, more Male Aids and in turn faces of all Colors and more languages. I do love Abbot Elementary and they have only one Straight Male Teacher who is also Black in a largely if not exclusively Black school. The White Teachers include one Woman and a Gay man. And is it shocking that the Gay White Male is the expert at Teaching Black History? No. I have been in those shoes as well, as have been in those same schools and they are not nearly as fun nor as interesting as Abbott and with that I have had and met many an Ava as an Admin, who is neither as funny or interesting either. I don’t think I will ever forget McKissack Middle School in Nashville and explaining to both Students and Staff the history of the McKissack name in history and their role in the current development of the African American Museum in DC. Wow that is when I realized how bad it was in Nashville. And that again was where I truly learned the concept of anti-racism and institutional racism. And when I realized I was not the problem but I was a part of it. I ignored much of it in Seattle as I attributed to our politics, our locality in the region, the Northwest is a bubble of idiocy and with that you get used to it. But the pandemic opened my eyes again to the division in public education, and it is not solely Race, it is Gender. I also knew few Teachers of any kind to be compassionate, intelligent Teachers nor Administrators. And with that you again realize being simply a part of it is not something you feel proud of. Or I did not.
Do I hate women? I am a Libra so that is a yes and no answer. I have no energy to try to connect, understand or actually care about women. The trauma and psychic damage done to women is not new nor will change. We don’t do change in America. We clutch pearls, offer thoughts and prayers and onto the next. Women are good leaders, bad leaders. Another woman leader, this one in Scotland resigned this week. This follows the female PM in New Zealand who two years ago was a hero. They both outlasted Britain’s PM who lasted what? Three weeks. She had her meeting with the Queen who died what? 48 Hours later. I guess another one bites the dust. We had a strong presence in the EU with Merkyl and now today the EU is in the midst of its greatest challenge since it was formed. I do wonder how Angela would have made of those Ukrainian ashes. What it does say is that Women are tough but they eventually get to their limits and know what they can or cannot accomplish. Or wait they are Marjorie Taylor Green shouting out nonsense during the State of the Union while her former bestie, Lauren Boebert who happily joined her in heckling last year, decided to have a more formal decorum. What.ever. This is the new Feminist. And a Woman and one of color as well declared her candidacy for Vice President. Well it was for President but it will not be long before Trump eviscerates her and she becomes the Republican version of Kamala Harris. And in turn Harris to will have to find a reason to resign as her role as VP coupled with Biden’s age will challenge the idea of her becoming a de facto President should he not outlive his term. Yes folks we cannot criticize or evaluate Harris for fear of being called Racist. Well I was more than familiar with Ms. Harris when she dated former SF Mayor Willie Brown, a notorious Womanizer. She then moved out of the City Attorney Office into the States Attorney General Office where she served with conflicts and onto the Senate where her attendance and voting record is there to examine. Voted quite liberally but poor in showing up. Staffing issues have followed her to the VP office. She had a horrid Presidential campaign and with that even after insulting Biden was selected. Her approval ratings are low and again given her well established public employment and history you can evaluate here with just that as evidence. Her Gender, her Race and her personal history aside has little to do with it. Hell I knew Gavin Newsom when he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle and that marriage was encouraged by the Getty’s whom Gavin was close, leading to rumors that he was Gay. And when you meet Kimberly that is your first thought, “She must be a beard as she is one piece of work.” Yes folks Women are PEOPLE and people are fucked up, or not.
And why I don’t defend, support, excuse or even try to explain women anymore. We share a common piece of anatomy, a Vagina. And it appears that you can construct those now so I can share that with Women who used to be Men. I wish them luck with that. I am not sure no matter how much self hate I had would I willingly change my Gender to be a Woman and not only be knocked down a peg but several. Some things are just not worth it. Who you are on the outside is irrelevant, who you sleep with, what you wear, who you are dating, married to or what you do is irrelevant. It only matters to you. We have difficulty just being ourselves so we want to be someone else. I wished it was that simple. You be you as everyone else is taken Girls just want to rule the world. have fun or just be raging Cunts. Or they can be all of the above. It is called CHOICE. Ah the good ole days. Now were is my Yearbook?
We are retreating back to the times of Roman’s and with that entering the ring to be like Gladiators who fight to the death for the right to be acknowledged by the Emperor and remain alive to fight another day. January 6th was the ultimate of that sport, hand to hand combat with only one bullet fired (despite the presence of guns which I still wonder why that happened or why they did not given their penchant for them) and all for the Emperor who in the safety of his Castle watched the games transpire.
And with that we have new Millionaire, no Billionaire Class becoming the new media barons. They own the local TV and Radio stations, the National Press, that they always have but now they own the alternative forms of what defines Media – the platforms and apps that are accessible and available to the great unwashed. What was once an exclusive club now anyone can be a member and with that it opens the great underbelly of society’s worst impulses.
A trip through the Twitterverse, the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Instagram pages, the Tik and the Toks demonstrate one singular factor or commonality – narcissism. With it come illiteracy in the form of an inability to articulate a coherent thought, what may be typos are in fact clear spelling issues as these (like this very Blog) are stream of consciousness rantings, and in turn those are read, often not fully with true comprehension skills or the ability to analyze and dissect the meanings or lack of one in the post, and much are simply laundromatted thoughts, meaning repeated and reposted without fully vetting the origin of said “thought” to confirm its veractity. The new owner of Twitter, The Musk (I feel we must all now call any and all Billionaires wit the prefix of “The”) retweeted a specious bit of garbag about the Paul Pelosi attack in San Francisco by the insane conspiracy crazed loon who lived in a storage unit. I was told he was a Fox News watcher which is likely but not given that he did not have a home nor cable. He did have access to the internet and its darkest caverns, maintained a blog and Facebook where he reveled in his madness for all to consume. The Michigan School Shooter, Sandy Hook, Buffalo and Uvalde all maintained a social media presence. Few have not, remember the Unibomber? When all else fails to get the message out and the messenger is a controlled form of media, as one doubts the New York Times would post that editorial despite their questionable ones in the past, one finds a way to ensure their legacy will be left behind if they die for the cause. We have had shootings live streamed and with that we have had that be the double edged sword that have enabled us to learn of Police and their own misdeeds and shootings at those who were simply on the wrong side of the gun.
This brings me briefly to the incident in the Pelosi home where the attacker had a hammer and at one point they were grappling for it directly in front of the Police standing there in the home’s doorway and while that transpired, the attacker managed to wrangle the hammer from an 82 year old man and bash the skull of this man leaving him seriously injured. This is the definitive moment like that in Wisconsin when that kid had just shot and killed two people walk by police brandishing a rifle, people screaming “He just shot someone” and they tossed him a bottle of water. So an elderly man in pajamas and a filthy street person (which in SF is a tough call I guess) is standing next to him and they are fighting over a hammer you just stand there and then pull him of after the damage is done? Had this man been Black I am not sure this would have gone this far.
What has transpired is that now this incident has become a joke to the GOP and another talking point in which to further denigrate and demean. This is America the land of the shit talker. I recall only a few months ago when a dozen or so Handmaidens arrived to protest at the Supremes homes to protest the overturning of Roe, how there was a demand for protection and an immediate passage of a law to prevent such a protests in front of the homes of the Supremes. And with that we have now Pelosi’s home invaded and Rep Jayapal in Seattle also a victim of stalking and harassment in her home. And all under the guise of security much akin to the Guards of Jeffrey Epstein or in many many other facilities throughout the the United States that are supposed prisons. Read this story about the children’s facility, Ware, in Louisiana and tell me again what are we doing right in this country? The Guards are more dangerous and insidious than the children they are guarding and they again are set free for reasons that are less about race and class but about wealth and power. Had the truth been revealed about this facility they would have been closed years ago. Same with Rikers but this is again about an industry that makes profit from doing nothing but feeding off of fear.
I have found one thing for certain, the Guardians of the Gates and their keepers are cut of the same cloth and that is same poisonous one Medea cut for her former spouses new wife. The endless books by Journalists that discus Trump and his malfeasance during his time in office to preserve for their books and then the second audio editions with him on tape to further earn their keep is beyond disgraceful. This is who and what we are, obsessed with money. With that we defer to those with money as we believe they know better are smarter and of course richer which means they are superior to those with less. Yes I can tell a persons IQ by the size of their wallet. Or is that their dick? Or shoe size?
Ego and its endless need for gratification has enabled social or as I call it “anti” social media to thrive. The isolation that was brought on by the pandemic had already begun to establish roots prior thanks to the rise of the cell phone and the ever present Stranger Danger nonsense that has been a massive focus since the 80s – with Satanic Cults now giving way to Q’Anon. There is no dividing line between those two. The rise in Cable Media and the slow eradication of the fairness doctrine gave way to Fox News and the rise in misinformation began to today’s never ending tales of bullshit and gossip that one had to buy in which to spread them. Remember the Enquirer? It was there first bringing down Presidential Candidate, John Edwards. Oh good times! Everything old is new again or just rebranded.
Last night on Day of the Dead I participated in a Seance and again I was certain my Spirit Guide would reveal himself and he did. He came to the Reader who confirmed my own images of him (as he has never been fully faced towards me in my thoughts, always in silhouette and in dim light. He was someone I knew and I am sure it is one man who does resemble David Tennant in Dr Who. But with that I again am not 100% positive as that time in my life there were many deaths and many men whose energy and good looks were simply robbed from them, so I simply leave it to chance of whom this is for certain. And with that he passed on positive and active messages for me to get out and do what I normally would not. And with Sunday’s horrific theater experience behind me I have looked at my schedule and finish out the few remaining tickets I have left and book no more for the following year. I am finally going to read reviews and wait as this too is simply for my own well being and putting the money toward something better to do and that too was the message, get out of the comfort zone and irony after Sunday it no longer is. Again, I was finding Theater a chore and more of an obligation and with that I need to pick less and find a new audience in every sense of the word.
And with that the discussion also moved to work and travel. Next week I do travel to Detroit to see a Van Gogh exhibit and with that I have three days not trapped in my apartment being afraid to live. Again my “influencer” the New York Times also had an article about a family and their relocation due to the noise police in their building. Yes folks the Karen’s abound and with that the reality is that this kind of harassment and abuse will continue thanks to the pandemic and the rise of the social media. The Politics are an afterthought and frankly just a cloak in which to hide behind, but they have enabled people to be free to be their most lowest form of humanity. They used to be reserved for the Arts and Politics now again this is everyone, a content creator of useless bullshit. And it is why I have been also going to Magic and Dance and Music in which to find outlets to both creativity and artistry. As I have the one light show left at BAM lets hope that is not a redux of the crazed German asshole actor who thinks playing a part means he is that part. Free pass to asshole denied.
So that lastly brings me to work. Still incredibly bad and still I go. I am not sure why other than to confirm my worst beliefs and that with that I can actually go and not care one iota but in reality just being there shows I care, about what or who I have no idea. I know it is not the children nor the Teachers so perhaps I go to feel superior to be right in the same ways others use social media to confirm their own beliefs. There is power in not giving a shit and seeing how that plays out. I invented quiet quitting apparently. And it goes with my no compromises policy about how to be treated. That came into play with the Hamlet and I retained my composure until I left but again I beat myself up over the reaction and treatment of me by OTHERS. And that marked my day at Ferris on Monday as the Teacher I had signed up for whom I knew of and had in the past I thought would be fine, but no I was assigned another. It was already I suspect a problematic day being Halloween and three Police Officers standing in the Lobby did little to assuage that, but I went again to the newly assigned room and found it locked. I tracked down a Custodian and when I returned there was another Sub standing next door wondering what to do. I informed her the custodian was coming and could also unlock her room. This pattern would continue throughout the day and it was to me at this point entertaining. The room actually was another Teacher’s rooms and this was a co-teaching arrangement so when I went in I went ahead with my standard protocols of opening windows, doors and moving any possible projectile or instrument out of harms way. Then the master Teacher arrived and her most condescending manner she asked if was “here for he as she was Ms Miller and this was her classroom?” Okay bitch if you are here and I am here then one of us in the wrong place and in the wrong time and if you know you are the lead and you have a co teacher you can assume I am that one. But that began the day. She did not ask my name, scolded me for opening the back/rear door and then corrected me when I said the Teacher (who I had not signed up for) name incorrectly. As if I fucking cared. Then I informed her I do that for safety and ventilation reasons, that I have no sub folder or file telling me what I can or cannot do and at age 63 being a substitute with no health care insurance, sick leave nor family to care take me if I became ill or injured and no safety protocol I leave all possible exits open. I know its dumb but I am not very smart. She looked at me and then said I was sitting at her desk and pointed to the back of the room to the desk by the door I was told not to open to sit there. I responded that good thing I did open the door as I am the one sitting by it then. And with that I watched this woman mismanage and poorly handle the class the rest of the hour. And I left via that back door closing it on my way out. Sadly that was not my last encounter as the room that Teacher was in was of course locked and the Custodian was busy but I had time to use the restroom and finish my coffee in the “lounge.” As I was heading back up Miss Miller found me walking up the Down stair case (classes were in session and irony a book with the same name about Teaching) and she reprimanded me again. I informed her again that I was not very bright and did not understand, those rules; she then asked me if I was subbing for multiple Teachers and did I know where I was to go. Still in that patronizing manner I find repugnant and I said I may not be very bright but I can do my best to find the rooms on my own. Where at one point during any of our exchanges when I added the phrase “I am not very bright” would you pick up on the fact that I am not interested into talking to you. I counted four in total, one should be sufficient a hint. But this is what Teaching has become, no it always was, Gladiator warfare. We pit people against people constantly to prove who is smarter, better and righter. I was subject to that at BAM on Sunday and again at Ferris on Monday, how ironic that two people who share NOTHING in common have one need – to be the STAR. How tragic. How Grim. How Pathetic. We are all stars in the theater of the absurd.
As I struggle to return to the schools I went to Ferris yesterday and thankfully my bestie, the Admin who hates my guts was pulling an Elvis and was out of the building. I ran into the Art Teacher/White Male Activist yesterday who informed me her most recent decision was to not allow Coffee or Coffee Cups on desks. Okay that is significant, and by that I mean as in stupid. I knew she was a crazy bitch but this is just being petty and small. If they shoe fits you ain’t Cinderella.
I am mystified how Jersey City was under State control for 30 years. It never fails to amaze me how bad these schools really are. I am not sure the curriculum is just inadequate alone as overall schools across the city fail to offer extracurricular activities that often build schools and community, which includes State Athletic Champs, a full Band and Music Program that competes Nationally and Internationally. Some of the most respected music comps are just across the river, literally a day trip. Then we have Theater, irony again that the largest Theater org is across the river, and yet not one school has any established Performing Arts/Drama program. There are schools with full on pottery and tech equipment to produce Visual Art, yet none with any acclaim or note. Add to that the diversity that Jersey City touts as a plus has ZERO International Baccalaureate or Cambridge program, no Bi-lingual Ed program like Proyetco Saber or a World/International School with multi language programs and cultural based coursework. They are screaming dumps. I recall the empty endless rooms with outdated computer equipment which could be used to teach voc tech repair or in turn update to include a larger STEM program. NONE of those exist here. I thought for a minute I was back in Nashville, the schools here are that bad. The reality is that I cannot say anything about these schools in a positive manner and this is for a State supposedly ranked in the top 10, Tennessee was the bottom 10. I did find pockets of quality in Seattle but they were small ones, yet they existed despite the best efforts to seal them closed. Sometimes they tried but more often or not they failed in spite of the liberal leaning and endless cash infusions into the district. That is the problem, they tried too hard and too many times to constantly move the goal posts and with that provide a comprehensive education to all students, not just those who were labeled and treated as the label they were assigned. That is a major problem in almost all schools and districts across the country.
So when I read about the Silent Rooms in Jersey Schools I was not shocked. I recall the first time I witnessed one in action in an Elementary School in Seattle. A young Black male was put in the room where it was located inside the classroom and with that he banged, screamed, pounded the walls until he was exhausted and then only then he was let out. The lead Teacher and all the Aides were Black and I was the single white woman there. And I could not wonder what that would do if the racial dynamic was changed and it was a white staff who did this to a child of color. Or that child was Asian or White. Things would not go well. I think the grade was 3 or 4 and with that the school was located in a largely white wealthy neighborhood and yet the school population were not the students from the area. It was a Special Ed class and I knew that there had been a scandal regarding SPED in the district, and no less in my old neck of the woods, the View Ridge area. Again a largely white residential area, where another Elementary used said technique to quiet students and again a child of color. It is the most appalling thing I ever witnessed and next to spanking it has to be the most abusive. We got real problems in our schools, the books are not them.
Inside the quiet rooms
N.J. schools are locking kids in padded rooms. Are they breaking the law?
Published on Jun 19, 2022
By Kelly Heyboer| NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Ana Rivera has lost count of how many times teachers locked away her son.
It started in pre-K when he was shut inside the principal’s office after he would not calm down in class. It escalated in elementary school when the Passaic County boy, who was diagnosed with autism, was routinely dragged into a room the size of closet and locked inside.
At age 6, his family said he came home with so many bruises from being roughly restrained by teachers that they took him to the emergency room.
Every time his horrified mother asked teachers what was happening, she heard the same refrain: The little boy was too much to handle. He needed to be locked up.
“They say to me they restrain him when his life is in danger, or when other people’s life is in danger,” said Rivera, her voice rising in anger. “But it seems to me they just do it when they feel threatened. When he talks too loud. When he tries to scream. When he does some disruptive behavior.”
He was left alone inside a seclusion room, which his teachers called the Reset Room, so many times he finally left his latest school and enrolled in another private school for children with disabilities.
No one seems to be able to tell Rivera how much time her son, now 13, has spent locked away in a school’s version of solitary confinement during his years in New Jersey classrooms.
“They don’t have the data to tell me how often he’s been out of academic classes,” Rivera said. “How long did he stay over there?”
And Rivera said she wouldn’t be surprised if other parents are alarmed as they read her son’s story.
Although most families probably have no idea they exist,school isolation spaces — known as a seclusion closets or quiet rooms — are perfectly legal in New Jersey. While at least six other states have banned them outright, the rooms have been used for years in some public and private schools across the state to isolate violent or disruptivestudents as young as 4 or 5.
Kids are usually placed in the stark, empty spaces alone until they calm down. Sometimes the doors are locked. Other times, teachers or aides hold the doors shut while children pound on the walls inside, scream for their parents or wet themselves.
It’s something New Jersey educators rarely talk about publicly. And parents don’t usually see the rooms, which are often converted closets with walls padded with gym mats, on school tours.
If teachers do talk about the rooms, they usually refer to them with easy sounding names, like the Calming Space, the Reflection Room, the Chill Zone, the Blue Room or the Timeout Booth.
Some educators, who face the potential of violence in the classroom daily, said the seclusion rooms are vitally necessary to keep students and teachers safe when kids are putting themselves and others at risk. But others said the quiet rooms are instilling lasting trauma on some of New Jersey’s most vulnerable children.
The use of seclusion rooms has been on the rise in New Jersey schools since Gov. Chris Christie signed a 2018 state law outlining when they can be used, according to disability advocates. The law says isolation rooms should be a last resort when students are exhibiting violent behavior that put themselves or others in “immediate physical danger.”
But NJ Advance Media interviews with more than 30 parents, advocates, teachers and school officials reveal a darker reality. Some schools appear to be violating the law by locking kids — including nonverbal special education students — in quiet rooms for relatively minor offenses, such as refusing to do assignments, fighting with classmates or taking off their shoes in class.
All of this is happening with little or no supervision by the state Department of Education, which said it has no statistics on which of New Jersey’s nearly 600 school districts have seclusion rooms or how often they are being used.
And what little federal data there is on the use of seclusion rooms in New Jersey shows children with disabilities and minority students — especially Black kids — are being locked away by their schools at disproportionately high rates.
“People don’t understand. They are thinking it’s this nice little timeout room the kid can voluntarily go into and calm themselves down. And that’s not at all what’s happening,” said Peg Kinsell, director of public policy at SPAN, the state’s parent education center for families of kids with disabilities.
“If I did this stuff to my kids, they’d be calling DYFS on me. I can’t say my kid is melting down, so I’m going to lock them in a closet.”
Peg Kinsell, director of public policy at SPAN, a statewide advocacy group for parents.
Seclusion can be used by any school in grades pre-K through 12th grade, according to the guidelines. But, it is often the most vulnerable students, elementary school kids with autism and other disabilities that leave them unable communicate effectively, who are getting locked kicking and screaming into what is essentially school solitary confinement, she said.
“If I did this stuff to my kids, they’d be calling DYFS on me,” Kinsell said, referring to the state’s protective services agency for children and families.
“I can’t say my kid is melting down, so I’m going to lock them in a closet. But we sure can in New Jersey (schools) — as long as it’s a kid with disabilities,” she added.
New Jersey public schools reported placing at least 1,150 students in seclusion between 2011 and 2017, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis of federal education data that shows for the first time how widespread seclusion rooms had become in local schools even before the new state law passed in 2018.
At least 34 large and small school districts — including Montclair, Little Egg Harbor, North Brunswick, Woodland Park, Northern Valley Regional, North Star Academy Charter School in Newark and many county school districts for special education students — reported using seclusionin 2017, the latest available data. Federal officials said that is likely a vast undercount because the numbers are only collected every other year and many schools are not providing accurate counts or any data at all.
About 91% of New Jersey students placed in seclusion had physical, emotional or intellectual disabilities, according to the NJ Advance Media analysis of the latest available numbers from 2017.
And Black students were the most likely to be placed in quiet rooms, accounting for 44% of the New Jersey students put in seclusion that year, even though they only made up about 15% of the school population, the data shows.
Though New Jersey has what is considered one of the best public school systems in the nation, the use of seclusion and restraint has rarely been publicly debated. The few statewide task forces that have been formed over the years to address the issue have produced little or been marred by deep splits between educators and advocates over whether seclusion is an absolutely necessary tool or a highly-abusive practice, participants say.
Some parents’ groups say it is time for New Jersey — a state with one of the highest autism rates in the nation and one of the highest percentages of special education students — to try again and rethink its law allowing seclusion and restraint. The current school guidelines do not contain many of the strict reporting rules and limits in other state’s laws.
Even prisons and mental hospitals have stricter regulations on seclusion than New Jersey schools, they say.
“It’s horrifying,” said Guy Stephens, founder of the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint, who successfully got seclusion rooms banned in his son’s school district in Maryland.
“Even as an adult, if someone forcibly threw me in a room and held the door shut, I’d be terrified. And when you’re talking about really young kids who don’t have the skills that an adult has, it’s even harder to imagine,” he added.
Stephens is among those pushing Congress to bypass the states and pass a nationwide ban on seclusion and all methods of restraint, including handcuffing and strapping students to chairs or having school staff hold them down. They cite national statistics that show the vast majority of kids locked in quiet rooms have disabilities and Black and Hispanic students are put in isolation at a greater rate than other kids.
“If you put those numbers to any other group, how could you not see that as discriminatory?” Stephens said. “It’s a civil rights issue. It’s a human rights issue. It’s a disability rights issue.”
Civil rights groups said it is no surprise Black students are being put in quiet rooms at much higher rates than other students in New Jersey and many other states. Black students have historically been suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than their white peers for the same behavior.
In January, the NAACP was one of 96 civil and human rights organizations that joined the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in calling on Congress to pass the bill banning seclusion rooms because of “bias ingrained in current school safety and discipline policies and enforcement of those policies.”
“The behaviors of children of color, children with disabilities, and LGBTQ youth are disproportionately criminalized, while white students or those who do not have a disability or are not LGBTQ and who engage in the same behavior are treated far more leniently,” the 96 groups said in a letter to Congress.
But some school officials said hold on: It would be a huge mistake to ban seclusion entirely. That would place teachers and other students in danger, force school officials to evacuate classrooms when students become violent and increase the need for teachers to call police for help.
Sure, it’s easy to say quiet rooms and restraint should be banned if you’re not the teacher, aide or school counselor getting hit, bit, kicked or threatened by an unpredictable student, some supporters say. In some cases, students are becoming violent multiple times a day.
Black students were the most likely to be put in quiet rooms. They accounted for 44% of the New Jersey students put in seclusion, even though they only made up about 15% of the school population.
Latest available N.J. data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights
In emergencies, students with severe challenging behavior must be kept safe, said Suzanne Buchanan, a psychologist and executive director of Autism New Jersey, the advocacy group that helped craft New Jersey’s 2018 law on seclusion in schools.
“Every situation is different and comes with a number of factors,” she said. “When you have children who are being aggressive dozens of times a day and presenting a dangerous situation, you have to keep people safe.”
Still, even supporters of seclusion say quiet rooms are being misused in New Jersey schools on a regular basis and no one, including state officials, is keeping a close eye on what is happening behind locked doors.
“All sides agree there is overuse of these procedures. And I would imagine that the vast majority of them fall closer to the abuse side of the spectrum than the safety part of the spectrum,” Buchanan said.
A view of the seclusion or timeout room built into the corner of a classroom at Monroe Township’s Whitehall Elementary School in 2018. The school later said it was eliminating the room after a parent’s complaint went viral on Facebook. (Monroe Township Public Schools)
Locked in the oversized closet
The short video animation was simple, just a seconds-long clip of a cartoon animal with big eyes cowering in a claustrophobic room.
But it was a trigger for Sarah Calkin-Ward’s daughter.
“Mummy, this is (me) in the Quiet Room,” the 8-year-old said when she showed her mother the online video a few years ago.
The girl, who has autism and a limited ability to communicate, didn’t say much more. But her words were alarming enough that her mother quickly Googled “Quiet Rooms” and emailed her daughter’s teacher.
She was devastated by what she learned.
School officials eventually sent her photos of their Quiet Room — a tiny, empty room with no furniture where teachers at the Monmouth County elementary school had allegedly been leaving the third grader on a regular basis when she screamed or was disruptive in her special education class.
“It was a closet. It was an oversized closet,” Calkin-Ward, of Atlantic Highlands, said through tears. “I didn’t even know these things existed, let alone they were doing this to my child.”
Officials with the Henry Hudson Tri-District, which includes Atlantic Highlands, did not respond to a request to comment.
“As soon as I found out about the room I was like you don’t have my permission to put my child in that room or anything like it,” Calkin-Ward said.
But the school didn’t need her permission.
“It was a closet. It was an oversized closet … I didn’t even know these things existed, let alone they were doing this to my child.”
Sarah Calkin-Ward, mother of a third-grader, after receiving photos of the school’s quiet room
Under the state Department of Education’s guidelines on the use of seclusion in schools issued after the law was passed in 2018, schools can either restrain kids or place them in seclusion any time teachers and school officials believe the student or others are in danger.
The guidelines define seclusion as the “involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving.”
Restraint is defined as physically holding a child to keep them from moving or using a mechanical device, such as handcuffs or straps.
Students are not usually restrained once they are placed inside seclusion rooms. But teachers and school security personnel often have to put kids in holds or restraints to drag them inside, advocates say.
New Jersey parents should be notified every time their child is put in a quiet room or restrained by teachers, handcuffs, straps or other means, according to state guidelines.
But, several families, including many who asked that their names not be used because they feared speaking out against school districts where their kids were still enrolled, said they were either not notified when their children were put in seclusion or received minimal information when they were restrained by school officials.
One Morris County mother flipped through the reports dating back to kindergarten that she was sent for all the times her son was restrained, usually by teachers or school officials putting him in a “basket hold,” where they grabbed him from behind, crossed his arms across his chest and brought him somewhere to calm down.
Restrained in 2018, she reads from her timeline of reports. Restrained in 2019. Restrained in March 2021 for 11 minutes with bruising all over him. Restrained in May 2021 with bruising all over him.
“A bunch of times we had to ask for the paperwork. We didn’t get it right away,” said the Morris County mother, whose now 10-year-old son has ADHD and autism. “This paperwork that they give us is crap. It basically says he tried to kick me, so that’s why he was restrained. Well, what happened before that?”
She asked that her name not be used because she is currently finalizing a deal with her public school district to pay for a private school for children with disabilities for her son.
She asked about restraint and seclusion when she went on tours of some of New Jersey’s top private schools for special education students.
One had a stark quiet room. The next had a padded room “that looked like a prison cell,” she said. It seemed impossible to find a private school for students with disabilities in the area that didn’t have some form of a quiet room, although all promised they used the technique rarely.
“I don’t think restraint should happen. I don’t think seclusion should happen. I think they should have a safe place where they could go to on their own,” she said.
An example of a padded “Quiet Room” used to seclude violent or disruptive students in schools. The photo was used to illustrate a report by the federal Government Accountability Office that found many schools are underreporting how often the rooms are used. (Government Accountability Office)
‘The Wild West’
It’s unclear when schools first started using seclusion rooms in schools. For decades, New Jersey was one of the only states in the nation without any law either allowing or prohibiting isolation rooms and restraint in schools.
Some disability advocates referred to it as “the Wild West” because New Jersey schools could lock students in rooms and restrain them as often and as long as they wanted, without any rules on when to check on them, how to document the incidents or how much to tell parents.
“To find out that the Department of Education had zero regulations, I was astounded … They could use restraint and seclusion at their own discretion,” said Eric Eberman, director of public policy at Autism New Jersey, who spent 20 years working in programs for children and adults with severe challenging behavior.
Autism New Jersey began lobbying in 2018 in favor of legislation that made it illegal to use restraint and seclusion in schools except in emergency situations.
The legislation sailed through the state Senate and Assembly with little public discussion. It was one of more than 100 bills signed into law by Christie in his final hours as governor.
The law said schools should only place kids into involuntary seclusion “from which the student is physically prevented from leaving” in an emergency in which people were in immediate physical danger. The law differentiated seclusion from a less severe “time out,” which was defined as placing students in non-locked spaces to calm down.
Some advocates viewed the law as long overdue protection for New Jersey students.
“We helped craft the bill so there could be some regulation around these very risky procedures that were completely unregulated, undocumented, no parent notification, no standards on when they should be used — and more importantly when they should not be used,” said Buchanan, executive director of Autism New Jersey.
But the law split New Jersey’s disability community. Some groups viewed it as a disaster. While other states were banning seclusion and restraint in schools, New Jersey lawmakers had essentially endorsed the practices and encouraged districts to set up policies outlining when teachers could use them, they said.
“We think it’s abhorrent. Restraint and seclusion were a problem before this bill, but this memorialized it into law — that it was allowed,” said Kinsell, director of public policy at SPAN, the state’s federally-designated education center for parents of kids with disabilities.
“We checked and the New Jersey Department of Education does not collect this data at a statewide level.”
Mike Yaple, a state Department of Education spokesman, when asked if the state knew how often kids were put in quiet rooms in New Jersey
State regulations say schools should be collecting data on how often they use seclusion and restraint, but there is no requirement that those numbers be made public. The state also does not keep track of how often schools are using quiet rooms or restraining students and no mention is made of it in the annual statewide report on school discipline.
“We checked and the New Jersey Department of Education does not collect this data at a statewide level,” said Mike Yaple, a spokesman for the department, who declined to comment further on the use of seclusion in New Jersey.
Schools are required to report the data every other year to the federal Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, but those numbers have not been publicly updated since 2018. A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found the nationwide seclusion data was filled with inaccuracies and underreporting.
“You really can’t start to really sort of make sense of it or what’s going on until you have some data,” said Eberman, director of public policy at Autism New Jersey. “I think that would be instrumental in terms of improving oversight and reducing the use of restraint and seclusion throughout the state of New Jersey.”
Blowing up the ‘Calming Corner’
The “Calming Corner” in her son’s kindergarten classroom initially seemed harmless, said one Brick Township mother. It was a cozy space with a beanbag chair and stuffed animals.
But, as her son — who has autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder — was sent to the corner more and more by his teacher, the corner got more and more stark.
Eventually, the school stripped it down to a bare space, blocked by a wood bookcase on one side and an aide holding up gym mats on the other to keep her kindergartener from escaping.
“It was an everyday thing. The moment he would say no or wouldn’t do anything, they would shove him in that corner,” his mother said. (Brick Township school officials did not respond to requests to comment on the district’s use of seclusion.)
One day, the boy told teachers he wanted to “blow up” the Calming Corner to save his classmates from ever having to go into it, his mother said. That was considered enough of a threat that the school required he get a psychological evaluation before he could return to class.
“It traumatized him. Now, he feels like if he does something wrong, someone is going to come and hurt him.”
A Brick mother whose Kindergartener was repeatedly barricaded in a “Calming Corner”
The boy, now in second grade, was eventually moved to a private school in Monmouth County at the district’s expense. But he has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder after his time in the Calming Corner, said his family, who asked that they not be named to protect his privacy.
“It traumatized him. Now, he feels like if he does something wrong, someone is going to come and hurt him,” his mother said.
Another mother in Montclair said a kid doesn’t have to be put inside a seclusion space to be affected by the practice. Her autistic child was never disruptive enough in class to end up in the quiet room in elementary school. But other children in the class were left screaming in the room on a regular basis. (Montclair school officials declined to comment on their use of seclusion at the school, except to say the district is following the law.)
When he moved to an out-of-district private school for students with disabilities he continued to see other children locked inside that school’s quiet room, his mother said.
“It’s literally caused our kid trauma, even though they weren’t put in one of these rooms,” she said. “You know you have a fellow child (in the room) and they could be you.”
The mother said she tried to look for a school that did not have a quiet room. But it was too difficult to find a specialized school for students with disabilities in the area that doesn’t use isolation spaces.
“There’s just not options — because pretty much every school has it,” said the Montclair mother, who now homeschools her child.
Following the law
To get an idea of what these rooms look and feel like, NJ Advance Media contacted 30 New Jersey public school districts, private schools and charter schools that have reported using seclusion rooms to ask if we could see their isolation spaces. All either declined or did not even respond to the request.
A few sent brief statements saying their use of seclusion rooms is legal.
“Montclair School District follows applicable laws, Department of Education guidelines, and Montclair Board policies and regulations with respect to restraint and seclusion,” said a statement from Montclair Superintendent Jonathan Ponds, who was among more than two dozen superintendents who declined to be interviewed on the subject.
“Our students’ health and safety are always our utmost priority,” Ponds’ statement said.
ASAH, the non-profit group that represents New Jersey’s private schools for students with disabilities, also defended the use of seclusion rooms in its schools.
“Our schools serve New Jersey students with the most significant psychiatric, psychological, developmental, and intellectual disabilities. Some students are referred because they engage in disability-related self-injury and/or dangerously aggressive behaviors,” said John Mulholland Jr., the group’s executive director.
“At times, these students may require emergency intervention, including the limited use of clinically-indicated and properly conducted seclusion, in order to ensure their safety and the safety of others,” he added.
Several current and former school employees said they were not surprised officials did not want to talk publicly or open their doors to a reporter.
A former kindergarten teaching assistant in Montclair said she didn’t even know her school had a seclusion room until she started hearing students screaming through the wall of the classroom next door three years ago.
“I could hear, ‘Let me out!’ and ‘Help!’ Mostly just screaming,” said the teaching assistant, who asked not be identified because she feared retaliation for speaking out.
She eventually learned the classroom next door had a padded seclusion closet for a program for students as young as 5 who struggled to manage their emotions. The padded room was used on a daily basis to the confusion of the kindergarteners next door, who did not have a seclusion room in their classroom, but could hear kids in the class next door begging for help through the wall, she said.
“We have kids screaming and crying in there for 30 minutes,” she said. “My kindergarteners would say, ‘What are they doing to him?’ That broke my heart.”
The teaching assistant said she tried to raise an alarm about the district’s seclusion rooms with the school board, superintendent and local groups for families of special education students. She collected photos of scratches on the wood seclusion room doors, presumably from kids trying to claw their way out.
But she said she was mostly rebuffed and told she was overreacting. Some parents in town lashed out at her for questioning the methods of special education teachers they felt were helping their kids.
Eventually, she left the district.
Some school districts have eliminated their seclusion rooms after the community questioned if they were necessary.
In Gloucester County, officials in the Monroe Township school district drew national attention in 2018 when a parent posted photos on Facebook of a closet-sized padded room built into the corner of his son’s elementary school classroom after the third grader came home saying he’d been put “in jail” by his special education teacher.
After the controversy, the district said it was ending the use of the “timeout” space. Monroe Township school officials did not respond to a request to comment further.
Looking at the science
Some researchers say there is no evidence placing students in padded rooms helps their behavior in any way. In fact, it may be harmful, said Robin Roscigno, a Rutgers University researcher and scholar who specializes in the history of autism intervention in the U.S.
“It’s not well studied, the emotional effects of seclusion on children. Most of the studies that are done are studies of the efficacy of behavior reduction,” said Roscigno. “There isn’t a lot of data on what this does to a child’s emotional state.”
Roscigno, who is autistic and the parent of an autistic daughter, said she worries that New Jersey’s seclusion law is too vague. It does not say how small a quiet room can be, how long kids can be left locked inside, how much parents must be told or who is making sure state guidelines are followed.
The New Jersey law also doesn’t address how much light should be provided in quiet rooms, she said.
“We need that law to be much, much, much, much more detailed and really to have a lot more teeth to it. Because right now all it’s really done is to greenlight restraint. It hasn’t really curbed its use. In fact, I think it’s probably increased it,” Roscigno said.
Greg Santucci, a pediatric occupational therapist who first saw a seclusion room about eight years ago while working in New Jersey schools, said he also has seen no research that supports putting students in isolation.
“None of that is based in the neuroscience,” he said.
His own work with students shows students can build emotional regulation skills to help them meet teachers’ expectations without constantly restraining or isolating them, he said. Though he has seen quiet rooms used in schools across the state, there are plenty of districts in New Jersey not using seclusion at all that seem to be getting along fine.
“This is a ‘Field of Dreams’ idea: If you build it, they will come,” Santucci said. “If you build a seclusion room, teachers will use a seclusion room. So, don’t build it.”
“There is no other solution than a complete ban,” Santucci added.
Holding the door shut
When kids were put in the storage closet-sized “Chill Zone” in one North Jersey public elementary school, a veteran teacher’s aide said he was the person who held the door shut.
“I would put my foot against it,” said the longtime paraprofessional in his 60s who said he spent years dragging kids into the seclusion room in the special education program at his school. (He asked that his name not be used because he still works in the district and was not authorized to speak.)
The small, empty, padded room did not have a lock. So, the aide would wedge his foot against the door for as long as it took for the kids, who were as young as 5, to calm down. He’d watch them through a small window in the door.
“They’d be ripping things down, banging, screaming, hollering,” he said. “We had kids in there who would urinate all over the wall.”
Other kids would be given their lunch in the room, then smear the food on every surface or rip the padding off the walls.
In his first year in the classroom, the aide thought the “Chill Zone” was a good place, he said. The room was used rarely and the kids put inside would eventually calm down. But, the following year he was assigned to a less experienced teacher who would place students in the special education program in the room nearly daily for taking off their sneakers in class, refusing to do their school work, throwing things in class or getting aggressive with other students.
“My overall impression of the room was it did more harm than good over time,” he said. “In my mind, I’m thinking no way, this is no good … If a kid needs quiet time, we have other open classrooms.”
He eventually moved to another school in the district, where seclusion rooms are not used.
Some advocates for special education students say many New Jersey schools appear to be violating the 2018 state law that says students should only be placed in seclusion if they or others are in “immediate physical danger.”
Renay Zamloot, a veteran non-attorney advocate who represents families of special education students in disputes with their schools, holds up file after file of cases she’s handled involving New Jersey kids placed in seclusion. (She asked that the students’ names and school districts not be named to protect their privacy.)
In one case, a young girl with autism insisted on carrying around a small notebook every day with stickers of children and animals inside she called her “friends,” Zamloot said. One day, her teacher said the girl had to leave the ever-present notebook behind while the class went to a school assembly.
“For some reason, the teacher chose this hill to die on on that day. I don’t why she did. She told her she couldn’t bring her ‘friends’ with her to the assembly,” Zamloot said. “It turned into a power struggle. The child started to scream and cry, ‘I want my friends. I want my friends!’ She was restrained and then she was dragged off to the seclusion room.”
In another file, Zamloot reads from the case of a student with autism in a Central Jersey school district whose parents came to her for help after their son was repeatedly placed in seclusion. The district had kept careful notes of how long the boy was kept in the room each day.
“He was banging his head against the wall, taking his clothes off, screaming and crying and begging to be let out of the room. And he was in there for hours.”
Renay Zamloot, a veteran education consultant who represented the family of a Central Jersey boy with autism repeatedly locked in his school’s quiet room
“I went into this room too. It was a little cement box that had a wooden door with a viewing window that was too high for the student to look out of,” Zamloot said.
“By the time I got involved, he was banging his head against the wall, taking his clothes off, screaming and crying and begging to be let out of the room. And he was in there for hours. He was urinating on himself. He was saying, ‘I’m hungry and I need water.’ He was just in there for most of the school day,” she added.
In both cases, Zamloot helped the families secure deals with school officials in which the students were eventually moved to out-of-district schools at the expense of taxpayers.
“Most of the cases of restraint and seclusion that I have been involved with could have been prevented had the school district simply conducted the appropriate assessments and provided the necessary positive supports, services and strategies,” she said.
In some cases, students’s needs were not being met in mainstream public schools and they found a better fit in out-of-district schools for children with disabilities that were better equipped to offer them the services they needed, she said.
But, not every family has the time or the money to fight their school district if their kid is being put in quiet rooms. Families with socio-economic disadvantages, including non-English speaking parents and undocumented immigrants, don’t always know where to start, Zamloot said.
Ana Rivera, the Passaic County mother whose son has been repeatedly put in seclusion since he was in pre-K, said she and other immigrant parents struggle to find Spanish-speaking advocates and groups for non-English-speaking families of kids with disabilities.
She said she went to multiple agencies and disability groups before she eventually found a free legal services group for low-income families to help her negotiate a new school placement and special education services to keep her son out of quiet rooms.
“There are not many bi-lingual advocates,” said Rivera, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. “At the end of the day, families have to stay and deal with this because they can’t afford legal representation.”
Lawsuits and legal bans
Georgia banned seclusion in its schools a few years after a 13-year-old boy hung himself when he was left in a windowless, cinderblock timeout room in his school in 2004.
Other states have similar bans, including Florida, Hawaii, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Advocates are trying to get similar laws passed in other states, including Illinois, where a 2019 investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune found more than 20,000 students had been placed in seclusion in a little more than a year.
Some families are trying to close quiet rooms by filing lawsuits or alerting the federal government to alleged abuses. Last year, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia — one of the nation’s largest public school districts — agreed to phase out seclusion by 2023 to settle a lawsuit filed by parents and disability rights activists.
Frederick County Public Schools in Maryland also recently agreed to stop using seclusion and restraint as part of a settlement with the federal Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office after an investigation found schools “unnecessarily and repeatedly secluded and restrained students” thousands of times.
But many activists say relying on state and local reforms is not working. They are pushing for Congress to pass a bill, called the Keeping All Students Safe Act, that would make school quiet rooms and restraint illegal nationwide.
“Punishing bad behavior is a healthy, human response.”
Max Eton, research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, urging Congress to vote against a bill that would ban quiet rooms nationwide
At a recent Congressional hearing on the new bill, some lawmakers expressed strong support. But others, including several Republicans, argued all decisions on whether to allow seclusion and restraint should be left to local school boards with the input of parents and teachers.
“When teachers don’t have the chance to use their good judgement, the rest of the class will suffer,” said Max Eton, research fellow at the the Washington D.C.-based think tank American Enterprise Institute, who testified against the legislation.
Removing quiet rooms and restraint would lead to a surge in “room clears,” a term used for evacuations of classrooms when a student is out of control, Eton said. That would mean other students would have their lessons interrupted every time a classmate lashes out.
Removing the student disrupting the class makes more sense, he said.
“Punishing bad behavior is a healthy, human response,” Eton testified.
Some New Jersey families of students with severe intellectual disabilities say they are also fighting any attempts to impose a complete ban on seclusion and restraint in New Jersey.
The reality is some parents with severely disabled kids have to send students to schools out of state when their states ban seclusion and restraint, said one Warren County mother. Her two sons have autism and were born with a rare genetic disorder in which one of the boys repeatedly banged his head and hurt himself and others.
Without padded rooms and restraint, he probably could not have gone to school in New Jersey, said the mother, who now works as an advocate for families of other “outlier” families she said are often forgotten in the debate over whether seclusion should be banned in schools.
“I really want all the voices to be at the table when this legislation is being talked about,” she said.
Front line injuries
People who work on the front lines in New Jersey schools also ask that they are not forgotten in the debate over seclusion and restraint.
About 14% of K-12 teachers reported an injury or other physical violence from a student during the pandemic, according to a national survey by the American Psychological Association released earlier this year. The numbers are higher for school psychologists (18%) and other school staff (22%).
“I have definitely had students throw objects, pick up chairs, throw desks,” said one behavior analyst who spent decades working in multiple suburban schools in New Jersey. “I am frequently involved in situations that are very physically intense.”
She was injured once or twice a year while trying to deescalate emotional situations involving students, though nothing serious, she said. But some of her colleagues suffered concussions.
“I have definitely had students throw objects, pick up chairs, throw desks.”
A behavioral analyst who was injured once or twice a year while working in suburban New Jersey schools
In her schools, restraint was limited, but necessary, she said.
“It is only used as a last resort to maintain safety,” said the behavior analyst, who asked that her name not be used. “Sometimes a student needs to be separated from their classmates to maintain safety.”
The reality is that many students with disabilities would not be able to be educated in their local public schools if teachers and school staff could not use restraint and seclusion, said a former Central Jersey school psychologist and case manager who oversaw autism and behavioral disability classrooms.
“We were very fortunate to be able to keep kids in district. And sometimes that meant because on occasion we needed to use restraint. Had we not been able to do that, we didn’t have another option, all those kids would have been out of district, which presents a lot of challenges,” said the school psychologist, who asked that his name not be used because he now works as a consultant hired by parents.
It is possible to have counselors and psychologists try to verbally calm a child down. But that is not always possible in New Jersey schools where staff is overworked and stretched too thin with administrative tasks and large caseloads.
“The National Association of School Psychologists recommends a 500-to-1 student to school psychologist ratio. And only about 22% of schools in New Jersey meet that ratio,” he said. “And we’re ninth best in the country.”
The New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest union representing teachers and school employees, did not respond to requests to comment on the use of seclusion and restraint in schools.
A walk to the ‘Zen Den’
Calkin-Ward, the Monmouth County mother who learned her 8-year-old daughter was being put in a quiet room at her public school on a nearly daily basis a few years ago, recently got an email from her daughter’s new teacher.
The girl, who now attends The Shore Center in Tinton Falls, became agitated in class that day when she was asked to read aloud and was taken to the school’s Zen Den, the teacher said.
The Zen Den is an alternative to a seclusion room used at The Shore Center, a public school for students with autism run by the Bayshore Jointure Commission. Unlike padded quiet rooms, the Zen Den is filled with sensory items to help students calm down. No child is ever locked inside or left alone, school officials said.
“Students may utilize the Zen Den as a place of comfort; it is never used as a punishment. The students are not confined in the Zen Den and are not in the room alone,” school officials said in a statement.
Calkin-Ward’s daughter was placed in the room for two minutes, then she calmed down and agreed to do the assigned reading, her teacher said in her daily email to the family.
After the trauma of learning her daughter was placed in a quiet room repeatedly at her old public school in Monmouth County, this new approach at her new school seems less harsh, Calkin-Ward said.
“It’s a really big difference from just shoving a kid in a room and shutting a door on them, which feels like punishment and isolation,” she said.
Still, her daughter remains traumatized by her memories of the quiet room. Though it’s been years since she was last in the room, she still talks about it several times a week and only recently began to be able to enter elevators and small spaces again.
Calkin-Ward said she doesn’t favor banning seclusion entirely in New Jersey schools. But, like many parents, she said it’s time for people to talk openly about quiet rooms and for the state to better monitor what schools are doing.
It’s also time to start speaking for the kids with disabilities who can’t speak for themselves, she said.
“If somebody had done something or said something, my daughter wouldn’t have gone through this,” she added, crying. “It still affects her… It’s done irreparable damage.”
The first four years of a Teacher’s job is the most difficult with that first year the most challenging but one of the few you are supported in some form or another, after that it is a crapshoot.
The story below is about a woman on what is ostensibly a Visa we have most often used for Tech professionals but we will have to expand to include both medical and educational professionals in the not too distant future given what we are seeing with regards to shortages in both fields. But in all honesty this is not the first story about a new Teacher and in debt, that is EVERY Teacher. The only difference is the place of origin and where they began to teach that is different and with that it is not just a world of experience difference but a world away when it comes to the American focus on public education and the values associated with it. There are NONE. NONE.
I have written about my experiences and whenever I discuss them the glaze over the eyes, the disbelief and the sheer level of shame or embarrassment is often the follow up with a change of subject. NO ONE ever wants to really talk about what is going on in the schools unless they have a child in them then they might and with that the protests and histrionics over the issues in schools has become, since the start of the pandemic, one to note; Rivaled only by the discussion over masks in general and vaccines, where you retreat into your bunker and hope to survive if not ignore the never ending battle.
I share with you this story about the young woman from the Philippines who was recruited to teach in Arizona. And like almost anyone in that situation the hostage negotiations begin immediately, as that is what it is like. You cannot stay, you don’t want to stay and yet you cannot afford to pay the ransom to leave. I get it I really do.
I started back subbing on Friday and irony on top of irony it was a whopping two hour day covering for a Teacher, but it was also a drill day when an active shooter is on campus. Great. The Teacher had just made it back but I did not make it out in time so I waited in the front lobby which was actually a relief. Of course Students who did not listen were wandering around and with that trying to get to lunch again proving my point that even in the ‘best’ school which this one is, kids don’t give a shit. They may test well but the ability to listen, to process, to act upon info is not all there. I see that repeatedly in the comment pages of the Washington Post. It is the bubblelator of life, you live and work and communicate in one. Look at Florida and how many regardless of warnings remained and with that were lucky and some not to get out alive. What more do you need to hear and actually understand what risks are and how to decide if that is enough to act or not. And every day we do and every day we either lose or win but in today’s culture we seem to not be able to do it without group think. And with that we must WIN all arguments. WIN THEM ALL. Logic, rationale or even respect of another is not possible. It is down to our tribes and our shared belief system. We simply are not able to decide independently and assess information in a critical and analytical way. And why? Read the story below, it may enable you to understand why.
An American education
Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona
By Eli Saslow The Washington Post October 2, 2022
BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz. — Carolyn Stewart had spent the past five months trying to find teachers for the Bullhead City School District, and now she walked into the Las Vegas airport holding up a sign with the name of her latest hire. The 75-year-old superintendent wandered through the international baggage claim, calling out a name she had just learned to pronounce. “Ms. Obreque?” she said. “Teacher Rose Jean Obreque?”
She saw a woman smiling and moving toward her with a large suitcase.
“Are you our new teacher?” Stewart asked, but the woman shook her head and walked by.
Stewart raised the sign above her head and took out her phone to check in with her office 100 miles south in Bullhead City, Ariz. The 2,300 students in her district had been back in school for several weeks, but she was still missing almost 30 percent of her classroom staff. Each day involved a high-wire act of emergency substitutes and reconfigured classrooms as the fallout continued to arrive in her email. Another teacher had just written to give her two-week notice, citing “chronic exhaustion.” A new statewide report had found that elementary and junior high test scores in math had dropped by as much as 11 percentage points since the beginning of the pandemic. The principal of her junior high had sent a message with the subject line “venting.”
“The first two weeks have been the hardest thing I’ve ever faced,” he wrote. “My teachers are burnt out already. They come to me for answers and I really have none. We are, as my dad used to say, four flat tires from bankruptcy, except in this case we are one teacher away from not being able to operate the school.”
Stewart had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement, but Stewart was still struggling to find people willing to teach in a high-poverty district for a starting salary of $38,500 a year.
She’d sent recruiters to hiring fairs across the state, but they had come back without a single lead. She’d advertised on college campuses and at job fairs across the country and eventually come up with a half-dozen qualified applicants for 42 openings. “Basically, we need bodies at this point,” she’d told her school board, and they’d agreed to hire 20 foreign teachers with master’s degrees to move from the Philippines to the desert of rural Arizona.
“Excuse me, Dr. Stewart?” She turned around to see a young woman who at first glance Stewart mistook for one of her students. She was less than 5 feet tall, wearing a backpack, hauling two large suitcases and pointing at Stewart’s sign. “That’s me,” she said.
“Ms. Obreque!” Stewart said, pulling her into a hug. “Your suitcases are bigger than you. Let me help.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I can handle it. I am very determined.”
Obreque, 31, grabbed her bags, and together they walked across the terminal to meet a few other Filipino teachers who had arrived in Las Vegas earlier that afternoon.
“How was your trip?” Stewart asked, and Obreque explained that she had left home four days earlier, traveled six hours to Manila, waited out a delay with her visa paperwork and then flown another 14 hours to the United States. She held up her phone and took pictures of the airport concourse, the escalators, the fast-food restaurants and a sign that said, “Welcome to Las Vegas.”
“My first international trip, and it is to my dream country,” she said.
“You must be so exhausted,” Stewart said.
“And excited,” Obreque said. “I am very eager to be in the classroom.”
Eleven different teachers had already substituted in what would soon be Obreque’s eighth-grade English classroom at Fox Creek Junior High, including the principal, the vice principal, the band director, a softball coach, a school board member and then finally Stewart, who’d volunteered one day when another substitute was called away to a different class.
Despite the fact that “superintendent” was imprinted on her name tag, some of the students had tested her, folding their handouts into paper airplanes and talking during her lectures. It had taken all five decades of her experience to harness control of the room and successfully complete her lesson, and by the end of the day she was so exhausted that she’d sat through 45 minutes of muscle cramps in the teachers’ lounge before she felt well enough to walk back out to her car.
“We’re very grateful to have you here,” she told Obreque.
“Thank you for the opportunity to teach in America,” Obreque said. “It will be the pinnacle of my career.”
***
She left the airport in a car with three other Filipino teachers and pressed her phone against the window to photograph the casino hotels, the downtown high-rises, the glistening pools of the suburbs and the neat rows of palm trees on the outskirts of town. Civilization began to give way to red dirt and jagged rock formations. The car’s thermometer showed an outside temperature of 114 degrees. Obreque put away her phone and watched heat waves rise off the desert.
“I imagined it would be greener,” she said.
“This isn’t like America in the movies,” said Anne Cuevas, a Filipina who’d already been teaching in Bullhead City for four years and had traveled to greet the new teachers in Las Vegas.
Cuevas had been hired before the pandemic as one of the first foreign teachers in Bullhead City, when the school district began to recognize signs of an impending teacher shortage. The Philippines and the United States have similar school calendars, curriculums and grading systems, which is why U.S. schools have hired more than 1,000 Filipino teachers in the past few years. Most Filipino teachers have master’s degrees or doctorates. In the Philippines, teaching is considered a highly competitive profession, with an average of 14 applicants for each open position, and teachers are constantly evaluated and ranked against their peers.
“What were your ratings?” Cuevas asked her passengers, all of whom had arrived in the United States for the first time earlier that afternoon.
“I was rated Outstanding Teacher — top five in my school,” said Vanessa Bravo, a seventh-grade math teacher who’d left behind her husband and three sons, ages 15, 12 and 10.
“Outstanding Teacher as well,” said Sheena Feliciano, whose father drove a bicycle taxi in Manila.
They looked at Obreque and waited for her answer. “It’s okay if you’re too embarrassed to tell us,” Cuevas teased.
“Most Outstanding Teacher,” Obreque said. “Last year, I ranked first of 42 teachers at my school.”
It was something she had worked to achieve for almost a decade, ever since she had earned a master’s degree in education and couldn’t find a teaching job anywhere. She’d worked the night shift at a call center, improving her English as she offered technical support for an American company based 7,000 miles away, until finally her 17th teaching application led to a job at a school in the farmland outside of La Carlota City for the equivalent U.S. salary of $5,000 per year.
Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.
“Teach the World’s Best in America!” read the brochure from one international teaching agency. Obreque had talked it over with her husband and agreed that the possibility of a $30,000 raise was worth the hardship of living apart. She’d interviewed over Zoom with schools in New Mexico and Arizona and then received an offer to teach in Bullhead City under a J-1 visa, which granted her permission to live in the United States for three years. She’d taken out $8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers.
Now the sun set on the Mojave Desert as they drove over a hill and began descending toward Bullhead City, a town of 40,000 across the Colorado River from the casinos of Laughlin, Nev. They drove by riverside trailer parks and run-down taquerias.
“Welcome home,” Cuevas said, as Obreque stared out the window at the scattering of city lights surrounded by blackness.
“It’s smaller than I thought,” she said.
“Everything here is different from what you expect,” Cuevas said.
***
She woke up jet-lagged on a mattress on the floor, changed into one of her new outfits and piled into a car with four other foreign teachers at Fox Creek Junior High to say hello to the principal, who was busy staring at the daily class schedule on his computer, trying to solve the puzzle of another day. Lester Eastman was down to one special-education teacher when he was supposed to have three. He was missing a teacher for five of that day’s art classes, five English classes, 10 math, 10 science and five journalism. All of his available teachers would have to cover an additional class during their planning periods. Eastman would spend his day teaching math. The vice principal would babysit art. “Plugging holes on a sinking boat,” Eastman said, as he finished filling in the daily grid, and then he left his office to greet the new teachers.
“What time is it right now in the Philippines?” he asked, as he shook their hands.
“It’s tomorrow, sir,” Obreque said.
“Well, we’re going to give you a little time to adjust before we throw you in front of a class,” he said, and then he thought about what else he wanted to tell them about Fox Creek, and all the ways he could characterize their new school. There was its F letter grade from the state of Arizona, issued shortly before the pandemic. There were the standardized test scores that showed fewer than 20 percent of students were proficient in either English or math, and more than half were performing at least a few years below their grade level. There were the $4.5 billion in statewide education cuts over the past decade, which had left him with a shortened four-day school week and some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country. There was the fact that many of those teachers in the district were now working beyond retirement age and taking on extra classes because they refused to walk away from a student population that so many others had abandoned. There was the school dining room, where every student qualified for free or reduced-price meals. There was the continued fallout of the pandemic, which had decimated their working-class town of casino dealers and hotel service workers, killing almost 1 percent of the population. There was the scene that moved Eastman each morning, when 600 children from those same families managed to show up on time in matching blue Fox Creek shirts to a school he sometimes worried was failing them.
But for at least the next few weeks, Eastman had decided that he wanted his staff to focus on only one aspect of life at Fox Creek: student behavior. After years of remote and hybrid learning, some of the students had come back to school full time in 2021 with little sense of how to act in a classroom. Disruptions had been constant. Suspensions had nearly doubled. Eleven of his 28 teachers had resigned at the end of the previous school year, and now Eastman had instructed what was left of his staff to avoid teaching any new material until they had established control of their classrooms.
“Rules. Procedures. Classroom management,” Eastman said. “These middle-schoolers can be like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They test the fence. They push the boundary. It’s in their DNA.”
“Discipline is crucial,” Obreque said. “Consistency is important.”
“Some of these kids will take timid and quiet and just eat it for lunch,” he said. “Once you win their respect, you’ll all do great.”
He showed Obreque to her classroom, where her job for the day was simply to observe. She wrote notes as she watched a PE teacher silence a class with his whistle. Then Cuevas came in to teach the next class, and she called Obreque to the front of the room to introduce herself.
“I’m Ms. Obreque, and I’m honored to be your new teacher,” she said.
“Miss who?” a student asked. “Can you talk louder?”
She nodded and stepped forward. “Ms. Obreque,” she said again, and several students began to talk at once.
“Are you strict?”
“How old are you? You look like you’re in high school.”
“Are you married?”
“How do you say your name again? Miss teacher something?”
“Raise your hands, please,” Obreque said. “We will be living together in this room for the next year. If you respect me, I will respect you. If you love me, I will love you.”
Several of the boys in the room started to laugh and then shout more questions. “One at a time please,” Obreque said, but a chorus of voices overwhelmed hers, until Cuevas clapped her hands. “Guys, enough!” she said. She handed out their vocabulary work, and Obreque watched and took notes until the final bell.
“How’d everything go?” Eastman asked later, when he saw her in the hallway.
“I’m learning a lot, sir,” she said.
He gave her a thumbs-up, went into his office and opened the class grid for the next day. Twenty-six empty squares. Nineteen overworked teachers left to fill in during their only planning period. One of those teachers had diabetes, and she’d gotten a note from her doctor saying she needed more breaks to recuperate. Another had told Eastman he was worried about suffering a heart attack from stress.
“This is a very devoted staff, but we’ve reached a breaking point,” Eastman said, and he hoped that with some supervision and mentorship, the new foreign teachers could begin providing a little relief. He clicked on a blank square for an eighth-grade English class and typed in a name: “Obreque,” he wrote.
***
She stepped in front of the class and clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking. “Let’s start with something easy,” she told the students, as the PE teacher sat in the back of the room in case she needed help. She handed out a blank sheet of paper to each student and explained their first task: to fold the paper into a name tag, write their first name in large letters and copy down a few classroom rules. “See? Simple,” she said, as she held up her own paper and demonstrated folding it into thirds. “Any questions?”
A student in the front row raised her hand: “Can I go to the bathroom?” she asked.
“Of course,” Obreque said, and then another student stood from his desk.
“Me too. Bathroom,” he said.
“Next time please raise your hand,” she said. “But yes. Go ahead.”
The students began to fold their papers as Obreque walked around to check on their work. There were 24 students in the room — half the size of her typical class in the Philippines. They had backpacks and proper school supplies. They had a classroom with state-of-the-art technology and air conditioning. “Wonderful work,” she said, as she watched a student draw hearts to create a border around her name tag, and then Obreque circled toward the back row, where a group of boys were huddled in a circle. “Let’s see your progress,” she said. One boy held up a name tag that read “Donut Man,” as the others laughed. Another student had folded his paper into an airplane. Another had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.
“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”
“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”
Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”
“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.
“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”
“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.
“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.
“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.
“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”
A boy in the front row raised an arm that was covered with tic-tac-toe games played out in marker. “Yes,” Obreque said. “Thank you for volunteering.”
“Can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.
She sighed, nodded and scanned the room for another hand. “Who else?” she asked. “Anybody? Remember, cooperation is very important for a class to be successful.”
“Bathroom?” another student asked, but before Obreque could answer she heard the sound of the bell. The students rushed out. The PE teacher put his whistle in his pocket. “Sorry. They can be brutal,” he told her, and he left to teach his next class as Obreque stood alone in the room, still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Sixteen bathroom trips. Seven completed name tags.
“I am capable of doing so much better,” she said, as another class began to arrive. She would start by going over the classroom rules. She would establish control. She would demand their respect instead of asking for it.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” a student asked, a little while later, and Obreque shook her head.
“Not now,” she said. “We are in the middle of working.”
The student slapped his desk and turned to his friend. “This teacher wants me to pee my pants,” he said, and Obreque told him to move to a desk across the classroom.
“Honestly, this is America. We have a right to go to the bathroom,” another student said, and more students called out in agreement until Obreque was straining her vocal cords to shout over them. “I want you to listen!” she said. “We are not in the jungle. We are human beings, right? We cannot proceed with all this disruption.”
“We cannot proceed!” one of the students yelled out, as if declaring victory, and others started to laugh and yell, too. “Please, have some respect!” Obreque said, but only a few students seemed to hear her. “Five, four, three, two, one,” Obreque shouted, but they weren’t quieting down, and there was nothing but more humiliation waiting for her at zero. She decided to try a tactic she’d used a few times in the Philippines, planting herself quietly at the front of the room, modeling silence, looking from one student to the next and waiting for them to recognize their own bad behavior. A boy was chewing on the collar of his shirt. A girl was taping pencils to each of her fingers and then pawing at the boy next to her. Two boys were playing a version of bumper cars with their desks. A girl was pouring water from a cup into another girl’s mouth, and that girl was spitting the water onto the student next to her. “Ugh, miss teacher lady? Can I go wash off this spit water?” the student asked. A boy was standing up and intentionally tripping over his friend’s legs. A girl was starting a game of hangman on the whiteboard. A boy was walking up to the front of the classroom, holding out a piece of paper rolled into the shape of a microphone, and pretending to interview Obreque. “So, what do you think of life at Fox Creek?” he asked.
“I heard the bell ring!” one student shouted, and suddenly a dozen students were scrambling out of their desks.
“Wait for me to dismiss you!” Obreque said, looking up at the clock, because she hadn’t heard anything, and she wasn’t sure if the class was supposed to be over.
“We heard the bell,” another student said, as he opened the door to leave, and before long the students were gone and the classroom was empty. Obreque held her hand up against her sore throat. She wiped the game of hangman off the whiteboard and started to collect several paper airplanes and notes left behind on the floor. “Can you even understand her?” one of the notes read, and she dropped it into the trash and then took out her phone, where there was a message waiting from her husband. “I’m proud of you,” he’d written. “I know you will impress them.”
She wiped her eyes and put the phone back into her purse, and only then did she hear the bell actually begin to ring.
***
She wanted to quit. She wanted to leave Bullhead City, travel back across the desert to Las Vegas and fly to La Carlota City, but she was $8,000 in debt and 7,000 miles from the Philippines, and instead the only safe place she could think to go was a few doors down the hall, into Cuevas’s empty classroom at the end of the school day. Three of the other new foreign teachers were already seated around the room, recovering from their days. Obreque dropped her bag on the floor and walked over to join them.
“I don’t know even what to say,” she said.
“One day teaching here is like a month in the Philippines,” another teacher said.
“Five of these students is like 20 back home,” another said.
“I don’t know how to handle them,” Obreque said. “I can’t connect. I can’t teach.” She looked at Cuevas. “I’m sorry if I am a disappointment, ma’am. What could be a bigger failure than crying on my first day?”
“Oh, I did that every day for six months,” she said, and the other teachers looked at her in disbelief, because they knew Cuevas as the model of Americanized self-assurance, with her own YouTube channel to share teaching tips and a new designation as one of Bullhead City School District’s employees of the month. “I was the worst teacher here for a whole year,” she told them. “The students ran all over me. I lost my confidence. I wanted to go home.”
She told them that it had taken her a year to pay off her debts to the international teaching agency, two years to get her Arizona driver’s license and three years to move out of a bedroom she’d shared with other international teachers and into her own apartment. She’d applied for an extension on her J-1 visa to stay in Bullhead City for two extra years as she continued to figure out how to build strong relationships with her students. “You have to prove that you really care about them,” she said, so she’d gone to the dollar store, spent her own money on art supplies and redecorated her classroom into a movie theater on premiere night, with a red carpet and a VIP door and a banner that read: “Every Student Is a Star.” She started attending her students’ sporting events, staying after school for volleyball and basketball games, and watching YouTube videos to learn the rules for American football. She watched every one of the Marvel movies they talked about during class. She called their parents not just with concerns but also to share praise each time a student impressed her. She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.
“In a lot of ways, they are broken and hurting,” she said, and because of that she’d come to admire her colleagues for their dedication and appreciate her students for their resilience, their irreverence, their bravado, their candor and, most of all, for their vulnerability. She’d turned herself into one of the most beloved teachers in a school that couldn’t find enough teachers, and yet she would be legally required to return to the Philippines when her visa expired in eight months.
“The students here are difficult, but they need you,” Cuevas told the other teachers now. “Maybe you can do something to motivate them, to give them more hope.”
***
The top-ranked teacher from La Carlota City was standing outside her classroom the next morning, ready to teach her students how to learn. “This is how you enter the classroom,” she said, forming them into a line and leading them in. “This is how you throw away your garbage,” she said, as they walked past the trash can and she dropped a piece of paper directly into it. “This is how you sit and listen,” she said, lowering herself into a desk, demonstrating stillness. “This is how you participate,” she said, raising her right hand.
Their lesson for the day was a three-paragraph reading comprehension exercise, the kind of assignment that would have taken Obreque about 20 minutes to complete with her seventh-graders in the Philippines. But at Fox Creek only 19 percent of her eighth-graders were proficient in reading, based on their state assessments, so she planned to take it slowly using a teaching strategy she’d learned in her master’s program, called higher-order thinking skills, which involved asking a series of simple comprehension questions after each sentence of the story to build confidence and encourage class participation. She handed out the assignment, which came from the school’s preplanned curriculum, and read the title of the story out loud: “Life, Liberty, and Ho Chi Minh.”
“Okay, so the title of our reading today is life, liberty and what?” she asked.
“Ho Chi Minh?” a few students said.
“Yes. Very good,” Obreque told them. She asked for someone to read the story aloud, and when no one volunteered, she pointed to a boy in the front row.
“Seriously?” he said, and she nodded at him. “Fine. Whatever,” he said, leaning down to look at the story. “‘By 1941, Ho was known as a …’ Sorry. I don’t know this next word.”
“Fierce,” Obreque said, reading along.
“Okay. Yeah. Fierce. ‘A fierce supporter of Vietnamese independence. Ho …’ ”
“Ho!” another boy called out, laughing.
“Shut up and let me read,” the student said.
“Whoa. Watch your language, bro. This isn’t the jungle, remember?”
“Yeah, then how come I’m about to punch you in the mouth?”
“Enough!” Obreque shouted, but several students continued to laugh and yell and disrupt the reading, until finally another teacher came into the room from his classroom next door. “You think it’s funny that I can hear you through the wall?” he said. “It’s not funny. It’s embarrassing. Do better.” They’d been working for more than half an hour to read seven sentences, and Obreque was beginning to lose her voice. “Please, I can feel that I’m hurting myself to make you listen,” she told them, putting a hand up against her throat, and then she pointed back at the text and asked another student to read a passage about how Ho Chi Minh had drawn inspiration from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
“Okay,” Obreque said, once the student had finished. “Ho Chi Minh lived all the way across the ocean. Why do you think he would use America as his example?”
The students stared back at her.
“Why America? What is so special about America?”
“Fast cash and fast food,” one student said.
“Okay, yes. Fast food is an export. But what makes this country great?”
She waited for a moment as the students began to talk to each other, write notes, fold airplanes, bounce in their seats, stare off into space and rest their heads on their desks, until finally one girl raised her hand and stood from her seat. “Bathroom?” she asked, and Obreque nodded and turned back to the class.
“America is a beacon of freedom, is it not?” she asked. “You have education. You have independence. You can achieve anything, right?”
She looked around the room and found no raised hands, no answers, nothing at all to quiet her own rising doubt, so she attempted the question again. “Isn’t America supposed to be a model for the world?” she asked.
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