A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educators
I get asked a lot about what it’s like to teach in the public schools while knowing the truths about corporate education reform. Obviously, the two worlds collide. And I have spent many a night trying to figure out how to describe it – and how to write about it - so that you might also know what it feels like. This is my attempt for those of you who do not teach in the public schools today.
It is surreal. It is so strange to watch the world crumbling down around you with such harshness and such coldness, while inside the walls of the school we continue to carry on, care for the children and fight to give them what every child deserves. As teachers, we fight to support one another - as human beings and as professionals. We fight to keep it together as we watch the corporate snakes slither in through the cracks and the crevices in our building. We shudder and hold the children close to us when others open the door wide and let the corporate snakes glide across the floor and make our building their own.
Yet, we must carry on because the children are always watching.
Have you ever had a bad day – a day in which you wanted to cry, or scream, or throw things; yet, you refrained from doing so because the children were watching. That is how it is every day for teachers who know the big picture - within the public schools. Every day we are protecting the children as best we can, without sharing - through our actions, our words, our teaching, our emotions - the horrors of the destruction making its way into our schools. Based