Teachers and other adults must explain the 2020 election without making kids from Trump families feel attacked. Neither children nor adults are likely to listen if they feel attacked. Those children from Biden families deserve to understand that the more than 72,000,000 Trump votes do not represent a repudiation of their skin color or sexual orientation by almost half this country’s voting population — not that racism and other prejudices did not enter into the vote. There’s a soft smell of sulfur underlying some of that vote, something ugly that has crept into recent American rhetoric.

I have gotten pushback on this post from friends who think I let Trump off much too easy. I don’t mean to whitewash the recent past. But I do want America’s children to understand that Trump’s 72,000,000 votes do not translate to a version of “abandon hope all ye who enter here.” We are not a country filled with evil people. And so…

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The hoped-for Blue Wave turned out to be a trickle. Red states splashed one after another across the map, leaving shaken democrats in their wake. The Senate may remain Republican. The Presidency has been declared for Joe Biden — but that race was heart-stoppingly close. Those last battleground states? As of this moment in time, Pennsylvania voted 49.7% for Biden, 49.1% for Trump. Arizona went 49.6% Biden, and 48.9% Trump. Nevada lists 49.9% for Biden, 47.9% for Trump. And Georgia’s still not official on this Saturday night, with Biden holding 49.5% of the vote to Trump’s 49.3%.

Trump clobbered Biden in a number of states. Both the popular vote and the electoral college vote have gone against him, but he swept what’s left of the Old West and rural America. Still, Idaho (63.9%) has only four electoral votes and Wyoming (70.4%) has only 3 in a contest that demands 270. In terms of the popular vote, Biden is about 5,000,000 ahead, but both men have over 70,000,000 votes.

Readers of this blog should be clear I voted for Biden. If Trump had done something about the insane number of days now spent on standardized testing and related punitive evaluations, I might have voted for Trump. If wishes were horses and if I could turn my pumpkin into a coach… Because I think we have been getting education so wrong for so long, under democrats as well as republicans. But this post is not about that. It’s about explaining those 72,000,000 votes to our students in a way that can help them understand what happened without writing off half the country in despair.

Let’s start with the fact that a surprising number of people are single issue voters. I have a Catholic friend who was informed she HAD to vote for Trump because Trump was anti-abortion. Nothing else mattered, she was told. The phrase that stayed with me: “People just have to hold their nose and pull the Trump lever.”

Ummm… I honestly don’t know what to say about that, other than I would bet many of those who took that advice are not by nature prejudiced against people of color. They may even be fine with LGBTQ rights, although obviously some will not be. Abortion opponents learn heavily toward the Christian right and many trusted Trump more than Catholic Biden.

I should note that not all antiabortion voters are Catholic or even Christian, and that many Christians are not conservatives. But President Trump gave conservative Christians two-hundred federal judges, appointed for life, who appeared to support their views — including three Supreme Court justices. Conservative Christians had every reason to vote for Trump again.

Another big single issue was the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms i.e. keep your own guns. Here’s a fact that often gets overlooked in gun discussions: The rural and small town view of gun ownership is quite different from the urban view. Guns in urban areas are virtually always trouble. Those guns make many city-dwellers nervous, enough so that they will consider legislation to reduce or eliminate gun ownership. In a city, guns mean crime.

The rural picture bears little resemblance to the urban picture. Guns in small mountain towns mostly make people feel safer. Guns are a source of comfort when the county sheriff is the better part of an hour away. In some poor, isolated areas, cops are already effectively defunded, short-staffed and unable to get to distant townships or farms quickly. Guns are also a source of recreation. Many kids in states that went heavily for Trump go to the woods or the river to shoot tin cans and targets. Some go hunting. All across America, people still kill what they eat. (One fervently hopes they eat that deer or rabbit, anyway.) Guns to those people represent winter meat in the freezer, and one more way of making ends meet.

America is not only cities and their suburbs. Our country has many small towns scattered between long stretches of emptiness. People in the mountains of Montana may live over half an hour from the expensive grocery store that is only place to buy food anywhere within a few hours drive. One of the best ways to understand how Trump took Texas might be to drive across West Texas alone — feel the emptiness, the aloneness, and watch those oil wells all by themselves in the middle of nowhere. The rural vote is part of 2020’s close contest.

Some classroom questions for discussion: Are there any reasons why urban residents might have different expectations from their government than rural residents? Why might urban residents focus more on the interdependence of people and the need for government to provide solutions for people’s problems? How would population density affect demand for and view of government services? How might police response time affect your view of gun ownership? (Note how loaded this question can be for many students who do not regard the police as a source of protection.) Why might people in rural areas object to gun control legislation?

People in many more-populated areas also supported Trump. especially those who lived in areas that have seen manufacturing, mining and other traditional blue collar jobs disappear. A full 68.7% of West Virginia went for Trump, almost identical to the 68.6% who went for him in 2016. In 2016, he had gone to West Virginia and promised to bring back coal. Newspaper reports suggest people there think he tried, but believe the forces against reviving coal are simply too strong for Trump or anyone else to control. Trump’s opponents hammer home that coal combustion releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is implicated in global warming. On top of that, cleaner, cheaper energy sources do exist.

I am going to bypass the actual issue here, other than to say that we owe it to our children to do the best job we can to clean up the air and water — even if it’s bad for business and even if it inconveniences everyone. The party should be over, that party where we use up the Earth’s resources, heat up the planet, put out endless forest fires, clean up after the latest latest storm or hurricane, and fill the air with gunk. I am reminded of a few lines from “The Party’s Over” by Eliza Gilkyson:

We danced on the tables midnight til dawn

Til all the time was up and the good stuff gone

The house is a shambles, broken glass in the streets

Guttering candles, blood on the sheets

We burned all the kindling, passed the bottle around

Watched the last coals dwindling

And the ice melting down

We can and absolutely must do better. The fact that much of the effort to reign in recent excesses has been spearheaded by Greta Thunberg speaks volumes. What is arguably the most important issue on the table today has coalesced around a sixteen-year-old, autistic Swedish girl who has made climate change her life’s work. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, not to mention the remaining trees in Australia and the western United States, this work should go to the forefront of everything we are doing today.

But that doesn’t help West Virginia — and West Virginia needs help desperately. America’s mining and manufacturing industries are not merely hurting. In some regions, those industries have effectively been destroyed. If you are looking for a picture that brings this home, I’ll recommend the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand. Stu is working part-time in the local calculator plant because that’s all that’s left. (This is before the superflu.) All across our nation, hard-hit regions have their versions of that calculator plant — although I wouldn’t be surprised to discover all the real “calculator” plants are gone — gone to India, China, Indonesia, and other low-cost producers.

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington in another time. When I was young in the sixties and seventies, decent, blue-collar employment could be found all around me. Friends’ parents worked as longshoremen and machinists. They could afford a comfortable house, relatively new car and often even a boat or trailer. Men and women worked in hot dog, pickle, beer, dairy and other food-producing plants, many union shops with living wages. Most of those jobs are gone now. The Heidelberg Brewery closed when I was in college. Nalley’s new owner, Pinnacle Foods, moved the pickles and various other products to Iowa, where the current minimum wage matches the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.

Wages definitely figure into this election. Currently, the average hourly pay for a miner is $23.77 per hour (https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Miner/Hourly_Rate) which is a little more than three times the federal minimum wage. That’s not great, but it clobbers that $7.25 federal minimum — although the exact amount of the minimum wage doesn’t matter when no jobs can be found.

Some readers may not believe my minimum wage. States and cities have legislated higher minimums; workers in Washington state receive $13.50 per hour, for example, and higher yet in some Washington cities. Let’s look at minimums. In the absence of a law, the federal $7.25 holds. It’s worth taking a minute to study those minimums and compare the states with lower minimums to the Trump states on the election map. The majority of Trump states — all but 7 — have a $7.25 minimum wage. Of the seven that have a higher wage, Alaska comes in on top at $10.19, with Missouri second at $9.45. Three of those states have minimums under nine dollars.

I’d like to note the “tip credit” as part of the minimum wage. A tip credit allows an employer to apply tips to the minimum. So that employer in Mississippi does not have to pay $7.25 per hour. An employer can pay $2.13 per hour, with the employee filling in the rest of the day’s wages through tips earned. (https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped)

Of the seventeen states that allow employers to pay $2.13 per hour to employees, using tips to get those employees up to minimum, thirteen went for Trump, a number expected to change to fourteen. North Carolina is expected to go for Trump. As of today, Georgia has still not been officially declared with a mere 0.2% difference in the vote. Only Virginia and New Mexico have that $2.13 wage but went for Biden.

Those 72,000,000 some votes for Trump have a great deal to do with money and security. Overall, financial hardship worked for Trump. That’s no surprise.

Trump promised to bring industries back to America. He offered hope to blue-collar workers who had seen their mines and factories close or move to states that did not have unions, states where workers could be paid $7.25 per hour. What happens when the grocery chain that paid a cashier $35,000 per year suddenly shuts down? One thing that happens is a large group of people who can afford their car payment suddenly are faced with a job search likely to end in their making about half or two-thirds — if they are lucky — as much as they had been making before.

Financial desperation worked for Donald Trump in many pockets of the country — the places where the mines and factories had been shuttered. That’s not universally true. Mines and factories have been going dark for a long time, all over this country. But urban areas feel those closures less because of their broader economic bases. The union worker who once filled the ice cream cartons may be able to find a job as a city trash collector that makes the payments on the house, car and boat.

Some small municipalities and less populated regions have simply been exanguinated over the last fifty years, however, in small cuts and bigger knife swipes. The shake mill went away, the paper goods factory went, and then the pickle factory, the hot dog factory, the steel plant, the glass plant, the boat building company, and so on. See “Coal’s Decline Continues with 13 Plant Closures Announced in 2020” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coals-decline-continues-with-13-plant-closures-announced-in-2020/, an article by Benjamin Starrow, describing how coal is naturally losing to cheaper natural gas and renewable energy.

Many of those former factory workers have become Trump voters. Trump assured them he would stop the flow of jobs to areas outside the country. He promised to bring back jobs from lower-cost producers like China. He made efforts in that direction, too, although mostly unsuccessful ones. It’s incredibly tough to compete with people who will work six long days a week for a small fraction of what an American worker does. Whether Trump succeeded or not, though, he told West Virginia that he cared that their lifestyle was being swept out from under them — and that unchanging vote tally tells us that they believed him.

We do have a genuine problem. When it’s cheaper to load all the cut logs onto ships for China and then bring back the cut lumber from China, the world’s gotten tough for the Americans who used to shape those logs into lumber and cedar shakes for roofs. That little shake mill in the small town by the lake probably doesn’t have a chance. Meanwhile, the logging companies are finding ways to reduce human staff by creating robots and other machines to take over for human labor. Trump’s message “Make America Great Again” resonates with the people who remember when the logs were processed locally, because they can still see in their mind’s eye that shake mill of forty years ago next to a lake filled with floating logs. They remember an easier time when their parents or grandparents never worried about the costs of new school clothes and supplies, when the start of the school year did not create a sinking feeling as adults juggled Walmart bills and car payments.

Some of those memories of a past, better time are obviously illusory. Especially for people of color and the LGBTQ community, MAGA sounds racist and threatening. But it’s not that simple. For many of the older folks who back Trump — and the group who voted for him are older than the democratic voters on the other side — MAGA has nothing to do with race. They would be 100% fine working beside black people in that long-gone auto plant that paid three times more than what they are making now. They have no problem with their LGBTQ neighbors. They would simply like their sons and daughters to be able to find a job and buy a house without going into deep debt for student loans.

Joe Biden’s promise to get rid of fracking appeals to people concerned about the environment. WE KNOW GRETA’S RIGHT. But Joe’s promise terrifies many other folk. That’s their JOB Joe is talking about. According to ZipRecruiter, “as of Nov 1, 2020, the average annual pay for an Oil Rig Worker in the United States is $75,511 a year.” Fracking is a version of oil field work. It pays well. If a person has spent years in the industry building up the fracking skill set, what comes after fracking shuts down? Welding may transfer to a livable wage, but other skills may be so specific that no easy transfer to another high-paying job exists. Like those former grocery clerks in the chain that shut down, they are simply screwed.

The effects of pervasive unemployment can be hard for many urban residents to understand — although in parts of Chicago, Detroit and other cities that pervasive unemployment and underemployment is understood too well, and its racial component cannot be denied.

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Beyond the day-to-day of managing groceries between weekly trips to the food bank, the challenge of keeping old cars running, and the usual problems associated with poverty, too, this country must grapple with licit and illicit drugs. Opiates are ravaging areas with high unemployment. Meth remains a common escape, especially in rural communities. “The sharp rise in opioid abuse and fatal overdoses has overshadowed another mounting drug problem: Methamphetamine use is rising across the United States.” See https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/25/656192849/methamphetamine-roils-rural-towns-again-across-the-u-s: “‘Usage of methamphetamine nationally is at an all-time high,’ says Erik Smith, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Kansas City office.”

Trump’s “tough on crime” rhetoric appeals to people watching the drug epidemic’s effects on households, as grandmas step in to raise kids whose moms are too high to manage. Growing drug problems frighten many and make law and order rhetoric appealing.. See “A grandma’s new role: Raising grandkids amid the heroin epidemic” by Wayne Drash and Andrew Iden, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/health/grandmother-heroin-crisis-huntington-west-virginia/index.html.

Civil disorder frightens the general public. Theft and looting make them believe something in the American fabric is fraying — and Donald’s promise to send in troops actually sounds reassuring to them. I’m sure many of my readers are thinking what I think: Tone matters and the bellicose tone coming out of the White House may have set off many of those angry demonstrations. I am hopeful that the new, conciliatory tone set by Joe Biden will calm my country down. The Trump White House too obviously made Republican states into favored children in a time of crisis — and us versus them is no way to run a country, a classroom or much of anything else.

But scared people have always gravitated toward “strong” leaders. That’s the history of the 1930s. That’s the history of the world. It doesn’t always lead to fascism. Sometimes it leads to Winston Churchill when it’s clear that Neville Chamberlain has no clue what is happening around him. But it’s dangerous. In the classroom, I might ask students to tell me the upside and downside of putting the strong, tough guy in charge. What are the risks?

Trump projects a forceful, confident image. He also has a talent for sounding like an everyday guy. He doesn’t go for the long, polysyllabic word. He uses “ordinary” speech, and sounds like someone you might run into at the hardware store or the auto show. Despite his wealthy background, he often successfully manages to come across as an Average Joe. I’m sure that attracts voters. People tend to like people who talk like they do.

I’ll add one last item to this list: the word “socialism” has been bandied about repeatedly during this election, often as if it is a synonym for another word I have heard a lot — communism. But socialism is not communism — not even remotely. Socialism is not … well, it’s not a lot of things that are being thrown willy-nilly into its definition. And a universal healthcare plan would not make us a socialist country. Every other developed country IN THE WORLD with a market-based economy has had universal health coverage for decades. Some of the people in those countries are living longer than Americans do with significantly better rates of maternal mortality.

The main impetus to this talk of socialism and communism seems to have been universal healthcare, fascinatingly enough. Universal healthcare? Instead of talking about Castro’s Cuba, we could talk about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain and Canada. The alternative to universal healthcare is what we have now, a system under which one catastrophic medical event can ruin a person or family financially.

I’m going off-topic, though. This is not about my opinions, it’s about why Trump gathered over 72,000,000 votes. Again, the word socialism scares many people. Trump presented himself as the anti-socialism candidate — easy to do since the democratic party gathers our socialists to it. Bernie Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist, as does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but because Bernie was trying to become President, he had no choice except to pursue that goal as a democrat. The U.S. has a true two party system. Democratic socialists must become technical democrats to be taken seriously.

Fear of socialism is not rare in the United States, especially among older people who remember Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Those regimes are not ancient history to older voters. Many equate the term “socialism” with Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. They fear government control of the economy. As Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin is widely believed to have killed between 20 and 60 million people during his 30-year rule. Scholars will argue that body count forever. Mao Zedong’s China shares a similar brutal past. During the Great Leap Forward, famine and political purges killed … 36 million? Or 45 million? I invite readers to research this topic on the internet. In Mao’s defense, the source of most of those deaths was famine. But during the Great Leap Forward, jobs were assigned, salaries were set and people could not change locations without government permission.

Which brings this election to Cuba. Part of Trump’s Florida victory came from Cuban-Americans. In 1959, Fidel Castro took control of Cuba by force, and the Republic of Cuba became a one-party communist state, its industries and businesses nationalized. Cubans have been fleeing to the United States ever since. One of my favorite coworkers a few years back escaped by working on a cruise ship, getting off in Europe, flying to Canada, and going south to the U.S. from there. Many refugees left behind houses, family and possessions. They lost everything they had built. Some of them are voting Americans. Their children and grandchildren vote as well.

According to NBC News’ exit polls, “55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of ‘other Latinos’ backed Trump.” Trump’s Hispanic vote increased from 28% among Hispanics to 32% this time. What is this Hispanic vote? It’s partially antisocialism, but I’m sure some of the vote in this heavily Catholic constituency is antiabortion. Many Hispanics are business owners, men and women who trust Trump not to raise the minimum wage and to work to support small businesses. Some of them probably fear the democrats will shut down the economy to get control of COVID. Trump clearly had intended to prevent that shut down.

Commentators suggest the democrats lost at least some of the Hispanic vote because they took that vote for granted. I believe that. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Guatemalans are not Venezuelans, I know some Mexican immigrants who followed established legal channels to get into this country — and don’t believe that people who skip those channels should be allowed into the country. Those voters may even have decided to vote for Trump because they preferred his position on immigration. Hispanics are too diverse to be considered a voting “BLOC.”

Eduhonesty: This post is an attempt to help people make sense of what happened. People vote their convictions. They vote their pocketbooks. Sometimes they vote both.

I hope this post can be a plea for understanding. What I think my many Biden-supporting counterparts should take away from this election is the realization that large chunks of this country have become unhappy and even intimidated by the world they live in. If not for the administration’s obvious bumbling of COVID-19, I believe Trump might have been reelected.

Biden successfully gained ground among working-class men and women in this election by making the case that Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus had harmed the United States. He also successfully argued that Trump’s tax cuts appeared to have helped rich Trump cronies more than the poor. Trump’s own support of the Proud Boys and others enabled Biden to convince many that Trump was racist. Trump’s court picks have spooked the LGBTQ community and others. In the end, some workers also realized that Trump was further damaging the union cause, even as he promised to bring industry back to America — and for many Americans, unions have provided a path into financial stability that could only have resulted from organizing workers.

Yet at the end of the day more than 72,000,000 Americans chose Trump. If we don’t want them to choose him again in 2024, or someone like him, we must step up and help those working class Americans who feel uprooted and lost. Their livelihoods went away. Whole industries are gone and do not appear to be coming back. The benefits of globalization are multifold but the price of globalization has been paid in closed factories and human lives. When a t-shirt can be made for $0.52 in Cambodia and $4.40 in the United States, that U.S. t-shirt factory can be expected to fold. What happens then to the man or woman who had been sewing those shirts for decades? In various regions across the United States, people have been losing hope for a long time. Lecturing them about the benefits of making products in countries with cheaper labor only makes them angry.

Donald Trump sold hope to people whose hope had been fading, and he sold it well.

To stay strong, the Democratic Party must be able to honestly replenish this country’s hope. As democrats do what needs to be done, they have to answer questions essential to U.S. long-term stability. How will we enable those former oil workers to find new employment? What will we do for other workers displaced by globalization? How will we provide national healthcare while not taking choices in doctors and hospitals away from our citizens? How will we deal with the nation’s drug problems? What can we do to help less prosperous regions realize they have not been forgotten? How can we restore the reputation and health of America’s unions? How can we undo the hit job that has been done on unions across this country? How will we repair the post office? I don’t think I emphasized enough how vital unions have been in providing living wages to U.S. workers.

I have skipped the elephant in the room while writing this post — white supremacy and associated racism. Those elements played into this election in scattered droplets across the nation. I don’t want to diminish their importance in any way. The intent of this post was to present America’s students and others with additional reasons for the Trump vote, to help them understand that many Trump voters are not racist — and, honestly, I’m sure some Biden voters are racist.

Economic displacement and desperation, however, are perfect fuel for the fire where racism is concerned. Trump’s attempts to limit immigration appealed to racists, but they also appealed to men and women who were afraid of losing their jobs to newcomers who would work for less money and fewer benefits. As we attempt to end racism, I believe it will be vital to understand how poverty and hopelessness contribute to racial discrimination, sexism, and xenophobia.

P.S. Let’s be clear: $7.25 is not a living wage. If it helps, 50 weeks X 40 hours/week X 7.25 = $14,500 per year, except getting that forty hours can be extremely tough. At 40 hours, employers can be forced to provide benefits. So often, the real numbers are 52 weeks (no paid vacation or vacation at all in this scenario) X 28 hours/week X 7.25 = $10,556. Those numbers explain why so many students’ parents have two or more jobs, all part-time, none with benefits.

P.S.S. Able to move and waiting tables? Washington has a minimum wage of 13.50 and NO tip credit. You will get your full wages without having to use your own tips to pay yourself.

O.K. This is officially pretty close to nuts. It’s Thursday and we don’t have a President. The oddest pronouncements are coming out of the White House and Twitter is censoring the tweets coming down from the top. Even if your kids have not said anything, teachers and parents, they are processing.

Many of you may think this is too much politics for children to handle. I have friends who are stunned by today’s circumstances. Stunned. If the kids are not talking, I suspect dumbfounded adults are also hoping to be able to keep silence awhile, at least until they can process what happened. How did it turn out this way? How can it be that close?

But our students are fully involved in 2020’s Presidential election for the most part. The passion that inspired votes on both sides has permeated U.S. households for months and, in some cases, years. Students may be feeling hopeful, waiting for the numbers to turn out right. Some will be traumatized. Biden or Trump was to supposed to SWEEP this nation.

The school of 2020 is already the weirdest thing those kids have ever experienced and hopefully will ever experience. Teachers drilled and drilled proper classroom procedures until 2020, when they drilled a whole new set of procedures. In some homes, school now takes place in a bedroom or kitchen. Suddenly our students walk through seas of masked men and women. Nobody gets to play in McDonalds, although the drive-thru lines are keeping the McNugget pipeline open.

Fortunately, kids are kids — and far more adaptable than adults. They also take their cues from adults. This may be next to impossible, but I’d like to suggest we keep as calm as possible. This is an amazing learning opportunity if we step back from the details, back from the hit our ideals have taken. This is the most fascinating Presidential election of my now-retired lifetime. And I hope it’s the last such fascinating Presidential election I ever see.

But what an opportunity to teach how U.S. elections work! What an opportunity to discuss democracy. If we can’t find a few million teachable moments in this mess, we don’t deserve to be called teachers.

This is a tough lesson to put together, probably impossible to do entirely right. That teacher in the front of the room or running the Zoom should not be politicking at all. A best attempt at objective discussion is demanded by the material, with the understanding that there are landmines in this discussion, landmines that can’t be allowed to detonate. Children of color and LGBTQ students are especially vulnerable right now. Those students must be made to feel supported and safe.

This social studies lesson must be a lesson in civility, a lesson in how to treat people with whom we disagree. Even the faintest whiffs of rejection and bullying have to be shut down.

If I did not think I could maintain a safe discussion in my classroom, I would sadly let my civics lesson on elections go, quickly shifting to another topic. Student safety must always come first.

If you have a classroom that can manage to explore the details of the 2020 election, though, I’d prepare the long list of questions; What is the electoral college? How did we get to this place? How can you win more of the popular vote and still lose the election? I’d prepare a pretty detailed case to show that this country has no history of any serious voting fraud and I would discuss the barriers to that fraud. Run the map, the various versions of the map over time.

Ask questions. What do you know? What do you want to know? How can you use the internet to find out what you want to know? What search terms might be effective? How can you know if a source is trustworthy?

Eduhonesty: The most apolitical of our high school students are watching the news right now. Kids of all ages are asking questions. I’d wade as deep into the chaos as possible while protecting my more vulnerable students — because the kids are trapped in the chaos anyway. Just as not teaching sex education will not stop early sexual activity — not teaching the politics of this election will not stop students from drawing conclusions about the election.

There’s much too much propaganda floating around out there now. Malcolm X once said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Many of us were not prepared enough for this election. We will be better prepared in the future. Part of that preparation requires helping America’s students to understand what’s real and what’s not real, what’s right and what’s not right. We’ve got this.

We can do it.

P.S. In response to feedback about curriculums and students being too young — Before testing ran so completely amok, once, long ago, we trusted our teachers. When they pulled out 4th grade books for 5th grade readers, no one insisted they use the scheduled 7th grade book instead. That was a delightful, if now distant, time. Again, we trusted our teachers. Who knows what’s best for the kids in Mr. T’s class? Mr. T knows. He knows his kids. Let Mr. T make the call then about any election discussion.

Because not explaining what is happening at all leaves at least some kids to fill in the details for themselves. That’s not fair. The election process doesn’t get more complicated than this.

I’d guess only the white people even want the 1950s back, and many white people would opt out, given the choice. June will not be helping the Beaver with his homework after vacuuming in her heels and pearls. Ward won’t be pontificating at the dinner table before firmly telling Beaver that his schoolwork comes before having fun in the park.

Why this time travel post? Because teachers — once again, you have been set up. Parents, once again, you have been set up. And we are all getting so used to these set-ups that we just keep going… and going… and going. More laptops! More shields! More sanitizer! More ventilation! Not yet? Then when? What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

“Well, at least I can open the windows…” teachers say, as they throw up their hands. Those who can open the windows anyway. They go online and find plans like this: https://thrivedirectcare.com/thesimplepathtohealth/2020/8/1/covid-care-diy-home-negative-pressure-room-for-under-25. Others toss up their hands and try to figure out how to duck and cover when there’s no place to duck and nothing to use for cover.

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

Parents demand that teachers make the unworkable work — or worse, don’t demand anything because they can see their kids are falling behind and they have given up any sense that the playing field ought to be fair. Not enough experience with laptops and internet connectivity problems? No way to stay home because the job pays the rent and the job can’t be done from a nice, quiet bedroom? No way to explain problems to a boss, nothing anyway that won’t end with another version of unemployment, or at least a sharp rebuke:

“What do you mean you can’t …?!?”

Desperate parents are pointing fingers at teachers for policies they did not make and cannot change, watching as their children fall behind. Desperate teachers are pointing fingers at parents, as they face evaluations based on the behavior and learning — IN SOME PLACES, THE STANDARDIZED TEST RESULTS — of children who are sometimes not even logging in to hybrid or online classes.

Is anyone in authority stepping in to own the fact that we have been operating with a discriminatory system of education for — not merely for decades — but forever? Yes, certain principals and school boards have been absolutely stellar in their support of parents and teachers during 2020. I don’t want to diminish the extraordinary support efforts by those administrators.

But let’s step back from this picture. Why are we getting such disparate results from online and hybrid learning?

Because the differences are huge — and they are growing. Online learning IS working for many students. But I know from social media posts that online learning works better for some students than others. It works for kids with parents who can stay home to help manage assignments and devices, especially when those kids are comfortable with their devices. It works for families who can easily afford to pay for sitters during this time. It works for students who are determined to go to college — when those students have the connectivity and support they need. Peer pressure helps to make online learning work. The more kids managing to meet expectations, the more kids believe they ought to be meeting expectations. It works in districts that can afford to hire new staff and pay for full-time substitutes in a crisis — since part-time subs have become thin on the ground. Especially for hybrid learning, extra staff can make or break how well this option works for students with special needs and language challenges. The alternative may be one teacher trying to teach 30 students online and in person all at once while entirely on his/her own.

I want to put our PROPERTY-TAX-BASED SCHOOL FUNDING out front and center today. Somehow, the big school funding cheat IS STILL GETTING IGNORED. Government grants are used to even out the funding picture, but those grants are capricious and come with strings attached and time limits. My one experience with a SIG grant led to the mandatory loss of the best principal I ever knew.

The U.S. school funding system ensures a wide disparity in funding per student — one favoring kids in areas where the homes have manicured lawns and oodles of expensive decorations displayed during the holidays, some put up by companies that climb the ladders for people who are busy or afraid of heights. In those neighborhoods, a modern June who can afford a nanny may be working at home on her MacBook Pro, cashmere cardigan draped over her shoulders as she takes a coffee break to help the kids.

Here are numbers worth chewing on in these tumultuous times:

Percent of workers with the ability to work from home by income percentile

Income percentile	Percent
Bottom 25	6.6%
25-50	15.5%
50-75	31.7%
Top 25	55.5%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/15/business/economy/coronavirus-worker-risk.html — See this chart for more details to explain the above chart.

The family of the fifties may be gone. But those moms and dads at home are an immense advantage for online and hybrid learners — and socioeconomic status has a great deal to do with who is at home and who cannot be at home. This game’s fixed. Damn, that fix has been in for as long as I remember. It’s why my long ago childhood high school in South Tacoma had no calculus class. It’s why the district I retired from has no calculus class. But if you want calculus — and other advanced high school mathematics — come to where I now live.

From the Glenbrook North website under the Honors category:

AP Calculus AB 183 or AP Calculus BC 183 and/or AP Statistics 183 and/or AP Computer Science or AP Computer Science Principles

AP Statistics 183 and/or Advanced Topics 173 (must have completed BC Calculus) and/or AP Computer Science or AP Computer Science Principles

Eduhonesty: Bits and pieces of the issues splashed across the internet — teachers, parents, schools, tech budgets, PPE demands, ventilation problems that keep schools closed, Zoom and Google rooms — factor into the evolving chapter of 2020, a year of learning haves and have-nots.

But the REAL problem is and always has been a staggering ability to ignore THE SHEER POWER of financial funding differences — even in 2020. It’s the $$$. It has always been the money. And we won’t manage to make any serious dent in the achievement gap until we acknowledge this truth. That income in the chart above? It opens doorways. It allows people to buy expensive homes in districts with ample funding for schools, homes often filled with laptops, software, books, and other pricey educational advantages.

For the moment, I am going to ignore the racial schism that is part of the funding picture — other than to say that I believe property-tax-based school funding is being used with great success to bypass Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That’s too nuclear an issue to come at sideways in a sound bite, though. Funding’s contribution to de facto segregation deserves its own post.

This post is a plea not to point fingers at one another as we struggle to make schooling work this year. Finger pointing allows the people responsible for the UNFAIR system of U.S. property-tax-based school funding to continue distracting us all. I have gotten lost more than once as I wrote this post, wanting to attack the lack of technology in academically-disadvantaged districts. But why is that tech broken or missing?

IT’S THE MONEY. Money may not be the root of all evil, but money is certainly the source of all goods and services in a classroom. Money HEAVILY influences the fact that over 95% of the kids where I live go on to college, while almost half the kids in that district from which I retired drop out of high school.

As long as we continue to distribute funds as we always have, ignoring socioeconomic forces and giving the haves MORE money than the have-nots, not much can be expected to change. I’d call the achievement gap indestructible with a set-up like that. My girlfriend and I laughed when our children’s school district asked the PTO to stop raising money because they had enough money and they didn’t know how to spend more. It seemed funny at the time. I had just begun teaching back then.

It doesn’t seem even a little bit funny now.

Step back, reader. Step back and think about this picture. Follow the money. Parent, teacher, taxpayer, it doesn’t matter. You have been set-up. We have all been set up.

This system, was never intended to be fair. Politicians moved into America’s best school districts or sent their children to private schools. They had no incentive to change a system that favored them. Our schools are like the electoral college: Winners don’t tamper with systems that reward them. Politicians never seem to make substantive changes to the U.S. educational funding system — which just “incidentally” tends to put the best schools exactly where they live.

This post was inspired by a woman looking for a YouTube video on good nutrition. She asked social media friends if they knew a source of good advice for children about healthy eating habits because — kaching! — her kids were much more likely to listen to a YouTube video than her. I segued from the video request into voting.

Who do kids listen to? Other kids. Who do young adults listen to? Other young adults and sometimes their brothers and sisters.

Teachers, I would like to offer an end-of-day suggestion for the next week: Before students leave school, especially high school students, I would take a minute to say something like, “Don’t forget to remind your brothers and sisters who are old enough that there are only a few days left to vote. This is an extremely important election.”

The youth vote will matter more in the next 10 days than ever before. All across the internet, columnists, bloggers and others are pushing to get the vote out. Whether in person or by mail into a designated dropbox — I would not risk the U.S. mail at this point — it’s time to vote.

I would NOT say anything about who should get that vote. Don’t open up that risky can of worms. But helping people to get to the polls — there’s no conflict of interest there, no line you should not cross.

Eduhonesty: Anyone want to throw together a YouTube video? If not, Plan B will help. Ask your classes to encourage the nation’s young and new voters to do their part. On the cusp of this election, any and all encouragement has the potential to help.

P.S. Nonteachers, please ask young voters to talk to their friends who can vote. I’d encourage going together to polling places. Where COVID makes sharing a car too problematic — which seems to be most of country at the moment — arranging to meet at a polling place to socially distance together in line while wearing masks will work fine.

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.”   Wisdom from Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Most teachers don’t struggle to get their laundry done. In the following link, the New York Times discusses a strategy becoming more common in New York and other areas, especially more poverty-stricken areas — washers and dryers to help students who don’t have easy access to laundry facilities. Homelessness and poverty have thrust schools into expanding roles that even include helping students clean their clothes so they can dress for school.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/schools-laundry-rooms.html. Since clean clothes can make all the difference in preventing bullying and boosting student attendance, it’s no surprise some schools have begun doubling as laundromats, providing fresh outfits and other sundries for students, such as tampons and pads.

What are those students doing now? How are they managing laundry and food?

Eduhonesty: An idea for districts that are remote right now — can you allow carefully scheduled, socially-distanced laundry for students? I assume you are already passing out the food the kids would have gotten had they been in school. Maybe offer to throw in feminine sundries as well? Some students may not have an easy way to get to the laundromat, and all those quarters may be a challenge too.

Your students would appreciate clean clothes.

Reader, if your anxiety is ratcheting up because of fears of learning losses. I am going to make today’s helpful suggestion: let yourself off the hook. A wise friend of mine brought this home to me in my teens. If you can’t fix it… If you can’t change it… Let it go. I am not saying toss up your hands. Lessons must be planned. Kids have to be led online, yours and the ones in your classroom. The dog has to be walked. But whatever your particular best effort is — that effort has to be enough, and it doesn’t have to be as good as your next-door neighbor’s effort, either. If Suzy Superteacher seems to have all of her students engaged and working while she tweets about how much she loves online learning… Well, that’s Suzy. We will always have Suzies among us. You’re entitled to have a few Invisible Young Men and Women in your classes, occasional crashes and even some spam. If you are in the classroom, don’t let Suzy’s mastery of spacing masked kids in perfectly aligned, quiet rows throw you off your game.

A tip for that absentee problem: I am sure you are contacting parents or guardians. You might try contacting friends, too. If Jamie and Christopher are friends, tell Christopher how much you miss Jamie. Ask him if he knows what’s going on with his friend. Can he think of any way you might help?

But don’t lose sleep. Don’t skip meals. Don’t spend all your waking hours trying to fix just one more thing. Turn on the TV and watch Lucifer or Supernatural. Carve pumpkins. Make bread pudding. Go for a drive to look at the fall leaves. Build a board game you can use at home and in classes. Brush up on your French.

Try “7 Mantras for Anxiety That Can Help Calm Your Mind Immediately.” https://www.boardandlife.com/mantras-for-anxiety/#:~:text=%207%20Mantras%20for%20Anxiety%20That%20Can%20Help,one%20is%20a%20personal%20favorite%20of…%20More%20 I especially like the one that says, “that cave is not meant for you.” You can’t go wrong with “Breathe in. Breathe out.”

Not a Marvel or DC superhero? Neither am I. Superheroes are thin on the ground right now and I think we are better off leaving them to battle giant robots. After all, the way this year has been going, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the arrival of giant Venusian robots — or even a resurrected Thanos. But YOU can’t fix those problems.

What can you do? Let it go. Do your best. Then go ladle out bowls of bread pudding while finding the remote. For parents trying to hold together online learning, I’d work on reading especially. Everything depends on reading. If reading skills improve, other holes in this year’s learning can be attacked later. Or not attacked. Freddy can always use his phone to find out who won the Battle of Shiloh. Teachers, shared lesson plans are probably your best friend right now. Buy lesson plans when those minutes simply are not there. Teacherspayteachers.com anyone?

Parents, teachers, and other readers, oodles of virtual hugs to all of you. We will get through this together.

Readers, once again I share lyrics from “Just Dropped In” by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal, and others.* Originally intended to be a warning about LSD, those lyrics just fit this year too well. “Just Dropped In” makes me think of school openings, as we step carefully into the abyss — because national attempts to open schools have become surreal in many locations.

We are living in a time of jagged sky. And as we drop in to see what condition our condition is in, I’d like to share with readers: “Children of all ages now make up 10% of all U.S cases, up from 2% in April,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yes, children fare better when they get this disease, with “only” 109 recorded deaths in school-age kids as of September 30, according to “COVID-19 Cases Rising Among U.S. Children as Schools Reopen” in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/09/30/covid-19-cases-rising-among-us-children_ap.html). Searching for this information is surprisingly difficult, I should note. Sources contradict each other. Information that ought to be readily available is simply… not.

Most cases are among kids aged 12 to 17. As is true for older COVID victims, black and Hispanic children do not do as well as white children. According to the CDC: More than 75% of children dying from COVID-19 are minorities. (https://www.fox5dc.com/news/cdc-more-than-75-of-children-dying-from-covid-19-are-minorities) Still, children overall are least likely to suffer serious complications. If this were only a disease of children, few people except for medical researchers would even be concerned.

But children go home. Many children go home to multigenerational households, especially now that COVID has eaten up so many jobs, leaving people and families without money for the rent or mortgage. Some children go home to shelters. One reason for the strong push to open New York City schools has been a profound concern for homeless students: From https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/student-homelessness-nyc.html: “By day, New York’s 114,085 homeless students live in plain sight: They study on the subway and sprint through playgrounds. At night, these children sometimes sleep in squalid, unsafe rooms, often for just a few months until they move again. School is the only stable place they know.”

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around a number like “114,085” when talking about homeless children in one location. That’s more than twice the average number of people who visited Disneyworld each day — back when people visited Disneyworld. Those students are holding onto the edge of a harsh reality by their fingertips, and any honest person must admit teachers are sometimes the only rescuers those children will find.

Teachers are mandated reporters for a reason. A mandated reporter is a person legally required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to relevant authorities. Teachers see the bruises, they find the lice, they hear the stories. Sometimes they grapple with the drug paraphernalia that comes to show and tell.

Online schooling has opened up its own ruthless realism — and teachers are left to decide what to do about the gun spied on a home desk or the obvious hoarding that has piles of trash climbing the wall. No one wants to call family services without excellent reason, but when enough discarded food and other refuse comes into view, questions of health, sanitation, possible insect and rodent infestation, and fire safety necessarily follow. Simply, what does the teacher do when Ben sets up his laptop in the kitchen and she sees all the dead flies floating on top of the scum in the water in the sink?

On the coast, teachers have been fleeing fires while simultaneously trying to begin online instruction. Those teachers especially are trying to crawl out of some pretty dark holes. So are their students, especially any students with asthma or breathing challenges. Even if no one has to evacuate, that air may be gray with ash. Does it seem those fires are over? Forest Fires have mostly fallen out of the news, but according to the California Statewide Fire Summary for October 11, 2020. “More than 13,400 firefighters continue to work towards containment on 21 major wildfires across the state.” (https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/).

We are careening from one monster piece of news to the next right now. Except there’s seldom time to put news in context before the next cataclysmic event starts being twittered. News fatigue results, as teachers, parents and almost any adult who is not a news junkie begins to duck potentially useful outside information.

Teachers, we have to fight the almost inevitable burn-out that can results from this endless stream of bad news, weird news, and unavailable news.

Eduhonesty: Hugs, teachers, parents and anyone else who has stumbled on this blog. The issues I have raised here cannot be addressed in sound bites. I would just like to continue to plead — please be KIND to each other, readers. Teachers, we cannot know how complicated our students’ home lives are. We may need mom to keep Freddy online — but mom may not have the option to stay home from work. If Freddy’s sister is in charge, and she is managing erratically, please don’t get upset with mom or dad. If Freddy keeps popping in and out of class like Casper the Friendly Ghost, remind yourself that many of our supervising adults and babysitters are far less familiar with technology than the average classroom teacher. And mom or dad, please, please don’t get mad at the teacher. She didn’t create the crazy hybrid schedule. There’s a good chance she had no voice in this year’s in-person, online or hybrid schedule at all. That online platform you hate? There’s a good chance she had no voice in that selection. She may hate it too, even as she frantically tries to become proficient so she can do the best teaching job possible in impossible times.

P.S. Incidentally, about that barrage of news: don’t drop the $421 million in personal debt that the POTUS owes some unknown parties. That’s the piece from the last few weeks that should not slip away. That’s a great deal of leverage possessed by an as-yet-unknown party. Don’t let POST-COVID POTUS become too big a distraction.

P.S.S. Many teachers and districts might as well be “eight miles out of Memphis without a spare, eight miles straight up downtown somewhere.” The situations today’s teachers are confronting can be impossible. You can’t regularly work 12-plus hours a day to make the online and in-person lessons while setting up the tech to include various lost and challenged students still struggling to log on — and also take care of your family, get your own kids into their online classes, keep your kids in those classes, somehow get yourself and other family members fed, the dog walked, and the laundry done, while also helping students and family members with homework and classwork. You can’t.

So don’t try too hard. Do your job as educator as fiercely as possibly during the school day. Then give yourself a break and make bread pudding. Take the kids to the park. Find a way to relax. https://fsl.yzp.mybluehost.me/website_5ad3d54d/there-are-no-venusian-robots-calming-down-in-fraught-times/

*If you are younger and somehow missed the song “I Just Dropped In,” I strongly recommend giving it a listen. It’s emblematic of an earlier, and I think kinder time.

Credit to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal and others

The line in the title resonates with me. They fooled you, many of you readers out in non-union or non-collective bargaining states. They told you new laws would not matter to you. They even vilified teachers in the process, some deliberately and some simply because they caught a wave whose true dimensions they did not understand. Those latter writers understood only that “bad teacher” stories were selling for some reason. How do you destroy a union? You paint its members as lazy neer-do-wells and even pedophiles hiding out in secret rooms in New York where they send the bad teachers they cannot fire. Why can’t you fire them? The evil union, of course. Although New York mostly survived those gratuitous attacks, other teachers in other states did not — but then New York is a heavily Democratic state. I will return to this point later.

Here is the start of a story by Karen Matthews, an Associated Press Writer, updated 6/22/2009 6:05:42 PM ET: NEW YORK — “Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31494936/ns/us_news-education/t/nyc-teachers-paid-do-nothing/#.X3yD2hSSmUk

The wave of stories continued because they sold. The long-term impact of that hit job went unappreciated. The advantages of having a union and collective bargaining rights can easily go unnoticed in quieter times. Latent power is often invisible.

Now, in many areas, legislators and school boards have been working nonstop on plans to get students into school and only sometimes out of school when things go wrong. In lucky locations, teachers have the help of unions. If not for relatively strong unions, would New York City have a plan for shut-down in the face of exploding coronavirus numbers? In too many areas, no one has an exit plan because we have no unions, or unions are so gutted that they might as well be trapped in brown paper bags. We need to drop in soon — and find out what condition our unions are in. And then we need to begin reforming those unions. Or restoring those unions to positions of power.

Eduhonesty: When THIS song makes me think of the state of U.S. education, we have taken our foot off the gas for far too long. What happened to collective bargaining power? They came for our rights in the night, they came with fabricated stories or cherry-picked examples, and we just opened the door to votes that sucked away the individual worker’s voice. We let our voices go because we did not understand the implications of being muted, not well enough to rage as legislators stole away our bargaining rights.

I believe that part of the reason we did not rage is that teachers tend to be regrettably trusting — at least at first. They believe the Board has their school’s best interests at heart. They believe they and administrators are on the same team (In better schools, this is true.) and they count on the Your-State-Here State Board of Education to look out for the students in their care. This faith has been eroding, as teachers watched test-score mania and the Common Core gain momentum, but remnants of trust and goodwill remain.

Unfortunately, we were not paying enough attention to the “bad teacher” stories this last decade. They had a purpose, and only in the most naïve hands was that purpose believed to be improving education. Instead, those stories had everything to do with control. If you eliminate the right to collective bargaining and/or ban the union, then you then can’t be strong-armed into paying teachers a fair wage or providing students in poor districts with a more equitable learning landscape. You can keep things exactly as they are, no matter how unfair that may be to teachers — and students with the bad luck to be living in the wrong zip code. Or the wrong state, it seems today.

Florida is an outrage and not the only outrage.

I am not against sending children back into live learning situations, and I fully understand some of those attempts will hit COVID walls, as sick kids and staff members try to manage quarantines and shut-downs. We have no perfect solutions. Everyone is operating in perilous times, heading into an unknown future. Going to live instruction or a hybrid version of this may be the best of the bad options in many locales. But that choice should not be driven by politics — and teachers should be participants, not terrified onlookers, in the decision-making process.

Let’s focus for the moment on those legislators who negotiated away teachers’, students’, and others’ voices. Since their immediate acts took place in the then-present — our past — and the world was much quieter back then, too few people fought back. Nothing much changed in “Washington Elementary” or other schools when anti-union legislation slipped through. I am sure quieter times disguised the immediacy of the threat of that legislation. Maybe we thought we could trust the government to take care of us.

I repeat a question from my last post: Is the government taking care of us?

Yet the future eventually arrives, and the future is hitting us much harder than anyone anticipated. Now, teachers and students are not worried about having enough paper or a half-hour for lunch. They are worried about physical safety. In some locations, they are being badgered to open even when circumstances suggest opening might be unsafe. In some locations, they are even being given the choice to either enter the classroom or be fired.

That’s not true in Illinois — where schools were shut in Chicago and remain shut until they are considered safe — but then Illinois is a heavily Democratic state, like New York. So is California where many schools remain closed, depending on what condition their schools’ condition happens to be in.

Here’s why I think anyone with free time who is willing and able to take on the fight should be working for the Democratic Party right now: Democrats have historically been exponentially friendlier to unions than Republicans. Especially in these fraught times, we need to organize or reorganize in many places. We need to reclaim our voices. To do that we will have to break Republican strongholds. Those Republican governors, senators and representatives? They must go — even the ones I like, I’m afraid. I have voted for a fair number of republicans in my life — I’m registered as an independent and I always liked the designation.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. I upset some readers recently by writing that people in democratic states should not vote for third parties. But a third-party vote in a democratic state is a vote for the current administration. We can’t keep voting in republican majorities if we want to #ReclaimOurVoices and #RebuildOurUnions. We need to flip those republican legislatures — small and large. The we need to repeal a number of laws and

Those of us lucky enough to have a union? Let’s see if we can help our fellow teachers who are not as lucky.

P.S. In fairness, I should note that anti-union sentiment goes back to the very foundations of the first unions. That sentiment took on legitimacy and gained support during the time of Ronald Reagan, a snowball that has been rolling downhill since Reagan and the air traffic controllers. But teachers were a tougher target to assail — because America once thought highly of teachers. Fortunately, despite the hit job, many people still do. But for those teachers who can’t understand the negativity toward them, given all their hard work and selfless acceptance of substandard working conditions in return for a chance to help and even sometimes rescue kids — go looking for those stories about unions protecting bad teachers. Those stories have a great deal to do with the contempt teachers now sometimes encounter in dealings with administrations and parents.

Organizing and reorganizing can improve working conditions for teachers.

Although I’ll add one last blast — If conditions are too bad, I suggest taking a chunk of time daily to try to change districts. There are some great principals and good districts out there. You CAN also QUIT! I read a post from a woman whose spouse took a position as a fast food assistant manager and now is making more money than she is. Fellow teachers, you have degrees. You are articulate. You know how to work long and hard. Maybe it’s time to get your real estate license? Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. A friend of mine who is an ER doc did a residency in occupational medicine to change into another field. It was a lot of extra work for awhile as well as extra educational fees. But she doesn’t have to get regular migraines from brutal night hours and changing shifts now. If Sunday night makes your stomach sink or even causes you to cry — think about it. You can move on.