To my students, then and now

To my students, then and now:

This was going to be an open letter to Betsy DeVos.  I was going to tell her how important her new job is to this country, and that she holds your precious futures in her hand, and that she should listen to the teachers instead of plowing ahead, no holds barred, into the apocalypse.  (That's all teachers want, right?  Whether it's a group of senators or a gaggle of teenagers, we're just desperate for someone to listen.)

It was going to be a fiery letter, full of guts and glory and parallel structure, sprinkled with self-deprecating asides and heartfelt imagery.  I would probably have raged while I was writing it, and wept, and raged some more.  I've gotten very good at raging in the past few months.

I'm not going to write that letter.

It's not that the letter doesn't need to be written -- it does, and someone needs to tell Betsy DeVos that removing federal funding will absolutely devastate schools in states with no state income tax (like Washington) and that for-profit charter schools don't improve low-income education (like in Detroit) and that donating money to groups practicing anti-gay religious conversion therapy is absolutely fucking reprehensible.  And, you know, proficiency and growth, and know your federal laws so that you don't swing us back into the dark ages of special education, and please god just listen to some teachers.  That stuff.

But other people (lots of other people) are writing those letters, and the thing is, I don't really care about her, as a person?  Like, at all?  And I don't think she's going to listen to me.  There's no point in my writing that letter -- there's no purpose.  She's confirmed.  It's done.

I'm writing to you now.

I'm writing to you, first and foremost, because I love you.  You know that, I hope, because I'm careful to say it, because I mean it, because you're the lights of my life.  It doesn't end when you graduate, either.  It doesn't end when your political views differ from mine.  It doesn't end when you've graduated from college, and now you're a grad student in linguistics in Columbus, Ohio, or when you're married (to each other?  What is this even, I did not know that you were dating) and in the military and in Arizona, or when you dropped out of college and moved halfway across the world, or when one of you from China and one of you from Washington somehow ended up living in the same dorm in college, which just warms my heart to a ridiculous degree.

You're my kids, is what I'm saying, and you're never wriggling out of that one, so don't even try.

The second thing I want to say is something that I'm pretty sure you've all heard from me before, if you're my kid, if you were listening.  It's this:  the years when you're in high school are the years when you're most flung up against people who are wildly different from you.  It's your chance to learn and listen, to perform that imaginative leap into the shoes of others, to discover that all people are complex human beings who are worthy of your respect and your tolerance, if not always your affection.

I really, really need you to remember that right now.  Take a moment to feel every feeling you have in you.  Think of one person -- your mother, perhaps, or your best friend, or your significant other.  Feel every conflicting emotion that rises in you about that person.  You love them so much it overwhelms you, but also you're a little embarrassed by them sometimes, but also you're proud of them, but also you kind of want to strangle them a little bit?

Now, as you hold all those conflicting, competing, complex emotions within you, realize:  every other human in the world is as complicated.  You are not alone.

Dizzying, right?

Students who are privileged in one way or another, let's take it one farther: your experience of the world is not the only one.  If you are white, you have not experienced systemic racism or had your basic Americanness constantly under question.  If you grew up wealthy, you do not have the experience of going to practice, then your after-school job and then tackling four hours of homework.  If you are straight and cis, you don't have the experience of feeling casually-tossed "that's gay"s and "faggot"s cutting tiny slivers out of your self-worth.  If you've always spoken fluent English, you don't have the experience of knowing that the words in your head don't match the building-block words that come out of your mouth, of knowing that people must see you as less intelligent than you know yourself to be.

You don't.  You haven't lived it.  So listen to those who do.  They know what it's like -- at least, they know what it's like for them -- and you don't.

(I don't, either.  I grew up as privileged as they come, and I still get things wrong all the time, and I listen, because how else will I learn?)

I love you all so much, and I'm asking you to show up for each other.  Don't call each other A-rabs.  Don't spit in each other's faces.  Don't glance at each other shiftily, defensively, through the sides of your eyes.  You have so much more in common than you hold in difference.

Because I can't write to Betsy DeVos, because she doesn't care about me and she doesn't care about you.  Because the world is getting a lot harder, and it's unfair, and you all deserve so much fucking more than this, and I promise that I'm not done, you know that, right? I'm not done, I'm still going, and they'll have to pry my cold dead fingers away from my whiteboard before they get me out of my classroom, but my point is, you're in this now.  You're in it.  You.

And you -- you have so much more power than you know, over your own lives and the lives of each other.  You only have that power, though, if you don't think of all the reasons for you not to trust "them," whoever "they" are.

Those reasons are useless and worthless nothings, meant to distract and destroy. Trust me, there is no "them."  There's only all of you.

So:  listen.  And leap.

We need you.

Love,

Your teacher