Sitting at my teacher desk this Wednesday morning, I am stuck. I am thinking about the moves planned for the day: conversations about Romantic poets, a close-reading of identity in a novel, the elements of a solid introductory paragraph, all practice that seems a bit out of reach in the midst of the conversations and reactions roaring around the country. I am thinking about the heaviness on people's faces as I walked to school this morning. I am thinking about my daughter who told me at bedtime last night told me that of course Hillary would win, because girls always can do the hardest work. Today, as I pushed together breakfast, I broke the news of the election to her and she was shocked. "But he uses bad words! Like the s-word!"
Maybe, those of you outside this bubble, there is so much wrong all it takes is a man with a huge megaphone and a simple wish, just to win, to get you to come out finally, to give you a voice. I know we all believe in a version of America, but I can't quite see what has gone so terribly wrong, what has split us apart so completely. Until this morning, I didn't know what it was to feel as though something not even in my grasp was being ripped away from me.
We all live in our idea of America, and yesterday's flurry of the polling place, the long lines and everyone waiting and taking their part in the civic ritual of voting looked like my America. Parents bringing their kids in and taking pictures at this historic vote, everyone showing up to believe in this notion--that's American. In the most diverse place in the country, I see an America in the faces of my students shuttling in and out of class, the hope of their parents during their conferences, the business of crowds on the subway. I see it in my students' willingness to believe and to catch that train of thought, and to work together to make something meaningful during the time we have in this class period, in this semester, in this year.
Maybe this is the end game to what America has done with education. Misguided allocations of time and money, mercurial goal-setting and values, a systematic disenfranchising of students who can't pay and teachers who have to believe it doesn't matter that their job is often regarded as more an hourly gig than a vocation. College that all but promises debt and that distant beautiful city of "making it" the way our parents did or our grandparents, seeming more and more out of our reach. The people who didn't get a good school experience voted yesterday with everyone else. The people who missed the idea that fairness is not necessarily giving everyone the same thing but actually giving everyone what they need--they voted too.
The meanness of this election was breathtaking and prolonged. Tossed around throughout the rallies, the thousand dollar a plate dinners and the debates, America became less a grand enterprise to be shared than a vanishing quantity, a failed state, and an unfulfilled oath. We are all worth so much more than the rhetoric gave us--the sound bytes of deplorables, bad hombres and nasty women didn't even try to look like us.
I am angry but am more scared. The history of all of this, that we have seen shades of this before, nudges insistently at the elbow and the edges of memory. The rage of draining the swamp, burning it all down, taking up the drawbridges, and building a wall is rough trade for what could be otherwise. I don't recognize this road. There is no path here, only a lot of edges--we seem to be dropping off the side of the world I know.
In twenty minutes, my classroom will be full of kids who will have in their own way seen and processed the events of last night and of the last eighteen months. They will have questions. They will be looking at my face. I never tell students where I stand politically. I have so much interaction with them, and I am an adult that they have been trained to look at and at least appear to be hearing over many hours in a week. It's unfair to tell them to what to think when my job is to teach them how to decide. So I need to figure out what to say, without division or name-calling, or too much of the sorrow that is sitting with me at my desk--what comes next?
And it is Wednesday. It is almost, amazingly, Turkey Day, and my classes are humming along. I am planning and grading and having the usual daily five hundred conversations. Piles of paper rise and fall on my desk, the one-armed bandits move around my room in endless iterations of small groups, seminars, rows, and to the edges as we take to our feet. Today is the day after the election and I have to make copies and set up my room and grade those last quizzes before my prep drains away.
I am repeating my mantra: we are all Americans, we know what we have learned and we have to ask questions and to keep looking and paying attention and making sure that we are all safe. We need to begin. Again.