My febrile imagination has for some time been considering the accusation levied by the Right, that our Public Servants are the cause of all the ills in society.
From Wisconsin to Ohio, Alaska to Florida politicians have lined up to blame "Big Government", characterized by the employees of government, for the economic woes of the United States.
That those employees are Teachers, Fire-Fighters, Police Officers and the like strikes a discordant note among those who value the work they do, and rather wish that there were more of them, doing more work, for better rewards and with improving outcomes.
So I thought I would share a small example from close to home.
Let's go below the "orange wave of optimism".
Mrs Twigg, as I have mentioned before in these pages, is a High School Teacher. She teaches, and has taught children, with Special Educational Needs, specifically those students who exhibit some level of emotional disturbance.
Emotional disturbance is a wide area, but typically we are talking about children whose development has been impaired by any one, or ten, of a large number of underlying issues that can include broken families, poverty, poor housing, poor parenting. Any, all or more of these factors can lead to children in High School who are poorly equipped to make satisfactory progress in regular classes.
These children are "unteachable" in a regular setting, because their emotional development is impaired to the point where they cannot access that which is being delivered.
They are special children, and they need special teachers. There are many special teachers up and down this land. They work, with skill and dedication desperately trying to raise the bar for these students, then trying to help them over it.
Every one of them has a Bachelors Degree. They all are poorly paid compared to the skill set they need to acquire and deploy every minute of their professional lives. We need them if we are not to simply abandon these kids to their fate.
It ill behoves any politician to express feelings of hope for our children, if they do not offer these dedicated professionals absolute and unwavering support. If Janet Barresi, Superintendent of Schools in Oklahoma, is prepared to cut the education budget, and she is, then she is unfit for the Office she holds. There is no parsing this. This State already spends less than the Regional Average on both Students and Teachers, and to cut it further is tantamount to child neglect.
Meanwhile, back in the High School it is Monday and the students would prefer that it were still the weekend. The teachers would probably prefer this too, but they have a job to do. One of Mrs Twigg's students really doesn't want to play. Why would he? He has been in school since age five, and very little of that time has been spent learning anything beyond the absolute basics, and those not very well.
In common with many of the kids floating around with "Individual Education Plans" (IEPs), despite the many man-hours that have been invested in trying to provide services, little tangible has been achieved. While it is tempting to blame the young man concerned for his truculent attitude and lack of motivation, it really isn't his fault. I say this only because blame, per se, is unhelpful.
Nonetheless, his teacher isn't giving up on him, and a general refusal to do anything productive is not the best way to get on the good side of my wife. Trust me on this.
So she challenges him. She will not let him lay down his head and sleep the hour away. There is an assignment that is due, and a zero isn't an option. She doesn't mind if the student's efforts deserve a zero, if that is the case she will give him exactly what he earned; but that also means that she failed. Failed to teach, failed to help her student progress, failed to help him achieve something better than nothing. For her, that isn't an option either.
Eventually the boy becomes angry. After all, it's Monday, and Monday is the day you rest from the toils of the weekend. He has Rights, dammit, and one of them is protection from anyone or anything that makes even the smallest effort to cajole him into positive activity on a Monday.
As a reward for this outburst he is asked to write a half-page report on his attitude and behaviour.
He produces the report the next day. It is half a page of close typed text. There is grammar in there somewhere, the odd real sentence, and some of the words are spelled correctly. What is remarkable is that the report was actually written, and that not a single word of it acknowledges that he may have contributed to the outburst of the previous day. If Mrs Twigg had done this, or not said that, or, or, or ... then he would not have yelled. It was, apparently, her fault.
Mrs Twigg thanks him for the report, and then asks him to take it home, returning it to her the following day, complete with his Mom's signature. She can be mean like that at times. The student is clearly agitated at this. He has also had his computer privileges removed for a week for inappropriate use of the school equipment, and he doesn't like it, not one little bit.
Mrs Twigg asks to speak to him in the hallway, so he unwinds his six foot three inches from his seat and follows her five foot seven (in shoes) out of the room. The conversation starts badly with the student attempting to basically shout down the teacher. He wants to talk about what he wants to talk about, and refuses to listen to anything coming back at him. This is not a new tactic. It is a well proven technique of deflection and avoidance that has, he thinks, served him well for the last ten years. He is a big lad, and he can be very intimidating. It works for a while, but the child is the loser in the end if it is allowed to continue.
Then Mrs Twigg says something to him that few have ever dared ...
"Jack, I will not be bullied by you. I am your teacher, and you are the student. This is your opportunity to learn something, and I will not let you waste it". I paraphrased.
Jack (which is not his real name) is a little nonplussed by this. Who is this woman? She is not a Coach (they listen to coaches) ... so he tries again.
"Jack, I will not allow you to bully me". Damn she is good!
After a minute or two they both return to the class. Jack is unusually quiet and apparently thoughtful. He spends thirty minutes working on the assignment and at the end of the hours asks Mrs Twigg if she will help him set up something or other when he gets his computer privileges back.
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My wife and I talk a lot. We share those things that surprise, intrigue and delight us. We talk about her work quite a bit. I often feel that we would talk about it rather less if she didn't care. On this occasion we talked about what was going on here.
From the little I know of Jack, and the rather more I know about the psychology of adolescents we gleaned the following:
Jack is troubled. He feels anger and frustration at most things, most of the time, and has little in the way of the inner controls that would create the space he needs to grow. I wouldn't like to be in Jack's head. It is a dark place that is most likely a permanent reminder of a scary and angry life. He doesn't understand why he feels so bad, and few people he has met have ever had either the strength or the understanding to help him make any sense of how he feels.
In common with other emotionally disturbed kids, Jack presents most of his problems to the women in his life. His Mom, his female teachers. He is okay with the men. This is frequently interpreted as those children having "issues" with women. It is rarely that simple. More often it is a security issue. They innately understand (even when they are wrong), that men have the strength to make and keep them safe. They do not get this feeling of security from women who are, in their eyes, small and weak; and anyway, Mom didn't keep them from harm, did she?
Jack is an angry young man. Not the righteous anger of a well balanced citizen denied opportunity by an unjust society. No, Jack's anger comes from within. It is the frustration of feeling that he has no control. The feeling of blackness and despair, of injustice springing from a young life that has not had consistency, good parenting, unconditional love.
What his teacher was able to do, and what she will have to keep on doing, is act as a container for that anger. To hold those feelings for Jack, when he can't hold them himself. To help him see how those feelings can be contained, can be understood, and how she can make him feel safe. That allows Jack to complete his assignment, make a Grade, achieve some success. This level of success can be built on, and some of the damage can be repaired. It's not much, and it is everything. Small steps ... giant leaps.
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I tell this tale for the following reason:
In every school, in every fire house, on the streets while patrolling, Educators, Fire-Fighters and Police Officers are employing skills like this to make our country a better place for us all to live, and helping citizens, both young and old make the most of the things society has to offer.
These professionals daily go above and beyond what they are paid to do. Poorly paid, most of them, despite years of training and highly developed skill sets.
Yet for some reason best known to themselves, the Right Wing of our political spectrum chooses them as the scapegoats. They are, they say, a cancer within and it is their duty to remove from them as many benefits as possible. Collective bargaining? Health Plans? Pensions? All of these and more are under attack.
Mrs Twigg and her colleagues really should be telling those who would harm them ....
"We are not the problem, we are a large part of the solution. We did not crash the economy. No teacher ever shipped a job abroad and reducing our pay will not reduce the deficit"
and, more to the point ....
"We will not be bullied!"