MAY 1 .. International Worker's Day... and I'm all alone.. in my classroom. Normally I have students. So what happened?
I work in a small town near Salem that is the ONLY Mexican-American majority town in Oregon. More than 60 percent 'Hispanic,' about 18 percent Russian, and the balance... are called... wait for it.... 'Majority Culture.' Really. The Irony Police never got that one.
I have an outdoor two-classroom portable building. So, I normally don't get inside all that much.. just to copy, talk with other teachers, steal office supplies, etc. So back in my classroom, I heard the 8:20 bell ring, and normally students kinda file in for the next ten minutes, until 8:30, when the tardy bell rings. Well, 8:30 came and went. No one arrived. I wrote the day's lessons on the board. I walked around the classroom, pacing. I sniffed some permanent markers, and opened a jar of library paste, hungrily eyeing it... and .... then .... Someone peeked in my window. It was a student from next door. Still none of my students arrived. Finally, at 8:40, I took roll on the classroom computer, and marked EVERY SINGLE STUDENT in my morning reading class absent! I could hear the 'Twilight Zone' theme song, but it was sort with a Latin beat. Rod Serling had a Spanish accent... " Mis amigos, bienvenidos a la Zona Twilight..."
I shook it off, and walked inside the main building, to the computer lab. I found two teachers (Janey and Catherine) talking about absences. Three students were in a corner, reading. Between three teachers, we had THREE STUDENTS, total.
My colleagues were talking about immigration and the importance of education. I spared them my Chomsky quote about education being a form of 'enforced ignorance.' We talked about the roots of immigration, I told them about NAFTA. Janey gave me pat answers about 'education being the solution,' and that our students should not be at the protests, they should be in the classroom.
Truly, so many teachers are completely ignorant of the real world, and have NO SENSE OF CURIOSITY about it. They parrot 'solutions' like, ' get an education and go to college, or you'll never get a good job.' When, at the moment, many newly minted college graduates WILL NEVER GET A DECENT DOLLAR RETURN ON THEIR STUDENT LOANS.
"The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized "new economy" never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago." Full story at http://www.counterpunch.org/...
As the conversation wound down, I told Janey and Catherine that I was so thrilled that our students were getting involved in their own lives. There are a lot of solutions and non-solutions to the 'immigration problem,' but hot damn... our kids are actually DOING something about a social issue!! How can any teacher not want that?
Anyway, there were about 350 out of 550 students absent yesterday, most to protest treatment of immigrants. I normally teach 82 students a day... yesterday I taught 24.
About ten of our teachers were out, too. That made me smile.
It was an interesting day. Today may be even more so.
(This is my first attempt at writing a diary. Thanks for listening.)