Education – Elizabeth DeOrnellas

A message about school shootings from a k-12 veteran

It does not matter how you register to vote (I am registered nonpartisan). It matters that you register. It matters that you vote. It matters how you vote. It matters who you vote for. It matters how you act when the votes are being counted and how you act when the vote counts have been certified. Maintaining democracy is an active process — it requires participation from all those living in a country that is a functioning democracy who wish to continue to live in a country that remains a functioning democracy.

Sometimes when you can’t get the news cycle out of your head, it’s time to say something.

I just finished 13 years as a k-12 teacher. I am headed to Temple in August to enroll in a master’s in journalism program. My heart bleeds for every Philadelphia parent who has lost a loved one; every Philadelphia student who has lost a classmate; every Philadelphia teacher who has lost a student; and all those who have lost friends and loved ones to gun violence. I know what it feels like to be at a student funeral and to watch your students grieve for a classmate. There are too many youth funerals in America. School shootings aren’t the only gun violence problem we have in America. Gun violence is a real and continuous trauma that all our students, teachers, and parents are struggling to confront.

If you do want to learn more about how school shootings fit into the larger picture of gun violence in America, and you want to inform yourself about school shootings, please talk to teachers and students. We know. We KNOW. And if you want to share, please don’t share conspiracy theories. Be a good human. Fact check. Cite credible sources. You know who has an informed opinion on whether or not teachers should be armed? Teachers. #neveragain #enoughisenough #uvalde #parkland #sandyhook

The only thing “normal” about the “new normal” is it isn’t new

I’m a high school teacher. I keep thinking: “God, I can’t imagine what it must feel like to grow up through this.” The insanity and cravenness of our politics. The drumbeat of daily disaster. The unraveling of social ties.

Tonight I realized: Someone thought that about me.

They must have.

I’m the 9-11 generation.

That was my first week of high school.

The mother of one of my volleyball teammates knew one of the flight attendants who died. I remember thinking how unreal it must feel to be personally connected to a disaster like that.

To know one of the bodies.

That disaster seemed too big, too profound, too far beyond every rule of civil society we thought existed.

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What Oklahoma teachers taught me

I am eternally indebted to Oklahoma educators for shepherding me through my first two years of teaching (an on-the-job learning curve unlike anything else on Earth). I will forever be grateful for their compassion, their empathy and their dedication. Their mentorship and expertise guide me to this day. In case you are at all confused about why Oklahoma educators deserve to be treated better, here is a by-no-means comprehensive list of what they taught me:

Oklahoma teachers have walked out, and they’re not going back.

When I write that sentence, I feel at once incredibly frustrated and indescribably proud.

I’m frustrated that national media outlets have missed nuance and context that you can really only get from local sources (I see you, Tulsa World – keep up the good work!). I’m frustrated that state and federal politicians are making the insulting and inaccurate claim that teachers care more about their own household budgets than they do about the needs of their students. I’m frustrated that years of regressive tax policy and corporate handouts to oil and gas companies have drained the schools of revenue so badly that one in five Oklahoma public schools now operate a four-day week.

I’m proud that Oklahoma teachers, while they work in a “Right to Work” state in which legislators have done everything they can to kill unions, have kept a seat at the table through the tireless work of organizations such as TCTA. You’ll notice that TCTA names itself an “association” not a “union.” I could write another entire post on my feelings on that distinction (a debate that frequently preoccupied the minds and hearts of the DAE, another local teachers’ union I’m proud to have been an active member of).

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What it feels like to be a teacher in the era of school shootings

When I was 22 and a first-year teacher, a Creative Writing student told me in the middle of a lockdown that it was my job to stand in front of the door so I would get shot first.

Then one of my students decided to hide in a cabinet so he could bang on its door.

I was proud of myself for not visibly jumping.

I had absolutely nothing productive to say.

That day, I had a 45-minute class that was on lockdown for at least two hours. We received no information from our administration other than confirmation that it was not a drill.

We watched Freedom Writers – not because it was meaningful or useful, but because Creative Writing was my third prep and it is nearly impossible as a first-year teacher to write curriculum for three different classes and be as over-prepared as you need to be to make sure you have enough material to fill each period, let alone deal with unforeseen contingencies.

Let’s be clear: School shootings (and the accompanying lockdown drills) are no longer unforeseen contingencies. This is my ninth year as a classroom teacher. When I heard about the Stoneman shooting, I barely blinked.

Why am I so desensitized? Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of the school shooting related incidents that have happened to me during the past nine years:

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One Year In

We have allowed our country to descend into tribalism, and that us vs. them attitude is infecting the way our young people view the world. The toxic bigotry of online life, in which anonymous hatred has become a reflex muscle, is seeping into our offline world. Meanwhile, our 70-year-old boy king tweets in the manor while the empire burns. He is the emperor of the trolls. He sees high ratings in the flames.

There are two Onion headlines that define for me the transition from Obama’s America to Trump’s.

On Nov. 4, 2008, the Onion’s main story was “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” I remember reading it and thinking, “That’s the most accurate description of presidential politics I’ve seen in a long time.” There was a knowingness to it – the cynicism that comes from watching a young go-getter go get something and then thinking, “Let’s see what happens when he actually tries to change something.”

Eight years later, the Onion ran this headline: “Study: Depression Up Among Teenage Girls Able to Perceive Any Part of the World Around Them.” It was after the election, and it said nothing about Hillary, but it perfectly captured the world weariness that comes from watching an absurdly well-qualified woman lose to an absurdly ill-qualified clown and having the conversation revolve, inevitably, around her “likeability” rather than his proudly ignorant bully of a persona.

Next weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, and the most shocking thing about looking back on those two headlines is how thoroughly Trump has managed to redefine the job he so obviously never wanted. With Obama, there was an understanding that the presidency is a job – a difficult one, one that requires patience, hard work, diplomacy, and knowledge of both domestic and international policy. With Trump, there is no understanding. Trevor Noah said watching the Trump presidency is akin to having a nationwide civics lesson in real-time. We’re all learning. The question is which lessons are sinking in.

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What’s Hidden from Hidden Figures

As we get set for the Oscars tomorrow, remember this: Movies are big, shiny things. Everyday reality is small and messy. No one gets a big, shiny victory without fighting the small, messy, everyday battles.

I can’t say I in any way watched a full slate of Oscar films this year; I almost never do. I am excited to go see I Am Not Your Negro tomorrow. Anything I’ve ever read by James Baldwin has struck me as incredibly poetic and profound, and I know I haven’t seen enough film of him to understand what he was like in his own voice, so I look forward to starting to rectify that.

I have already made time for La La Land (I have a soft spot for both musicals and romantic comedies, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this one deviate a bit from the normal boy-meets-girl tropes); Moonlight (A friend one described Rachel McKibbens’ poem “The Widower” as an emotional bitch slap; there’s a reason I use that poem to teach figurative language. If I taught film study, I would teach this film for the same reason; it’s that powerful); and Hidden Figures.

I suppose I could have started with that. I could have started with “I just came home from watching Hidden Figures…” but that opening doesn’t make sense to me for several reasons. One, I didn’t read exhaustively about the film before I went to see it because I wanted to experience it as a movie before I decided to pick it apart, but I did do enough pre-reading to know that “based on true events” is, as always, an admission that liberties have been taken with the narrative. The resulting omissions and edits left me feeling decidedly bittersweet about this particular success story.

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What Community Means to Me

The internet and social media allow me to be part of a nationwide (and global) community of educators. That is my community. Those are my people. Students are teachers too. I learn more from my students than I learn from anyone else. Listen first. Then speak out. My definition of community includes honesty. Speak your truth.

My current charter school organization started an initiative last year in which we talked a lot about building “tribal community” on our campuses. Thankfully, we have stopped using the term “tribal” – I don’t feel the need to tell you who was upset and why; I trust you to figure that out.

That shade aside, the concepts behind building community in our classrooms and on our campuses truly are key to effective teaching. Students can’t learn if they don’t feel safe. There is extensive neuroscience that backs that philosophy, and it is a philosophy that educators across the United States recognize to be both research-driven and ethically important.

It is naive to pretend that this is a philosophy that only matters to students. Teachers have to feel safe in the classroom too. Respect is a two-way street. It is the teacher’s job, as the adult in the room, to set a “warm but strict” tone that both acknowledges students’ innate humanity and holds them to high expectations regarding behavior (in both the academic and social realms).

Back to the neuroscience realm: Teachers must acknowledge that students are operating with brains that are still developing; therefore, it is immensely important to be as patient as possible when dealing with students who have in any way violated the agreed-upon community norms. It’s also important to let students have a say in establishing those norms. Norms that Summit Public Schools regularly uses that I love: One Voice (listen attentively to whomever is speaking, whether that be the teacher or a classmate); Stand Up for Your Education (advocate for yourself; seek help from adults or peers when necessary to reach academic success; value your development as a lifelong learner); and This is Our School. (That one is the one that is most likely to be interpreted in a sarcastic manner by students who don’t necessarily respect the physical space of a classroom, the equipment they are given, or the physical space of the school outside a classroom; however, it is also the norm that reminds students to respect said physical spaces and to value their school community as both a community of people and a physical space for learning. Sometimes my students pronounce the acronym TIOS “tee-awhs,” and my gringa brain thinks, “Why are they pronouncing ‘uncles’ so strangely?” Then I have to remind myself that’s not what the student meant.)

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What We Talk About When We Talk About War

Some days I think all I have to do as a teacher is just get out of the way. Shine enough light into the darkness that kids can see their own brilliance. Or maybe tell enough truth about the world that students can see the darkness, and that’s when they discover their own inner light.

I’ve been struggling with this pervasive sense – on social media, in the mainstream media, in pop culture, in everyday discussions – that our country is at war with itself. Trump’s election win seems to be the culmination of a host of unsettling, depressing trends that have stoked fear, anger and anxiety. Those trends include (but are certainly not limited to):

-Hyperpolarization fueled by filtered news feeds and the rise of fake news

-Increasingly antagonistic partisan politics and the collapse of bipartisan political efforts (which fuels a collapse in our collective faith in the effectiveness of government institutions)

-Identity politics that sow divisiveness and reject unity / identity politics that raise issues Americans aren’t ready or willing to accept as reality and honestly discuss (the perception of that issue pretty much breaks down along party lines)

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Politics in the Classroom

The first presidential election that I remember is Bush vs. Gore, and to this day I’m impressed that we got all the way through that year of civics without anyone being able to discover what party our eighth grade teacher supported.

Looking back on it, I think it’s quite possible that she truly was a moderate, and that made it easy for her to stay neutral. I remember how horrified she was by how polarized our class was and how much energy she put into making us think about the election issue by issue instead of relying on the party line.

In 2012, I pulled off the same trick. I had half my journalism class convinced I was voting for Romney simply because I made them analyze both candidate’s platforms.

This year, I found it impossible to stick to that line. I told all my students that I wanted them to feel free to express whatever political opinion they held. I encouraged them to play devil’s advocate. I also told them I simply couldn’t stay neutral – not in the face of a candidate who was willing to throw away all the rules.

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Dear Michelle Obama

You said, “When they go low, we go high.”

I’ve been trying.

It’s just really hard for me to stay neutral in this election.

I could teach an entire class on understatement with just that sentence.

This year, the politics are personal.

I can’t listen to a presidential candidate call for a ban on all Muslims, knowing I went to Prom with a Muslim from Pakistan.

I can’t listen to a candidate call Mexicans rapists, knowing all the times my students have been ecstatic to go home to visit Mexico.

I can’t listen to a candidate call immigrants criminals, knowing how many times I’ve seen a student break down because they can’t afford college without papers.

I can’t listen to a candidate call sexual assault “locker room talk,” when I know 1 in 4 college-age women in this country have been sexually assaulted. I teach high school. Sometimes I can hear that clock ticking. Sometimes it feels like a bomb is about to go off.

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