A Childhood In School
I’ve spent more time in pre-highschool schools than most people in the US. I started school at age 3 with a Christian pre-school Ddo they call this pre-pre now? There was a joke in the TV show Archer about “pre-pre”. It sounds like pee-pee. They should not call it that.). The next year, another pre-school. Then at age 5, I started public school kindergarten in the same school I would remain for grades 1 through 6 (my school district had a junior high school, not middle school, that covered grades 7, 8, and 9, and then high school for grades 10, 11, and 12.) By age 12, I had been in school for 9 years.
But that was only my own school. A large part of my non-school time was still spent in school, just not mine. My mother taught 2nd grade in a different school district and my dad was either at home drunk or high or not at home because he was in rehab. So it was a gamble to leave me at home alone or with him. I was chronically ill by 1st grade, and it was hard enough for my mother to cope with calling in substitutes every time she needed to deal with my shit. So any time I was healthy enough to sit in the corner of a room, any day my school was closed and my mom had work, I went to work with her.
I tagged along on trips to the school supply store every August when my mom would buy all the supplies she could afford, because even 30 years ago teachers were paying for their student’s education out of pocket. I would be there for the long parent-teacher nights, I would help decorate for their art shows, I would clean chalkboards. I would entertain and watch classes while teachers needed to step out, I ran errands, corrected tests and homework, and sometimes when the school was empty I could take a rolling chair and ride it down the halls.
None of the other teachers ever brought their kids to school, at least not often enough that I would ever see them or notice them. Even other kids I knew whose mothers were teachers, their experience was not mine and they had very little insight into what their mother’s work entailed. Other teachers generally had child care, responsible spouses, or at least a kid that wasn’t sick. They weren’t attached to their mother by circumstances the way I was.
As an only child being kept at your mother’s side at all times, a lot of my memories are of being in rooms with older women. Most of her social connections were with teachers, and anywhere she went, I went. I was often relegated to sitting somewhere with toys or a book if not actively “helping” with whatever was going on. I had friends my age, but looking back I can recognize that these were strategic friends my mother had arranged because their mothers were safe people to send me off to for a weekend or longer when shit got extra scary at home.
I don’t know how much this put a strain on her working situation with her principal or other teachers, I was too young and too preoccupied with being sick and abused that my mother’s stress didn’t start to effect me until my mother could barely get to work in the mornings because of me. I can only imagine she had to have a fairly good relationship with her boss and other staff to allow me to tag along everywhere for years.
An Adolescence Out Of School
As I got older, things got worse. I was missing weeks at a time from school from chronic bronchitis/pneumonia, but at the times when I was healthy enough to go (which was ridiculous, because everyone sent their kids to school sick, so I would just get sick immediately again because my immune system was fucked) I had developed horrific anxiety about going to school at all. I would break down and refuse to get out of the car when my mom pulled up to the front doors of my junior high.
Of course, in hindsight, being constantly behind in school work and absent made me somewhat of a spectacle when I did show up for class along with being alienated from my classmates because of my constant illness and the lack of empathy/sympathy from my teachers was of course going to be a problem.
And so, as the situation became untenable, my mother found solutions (with the super powers of being a public school teacher herself, and being white). She began to argue with my school district and demanded that they homeschool me. I had doctor’s letters to back it up (doctors paid for by my mother’s health insurance, from being a teacher). And so, due to the obligation to educate me and accommodate my health, the school district had to send tutors to my house multiple times a week because this was olden times and our computers didn’t do video chat.
My mother died a year before Columbine happened in the parking lot of her elementary school (not from gun violence). She only had hints about what was coming for her profession by then and never had to run a shooter drill. But she did know that more options than “religious extremist homeschooling” and “in-person failing public school system” were needed. That false binary option has never done us good. (Yes, there’s private schools, but I’m not here to talk about rich people options.)
Opinions In Adulthood
It’s now 2022 in the US, and public schools are riddled with plague and gun violence. And I cannot imagine my mother working in those conditions, let alone allowing me to be vulnerable to those dangers. She fought for me to get an education without compromising my health. She proudly went on strike with her union. She hated guns.
Would she have gone in-person to work knowing she could bring home a virus that could kill me? I don’t think she would have. Would she have wanted me to be in a school during a plague of gun violence across the country in a place where people had confederate flags and guns in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot and healthy KKK membership numbers? Of course not. Would she want to risk being murdered in school, leaving me alone with my abusive father? Emphatically no. (But then my mother did die at her school only a couple years after securing my homeschool situation, leaving me alone with my abusive father. It just wasn’t a gun that killed her.)
Right now, today (okay not today probably, it’s Saturday, but still), millions of people are sending their children to disease-ridden death traps as though it’s fine and normal, and that scares the shit out of me. However, I don’t have children, and I don’t even live in the US anymore. I am one anecdote, one experience of the dirty parts of public school teaching (and I didn’t actually talk about the scary stuff). So it isn’t like I’m entitled to some sort of superior opinion on the safety of US schools. And on top of it, who am I to claim that my mother would have done whatever she could to keep me safe, when she refused to leave my abusive father for her entire life and left me under his control after she dropped dead in her school’s parking lot? We’ve all got our own personal boiling pots. It’s boiling pots all the way down.
If I were to say that I would never send my child to school during a plague or with the chance of a school shooting no matter my situation, it would sound silly because I can’t possibly know that. I still believe it, but I can’t claim it as some sort of inevitability based on my character or beliefs.
Answers
But I do know how awful teachers have be treated the past 40 years, and I know the reasons why. We have seen the dismantling of the public school system happen in real time for our whole lives (if you’ve been looking that way), and the reason is because it was never very safe to begin with. Everything in the US was built in pots on a stove that was already hot. Education. Women’s rights. Workers rights. Public health. Gun safety. Climate. All the pots are boiling all the frogs at the same time.
The answer to a million problems is a million answers. It’s millions of options for one answer. It’s millions of possibilities for millions of options. Some of the individual answers are “get out of the pot”. But it’s also one answer, and that answer is “not fascism”. Fascism is what is boiling the pot, and you need to put out that flame. And then maybe replace your fascism-spewing gas stove with a safer, socialist electric one.
I don’t know why I insisted on sticking with the frogs in pots analogy. It’s imperfect and I was just wanting to get some thoughts about school and people’s seemingly bizarre behaviour of putting their children in danger by sending them to school. But for some reason the lyric “despite all my rage, I am still just a frog in a pot” formed in my head and it was severely funny to me.
Please don’t boil frogs.
