More Coffee, Please

If I knew what the movie was, figuring out my part would be much easier.

Yesterday’s vote to not approve the budget or the contract has today left me wondering where to go from here. I am pulled so many ways, not sure who or what to be in a situation that I no longer believe I understand.

In a margin only slightly greater than last year, we’re again faced with the prospect of cutting funding in a system which has already been running on empty, and trying to once again make do with nothing. I’m astonished by this, astonished there are people who honestly believe that the contract proposed was too much, that it didn’t offer a deal to the taxpayers. I’m horrified there are people who could think that, let alone publicly state it or vote for it.

It seems to be our populace.

So I wonder—what is this story we’re playing out? What are we doing? What is going on here?¹

2 Maccabees 7:18 says, “Do not deceive yourself in vain. For we are suffering these things on our own account, because of our sins against our own God.” Perhaps this is true of every teacher in the distract. Perhaps we have offended, by not offering the education our students should have, by not teaching them in the best possible way, so that their mothers and fathers, cousins, uncles, grandparents—every community member—would be proud.

Teachers serve a higher calling, serve the cause of education, and maybe we haven’t done enough. I went to MRHS for a conference Tuesday, and was astonished by the numbers of teachers who said they wanted a block schedule in the high school, who wanted an advisory period, who wanted an end to a confrontational, factory-style treatment of children, who wanted anything but what is now present.

Yet, despite those voices, despite being the home of a school New Hampshire is modeling state law on, nothing like it has occurred elsewhere in the district. Have we failed to live up to what we really believe in? And with that failure, have we become hollow, not possessing the integrity needed to demand that the community support their children as much as the school system does?

If we have, then I know the story. When a system becomes antithetical to the beliefs of the people in it, then there’s a revolution. Is this France before the Revolution? Tsarist Russia at the end of three years of brutal struggle which ultimately gained nothing? Weimar Germany in 1933?

It may be, and it may be time to demand a revolution, to demand that something change, something be done. That way lies change, and that way lies new things—but also led to Bonaparte, Stalin, and Hitler long before it led to liberty, fraternity, equality or an America triumphant at the end of a long, cold, and expensive war.

There are probably a great many who would not be happy at considering this scenario. I throw it out there before I reject it. There may be truth there, it may be one reason—but it is not the cause. Those things which are most in the way that things should go—notably MC²—are the things most heavily reviled by opponents of the school system. It seems innovation and change is the largest terror for the district, and that is a tragedy.

For my part, I don’t know of any individual who knows how to do more, not one teacher who isn’t lost, who can comprehend what’s going on. Today we’re all walking wounded—shocked that this could happen. How can anyone work so hard, be so selfless, and still be punished?

Perhaps this is The Lost Battalion, the famous unit from WWI which survived so much. Cut off and surrounded for six days by the German army, the battalion survived constant attacks, mounting casualties, and brutal weather until it was eventually rescued by other units of the Allied army.

Every soldier in the battalion gave credit to Major Whittlesey for his determination, for his refusal to surrender. Only 194 men walked out of over five hundred—casualties far beyond the point where morale usually collapses.

So maybe this is time to dig in, to grit the teeth, to place one foot in front of the other. It can be done. The question is whether it’s worth it.

Many people remember the story of Major Whittlesey. What many people don’t remember is, after the war, he committed suicide.

Perhaps it’s just tough times. Maybe it means nothing at all—just a reflection of rising fuel prices, fears of economic problems, something bigger than any of us. Maybe it’s Of Mice and Men—small people crushed by something beyond them, something they had no control over, the cruelty of apathy and people who didn’t understand what was in front of them.

If so, the question is whether teachers wish to be the wounded, hurting, half-humans who stagger away from the dream, or the lumbering giants who take a bullet in the back of the skull.

Right now, I already feel like I’ve been shot in the back—and the reason is simple. Everything the Monadnock Taxpayers Association asked for they got—and nothing the budget committee or school board recommended went through. I think that means one thing:

The people of the district trust a private anti-tax group more than they do the officials they elect to represent them.

Today is not the best day for reflection. Still, I have tried to be objective, to look at things calmly. I opened with a thought from the Bible, and it seems only too appropriate to close with one—something I think a disturbing number of teachers will be thinking this year.

Mathew 10:14 “Whoever does not receive you, nor heed your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet. Truly I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.”

1 More selfishly, I wonder what am I to do. What does a man do when he can’t afford a home on his salary, when he and his wife can’t have a child in the town he works in? What story is this, and where do we go from here? ↺

Gregarious

Share This