Snapshots from the First Day of School

I begin my first day of fiftieth grade working at home, prepping tomorrow night’s seminar. New this year is historian Catherine J. Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness, which I have slipped into the syllabus sight unseen. When we talk about teaching, my graduate students will consider Denial’s suggestion that teaching begin with kindness, toward ourselves and our students.

When I am on campus, printing out the class list, news of the killings at Apalachee High School comes across my newsfeed. I gird myself, pray about the body count, turn my mind sideways, do the mental calisthenics I learned somewhere between Sandy Hook and Parkland. I carry my books and papers and welcome the undergraduates to class.

I begin with my values. I tell my students I know they are people first. They have complicated lives that will sometimes get in the way of their ability to do the work we are meant to do together. I value their physical and mental health. Last fall a student told me no professor had ever offered that message before. I tell them teaching is a sacred trust.

I assure the students that the deadlines are soft. We will have ungrading instead of rubrics and graded assessments. When they do the work in good faith, I will give them the same engaged feedback I give my colleagues. They will not lose points for lateness or misplaced apostrophes or less than fully-formed ideas. Learning to please their own standards outweighs the anxiety of trying to meet mine, still unknown to them. I also ask them for their grace. I am a caregiver for a relative in hospice. Soon I may need them to forgive my distraction and absence. I too am a person with a complicated life.

The class meeting is full of laughter, with more instantaneous connection, engagement, and pleasure than I have ever experienced on the first day of school. The students are genuinely enjoying themselves. They are also giddy with relief. They may have come to class knowing about the news from Georgia, done their own psychological gymnastics. They are mostly no older than Columbine. They have grown up in the shadow of school shootings and the heat of a warming planet. They have chosen higher education despite it all. My classroom will provide a little respite from the grief.

After dinner I deal with my high school senior’s back-to-school paperwork. I read and sign a syllabus. It is fierce and adversarial. It admonishes and threatens. It tells students they must do the reading, come to class fully prepared, not hide in the nurse’s office during a test, write an extra test if they miss the AP exam next spring. It looks like the kind of syllabus that many of us wrote before the pandemic. But at least my child came home today.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel defeated in this vocation. Educators feel ourselves so thoroughly devalued. Policies set us at odds with our students: following the curriculum is more important than learning, judging our students is more important than loving them. Our schools have been stripped of funding. We show up for the first day of school knowing that somewhere in the country, dozens of our colleagues and students will be murdered at work this year. Perhaps in ours. In school, the Second Amendment outweighs our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I no longer hope that we will renounce the madness of the guns. The worst has already happened, over and over again, and nothing has changed. Kindness is not the kind of structural transformation that can counteract the consequences of bullying, abuse, illness, and rage. It is a pedagogical strategy, or perhaps a tactic. It is not enough. But it is something that I can bring to my teaching, to how I work with students and how I set up my classes.

After I walk the dog in the dark, I have a free hour to write. I contemplate the metaphors of conflict built into my vocabulary: snapshots, gird, deadlines, defeated, strategy, tactic. I consider whether to free my language of their taint or to keep them, markers of how hard it is even to speak peacefully.

Earlier this week, another teacher reminded me that in the long run students will forget the content of my class, but they will remember how I made them feel. I am not so naïve as to think a million teachers infusing our courses with kindness will be enough to stop school shootings. But as I peer over the rim of my own despair, I wonder whether being kind might be enough to give pause to the shooter who walks through my hallway. He might point his gun downward as he passes our classroom door, away from my beloved, laughing students, full of the joy of learning.

2016 is not 1968. But they are relatives.

During my first year of doctoral study in history, one of my assignments was to read a month’s worth of newspaper coverage from any year in history. As a student of postwar America, I picked the stretch of time (really two months) between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the spring of 1968.

            It was indeed a tumultuous year. At the end of February, the Kerner Commission issued its report on the riots that had rocked American cities in the summer of 1967. Its most famous line, that America was becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” offered little hope that things would get better. The Democrats were split by the war in Vietnam. In late March, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. Less than a week later, Rev. King was murdered in Memphis, sparking mourning marches that transmogrified into arson-fueled riots as terrible as those the Kerner Commission documented. Robert Kennedy, running for president on an anti-poverty message and invocation of his slain brother’s legacy, was killed just after winning the California primary election. At the Democrats’ convention in late August, political shenanigans reigned inside Chicago’s International Amphitheater while members of the Chicago Police Department beat up protestors on television images that “the whole world [wa]s watching.” The United States seemed fully destabilized.

            With increasing frequency in the past week, I have heard comparisons between the summer of 2016 and the summer of 1968. Two primary factors seem to be driving that comparison: the political stalemate over the deaths of black and brown civilians from guns wielded by police and the mass shooter in Orlando, and the unprecedented presidential campaigns, especially that of Donald Trump. Additionally, the combination of Trump’s mercurial politics and the unfilled Supreme Court seat of Justice Antonin Scalia quietly hint that a constitutional crisis might unfold sometime between August and January, 2017. Finally, the backdrops of the Syrian civil war, multi-national terrorism credited to ISIS, and the echoes of Brexit across the Atlantic keep Americans unsettled about the virtues of entanglements abroad. While some cultural sea changes—most notably the national institutionalization of gay marriage—have occurred with fewer ripples than might have been expected, 2016 is also a strange and uncertain time.

            But the comparison between 1968 and 2016 goes only so far. Forty-eight years on, while they invoke similar feelings of public and personal anxiety, some significant differences reign.

            In 1968, African American public protest took on broad range of issues. Despite the legal gains of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the dismantling of segregation promised by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education rulings a decade earlier was incomplete. African Americans remained locked out of many employment and housing markets and even nominal school desegregation was bitterly contested. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement targets one issue: the deaths of blacks at the hands of police, asking only “Stop killing us.”

            In the 1960s, black public protest took two forms beyond the court system: demonstrations and civil disturbances. The frequency with which protest marches occurred simultaneously with riots confused white observers, who had trouble discerning the differences and roundly condemned public activism as unseemly. Catholic nuns and priests who marched for civil rights received angry letters condemning their political expressions as inappropriate. President Johnson, presented with a proposal for “Demonstration Cities,” insisted that it be renamed “Model Cities.” Riots were such common occurrences in the “long, hot summers” of the mid-1960s that both civil rights and government organizations developed plans for how to respond to them. In 2016, marches protest police shootings of black civilians have been tense but largely peaceful—until the murders of police officers in Dallas by a rogue shooter who was not part of the demonstration. Because of the easy availability of weapons, an angry person who agrees with protesters’ critiques but disagrees with their tactics does not need a mob to wreak havoc.

            That same easy availability of semiautomatic weapons—put to traumatic use in recent years in public places including malls, schools and universities, workplaces, grocery stores, houses of worship, military bases, community centers, and an Orlando nightclub—has put all Americans on guard in a way that they were not in 1968. Although there were from time to time mass murders in the American past—including those committed by the 1966 sniper on the University of Texas campus—the term “going postal” did not signal a cultural phenomenon until the 1990s. Although homicides by gun have actually decreased markedly since the peak period of the 1970s to the 1990s, adults understand that they are implicitly taking a risk when they go out in public. Nonetheless, the New York Times pointed out recently, the vast majority of mass shootings take place in the country’s poorest neighborhoods.

            Even segregation is different in 2016 than it was in 1968. In the 1960s, protest of residential segregation focused on black access to white neighborhoods. Racial steering by real estate dealers, blockbusting, and the dual housing market meant that few white Americans lived near African Americans. Although racial discrimination and exploitative real estate practices still exist in the US, blacks did get legal and financial access to formerly all-white neighborhoods. Many American public schools are somewhat integrated. What hypersegregation means in the 21^st century is that many African Americans do not have white neighbors or classmates.

It was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision invalidated state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. In the twenty-first century, although it is not necessarily evident to African Americans who still live in all-black neighborhoods, many more white Americans have deep personal connections to people of color. This week, responding to police shootings, two of my Facebook friends shared a meme reading “I can’t keep calm, I have a black son.” One is a white woman married to a black man; another is herself a biracial mother. The dangers felt by blacks who are stopped by police might well be resonating in your mostly-white family.

            In short, in 2016 we are not as separate as we were in 1968. But we surely still are unequal. 2016 is 1968’s grandchild, softer in some ways but harder in others.

Lessons in the Wake of Mass Murder

As the clerk rang up my peanut butter, bread, and cherries, I glanced over my shoulder and could not miss the bright orange turban. A tall young man in the self-check lane, chatting lightly with a young white woman. Although I went to public school in polyglot Northern Virginia with many Sikhs, learned in Sunday School that Sikhism is one of the great world religions, and have a few Sikh colleagues, until this month I knew little about them or their faith.

The glimpse of the orange turban reminded me of some of the things I have learned since the shootings at the gurdwara in Oak Creek: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbor, intimacy.

A photograph of a former mayor of Oak Creek, sobbing, seeking comfort in her husband’s stoic shoulder. Her feelings were my feelings, etched more sharply: grief.

From a letter to the editor, I learned that visitors to the Golden Temple in the Punjab can stay as guests for several days, asked only if they like what they are seeing, not to pay for the privilege: hospitality.

From several news stories, an opinion piece, from comments made at the memorial service held on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, I learned that you can enter a gurdwara at any time, through a door from each of the cardinal directions. If you go on Sunday, or perhaps in the middle of the week, you will be offered food. Worship and nourishment: sanctuary.

As I loaded my daughter into our car, the young man with the turban and the white woman walked to their car, parked next to mine. She was wearing denim cutoffs. He was holding a bright blue package of Oreos. He seemed so carefree at the moment; I did not want to remind him of what had happened, just because I was thinking of it at that moment. I looked away.

In Colorado, you cannot tell by looking at a stranger that they might have been at the movie theater, or infer that they know someone who was there. Here in Milwaukee, though, our survivors, our male survivors anyway, are marked. Their dress reveals their faith. The liberal in me rebels against allowing myself to assume anything about someone based on their appearance. Did I look away to spare his feelings, or my own? Doubt.

Yet the murders in Oak Creek felt different to me from the ones in Aurora a few weeks ago, as awful as they felt. Daily, I pass among people for whom Oak Creek is home. I remember after 9/11 disbelieving a New Yorker who angrily insisted that if you were not there, you could not feel what they had felt. But now I feel what proximity brings. Not just our own grief, but inescapable, forceful reminders of what those among us might be feeling as we greet them. Neighbors.

I looked him in the eye. “How are you doing?” I asked. Not a nod, a hollow “how are you?” but “How are you doing?” He answered, not quite lightly, “I’m doing all right.” I knew he meant, “As well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

Intimacy.

Lessons in the wake of mass murder: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbors, intimacy.