I’m working out problems of conscience here. Hannah Arendt wrote about the cultural/moral climate in Nazi Germany, and I’ve been reading her work. It helps to understand that maybe these dilemmas aren’t new. It’s discouraging, too, but maybe this is an opportunity for some old-fashioned resistance. Thank you for your encouragement.

I’m writing. Also thinking of drawing. I have a hard thing to write this weekend-i’ll get it to you just by way of a hello…i just read about your classroom via appropriateness…spent all day harranging and wanted to simply say to myself “step back” I sounded ridiculous but I feel a lot of pressure at the site..

I’m really enjoying your blog. You write so well. Your kids are lucky to have you.

Let’s form a place where leading is listening and control is the least of it where enabling another feels better than bowing for our performance, no?

Sarah

Maybe there’s another venue besides the classroom for some of us when the school doors close. I’ve been thinking about alternatives.

But with the passage of NCLB and the privitazation and destruction of schools in areas of poverty called “improvement” I finally met insanity in its working garb. Here now they began friendly fire on the troops on the front lines and now teacher is target , and I’m afraid we are going down by our own. Sacrificed in order to radically alter in a new and very fundamentally undemocratic and dangerous way any notion of education in any form for those who lack affluence.I sort of see it as taking Carl Rogers and essentially sucker punching him to the floor and holding the place hostage. Now I cannot talk to you or others about these “change” or “transformative” things in terms of my praxis-I’m hamstrung into scripts that won’t /don’t work by those either following orders or making fantasic salaries and commision fees in the “restructure”. I am witnessing the poor getting treated to something like a public looting. Here reading “1984″ really is instructive. And now I realize the truth . It is in the interest of capitalistic greed and political facilitation the young really are valueless, and eaten.
If at the core of any “change”, anything you do, if a central construct is not doing good work and doing it with an eye to preserve the best of what you do and to build healthier ways to do whatever you do and key examination of our constructs, if we cannot at the end of the day think of this ed system as a way to help those who need it most, if monies are used to construct methods to loot the children of the public funds, well….I’m not able to work anymore to construct meaning in any way. It’s over for me, really. I’m in a fascist state. And don’t kid yourself about where that might go. Try to get medical care to your loved one in the present medical climate on a rare condition and see thought to having good medical systems once privitazation has done it’s work-America can’t even take care of its children…..in terms of health.

And I long for times when I felt I had an internal dialog with myself about methodologies and praxis, what changes, what works(and by way of that many things in many constructs). Now I’m an automaton. We in the settings where the might NCLB is destroying hope and futures. We need advocates, avocacy, rights to think, be heard, to come to the table with issues like how to educate 2nd language poor children who Lou Dobbs wants to point to the Border. We need to connect and explain what awful curriculum design we are forced to deal with, how poorly it fits our kids and we need help to develop our thinking and voice. Because we are literally drowning in a sea of political, legislated destruction of dream…..and the biggest heartache is knowing that as long as someone else gets theres , for their own child, then that’s okay…watching that define education though these times is unbelievably difficult.