It was almost too dark to see this morning near Lowell when a group of teachers were setting up a canopy to protect against the rain that had just started falling. I overheard a dispute about how the canopy’s legs should be arranged and the best angles to use.
Somebody called out, “Could we get a physicist over here, please?”
I had to smile. I love my colleagues.
But the disrespect we United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) teachers have faced over the last five years has reached epic proportions. It reminds me of an old Yiddish story I used to hear as a child:
For more than 20 years, Mendel the tailor said nothing as his neighbor dumped his garbage every night at the front door to Mendel’s shop. “Oh well. What can I do?” Every morning, Mendel just shrugged. “He’s a difficult person.”
Finally, one morning, Mendel swept all the garbage back onto the neighbor’s stoop with a note: “You dropped something.”
The neighbor stomped over to Mendel’s shop, his face twisted with rage. “You have a lot of chutzpah! After all these years, now you complain?”
Mendel looked up from his sewing. “After all these years, I finally realized — a shlemiel I might be, but I don’t have to be a doormat.”
After that, the neighbor never dumped his garbage there again.
As Mendel’s rabbi later summed it up: “Better to be called difficult for a day than a fool for a lifetime.”
By the time Monday rolled around, I had simply stopped talking to certain community members about the strike. They kept insisting that “now is not the time.” Really? Could we get a little understanding over here?
I mean, how hard should it be to get sympathy when you haven’t been paid correctly in five years? What if I were a software engineer or a nurse, instead of an educator? What if I were a venture capitalist or an attorney? Would you have any sympathy for us then? Why is everyone so terrified to admit that SFUSD’s systems are still broken and we’re still being harmed? Some community members want to avoid our reality by telling us, this is not the time to address that. Seriously? When the system is broken, isn’t that the correct time to focus on fixing it?
Once it started becoming clear that some special education families were winning big multiyear settlements against SFUSD because the district had failed to account wisely for and staff our colleagues’ workloads in accordance with what’s reasonable, wasn’t that a good time to put a stake in the ground and move toward change? When we found ourselves having to hire so many contractors at twice the cost of district employees because so few prospects wanted to work for the rate we were willing to pay, wasn’t that a good time to focus on improving our system? How bad do things need to become before it will be “the appropriate time” to fix problems that are bleeding our systems dry?
It’s all those greedy teachers’ faults,” the world seems to respond. “If they would just shut up and accept indentured servitude for three more years like we keep telling them to do, none of this would have happened.
Some community members want to avoid our reality by telling us this is not the time. How bad do things need to become before it will be “the appropriate time” to fix problems that are bleeding our systems dry?
Has it always been this dysfunctional? I found myself wondering.
Meanwhile over at our Day 3 picket this morning, neighbors and families dropped off coffee and pastries and encouragement even before the sun had come up. Students and parents showed up to walk the line with us, marching and chanting in plastic ponchos in the gloomy rain.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) showed up too — parasites that they are — and after walking a couple of laps, they started trying to break our line by recruiting students to their own events, asking if they’d ever considered a life as anarchic communists. California Teachers Association came over and shut them down so hard and so fast there weren’t even stains left on the sidewalk.
I found myself thinking, Seriously — even the socialist maniacs think we teachers are such wusses they can just pick off our students right under our noses? No, thank you.
And other people are telling us UESF teachers what they really think of us.
On Monday night, the district revealed that they hadn’t actually met with the San Francisco Health Service System yet to start their research on the costs of the health and welfare items being bargained.
Excuse me?
Our volunteer bargaining team has been researching and writing proposals and counterproposals for more than 10 months in the minutes and millimeters between teaching classes and raising their families, expecting that their district counterparts were doing the same.
Turns out, the district team hadn’t been doing their homework.
Oops.
Every teacher in America knows this moment of recognition. And every teacher in America recognizes the misdirection of blaming that tends to come along with getting caught.
Truthfully — this is getting old.
But our striking is on a roll. Teachers are masters of getting better at things little by little. Over the last three days, we’ve been refining and improving our striking systems.
I looked out at my colleagues as we were marching and chanting in front of the school and I marveled, even as some snarky voices on social media continued to ask in their most sneering tones what our outcomes are.
You must be kidding, right?
Here at Lowell, how about the largest number of acceptances to the U.C. system year after year — more than any other school in California? How about three Nobel Prize winners? You want more than that? Too bad. We’ve got work to do. We’re too busy educating the students who are going to win our fourth. We don’t have time to argue with you.
But we’re done with your pretense of caring.
SFUSD students value their schools and their teachers because we’re doing everything we can to give them everything we’ve got, all day, every day, every school.
And as every teacher across space and time can tell you, school of any kind is a miracle in a crisis. So we’ll keep working on improving outcomes in our classrooms … but what will the district do to fix its broken systems?
The antidote to disrespect is not self-abnegation — it’s self-respect. Hey, SFUSD. Call us when you’ve completed your homework.
And speaking of disrespect, what did SFUSD offer to families of students when we withheld our labor?
That’s right. Busywork packets. And a contract for completion.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to do that to families and then try to blame teachers while showing up at bargaining without having done your homework.
We teachers are finally responding to disrespect in whole, bounded, and integral ways. We are not accepting nonsense any more. We are engaging together in acts of radical self-respect.
And we are watching to see what happens next.