They resigned. But we all know what happened.
They were unceremoniously fired. They faced a firewall of criticism and accusations.
If a "small group (three)" middle school teachers in Sun Prairie would have had a contract, if they would have had union protection, they still might be teaching today. Oh, chastised, I suppose, about a lesson that they got off a site that teachers use to do more creative teaching, created by other teachers--and what, may I ask, is wrong with that?--and perhaps a warning, maybe even a freezing of a "step" on their salary scale.
But not fired. Not shown the door.
There was no review of any good teaching that any of them did, no attempt to balance this 'offense' against good reviews posted by their superiors. No mitigating information considered, in other words. No attempt to blend that lesson into the overall curricula. Nope. Guilty: Gone at the drop of a hat.
No UniServ Director, no other union rep, can do a thing about it. Their legs have been cut off early on. Oh, they can complain and make public statements, but it's all done in an echo chamber now.
Republicans love it: You can now get rid of teachers if any parents complain, right on the spot, the very thing they were always whining about, along with administrators who didn't want to put in the work of determining who could survive the three-year probation period that nearly all local contracts offered, work that could bear great fruit down the line. Teaching descended to a common blue-collar job with the advent of Act 10, with the dissolution of agreed contracts which established due process for the determination of punishments or firings.
If liberals love it, too, immersed as many are in the cancel culture, they might pause to think again. For, handled well, there might be plenty of good things in the presentation which cost three teachers their jobs.
The lesson was, ostensibly, determining what punishment slaves might undergo--and what students might assign--if they lived under the Hammurabi Code, created more than 3700 years ago and named for the king who enforced it. If you haven't heard of this, it's one of the first collection of written laws ever recorded and preserved. Some of the laws were relevant today; they were, in any event, attempts to equalize a punishment with the offense, a forerunner of our Eighth Amendment against "cruel and unusual punishments."
Not that it made everyone equal under the law. Just the opposite, in fact. And maybe that's what the teachers were trying to point out (giving them the benefit of the doubt). The History Channel's webpage, for instance, notes that, under the Code, the charge for curing a severe wound was ten shekels for a 'gentleman,' five for a 'freedman,' and two for a slave.
Fair? Well, the charge was clearly scaled for the anticipated ability to pay. And what's wrong with that? Ever hear of Medicare?
On the other hand, the price of malpractice didn't seem fair: If a doctor killed a rich patient, his hands were cut off; if it was a slave, he merely paid restitution to the owner. It's a sad comment on the diminishing value of human life based on social status. That, as we know, extended far into the future and the terror of slavery reached our shores for two and a half centuries.
What a great foundation for a discussion, though. Who were these people, that they agreed to live under this code, that tried to be fair but in the end could not, or perhaps preferred not to, deal with the unfairness of slavery?
Hmmmm. "All men are created equal." Remember where that appears? Remember who wrote it? Remember that he owned slaves and tried to reconcile it with a statement about it--which was shot down by other members of the group which signed it? Remember that we lived under a government that permitted it right from the start? Isn't that worth mentioning?
And let's back up a minute. If the teachers' core subject was world history, they owed it to the kids to stay within that realm. The New York Times' "1619 Project," which could have provided lots of factual information and emotional importance to American slavery, was off-limits in terms of scope and content. The teachers reached out to other teachers and tried to be creative with what they had to work with.
So should they have just skipped an in-depth discussion of what it meant to be a slave thirty-seven hundred years ago, and just stressed the horrible parts of it? Does any admission that, at one or two points, a slave actually got a break mean necessarily that the teachers were advertising slavery as a good thing, as a lifestyle advantage, or just a point of irony? To the more cogent point, was the presentation racist, which is obviously what someone assumed?
Am I a racist for saying so? I don't think you'd conclude that if you've read any other blogs I've put out there. We all have work to do, to be sure; racism can be seen on a spectrum. But I sincerely doubt that racism was any part of what those teachers meant to teach kids. If it was, they deserve a strong scolding and new training. Maybe they were just relatively clueless.
Look, I wasn't there and have no concept of the context of the moment. But that's the point. I assure you that the people who are raising the stink about this may easily have taken it out of context, too. Nothing in the lesson sounds egregious on its face. And nothing, hopefully, that was taught was inaccurate. History isn't a bunch of safe, antiseptic, nice things: It's often bad news for someone. And information that may be ethically challenging or unclear. On the other hand, you can mold new realities with chosen facts: Just look at Fox News.
This, of course, would have been aired at some kind of hearing that had a contract as its basis. But there is none. There are just "conditions of employment," including catch-alls that allow administrators to release people who have done things which may be the least bit controversial.
The higher-ups own it. The teachers don't. They have no input. That's the impact of Act 10. School districts don't have to listen to teachers anymore, even though they're experts in their chosen fields. They have a college education. So what? They're just working slugs now.
Who else does this hurt? It hurts every social studies teacher, and perhaps every other teacher, in the district. It means that stepping outside of the textbook to take some chances and expand students' minds will be strongly self-restricted--which is to say, for many it won't be tried at all. Why bother? They'd be on the street the next day, maybe after the next irate phone call. Why have to look over one's shoulder?
The kids lose, too. They lose the joy of teaching, the creativity of ideas expanding in the moment, exactly the thing that I enjoyed about teaching: my own moments of 'aha.' Kids feed off that excitement. They remember days like that.
Better still, they take them home and tell their parents. I wonder if, in excitement, some student did and opened a can of worms they didn't even know was there.
Nearly twenty years ago, No Child Left Behind took much of the meaningful spontaneity of teaching away with its demand of textual adherence to buttress test scores; the rest is left to unvetted paranoia like this. An investigation, supported by contract, might have ameliorated the situation and placed it into proper context.
The Hammurabi Code was, literally, carved into stone in the 18th Century BCE, and Hammurabi's name is carved into the facing of the south wall of the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing room, to demonstrate how vital at least the form of the writings were. I've personally seen it. Slowly, inexorably, Act 10, now ten years old, is being carved into the same legal stone. Educators not only suffer in Wisconsin because of it; education does, too.
Be well, Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment