For Real

I had to double back to take a look at the story of a fifth grade teacher in Virginia who resigned from her job at a school board meeting. First of all, she gets and A plus for theatrics. Making a show of her departure sends the message that she really wants us all to know why she left her position with the Loudon County Public Schools. "Within the last year, I was in one of my so-called equity trainings that White, Christian, able-bodied females currently have the power in our schools and ‘this has to change.'" The tip-off here is the "so-called" in front of equity. Laura Morris feels that her voice is being silenced and her opposition to the weird and elusive Critical Race Theory curriculum is being quashed by her superiors. "Clearly, you've made your point. You no longer value me or many other teachers you've employed in this county. So since my contract outlines the power that you have over my employment in Loudoun County Public Schools, I thought it necessary to resign in front of you," she went on, beginning to tear up. "I quit your policies, I quit your training, and I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas to our most vulnerable constituents – children."

Hey Laura, in all the time you spent in teacher school or even before that, did you ever run across the phrase, "History is written by the victors?" Many people attribute this quote to Winston Churchill, but that may be because he is a white male who happened to be on the winning side of a war. Time seems to have paved over the originator of that aphorism, but it has been the happy refrain of the parties in power for a very long time. So, instead of being terrified by the suggestion that we have to settle all accounts at once by indoctrinating our children with ideas like slavery was bad and entire cultures and races have been oppressed or wiped out by White Christians, maybe we can try another CRT: Culturally Responsive Teaching. The lens that we encourage our kids to peer through to see the world in which they live has been smeared with Vaseline for far too long. It's about time that we stopped painting Christopher Columbus as a brave explorer and start seeing him as the greedy merchant whose faulty navigational senses brought him to a country that was already in progress. Much in the same way that Puritans landed on a rock they decided to call Plymouth because they couldn't pronounce the Wampanoag word for it. And when things got tough out there on the new frontier, we brought people from other lands to do the dirty work of forging a new nation. The founding fathers had some great ideas, but they didn't do a lot of the heavy lifting. 

So, dry those tears and decide if you want to be a teacher. For real. Or is it more important to be a White Christian able-bodied female?