Principled Bullies

At the end of this seemingly endless week (perhaps it just seems linger because I've spent so little of it sleeping), what I most treasure are people of principle. And I'm going to ask you to do something for me here, because if you get mad and check out in the middle of this piece, you are going to miss the point.

One of the most striking and disappointing things about many Trump supporters has been the speed with which they jettisoned previous convictions. Adultery was a disqualifier, until it wasn't. In the face of tons of evidence of his Christian faith, Obama was endlessly labeled an anti-Christian. Despite the tons of evidence that he worships no God but He, Trump, DJT was excused away as probably an instrument of God. Yesterday's "This man cannot be President" became today's "Yes, Sir, I would love to have a job in your awesome administration!"

Meanwhile, folks from the other side have taken to moves like slut-shaming Melania Trump, because misogyny is okay if the woman really deserves it.

And the pledges. "I will give Trump and the GOP the same cooperation and respect they gave Obama."

And this one, which oddly enough came this week out of a context having nothing to do with the election: "I will treat that person decently when they earn it."

No. Just, no.

When my children were little, their mother and I repeated one sentiment often-- You treat people with decency and respect because that's the way you're supposed to treat people. You don't treat them well because you think they deserve it-- or rather, they deserve to be treated decently because they are human and alive and here on the planet.

"Use every man after his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" That's from Hamlet. It's a reminder that nobody really deserves to be treated well so, Hamlet goes on, so treat them based on your own ideas of honor and dignity.

This does NOT mean that you become a doormat. It is not respectful of a person to let them repeatedly punch you in the face. It is not respectful of a person to sit still for them to treat you badly.

And this absolutely positively does NOT mean that you cease taking a stand on principle. I expect and hope that every single time President Trump sets out to do something wrong, a whole chorus of people will stand up and shout "No!" and "Hell, no!" I hope that every stupid policy he tries to implement (and I expect hundreds) will become a difficult slog upstream until he becomes bone weary of trying to inflict stupid things on the American public.

But there is a difference between standing up for a principle and setting out to hurt someone no matter what they do. There is a difference between setting out for justice and setting out for vengeance. Like many endeavors in life, the goal shapes the journey. If our goal is "to make sure they get what's coming to them," our journey goes through some dark places, because ultimately our objective is to hurt other people, and the more we embrace that goal, the more awful things we are willing to do. On the other hand, if our goal is something positive, a principle that stands for something good and right in the world, we can take a lot of punishment  and ignore a lot of temptation on the way.

I think a lot about this in the context of bullying because I teach teenagers and so, bullying. Bullies put target above principle, though they will always have a principle to invoke, no matter how "flexible" their hold on principle may be. Note the guys like Joe Walsh who was ready to "grab his musket" and take to the streets to exercise his First (and Second) Amendment rights-- well, right up until Trump one. Then Walsh was ready to slap down those damn protestors who wouldn't cheerfully accept the results of the perfectly good election. Note that right now, people who do or don't support the ideas behind the Electoral College divide pretty much along the same lines as who supported which candidate.

When we deal with bullying in school, we talk a lot about tolerance, which I think is pretty much the wrong way to go about it. "Tolerance" implies that, well, I know you're wrong and you probably deserve to get punched, but I'm going to hold off on that. This accepts the underlying premise of all bullying-- that there are some people in the world who just deserve to get punched, get hurt, get the suffering that they have coming to them. I'm not a bully-- I'm just the universe's righteous delivery system for the hurt that some people have coming to them.

It gets so complicated-- I have to remember every slight, every misbehavior, and keep a giant list of who has "earned" which kind of treatment from me. It's exhausting, and it can become ridiculous when I am responding to two different people in completely different ways even though they did the same thing, because I have them on different "deserving" lists.

Rather than tolerance, I would prefer to teach principle. If it's wrong to punch a person in the face, that applies to all people and all faces. If it's wrong to tell awful lies about someone, it's always wrong to tell lies about anyone. If all human beings should be treated as if they have value, there is no "except for..." clause. In short, there's no measure of right and wrong that includes who's doing the thing and to whom they are doing it.

Lord knows, my belief in all of this has been hugely tested this week. I have a huge intolerance for willful ignorance, for deliberately trying to NOT understand, for chopping down a forest of comprehension to make fuel for a bonfire of hate. And that's what we've installed in the highest office in the land. As a middle-aged white guy, I will never have the kind of crap directed at me that others get, but some of those others are loved ones of mine, and as a middle-aged white guy who has 'scaped a lot of whipping of my own, I have an obligation to try to get this stuff right.

But I can't walk into my classroom and try to sort out issues by telling my students, "Well, you shouldn't hate these people because you should be hating these other people instead." I have always accepted as one of my premises as a teacher is that no student in my classroom has to earn my respect or my support, and that has over time bled into the rest of my life. But now we have this dark mess. like many folks, I'm just looking for a light to find my way through it.

There is a difference between being a bully against someone and a warrior for something important. The world needs more of the latter; we already have a surplus of the former.

Education's Trumpian Crystal Ball

Today's new cottage industry is Trumpian predictive activities-- what will he do, what will happen next, what will he decide about My Favorite Issue. This is a bit of a fool's game-- on the one hand, Trump has told us pretty clearly what he's going to do, and on the other hand, this is a man who feels no particular obligation to think about what he says before he speaks or stay true to it once it has been said. Word noises come out of his face and fly off into the ether, to die a sad abandoned orphan's death either sooner or later. As Rick Hess has noted, "There’s no reason to believe that Trump necessarily means what he’s said on any issue. In truth, he seems to regard policy declarations as performance art."

This is particularly true in education, a field about which Trump knows little and apparently cares less. His policy is indeed "murky at best". But it may be worthwhile to look at the predictions. We always knew we were going to have to struggle for public education after the election, no matter how it went. Exactly what struggle might we face?

The wonkisphere has been churning away. In no particular order here are some of their thoughts, and mine.

Secretary of Education

Is it a contradiction to search for a secretary to head the department that you have occasionally promised to get rid of? Probably, but I suspect we will have ample opportunity to get used to contradictions. Don't call it hypocrisy; you can only be a hypocrite if you actually have some convictions.

Ben Carson's name has been tossed around a bunch. Like much of what is about to happen, this falls into the would-be-hilarious-if-it-weren't-going-to-cause-so-much-real-damage category. But if you want to consider some more flat-out scary possibilities, Politico says that Betsy DeVos and Kevin Chavous have been felt out for the job. DeVos is a rich angry edu-diletante with a heavy conservative streak; her father-in-law founded Amway, and her brother founded Blackwater. Chavous helps run her advocacy group, the American Federation for Children, a dark money group dedicated to school privatization.

Other names are out there (Scott Walker??!!), but at this point creationist Ben Carson is most people's favorite.

Transition Team?

This is probably a good moment to note that Trump supporters are about to endure a great deal of disappointment, and that starts now with Trump's abandonment of his pledge to drain the swamp and sweep clean the DC insiders. The New York Times notes that his transition team is loaded with the usual gang of DC lobbyists and influence peddlers.

When you think about it, this is not a surprise. One of Trump's lifelong motivations is to get the respect of the hoity-toity upper-crust insider crowds from DC to Manhattan. Given the chance to make them work for him, call him Mr. Trump, and kiss his ring, what are the odds he will pass that up. He has wanted their admiration and respect his whole life-- it is one prize in this race that his ego cannot pass up. My armchair prediction is that the administration will be a solid mix of sycophantic grifters like Breibart's Steve Bannon and choices from the long list of GOP insiders who jettisoned their personal dignity and principles so they could get on Der Fuhrer's team. Line forms on the left, guys, right behind Christie and Pence.

Because Trump has few convictions, his choices for a team matter. His education transition team includes James Manning, a career bureaucrat who worked in both Bush and Obama administrations; Gerard Robinson, from the free-market-loving American Enterprise Institute; Townsend McNitt, another Bush-era Ed Department suit; and Bill Evers, from the super-conservative Hoover Institute and Margaret Spellings' Ed Department. I have been tweeted enthusiastic endorsements of Evers who has a rep as an anti-Common Core guy, but his career (which includes setting up schools in Iraq back in 2003) is heavily focused on free market schooling.

Policies?

Mike Petrilli (Fordham) does a good full-length shrug over at Education Next that covers most of the recurring themes. The Obama administration got a lot of mileage out of using the Office of Civil Rights to enforce education policy. It seems safe to say that civil rights issues will not generally be on the Trump front burner.

It also seems a safe bet that a Trump Ed department will have some new ideas about implementing ESSA, which will dovetail nicely with the question of just how long the bipartisan agreement that hatched ESSA will survive under the new hot orange sun.

Common Core? I've addressed that and, as many have noted, the new law puts the power to control the standards out of his hands. Of course, the old law said that the feds can't impose things like the Core on states, and we worked around that just fine.

There's really only one clear policy, and Trump has touted it pretty consistently-- choice, choice, and more choice. Scrap the public schools and open up the market to the people who want to make a buck playing the education game. In Trump's America, everyone is free to choose a good school and good health care, just like everyone is free to stay at the top suites in a Trump hotel. If you can't afford any of those things, well, then, you should try not to be such a poor person, such a loser. If you can't afford Trump Tower (because, for instance, you work there) then there are always nice tent cities outside of town for Your Type.

In fact, I can't think of anyone who has more explicitly articulated the underlying principle of free market charter schooling-- in this world there are winners and losers, and Nice Things (like good schools and health care and shiny cars and hot model wives) are for the winners who can afford them.

Debate Realignments

The Education Debates have made strange bedfellows out of a lot of folks, and now some of that will change as soon as, well, yesterday. The anti-common core crowd included a mix of right-wing folks and progressives, and as far as the right-leaning folks are concerned, the fight is over and they just won it. Meanwhile, the pro-reformy crowd is split, much like the rest of the conservative world, between people who are happy to be on a winning team no matter what that team looks like and people who are a little afraid to realize that their allies may be scarier than their enemies.

Meanwhile, allegedly Democratic reformsters may need to stop and reassess. What exactly separates the reformy hedge fund managers of DFER from the Trump administration (spoiler alert- absolutely nothing, except that pre-election they never would have accepted his gauche butt at their country clubs). And if there's no policy difference between DFER and the Trump administration, and Democrats have shown themselves to be the least effective and most powerless party in town-- well, is there any reason for DFER to keep pretending that they're Democrats?

There may be some good to come out of Ed Debates under Trump-- for one thing, it's going to be an awful lot harder for anyone to pretend that race is not an issue when it comes to education in this country. But I think we're going to have a short period of confusion and mess while people try to figure out who their real allies are at this point.And that in itself is a reminder that it really helps to focus on what you want to move toward, and not on what you disapprove of.

We'll know what Trump is going to do when he does it. The best use of this time is not to try to read the tea leaves (I know, right? Just wasted a whole post's worth of your time) but to renew focus on and commitment to the values and goals that you want to move toward. Let's catch our breath, our strength, our focus. Let's remember what and who we love. Let's get ready.

Will Trump Kill the Core

Apparently one more side effect of Trumpocracy will be the revival of half-baked, ill-informed writing and bloviating about Common Core. Let me do my part to add to that.

Trump has, of course, promised to rid the world of Common Core, even though he has no idea what it is, what's in it, how it works, or how it is implemented. This may well actually happen when pigs fly. But this is the perfect cue for writers like, apparently, NPR's Cory Turner to redistribute some of the same misinformation about the Core.

In "Can President Trump Get Rid of Common Core," Turner brings back the old fiction about where the Core came from:

The Common Core standards were developed by governors and state school superintendents and adopted at the state level. They were not created by the Obama Administration or forced on states. Indeed, several states chose not to make the switch. That said, President Obama did use federal dollars, through the Race to the Top program, to encourage (critics prefer "coerce") states to adopt new, more rigorous standards. And, in the throes of a downturn, that extra school money was a powerful enticement.

Actually, I prefer "blackmail" or "extort," but I suppose "coerce" is politer. It's certainly shorter than, "Either you implement my programs or I use your inevitable and unavoidable violation of No Child Left Behind laws to cut off your federal financial support." But the Common Core Standards were most certainly not developed by governors and state school superintendents. They were written by a handful of education amateurs, pushed by Bill Gates and other well-connected amateurs, financed by many of those same folks, and adopted by states under so much political pressure that some states didn't even wait for the standards to be finished.

Turner fails to talk to anyone outside the circle of Gates-funded Core backers (Achieve, the Fordham Foundation) and when he turns to a critic (Neal McClusky, Cato Institute) still stays within the conservative thinky tank sphere.

What Turner gets right is the effect of the Every Student Succeeds Act (the NCLB replacement) which is pretty firm and direct in forbidding federal meddling in state educational issues. Of course, ESSA still comes down hard for "college and career ready standards," a phrase which is to Common Core what "states' rights" is to segregation.

But the real problem, which folks on at least two sides of this hydra-headed debate fail to acknowledge, is that "Common Core" no longer means a damn thing. It is a term that is only slightly less vague than "Education stuff" and is used to refer to a dozen different versions of standards, the completely different standards being tested on Big Standardized Tests, the completely different sets of standards being pushed in "Common Core" textbooks, and the completely different sets of standards being touted by traveling consultants and college professors. Plus, all the versions that are now hiding in plain sight under an assumed name.

At this point you can't drive a stake through Common Core's heart because it is a vague and diaphanous cloud of toxic mist.

And, as Turner reports, Trump is already slinking away from his pledge. Asked about it by EdWeek, transition team education guy Gerard Robinson had this strong, ringing statement to make--

To be determined. But he will expect his secretary of education to have something to say about common core

Something to say!! Hoo boy-- I bet the Common Core is shaking in its invisible boots right now

Common Core needs to be rooted out, stomped flat, and burned with fire. But none of those things will be accomplished by people who don't even know what they're talking about. Perhaps Trump will appoint someone with real education expertise and knowledge to the secretary position. And perhaps pigs will fly out of my butt.

The Racist Dinner Party

Many of my Trump-voting friends are genuinely baffled and upset at being called racist, sexist, bigoted by association. "Really, not about race," they say about their vote. Let me try to explain, as I often do, with a story.

You are an American of Ostrogoth ancestry. You and your wife and children are going to a neighbor's house for Thanksgiving dinner. You're pretty pumped.

Out on the sidewalk you meet this guy. "What do you think you're doing in this neighborhood," he asks, not very nicely. "I don't really think we want your kind around here." He's pretty confrontational, but also kind of clownish. You're uneasy, but not quite worried. Then you notice that there are a bunch of other guys standing behind him, just coming out of the shadows.

"Yeah," says one of them. "How about we just kick your Ostie ass! How about we just send you and your little Ostie spawn back to Ostrogothia, or wherever the hell you people come from." You notice that a couple of the men are holding baseball bats.  ("Ostie" is a crude and vulgar slur against Americans of Ostrogoth ancestry. And your family has lived in this country for six generations.)

The thugs kind of look at the first guy, to see if he's going to let them continue. All he says is, "You know, I miss the old days, when certain people knew their place. We need to make this neighborhood great again, like it was before certain people moved in. Maybe we should get rid of these ones. "

"But maybe not the woman," says one of the thugs. "She looks like a nice piece of ass."

"Yeah," says the first guy, who appears to be their leader. "Yeah, I'd f@#! that."

The rest of the mob starts chanting "String them up" and you are sure it's time to go, so you and your family hurry up the walk, to your neighbor's. Shaken, you go inside and prepare to sit down to dinner. You tell your hosts what happened. Maybe they mumble something about "Oh, that racist fool" or maybe they don't say anything at all. You try to shake it off.

Then you walk into the dining room, and that guy who moments ago had you fearing for the safety of your family, is sitting at the end of the table, holding the carving knife.

You turn to your hosts. "What the hell??!!"

You host shrugs. "We thought he'd be really good at carving and serving the turkey. At least better than Aunt Hillary. You know, that awful bitch."

And as you hustle your family out the front door, hoping the mob isn't still out there waiting for you, and as you put on your coats, your hosts are upset-- "Why are you leaving? Look, we're not racists. We didn't decide to have him over because we agree with his racist stuff. We just, you know, thought he would make a really good carver."

And if you're the host in this story, maybe you did make your choice for what seemed like non-racist reasons. But if you can't understand how your Other citizens feel when they see the man who came at them with racist threats, empowering racist goons-- how they feel when they see him in charge of carving and serving up the turkey at the dinner, well, you need to think it through for a moment, because you invited him, and it is on you to pressure him to behave.

And no, this isn't a perfect analogy. Non-white non-male non-straight citizens of this country are not guests (they're citizens), and there is a lot more history involved than just one ugly encounter on the sidewalk. But the point remains-- if you bring a racist, misogynistic, ugly man into our shared home and seat him at the end of the table, your motives don't absolve you of responsibility for the choice that you've made. You may not have said anything racist yourself, but your actions make it clear that you don't consider his racism all that important and the comfort and safety of your neighbors is not as important to you as a well-carved turkey.

A Lesson from 11/9

I am still crawling out of the festering dung hole that is the 2016 Presidential election. There is an awful lot to unpack and learn and understand going forward. But there are good lessons from last night as well:

* In Massachusetts, the charter school early Christmas bill that was supposed to open the floodgates to endless charter paydays-- well, that bill was squashed like a bug. Gov. Charlie Baker and his hedge fund buddies invested a ton of money and political capital in the bill, and they lost it all.

* In Georgia, Governor Deal wanted Amendment 1 to pass, letting the charter industry scoop up a handful of schools every year, converting public schools to private businesses financed with public tax dollars. That bill was also defeated, and once again, it was not a matter of just a couple of narrow percentage points.

* In Washington, three state supreme court justices suddenly found themselves facing the deep pockets of Bill Gates and his friends for daring to actually enforce the state constitution instead of sweeping it aside so that charter schools could be allowed to feast. Those judges won their battle.

* In Kansas, Governor Brownback was given a stern and unmistakable (to anybody but Brownback himself) rebuke.

To be sure, not all the local news was good. In Oklahoma, voters told teachers to go suck air.

But there is a lesson in here. What all of these initiatives had in common was the mobilization and hard work of local activists. The amount of work put into the #NoOn2 campaign in Massachusetts is mind-boggling-- folks worked their butts off for that win. But there as in Georgia and Washington and Kansas, the story is that billionaires can be beaten by local folks who organize and work to do it.

We have a long hard slog ahead on the national level (and we knew we would, no matter what happened) and making an impression at the federal level is a degree of difficulty somewhere between shaving a flea and emptying the Mediterranean Ocean with a spoon. But we see again and again-- with organization and commitment, people can make a huge difference on the state and local level.

My thanks and a big hats off to all the people who eked out those victories. It is no small thing to beat back millions of dollars with a smile and a handshake and a phone call and some shoe leather (or whatever is on the bottom of shoes these days). A salute to all who served and found victory in this discouraging and disheartening year. May we all take strength from the few victories that were scored for public education, because we're going to need it.

Making the Team

I only recently encountered this article from back in February, but it has really stuck with me. It has nothing at all to do directly with education, but it has everything to do with education. Charles Duhigg's "What Google Learned from Its Quest To Build the Perfect Team" was part of a package of articles about "reimagining the office," but there is of course a whole world of teams, including the team made up of teachers and the students in their classrooms. Yeah, maybe Google is the Evil Empire, but that doesn't mean Googlers can't find useful knowledge. So what did Google learn, and what does it mean to us as teachers?

Google for many years pursued super-groups by using what may seem like common sense-- put the best workers together and you get the best work group. Duhigg also notes that managers tried various types of group folk wisdom-- groups should socialize outside of work, introverts should be teamed with introverts. But as Google set out to figure out what made the best groups the best, researchers realized that many commonly accepted pieces of wisdom had never actually been tested.

Project Aristotle launched in 2012, a group project about group projects. The team examined all sorts of features, from male-female balance to shred hobbies to shared college background. No piece of data seemed to hold a clue. Said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Eventually, the researchers shifted their focus from the "who" of group composition to the "how" of group interaction, and that was the key. Norms, the unofficial (or semi-official) rules by which the group operated looked like the most important piece. But how to narrow down the search?

Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?

Eventually the researchers narrowed their focus on two behaviors-- good groups allowed for an balanced amount of sharing and input from all members, and good groups showed emotional sensitivity, what we might call emotional intelligence, to have a sense of how all group members were feeling. And those in turn led to the key:

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. 

Groups do well when they establish a psychologically safe environment. And that leads us to this killer paragraph in the article:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

As I said-- nothing in this article addresses education, yet the concept of psychological safety is absolutely what we need to establish in a classroom. It allows our students to connect their own humanity to the work of learning, which is one of the most critical connections to make. What purpose could there possibly be in teaching a child that Learning Stuff is a thing you do in school, not in any way connected to who you are and how you live your life.

This also, for me, puts a face and a name on what's so deeply wrong with No Excuses schools, which are all about establishing the exact opposite of a psychologically safe space. Students are instead required to live on High Alert at all times, understanding that they must bring absolutely none of their personality and inner life into the classroom, that they must learn to always wear a mask, and that they are in a space that is most decidedly unsafe.

Or grit, which denies our responsibility to establish a psychologically safe space for our students, instead demanding that they develop the "grit" and "resilience" needed to operate in a deliberately unsafe space.

This article also underlines the foolishness of imagining that there is a single set formula by which classrooms can be operated. In one portion, Duhigg tells the story of a manager who, struggling to get his team to connect, tells a highly personal story about his own health issue, even though there was nothing in the protocol that told him to take that step.

But you can no more script a perfect foolproof way to manage a group of human workers or human students, no, no more than you can hand out a foolproof script to a hundred people, telling them that if they follow the script, they can have a happy marriage.

Yes, there is sad irony here. Google spent a ton of time and money to learn that the best way for humans to work together as a team is for them to act like humans with each other. Well, the best kind of humans-- the supportive, open, messy, honest, listening real kind.

There is no difference between those work groups and a classroom. We have to see the humans, listen to the humans, be open to the humans, love the humans that are in those classrooms with us. Insisting that they strip off their true authentic selves at the door and wear a fake mask-- insisting in fact that the fashioning and wearing of the big fake mask is what education is all about-- that's just wrong. And not just morally or ethically wrong, but it-gets-lousy-results wrong.

And of course now, more than ever, our students need to have a safe place. They need to know that our classroom is a safe place to be who they are, even if it feels like the whole rest of the country is not safe for them.

This is how we make a team. By sitting down as real live humans together, open and listening to each other. And you know it's true, because Google says so.

Teaching in Trump's America

And let's face it-- we had to face the prospect of a Trumpified America whether he won tonight or not. Now it's just that much more real, more powerful.

And I still have to go to school and teach in it (especially now that my retirement fund is worth about $1.50).

I teach 11th grade English, which means it's my job to teach about American literature and the culture that it reflects. This has always been a challenge, because our history and our culture has never been black or white or even grey-- it's more like a mottled black and white mess, a cascading Jenga mess of yin and yang, a beautiful warm rich loaf of bread with a dead rat baked into one end. Here are our forefathers-- on the one hand, they did these awesome things, and on the other hand, they did these other terrible things.

But this has always been the story for me-- as a nation, we have set out ideals and principles that we can't live up to, at least not yet, but we still try to move in that direction, and over time, we get closer and closer. The arc of the universe, and all that.

I don't know how to talk about this with my students. Hell, I don't know how to talk about the country with my students. I'm not puzzling over a pedagogical choice. It's that my image of us as a nation, my concept of who we are, which has been teetering on the edge for about two years of this endless shitstorm, has finally overbalanced and fallen onto the floor, pieces slamming in every direction.

I want to be able to tell my black students, my brown students, my gay students, my female students that I'm sorry, that this giant F you delivered directly at them is not what this country is, except that, of course, we just elected this guy, and apparently this is what this country is. I've watched the gleeful raised fist, the angry yell, the happy anticipation of telling Those Damned  [fill in the blank with your favorite Other] that they can go straight to hell and we are just going to stick it to them now, you betcha. As I contemplate tomorrow's work day, I have to wonder things like how my coworker who is spending the night at a "Build That Fucking Wall!" party will interact with our co-worker whose husband, the father of her child, whose wedding we all attended, is Hispanic.

This election has stripped us all of so much. While I am generally perceived as liberal or progressive, the fact is that I come from a conservative background and there are many conservative principles that matter to me-- yet I saw the GOP leaders abandon virtually every principle they ever pretended to have. I have been churched most of my life-- heck, spent many years as a church choir director-- and I have been astonished to see Christians jettison beliefs that they have supposedly-- but apparently falsely-- held for ages, just so they can-- I don't know. Win? And the Democrats, my own adopted party (you can't vote in primaries as an independent here) have continued to prove that they get stupider and stupider every time, dropping their principles and constituents so that they, too, can get their hands on big piles of money. I hope that this will finally be enough of a shock to wake them the hell up.

How can it be that there are so few people of principle in American public life? What the hell is wrong with us as a nation?

At long last, does anybody have any shame at all?

Apparently not. Every base undisciplined racist impulse that ever sat beneath the surface of this country is now free and loose, with state governments like the asshats in North Carolina bragging about how they kept black people from voting to all the small-time bigots and fools who now feel free to indulge their worst selves. My nephew's girlfriend, my niece and nephew, and a whole bunch of other people who aren't white can expect to be harassed even more often.

Jesus? Screw him-- better to slap down Those People and put them in their place. Love is for people like me, not Those People, and kindness is only for people that I approve of. That's what He said, right? What better way to re-establish America as a Christian nation than to elect the least Christian man to ever run for office (including that old Jewish guy).

Democracy? Don't need it-- just a Fearless Leader on whose words we can just hang today (and forget tomorrow). Let's face it-- some people just don't deserve to have a say. People with not-quite-white skin. People with vaginas.

Facts? Expertise? Understanding? That's for Those People. Just go with whatever feels good right now.

Yeah, yeah-- I know. I get it. The Democrats utterly failed to present an alternative to Herr Trump. The USA is rife with grievances that are routinely and completely ignored by the Powers That Be. And the USA is also rife with people who don't do their homework and settle for whatever ragesoaked molotov cocktail is tossed into the parlor. Both parties and the thugs who hang on the political scrim, hoping for a slice of fame and fortune-- they've been trying for years to play the game of steering the herd by stampeding it with a steady diet of fear and panic, and they've done a great job. Well, a great job with the panic and fear. Not so great with the steering.

I also get that plenty of reasonably thoughtful and generally decent people held their nose and voted for Der Fuhrer. To you folks, all I can say is that I hope you speak up. I hope you get out your megaphone and holler, "I voted for you because you are the lesser of two evils, but you'd better start being a lot less evil, and soon." I was prepared to be a complete pain in the ass to my candidate if she was elected; I hope you are prepared to do the same. I can live with "lesser of two evil" votes, but you don't get to say, "Well, I made my decision strictly on policy, and I didn't pay any attention to that other stuff" any more than you get to walk past a mugging and say, "Well, that's not my problem."

Trump will be a disappointment to his followers and an embarrassment to the country. Fine. We've been there before. But he's also dangerous and a source of encouragement to dangerous people. This will be the ugliest bully pulpit ever. My America was never perfect when it came to being inclusive, loving, welcoming, supportive, and built on community, but at least it held onto those as ideals. I do not know how to wrap my head around an America that is so open about hatred, aggressive about exclusion, violently and deliberately unkind.

Maybe that's first step. Maybe we get all of our ugliest impulses out in public and are thereby forced to confront them, deal with them. Maybe. I fear there will be a lot of violence, a lot of destruction, a lot of death before we get there.

In the meantime, how I do I do my job in this version of America, where might makes right and abuse is a virtue, where folks have really, truly lost sight of what Jesus had to say, who are not even trying to understand then intent of the framers and founders.

In a weird way, I suppose the last fifteen years have been a sort of warmup, a sort of dress rehearsal of that new show, "How To Keep Teaching When A Top-Down Prescriptive Bureaucracy Is Trying To Force You To Commit Malpractice." We're teachers, and many of us already know how to defy authority. Maybe we were getting ready for this.

And of course for some folks, literally nothing has changed at all. There is no new ugliness-- just the same old ugliness without a pretty mask or snappy suit. Just ugly and vicious like always, but now naked of any pretense. We can probably learn some lessons from those folks.

To my Trump-voting friends and associates, I'm not mad-- well, yeah, actually, I am pretty pissed at you right this moment, but it will probably pass. But please-- when it turns out he's lied to you about, well, everything, do not expect me to sympathize. Over the next four years I will have ample opportunity to say I told you so, and it's unlikely that I'll hold my tongue. But at the moment, my anger does not run as deep as my heartbreak (which, as I said, has been grinding away for the last two years) and loss and confusion, because I just don't know what country I live in any more. I don't know what this country stands for. I don't know what we value as a nation or a culture.

I don't know how to teach my students about us. I don't know how to prepare them to go out into this new, uglier America.

The next days are going to be awful, ugly, just plain bad. Keep your heads down, brothers and sisters. Watch out for each other, and cast an eye toward the future. I don't know who we are any more, but we have to be better than this.