Kipp Dawson is a veteran teacher in Pittsburgh. She writes here about the new school year and the ongoing struggle to teach her students without idiotic programs foisted on her and her students. Kipp was a coal miner, and she knows the meaning of struggle.

She writes:

“Teachers and other front-line workers in our public schools are also on the front lines of some of the biggest battles in this country right now, as we are fighting alongside our children for their future. As school opens this fall, we can feel this, as we are torn between what we can already see and feel in their eyes and words of their potential and real lives and beauties and challenges, on the one hand, and what is required of us to do with and to them, on the other.

“As I begin what may become my last year in this particular relationship to these struggles, I feel a particular obligation both to do all I can with and for each of the marvelous souls and brains with whom I am blessed to spend our teaching/learning brains, and the communities they build together in our classroom, on the one hand, and simultaneously, with my amazing collesgues, to work to make our schools shrug off the ridiculousnesses politicians and their conduits who run many things put in the way.

“This is a Report from One of the Front Lines, #1 for 2017.

“Yesterday, three of my 12-year-old boy students presented personal narratives to their classmates. Two of them had been called out to do so by their peer reviewers who were stunned and impressed by their stories. These boys came from different neighborhoods with different skin hues, and each presented well-constructed, dialogue-filled, literary-devices-well-used (mainly similes and colloquialisms), narrative structure in place and well used. Each of their stories was about overcoming a personal challenge (one, learning to ride a bike; the other, overcoming a fear of rollarcoasters). Each stunned me with the skill both of the writing, and the presentation (hats off Ms. Greco, their 6th-grade teacher!). It was marvelous to see their classmates enjoy, and celebrate, their writing.

“Among their classmates was a third boy who had shared his story only (so far) with his peer reviewer, and with me. This child has the same skin hue as one of the above-mentioned presenters. (To put it right out there: to armed police, both would look like Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin). This boy’s story was much more bare — no literary devices, sentence structure lacking a bit. He wrote of having been with his uncle when the uncle was shot, three times, in the back, as they left a store. His uncle died, he wrote, was revived, and then died again, forever. The end. Unlike the other two stories, there were no adjectives or adverbs or literary devices. But he felt he had a story to tell, and a safe place in which to tell it.

“These three boys were among their 100 or so 7th-grade peers who noisily left school for a three-day weekend when our last bell rang yesterday. These three boys were going into three different worlds. These three boys will be back in this classroom community, together, on Tuesday. They will spend a school year together in our classrooms. They (hopefully) will grow up and keep going out into different and same parts of this world. For this next few months, we have them, and we have so so much we/they/all of us can do to grow together.

“But.

“When that last bell rang, we who teach these boys, and all of their classmates, gathered our thoughts and papers, did some debriefing with colleagues or rushed out to be with families or simply collapsed at home with fatigue, beginning a weekend of downtime and the first weekend of organizing our time to meet the needs.

“Needs imposed on us by a “data-driven district” (aren’t they all, now?)

“Data.

“I am not alone in having in my home now, the stories and letters to me and daily check-ins of my approximately 85 new 7th graders, on the one hand, and the demands of a frenzied, trying-to-stay-afloat public school district which is translating that frenzy into increasingly onerous distracting, time-consuming, mis-focused (in my humble, professional/human opinion) demands on the workers, especially teachers. I will spend as much time as I can reading every word these new-to-me students wrote (or did not follow directions and left blank — equally important!) this first week of school. I will spend as much time as I can communicating with each/all of the new-to-me (with, of course, some returning via siblings) parents of these children, as these relationships are essential. I will be pulled from doing that by meeting the demands of administrations, some of which are understandable and helpful, and some of which drive me (almost) to despair.

“Test scores are our source of data. We are data driven. Therefore, our children, and their teachers, are judged, grouped, approached, by data, and test scores. Therefore these personal narratives become important mainly in how they will be rated on the rubrics which will turn into data when these children take their end-of-the-year tests. And now we are to take precious time out of our classrooms each day to put them in front of computers so the machines can judge their skills and give them individual, screen-and-keyboard-responses-only, assignments and evaluations. Every day. I am not ok with this. At all.

“If you have read this far, most likely you, also, are a school worker and/or parent. Most likely you, also, are pondering how to respond to the wonderfulnesses and alarm signals of your back-to-school days. Most likely, you are looking for ways to make things better for our children. Let’s do this together.”