Calling All Teachers to Stop the Insanity

Let’s do our part, teachers, to stop the insanity. Let’s not wake up again, like every other day, to hear about the next mass shooting, the shooting of a person because of their color, or other tragedies of politics, famine, war, and hate, and then wonder why.

We know why.

We know that for decades teachers have been asked to commit what will be seen in the future as crimes against humanity.

We know that teachers have had to follow senseless rules and regulations to keep their jobs and feed their families.

We know that teachers are bullied throughout our school systems in the same way that some of their students are bullied in class.

We know teachers’ voices are almost the least heard when systems decide what is best for their learners, and that only the students themselves have less of a voice.

We know teachers feel dissonance daily, and that they are asked to do what they know is not best for their kids.

And we know they feel powerless to change – the system is too big and too strong.

Still, we ask, “Why are our people, our nations, and our world in so much pain?”

It is startlingly simple.

For years we have left teachers alone in their classrooms, secluded from the workings of the real world, and then asked them to prepare our children for their futures in the real world. We left them with a divided, knowledge-based curriculum that separates life into content areas, adult constructs that makes sense of education but no sense in reality. Kids don’t experience the world as a mathematical equation, or as a science experiment. Teaching static content and facts does not help develop children who know who they are, how they fit into the world, and how they can contribute back.

Teachers, ask your students who they are, who they want to be when they grow up, and how they can contribute to humanity. You don’t need to wait, just do it. No one is coming. It is up to each of us to change the world, not tomorrow, but right here and right now.

If you stop what you are doing, hug every learner in your classroom, and tell them one thing you admire about them as a person, you will be saving lives. Believe that equity in our school systems is a right, not a fight, and that you and your learners can make the world a better place.

Changing one student’s world can be enough to change everyone’s.