Remember to fasten your own mask

before attempting to adjust your child's. (as in, the warning on the airplane pasenger card.) One step less scary than TUC, time of useful consciousness, the time the pilot has to save the situation before the air runs out.

So, here's to trying out the old blog and adding on.
On teaching, healing, drawing-out (e-duc-ation), memory, politics, language, love, liking girls and how that's changed my life, all that stuff. Reiki, marching, dancing for a cause, writing for your life, figuring out how to organize solidarity not charity.

I resolve to try again. and again. and now. and again, now. Because that's all you actually have.
And figuring out how to live every day without getting trapped in memory.

correcting the record, old history about the GSA and the car burning

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correcting the record, old history about the GSA and the burning of my car
1 message

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I have thought long and hard about HOW to start talking about this, and I was stunned to see, when I googled my name and Kennedy on the web, that instead of anything about the GSA-related violence back on 2000, I got back the articles I referred to below, and a blog-comment from George Schmidt -- with whom I have worked with for years, and who has a heart of gold beating under an extremely crusty exterior. I post this letter, slightly revised, that I wrote to him. I know, his note is a year old, I don't deal with other questions like, DO we need a LGBT high school (maybe) and issues, still hanging, about my experience -- like, how it triggered PTSD for me. But I thought it might be a good place to start the unravelling -- or, no, the opposite, the picking up of the dropped stitches which has led to my unravelling. So here goes. And I'll see if I can find a picture. Tina Beacock	Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 12:20 PM
To: George Schmidt editor of Substance, longtime teachers' union (and other) activist Cc: friends and comrades
George, you are the ultimate archivist and resident memory, but this time you got it wrong. I am writing you about a year-old article on a nine-year old case, because I realize you shared the same misconception of many of my friends and comrades in the fight with the boss. I thank you for the compliment, that I was a fighter, and that's why they came after me. But class fighter is only a piece. You said in blog exchange below, "And nobody will claim she had a hard time because of her sexual orientation." I would. It was one part of the reason I was blacklisted, as you (correctly) observed. I didn't start the FIRST GSA at CPS, there were many, in schools from Curie, Whitney Young, Jones High School. You notice the list? Kennedy was one of the first neighborhood schools where we tried to organize. It was the working class neighborhood of Garfield Ridge, where lots of cops and firefighters lived, to meet the residency requirements, and the students came from everywhere-- including Little Village, before the Little Village was built, and LeClaire Courts, which every few years had to fight to stay included in the attendance area. The kids weren't calling the shots, or setting the tone. I WAS attacked because I helped start the GSA. The kid , Daniel Cummings, bragged about it to friends, how, "I got that lesbo faggot teacher," and that is how I was told who did it, and how I told the POLICE who to arrest. He'd already had confrontations with me in the classroom about the "safe space" pink triangle on my bulletin board. He torched my car after a failure notice (not a grade), but he thought it was safe to do this, because of the hostile environment the local LSC helped establish. ('We can't let a gay in here! They'll be marching down Archer Avenue!!") The young man's grandfather was a firefighter who worked with a detective on an arson squad, who showed up pounding on my door at 1 AM to discuss the case. The police and the state's attorney's office made sure the charges were reduced from hate crime (never charged) to arson(dropped)...to property damage. MANY elements (police, school board, others?) wanted the case to go away quietly, and hence, the widespread circulation of articles you probably read, George, within two weeks of the arrest, that said, no, no, it was just a dust-up over a grade. No problem here, no hateful violence, just aq little student anger. Don't we call that spin control? I got really active in the union AFTER my car was torched, I was made to learn the hard way, teachers, you can't just shut the door and teach in your classroom, you have to organize to defend yourself as workers, or they can chew you up and spit you out, for all kinds of reasons. I represented all the members at my school, including the homophobic ones who told me they loved me, 'just like a murderer or a thief,' who were the same ones who said "No students in MY class are gay!" who told students in their"student-led" bible clubs that gays an lesbians had no r i g h t to l i v e . I could be fearless on the House of Delegates floor, and still be forced out of one school, marginalized in the next, and never hired again, for several reasons at once. I had not endeared myself to the (police and shopkeepers) community there when I helped students petition for Mumia Abu Jamal's case, or supported a strike at the Aztec tortilla plant. The first policeman investigating the arson asked, was there any group I belonged to, which might make me a target? Yes, somebody had my name on a list. But it wasn't till the GSA issue that some thug thought it was OK to torch a teacher's car. The expected level of backlash for a grade would have been KEYING the car, not smashing the tail-light and windshield, and then setting it on fire. Someone once said, I don't get to wake up in the morning and choose how I will be oppressed today -- we don't get to pick our oppressions-- they come in a package. On the other issue of, what's the climate like now(then, in 2008), I suggest getting in touch with the various Gay Straight Alliances who network with the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance-- and sponsor the Day of Silence/Night of Noise, or the residency programs for kids who get kicked out of their parents' homes, or places that counsel LGBT students when they consider suicide, or THEY get expelled for carrying knives to school to defend themselves from constant attacks. The climate's definitely, mercifully changing, but a bit of hard data would be helpful. from http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/RUSSO/index.php/entry/1181/Can_A_Gay_White_Motorcycle-Riding_Principal_Help_Libby_ES_Improve%3F By: Maureen Kelleher Can A Gay White Motorcycle-Riding Principal Help Libby ES Improve? Hey, George- While you're right that economic class and racial segregation are huge and pressing problems that many people would rather forget about, I think the possibility of a high school that expressly welcomes gay and lesbian students is in a whole different league of news from pointing out some principal's orientation. And harassment of teens about orientation is a problem for CPS kids--both those who are gay and lesbian and those who are not. There are CPS students who are dropping out rather than face harassment about their sexuality in regular schools, and let's not forget the Kennedy High School teacher whose car was bombed in the school parking lot some years ago because she dared to start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the city. For more on the proposed Social Justice-Pride school, see this link: http://www.windycitytimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=19257 Wed Sep 17, 2008 at 1:24 AMBy: George N. Schmidt Can A Gay White Motorcycle- Riding Principal Help Libby ES Improve? "...and let's not forget the Kennedy High School teacher whose car was bombed in the school parking lot some years ago because she dared to start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the >city..." (Lois Lane, yesterday). Maureen, Tina's car was not bombed because "she dared start the first Gay-Straight alliance in the city", as the investigation later showed, but because she had run afoul of a student who didn't agree with her grading policies. Call her up and ask her for a full clarification of the story as it turned out to be -- not as you can Google it in a short cut substitute for reporting. Fag bashing was once a major problem in CPS, and as a disciplinarian at Bowen, I >had to deal with a little of it, but in fact by the late 1990s it was in abatement across >most of CPS. Just ask any of dozens of the kids who went through the schools in those days. When my eldest went to his prom in 2007, one of the couples that shared the limo was a young person who had began high school as one gender and graduated as another. There was no problem with that reality by graduation day for the Class of 2007 at Whitney Young. While it may be true that there are pockets of problems, still, to maintain, as the project does, that they are significant is simply ignoring an awful lot of current events and evolving historical reality. Before my brother came out in the 1960s, these were major problems (Thomas Lanigan Schmidt, a Stonewall veteran; Linden New Jersey High School, Class of 1965; Google him) in the schools (elementary and high >schools). To reprise realities of a decade or more ago is to ignore the changes that have happened. No matter how many people cite that "example" reported in the Tribune about Tina's problems at Kennedy a few years back, it turned out that the reality was different (but the correction never surfaces when the story is recycled for whatever purposes). The real story there might be how Arne Duncan's administration has blacklisted that teacher, after moving her through DuSable and a few other places. And nobody will claim she had a hard time because of her sexual orientation. They went after her for class reasons. She was a strong union delegate. Get the whole story or start making your living writing fiction, instead of fictionalizing complex realities based on preconceptions and Google clips that need to be checked as carefully as last week's report on the "bankruptcy" of United Airlines.

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Up from underwater

Still having trouble with the time-space continuum thing, but this is a declaration of intent, to make this a space to cllect interesting insights and observations al all and sundry. It only took me twoo hours and then another two hours to thread my way back into my own blog. A little like one of those dreams wher you can SEE the doorm but you can't get THROUGH the door.

Young Lords, Cha Cha Jimenez and Fred Hampton

omg, just found out/figured out why they shot Fred Hampton. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales had a thing on this morning about the Young Lords HERE
http://www.democracynow.org/
wonderful description about the already-radicalized militants, out of the antiwar and radical movement of 1969, looking for a vehicle to capture/disseminate practice and theory in the Puerto Rican community. In NY they were from S.D.S and the antiwar movement; in Chicago where the YL started they were from the same currents ans the Panthers -- formerly a turf-gang, which became political HERE
http://nationalyounglords.com/Jose%20bio.html
and in this link we find some wonderful Chicago history, the Division Street riots, Cha-cha Jimenez, Omar Lopez -- and Fred Hampton's initiative to form the first Rainbow Coalition-- the Panthers, the Young Lords and others. NO WONDER they(the Chicago police, Hanarahan) shot him!
Interesting to compare the different sites, the links almost immediately with academia, the undeveloped and unclear understanding about gangs, and their routes to EITHER politics or drug-mafia, reflecting the same confusion youth have when they first learn of these things. Just because it has a pretty web page doesn't make it truthful, authoritative, clarifying!
For an example of bad, incomplete history (because of the ideological limitations of the source) see http://www.gangresearch.net/ChicagoGangs/latinkings/lkhistory.html For an interesting evocative description of life in Puerto Rico, see Cha-cha Jimenez' entry in Wikipedia HERE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jose%28Cha-Cha%29Jimenez
OK, NOW I'm REALLY just avoiding what I have to do....

Anecdotes on Jerry, buttons, acting out kids, and language

This blog might get less and useful on teaching and Chicago in general and more interesting as the story of an individual.
Found myself remembering Jerry, a dear friend and English teacher who literally dropped dead at a useless professional development meeting. His own story deserves more, but here's just a moment. He had such great insights about kids.
Teachers complain about individual kids who make their life hell, the way other workers complain about the boss (sometimes) or about a coworker who rubs them the wrong way. It is the job, of course, of a student to make a teacher's life miserable-- not all kids to all teachers, but for every wonderful bond where you're there for that kid, there's also a miserable bond, where one kid in a class has made his, or her, life mission to ruin your day, get a reaction, set you off. This is not a stupid 'all kids are malicious' riff, it results from a simple fact. You are the first adult the kid reacts to, learns to defy, fights against to become themselves, after their parents. You are the next authority figure against whom they prove themselves, establish their own identity, weltenshung(?) (worldview). So they aren't being evil, they simply growing. As a teacher you agree to be the tree they carve up, the wall against which they kick, etc.*
So as a teacher, you commiserate about the jerk in second period, oh you have him/her? Yeah, and so-and-so. When you tell a story about how a class went badly, you inevitably tell it as a challenge with names. Sometimes you get questions, oh, so-and-so? Or you get advice on classroom management -- the police function. "If the kids spend all period looking out the windows, close the shades. " Don't treat it like a behavior problem and wrangle all period, treat it as an environment problem, and change the setup. Or change a rule.
I remember when I told stories, or others did, Jerry was the only one in the teachers' lounge to ask, what were you teaching? What was the subject? After years of teaching the remedial class, he knew that behavior problems were often reactions to not getting something. So you'd tell him what it was, and he'd suggest a different approach, or a way to break it down, or tell you what he'd done. He was always the one with murals painted on refrigerator boxes (they're huge, like scenery), and, I swear, boxes of costumes and props where other teachers had boxes of handouts. Oh, he had handouts, too. Many he did himself, as we all did, making up our own materials.
I was remembering him when I thought of a new approach to language, having told someone, again, about the USA being the only country int he world where knowing more than one language is a problem instead of an advantage.
So, you talk to a kid, frustrated at how hard learning Spanish is. Maybe they don't read English particularly well, and they're frustrated because, instead of being able to learn data + data + data, they keep tripping over, needing to learn a whole framework. So, you ask them, how do you catch a whale? You don't know. Neither do I. Is that because you CAN't learn it, or because you HAVEN'T? Same with Spanish. Be patient with yourself. It's BIG. I was thinking of my student, who was so furious that this was so hard, and got his football coach to come tell me how he had to pass. I kept saying, he had to try.
And then I think of all those kids, classed as SpEd because they had low reading scores. Now, was that because they COULDN'T learn to read, or because they'd never been taught? After a certain point, it doesn't matter, because all you deal with is the CAN'T. And the low scores which you don't want on your school's record.
Oh my, everything leads to a tirade. I swear I better to learn to knit better. Me and Madame DeFarge. My list will be so long.
But teachers like Jerry are unnumbered and uncelebrated. Thank you, Jerry.

* Funny for someone like me, whose motto is, "Warning, I'm likely to do things inappropriate for my age and gender", to be the authority figure. Teachers did a pretty good job of policing each other for conformity. I realize only after the fact, one teacher was at great pains to point out, my clothes buttoned and zipped on the wrong side. You know, boy's and girls' clothes. And another insistently wanted me to tell her I went to second-hand stores to buy my (men's) vests. I was so good at self-defense on these things, I didn't even notice their nastiness -- their put-you-in-you-placeness. She's on my list. Teachers who demean other teachers are on my list, but the principals who did this are first.

Duncan OhNo

Arne will be the new Education Secretary for Obama, it was announced yesterday. So he can do for the country what he's done for Chicago? Front for the business/corporate community which wants to downsize public education?

Close schools, fire teachers, displace students, dismantle all the "underutilized" schools, siphon off public money for charter school showcases, to be closed quietly after a bit of fanfare and create a two-tier system, a whole set of second-class lower paid teachers, non-union unprotected, fired-at-will --

Think of the school system being run by Fedex -- or, doing for schools what HMO's and insurance companies have done for health care.

I knew this was coming and I KNOW you can only be disappointed if you expected something better.
AND my job is to get a job.

I do not have TIME or ENERGY to splutter about this and years of abuse. To me. There was a study on stress the CTU sponsored, but I can't get anyone to tell me about, where it is, or where I can read it. The study focused on, did teachers get harassed or abused by a)students b) other teachers, or c) administrators -- that is, physical or verbal abuse.

I flash quickly on, the talk in faculty meetings about, oh no Ms B, the students don't see me like YOU!, and hearing the most obstreperous students tell me, I HAD to pass them because I 'wasn't a real teacher'.

Thank you NCLB for sending to the students the information that I had not taken a Spanish competency test -- which I'd never been told was necessary. The req's were changed after I got an endorsement, and I found out about the change by the letters to students telling them I was not "not highly qualified". When I passed the test, no such school wide mailing was sent out correcting the undermining information.

Unraveling this little story, I do need to remember that I got into the mess by being assigned to teach off-certificate, a history position teaching Spanish 4 classes by my principal. and other things like it-- put in a classroom barely big enough for ten students, with a full class-load, no windows -- a room the previous teacher had died in, when he had a heart attack. All those changes I dealt with by..ignoring them until I left the school -- out of the frying pan into the fire.

Splutter, splutter.
I know ( all the paragraphs start with I today) there are teachers in schools where they feel supported. But even as I write, I realize, I'm never going to be one of those teachers, not in this system. It is so hard to let something go that I love. Can't let go of the anger or the fond memories,
like the moment the other day when the student made an ignorant comment about, it's okay if a gay gets attacked by a monster (Halloween stories) and I jumped up to say -- you know, one out of every ten people you KNOW are probably gay -- could be, your teacher! Really, another student asked, are you a lesbian? (Freeze, is it safe? Breathe caught in my throat) Yes. Cool, my mom is too! And she high-fives me. You, another says, are the coolest sub we ever had! I think they call that, a teachable moment.

So, there are moments which I use like a pro biotic, to reintroduce the living part I love.
And try to remember why it's necessary to do something else.

So many stories, so many details to the painful etchings I carry around with me, trying to find a place to lay them.

Factory occupations and school stories

It was really exciting to hear about the plant occupation by workers at Republic window-- it's hit the national press. Raises all kinds of ideas about what to do when the corporate interests that own factories --and run schools -- renege on their commitments. At Republic, they closed the plant from one day to the next -- and workers took over the factory, demanding they give 60 days' notice and pay the pension requirements and HEALTH CARE the company owes.
So, if the the Chicago School Board reneges on its commitment to public education, and closes more schools -- shouldn't we, as proposed at the union meeting, do an emergency picket the Monday after this is announced? Yah, yah, the union has AGREED not to take job actions while a contract in is force -- but what if the Board doesn't meet its commitments, and closes schools for factors teachers don't control... what are the options open to us? What would our fellow workers be willing to do? How would we get support from parents and community?

It's still pretty hard to get motivated to sub--especially since it takes so much more initiative than just, making myself available. I have to call schools to ASK if they have openings-- probably more likely to find individual schools who are willing to call than rely on the central call-center to call.

I write today to try to set up a pattern.
I am thinking of a book to be titled, "why I am a bad teacher ' the first impression is, WAY too self-deprecatory, but it's in the spirit of Linda Bubon's performance, 'Why I am a Danger to the community, " about a copper-miner's wife fighting the copper bosses in (Arizona? New Mexico?) a la Salt of the Earth. And Ray Hanania's, "I'm Glad I look Like a Terrorist". He wrote pre-9/11 I think, he's a liberal Palestinian writer who did talks for the Mayor's commission on human rights....
Of course I am a bad teacher. Too much going off on my own. I took my lead from my students, to organize the social justice club, to start the GSA, to organize a trip to Europe ( on Easter vacation to Rome, no less....).When the principal suggested I should organize a tour to take her and her favorite teachers to Europe as chaperones... I just faded into the woodwork. And got told no fundraising schemes were permitted because they weren't legal. Till they were done my another teacher, for another cause. What is that button, DOES NOT work well in groups-- at least in the scratch your back group that passes for taking a lead from the boss and delivering favors. I'll never forget the way one principal brought me into his office to show me how another student group showed their appreciation for him by bringing him flowers! This is how you kiss up, dear. And my colleague and I were spending 15 hours a week after school putting together plays. Amazing. That was NOT the way to get his attention. Takes my breath away to think about it.

I set up a website where students wrote their own poems ' Yo soy de...' a bilingual poem trying to get kids to talk about their own lives and learn the Spanish words for struggle, hood, fried chicken, basketball court (as opposed to where the law is decided).
And I fought, argued, STATED the teachers' side when I was the delegate and a High School vice president pf the CTU. I didn't 'get to yes. I have acquired more negotiating skills, on HOW to explain to the local manager ( as a principal is) how things would go better if they got teachers' support versus central office. But I knew how to convince teachers better than bosses. Not a bad thing, just, doesn't put you on the short list for darling of the school system.

And oh, did I want to be admired for my teaching! Oh, my. Still the student who wanted the A. They say most teachers are that kid who strains and strains for the teacher's praise -- for whom the model worked, in some way. Teachers are also the single occupational group most likely to have significantly changed their class position by going to school OF COURSE they love Horatio Alger!

While I found it harder and harder to say, you can be whatever you want. To tell kids in the inner city and children of two parents both working ten hours a day at less than living wages, you can be president.
Instead I fastened on, in your life, there are many in the society who are waiting for you to fail. They expect, and they teach you to expect it to. Conditions in the world (class dynamics, the controllers, whatever) have conspired to give you a narrow little space, thismuch room where your initiative matters. But this is the space -- use it, take it, push it to the limit. For all those who are waiting for you to fail, prove them wrong.

But I wasn't good at organizing a network of support for myself. I read too many superhero comics -- heroic knight in armor, Saving people?

I still like the quote, in the book Civics for Democracy (K. Isaac) where Ralph Nader says,

" a democracy is a society in which less and less courage is needed of more and more people to spread justice and the blessings of liberty throughout the land. "

I used it when got the school to let me teach political science at the high school level, NOT an AP class. Now, what if I had known how to do that, with other grownups?
I haven't found the voice yet, to tell the individual stories of just HOW I feel I was broken, traumatized, how I literally watched friends die (a teacher, in constant conflict with the principal over running the school and on the LSC, who dropped dead of a heart attack during a 'professional development' meeting where some overpaid expert nattered on at us about brain research and wasted our extremely precious free time Telling, not Asking. Anyone else get a Fry grant?)

So many wrongs in so many ways. So many stories of victories and defeats. I guess that's what this opens. I find a place to mention the stories and will go back here to tell each one. With details. And breaths. And complete sentences.
The definition of stress is, all responsibility and no power.