When I was in second grade, I had a teacher, an energetic, funny, charismatic woman beloved by all her students, who used to routinely sing us a few lines from “On the Sunny Side of the Street”: “Grab your coat/ get your hat/ leave your worry on the doorstep . . .”
This past week, my second grade teacher passed away and folks from my class (all of us now in our 40s) effortlessly remembered this detail. I’m not sure what worries, at 7, we had to “leave on the doorstep” but I’m sure we had some and these lyrics, delivered effervescently by our teacher, no doubt offered us comfort—the kind we remember decades later.
The majority of my own students are high schoolers, most upper-classmen, and I really don’t think they’d find any comfort or joy in my singing voice, but I recognize that part of my job, as an adult in their life, is to provide some comfort. They have big worries, and with good reason: College is expensive, housing costs are impossible, we live under constant threat of mass shootings, the planet is dying.
The weekend before we returned to school, 31 people were massacred while back-to-school shopping in El Paso, while grabbing drinks with friends in Dayton. The day before classes resumed, the president posed, grinning, thumbs-up, alongside an orphaned baby whose little fingers still bore the tape used to mend them after they were broken by the weight of his mother’s body as she died attempting to shield her child from a white supremacist with a gun. Nearly 700 immigrants were detained in Mississippi, separated from their terrified children who were also about to begin the school year, and Jimmy from Michigan, a man with significant mental and physical health issues, who had spent all but the first few months of his life in the United States, was deported to Iraq where he subsequently died—homeless and isolated.
One week in America on the precipice of “back to school.”
I would be lying if I said I do not despair.
So in addition to our new backpacks, our clean notebooks, sharpened pencils and fresh pens, what do we need for back to school in America in 2019? A syllabus:
Course Description: Back to School in America – 2019/2020 *
In 1963, James Baldwin gave “A Talk to Teachers” and opened with these words: “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.”
We are living through a very dangerous time.
It is OK (and totally understandable) to sometimes feel afraid, to sometimes feel vulnerable, but it is not OK to give up hope. Hope is out there, and we will find it.
Proper grammar and spelling is useful, but not nearly as important as being a trustworthy, strong and compassionate person. (Also, don’t be the jerk who corrects people’s grammar on the internet—totally unhelpful.)
You will read whatever you can get your hands on, but especially Toni Morrison and Baldwin and Claudia Rankine and Whitman and Joy Harjo (she’s the Poet Laureate, you know). You will read and not revise “The New Colossus.” You will seek out art—not just the kind we’re told to find important. You will listen to each other and you will listen to music (might I recommend Tribe Called Quest, Childish Gambino, maybe a little Woody Guthrie). You will tell me what music and art and literature I ought to listen to/view/read.
I will listen to you.
Course Objectives:
Students will demonstrate the ability to:
- Recognize that it is abnormal for a leader to smile and give a “thumbs up” beside an infant who has been orphaned by gun violence.
- Recognize that wickedness does exist, but we have no obligation to humor or tolerate it.
- Recognize that it is abnormal to tell American citizens of color to “go back.”
- Recognize that goodness also exists and it is material and real and actual.
- Believe that cruelty is not our default setting.
- Believe that an American Citizen is an American Citizen whether they were naturalized or born here.
- Believe that all human beings, despite immigration status, gender, race, economic status, et al, are still human beings with feelings and dreams and rich inner lives.
- Understand that racist and misogynist and homophobic name calling (even, perhaps especially, when it comes from the president) is abnormal and destructive.
- Understand that we are not powerless.
- Understand that poverty is not a character flaw.
- Nor is financial wealth necessarily a sign of good character.
- Practice patience, but vehemently reject complacency.
- Identify what thrills, enthralls and delights us. Revel and rejoice in these.
- Respect our planet.
- Do your level best. You don’t have to go vegan/have a solar powered toaster, but at the very least put your recyclables in the right bin.
- Respect differences.
- See James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
- Find common ground.
- Ask for help.
- Be gentle with yourself.
- Even when you’re mad at yourself.
- Forgive ourselves and one another.
- We don’t owe anyone forgiveness, but we can still, at the very least, be gentle.
- Know that living under the omnipresent specter of gun violence is abnormal.
- Know that we can change.
- Know that we ought not “settle for” anything that compromises our integrity/sense of right and wrong.
- Admit when we are wrong, apologize, be open to revising ourselves.
- Respond with intention to injustice.
- Examine your biases and prejudices in an effort to disentangle the knots they’ve made inside of you.
- This may be a lifelong process.
- This will not always feel good, but it’s worth it.
- Listen.
- Vote.
- Honor beauty, art and laughter.
- Be ridiculously kind to all children and animals.
- Love.
Course Materials:
Your beautiful mind
Your good intentions
An abundance of hope
Strength of character
A sense of humor
* No one ever gets an “A” because, despite our best efforts, we are flawed.
** We should strive for an “A” anyway.
*** Sometimes we will leave our worry on the doorstep.
