The Dream Of Man Will Not Accept What Nature Hands Us
Wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side
My school year ended last week, not with a bang, but with a whimper. It’s the first time in my teaching career that there has been no closure, no occasion for putting a bow on things and celebrating the work that we all put in together in the classroom.
For those who don’t know, I teach a GED program for 16-21 year-olds at a community college in Seattle. Designing a program around a standardized test rankles all of my sensibilities as a teacher, so I try not to, splitting time between targeted GED practice and a program of critical thinking and exploration that goes beyond the narrow bounds of a corporatized one-size-fits-all exam. Really, one of the only benefits of the GED as structured is that my students can graduate when they’re ready instead of having to slog it out bored for an entire quarter or school year when they’re already prepared to exit.
But none of my students have graduated the program since February, which makes me feel like a failure despite being entirely out of my control. The GED—which has to be proctored at a testing center—has not been available to students since the beginning of COVID-19. Now they’re beginning to roll it out remotely on a limited basis, with some terms and conditions. A few of those include:
Taking pictures and/or live video of your surroundings to prove to the proctor (watching you through a webcam) that you have no access to extra materials
A private room with a closed door, with no one allowed in or out while you test
No breaks, and no food or drink in the room with you except water in a clear glass
The third item on the list here is the most egregiously bad; if your test can be compromised by the information on a bag of Cheetos, it’s probably not a good test. And to achieve the first two, you probably need a level of economic security and comfort that are not hallmarks of the average GED tester. But all three—rooted as they are in the assumption that, left to their own devices, people will scam and cheat and mislead—are examples of what blogger Jeffrey Moro has called “cop shit.”
Cop shit is seductive. It makes metrics transparent. It allows for the clear progress toward learning objectives. It also subsumes education within a market logic. “Here,” cop shit says, “you will learn how to do this thing. We will know you learned it by the acquisition of this gold star. But in order for me to award you this gold star, I must parse you, sense you, track you, collect you, and—” here’s the key, “I will presume that you will attempt to flout me at every turn. We are both scamming each other, you and I, and I intend to win.” When a classroom becomes adversarial, of course, as cop shit presumes, then there must be a clear winner and loser. The student’s education then becomes not a victory for their own self-improvement or -enrichment, but rather that the teacher conquered the student’s presumed inherent laziness, shiftiness, etc. to instill some kernel of a lesson.
Adversarial is the right word for this mode of thinking. Standardized testing is not just a private commodity to be consumed, it is also to be earned, on the terms of the people charging you $120 for the privilege. Of course these same people treat students like suspects in a crime that hasn’t been committed yet—students are both their clients and their competitors, as passing the test on one’s own terms on the first try would mean an end to their giving the company money.
Moro continues:
In conclusion: expel cop shit from your classrooms; expel cop shit from your hearts. We are educators. We are not cops. If you want to be a cop, I recommend you go be a cop. At least then you’ll wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side.
I want to stress that this goes beyond just what harm you might inflict on those you oversee. It should go for our relationships with our peers, too.
The enormity of the task before us doesn’t make for easy solutions or, most days, the ability to do anything that feels remotely impactful. Our pockets are empty of pennies to throw on the tracks of the train of human misery that barrels onward forever toward the horizon—and damn if it doesn’t seem to be speeding up these days, too. Accordingly we turn our attention to what we feel like we can control, which is the behavior of people around us, physically or digitally.
So it is that my Instagram “stories” feed has turned into a stream of the same eight or nine social justice image sets each day, packaged in twee Millennial-friendly pastels or stark black and white. While they are surely individually well-intended the net effect feels like a constant low-grade scolding that the images also suggest I should be grateful for receiving. Perhaps the (non-Black) people I see sharing them live in less of a bubble than I do and so the bulk of people seeing those stories really are being exposed to new ideas and information, I don’t know. But I can’t help but feel like it must often be either reflexive or defensive—sometimes it even gets meta, where the images du jour specifically say that if you aren’t sharing them (or ones like them), if you’re back to posting your tacos or your pets or whatever, then you are not just shirking a duty, but are actively complicit in upholding the systems that necessitate the images in the first place.
Holding individuals personally responsible for the effects of an all-consuming, impersonal system of misery and humiliation feels, to me, like cop shit.
Don’t get me wrong: I am glad that the whole world appears to care deeply at once, and for a longer unbroken stretch than I have probably ever seen. But I also think it’s important to take it easy on each other, and ourselves, more often. Being against cop shit also means setting yourself free from the relentless self-imposed pressure to meet a standard that you imagine everyone you know secretly has for you. (Sometimes this newsletter is just an exercise in talking to myself—I am horrible at this, but I won’t that let me stop you from telling you to do it.)
There’s a Twitter version of this, too:
Having so many people clustered together virtually, each painfully aware that they have so little chance to move the levers of power and perhaps less aware that they lack the proper framework for even beginning to do so, can lead to some astonishing displays. It’s often pretty harmless, honestly—one of the weird things about Twitter is that even powerful people feel the need to be on it and sharing their thoughts, which means that you or I can hop on there and tell Fortune 500 CEOs and war criminals and racist former Major Leaguers to eat shit. No harm in punching up. But on days when none of those people are acting so egregiously bad as to be the main character, it feels like that honor falls to some regular person who has (or is alleged to have) done something petty or stupid or hateful.
(Look, I’m not going to bitch and moan about the insdiousness of “cancel culture.” That phrase hits some receptor in my brain that makes whatever else the person says sound like Charlie Brown’s parents are talking. I think it’s a good thing when people with power are held to account for the bad shit they do and say; honestly, there are rarely even real consequences, unless you consider mean comments adequate punishment for triggering the 2008 financial crisis. But the consequences for normal people whose “cancellations” go viral tend to be proportionally larger.)
One more wrinkle worth considering:
Anyway I’ll get back to the original issue at hand here. While each of us has an obligation to join in the work of liberation, we also have to give space to others to figure things out on their own terms. (I hope it’s clear that I’m not talking about the virulent racists or sexists or queerphobes here, but the people trying not to be those things in a world that encourages it.) Wallace Stegner wasn’t talking about this, specifically, in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, but a point he makes in that essay collection holds up anyway:
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. That is the law of nature. But the dream of man will not accept what nature hands us.
Smart man. In another essay, Stegner says:
Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.
He was talking about neighborhoods and towns and pieces of continents. But I think the same is true for everyone who is trying to make the world a little bit better. People are going to flail around and fuck up plenty before they get anything right, in any endeavor, and I don’t think it’s impossible to square being okay with that that with knowing that an exhaustive amount of information and its sources are already out there, making others’ ignorance a maddening thing to witness.
I don’t have all the answers. But I think it has to start with refusing to treat the acquisition of specialized and esoteric knowledge as a precondition for participation in the struggle for freedom. We can no longer accept cop shit—from the cops, from each other, or from ourselves.
Thanks as always for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck