Put Your Outrage Where Your Classroom Is: A Pep Talk to Teachers Horrified by Headlines

I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m writing this selfishly. I’m writing it for everyone who’d like to read it, of course — but I’m also writing it for myself. I need a pep talk after every Twitter scroll.

My relationship with Twitter has always been strained. I love communicating with wonderful educators across state lines, teachers and mentors who I would have never met without the little blue bird on my phone. I deeply appreciate input on my thinking from so many different voices. I rely on Twitter to draft my writing — a Twitter thread of mine inspired this post. But every morning before logging onto Twitter I have to brace myself for all the headlines I missed while I slept. Again, this isn’t necessarily new — I’ve been beat up by the horrifying and constantly updating headlines every day since I downloaded this app. I’m sad, yes, but more than anything I’m furious. I’m so angry that each tear is boiling in my eyes. I can’t understand how any teacher wouldn’t be 100,000° past their boiling point, how anyone who claims to care about all children could fail to obsess over our country’s history of systemically abusing them.

The trauma inflicted on children of color is only new to those privileged enough to realize the depth of the United States’ racism and xenophobia in November of 2016. It is the black children who are beaten and killed by law enforcement, only to be demonized after their deaths by Americans who chose their comfort over the humanity of a child. It is the indigenous children ripped from their families. It is the black children born and sold into slavery. It is the Asian-American children raised in internment camps. It is the immigrant and first-generation children who had nightmares about being separated from their families long before Trump took his oath. It is every child who has felt abandoned by the United States’ educational system. It is far more than I can do justice to in a single post, far more than I could fit in volumes of books.

Violence against marginalized children is woven into the system of government that the United States congratulates itself for crafting. It always has been.

Education generally (and literacy particularly) has been weaponized against children of color for decades. I doubt that our educational system can truly develop sustaining and fulfilling relationships with communities of color until it directly addresses that fact. It is deeply unrealistic to expect communities of color to automatically, unfalteringly trust an educational system that still relies on its historical foundations of oppressing black and brown children. But that’s a topic for another blog post — that’s a topic for another volume of book. I’m here for our pep talk.

I know you’re sad, you’re angry, you’re afraid. I know you’re aware of the long-term impact of the trauma on children. I know you don’t feel like you’re doing enough. We could never do enough.

But to reflect endlessly on the horrors of the world without reflecting on how this horror impacts and can be combated through our teaching practice is fatally shortsighted. A teacher who fails or declines to adapt their practice to fight the injustices they protest is a teacher who chooses to cope with the consequences of white supremacy instead of eradicate it.

We can do more.

Do more than tweet, do more than call, do more than donate, do more than protest — do what you do best.

We are professional learners. We’ve been trained in the art. Learning is so ingrained in the teaching profession that many of us are obligated by both contracts and evaluations to hours of professional learning every year. And, fact is, we devote far more hours, energy, and money to learning than is required. We attend conferences and workshops. We read articles and connect with our peers. We spend stacks on professional texts and children’s literature. We are learners by training, yes. We are learners by profession. And none of us would survive this work if we weren’t also learners by passion.

Take that professional training, take that passion, take all your heartbreak and outrage, and research trauma-informed education. Research equitable and culturally sustaining practice. Study Indigenous history, Black history, Asian-American history, Latinx history, LGBTQ+ history. Study the history of American interference in Latin America that lead to so many being forced to leave their homes in the first place. Study how all these groups fight for their rights in the present tense.

Then teach.

Do the work that you want to see in the world. Do the work that the world needs to see. Teach like our country depends on it — because ultimately, it does. Every single official justifying and enforcing the separation of children from their families graduated from our educational system. Somewhere along the line that educational system failed to teach these officials that all children are human.

Teach like there are children — children with mental illnesses, children living with trauma, children who have been kidnapped from their families, children who live at the crossroads of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, ability, and body marginalization — who depend on you to model the justice that they are both entitled to and systemically denied. These children are not theoretical concepts. They are not tweets or Time Magazine covers. They are our past, current, and future students. Everyone committed to discussing and fighting the trauma systemically inflicted on children should also be committed to discussing and implementing the trauma-informed classroom structures that offer these children a more equitable opportunity for learning.

Put your money where your mouth is. Put your outrage where your classroom is.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for needing breaks to protect themselves psychologically and emotionally — in my rookie year I hid under my desk to eat lunch. I’m no longer a rookie but I’ll probably still hide under my desk at some point this year. I don’t blame anyone for being novices in this work (I blame your K-12 education and your preservice training). And I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling overwhelmed, I’d be a hypocrite. I’ve felt overwhelmed for the past five years. I’ll be overwhelmed for the rest of my career. It’s an overwhelming job.

But you are not inventing the wheel. There are so many people and organizations to learn from that literally every single word in this sentence is hyperlinked to a different resource, and I had to add words to this sentence to make it longer. There are wonderful websites — Teaching Tolerance, to start — that offer lesson plans, blogs, and nuance to a range of issues. There are professional organizations that publicly emphasize their commitment to equity. We should both lean on their resources and hold them accountable to that commitment.

You are not tasked with founding this work. It has been done for decades by people of color who were determined, at absolutely any cost, to provide their children the education they are humanely entitled to. You are continuing this work.

And to anyone who feels particularly alone — anyone who is emailing their apathetic administrators or desperately trying to convince their co-teachers, anyone who is constantly questioned by parents who object to curriculum that criticizes the white supremacy they were raised in — I’ll leave you with a line that José Luis Vilson gifted me last week, a seven-word sentence that made my soul feel lighter:

“There will be more of us tomorrow.”