For teachers to survive in the NYC School system it is vital to pick your battles. The advice given to novice teachers who are in an uproar of righteous outrage is to simply "close your classroom door and teach". While this method may help teachers maintain their sanity, it concerns me quite a bit the way that this mentality isolates and disempowers us as educators and people. The abiding sentiment in the NYC public school system seems to be “Nothing is going to change, so why waste your breath complaining?”. When our expectations are thus lowered, teachers are easier to manage and “lack of student motivation” can be blamed for a maelstrom of educational ills and failings. If all teachers simply close their doors and teach, then they are not forced to confront the fact that violence reigns in our hallways. I call this attitude “The Culture of Silence”—and teachers who violate it are punished like the Amish—with shunning, banishment, scorn and derision. And that’s just from the students—wait until the administration gets wind of your “We Are the World” one-woman chorus and your life will really turn into a nightmare.
A school or school system's failure to ensure a safe learning environment for all students is a gross injustice to all students, teachers, and administrators forced to work in an environment where violence has no consequences and vulgar behavior is the norm. For our students, this environment is particularly unjust-- let's face it, we all go home to our relatively middle-class lives after the last school bell of the day, but some of our kids get no respite at school from the violence that they experience in their home environments when the school becomes an extension of that environment rather than a safe haven. This situation exists because it is easier to ignore than it is to fix. I am not saying that I know what the solution is to this, but when we all go in our rooms, close our doors, and teach, we are tacitly consenting to maintaining the status quo.
I am reminded of a quote from Berthold Brecht, (which I will paraphrase for the purposes of this discussion), "For art to be non-political is simply for it to ally itself with the ruling class". So by ignoring the fact that our schools protect neither us nor our students, and going along our merry way, we are allying ourselves with the administration and the culture of that school-- like it or not. Furthermore, by making a choice to do nothing, say nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing, we are isolating ourselves and wasting the $90 that we pay the UFT to represent us because we are not speaking out. But what does one do, when silence is consent and dissent is dismissal? How can we as teachers find a way to say, "Ya Basta" and put a stop to this divide-and-conquer, “survival of the quietest” mentality that is so pervasive in the Board of Ed? And when are we going to stop being asked to lower our expectations to keep our jobs?
-Ms. Mouthy
