Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.
Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.
To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.
(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)
I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!
Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.
The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.
My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.
Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.
The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.
Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.
All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.
I kind of need tomorrow to go well.
(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.
