Blech, pt. 716

I applied for a couple of jobs yesterday. I don’t know how I feel about it, really, and I’m not expecting much to come from it, necessarily, but I did it. I remain convinced that if I’m still teaching next year, I want to be teaching at the same school, but Indiana’s legislature appears to have decided that they don’t want me in their classrooms. There are a Black Lives Matter and a gay pride flag hanging in my room. Part of me is very much in “If the governor wants them, he can come and get them himself” mode, and part of me is so sick of how America treats teachers that I no longer want anything to do with the entire enterprise. When I quit in 2016 it was because I got sick and my doctor more or less told me I had to. This time? I’m defeated. I can’t do this anymore; America wants to be a society where only the wealthy get any education and everyone else gets a babysitter, and I refuse to be a babysitter.

God, I don’t even remember if I talked about this, so forgive me if I’m repeating things, but I sent an email out to my parents on Sunday letting them know that forty-six of my seventy-one kids were failing math. I take this shit personally, as I deliberately set up everything about my class to make it virtually impossible to fail if you actually try.

I emailed maybe 50 of my parents; the rest I don’t have email addresses for despite the fact that it’s 20fucking22 and I know good and fucking well they all have email. I heard back from one. The rest either never saw the message because they gave their kid’s school an email address they never look at or they looked at it and shrugged. Fuck it. You want your kids warehoused too, apparently. I don’t know how much longer I can do this even under the best of circumstances, and … man, I’m done with all the rest of it.