Tag: malicious compliance

Let’s see if you can make me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

I spent my first few hours of the new school year working in my room today; as per previous practice, we don’t actually start getting paid until next week, but if I wait until the days I’m supposed to be there, there’s not going to be anywhere near enough time to get everything done that I need to get done. Adding insult to injury, Open House starts at 1:00 in the Goddamn afternoon on our second day of the three we have before school starts, meaning that the real deadline for when our rooms need to be presentable isn’t even the day the kids come back, it’s a full day and a half before that.

I made two promises to myself at the end of last year, which were that I wasn’t going back into the building before school started, and I wasn’t going to spend a ton of money during the couple of weeks heading into school, and I’ve thoroughly broken both of those promises. (Want to help me out with supplies? My Amazon wish list is here.)

We got emailed a document a few weeks ago about the district’s new expectations regarding classroom decor and classroom furniture. I’m probably not supposed to post the entire thing, but I’m really, really tempted to do so. Needless to say, it bans several things I already have in my classroom, and I’ve already purchased, as in during previous years, specifically for use in my classroom. Shit that I not only have nowhere to put at home, but is too big to fit in my car to take home even if I had somewhere to put it. I’m not joking when I tell you they apparently want me to just throw away hundreds of dollars of shit I’ve bought for my room to make it more comfortable for my students. Hell, I decided I wanted to grab an end table we weren’t using at home (it’s been living in the garage for a couple of months) to put my iPad charging station on, and technically, I can’t even bring that in.

The policy basically boils down to “You are only allowed to use the furniture we give you, and we have no intention whatsoever of furnishing your room appropriately, so suck it.” The teacher chair from the district that I replaced with my $600 SecretLab chair was broken when I got it. Is somebody going to reimburse me for all this shit I already bought, that was perfectly fine in previous years?

Yeah, I know.

I don’t think most people realize just how bare a classroom looks when it literally only has the things in it that the school district paid for. They’ve even gone so far as to ban various kinds of flexible student seating (I don’t have them any more, because the kids popped them, but I’ve had fidget seats in the room before) that are commonly used in IEPs. They’re supposedly going to have the maintenance crew go through the buildings and mark the level we’re supposed to keep our lighting at on the switch plates. The maintenance people come through every single night and set my lights to the maximum before turning them off, a level of harsh overhead lighting that I absolutely cannot tolerate. We aren’t supposed to use staples or thumbtacks to attach things to the walls any more. Our walls are specifically constructed to take staples! They did that on purpose!

(My room didn’t even get fucking vacuumed over the summer, by the way. Everything is exactly where I left it at the end of the school year. I had no reason to put anything away.)

Anyway, my AP walked into my room today to say hello, and I’d moved my couch to a spot where it is clearly visible from the door, the same couch I’m not supposed to have in my room any longer, and she didn’t say a damn word about it. I’m not sure how much of a stink I’m willing to make about this, but I’m absolutely not complying with anything until my boss specifically tells me to, and I’m trying to decide if I’m petty enough for malicious compliance to kick in if that happens.

(The document also bans, believe it or not, cast iron bathtubs from being in classrooms. Specifically. There has to be a story behind this. I want to know what it is.)

In which I am subtle

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”

Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:

This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.

This one is the snarky one:

Not one of them says gay! I follow rules.

On HB 1608, Indiana’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and being a teacher

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Because the place I live is terrible, the state legislature has passed, and our governor has signed, a “Don’t Say Gay” bill inspired by the recent bullshit in Florida. I’ve been thinking hard about how I want to deal with this bill as an educator and I think my thoughts are formed enough that I can write about it.

First and foremost: I refuse to out any student to their parents under any circumstances, my teaching license be damned. I simply won’t do it. Any parents who needs their kids’ teachers to let them know that their kid is trans does not need to be notified that their kids are trans. If you could be trusted with that information, you’d already have it.

That said, there’s noncompliance and then there’s noncompliance, and this bill is so sloppily written that one wonders why they even bothered.

(That’s not true. They bothered because they wanted to make it clear to a vulnerable minority that they hate them and think they should be dead. That’s the reason this bill passed. It’s the only reason.)

Anyway, here’s the text of the law:

—

Chapter 7.5. Parental Notification Regarding Identification

Sec. 1. As used in this chapter, “school” has the meaning set forth in IC 20-30-17-1.
Sec. 2. (a) A school shall notify in writing at least one (1) parent of a student, if the student is an unemancipated minor, of a request made by the student to change the student’s:
(1) name; or
(2) pronoun, title, or word to identify the student.
(b) Not later than five (5) business days after the date on which a school receives a request described in subsection (a), the school shall provide notification to a parent as required by subsection (a).

—

I can think of two ways to deal with this law. The first relies on a close reading of the text itself. Note the usage of the words “request” and “change” in the first line of Sec. 2, and the repetition of “a school receives a request” in subsection b.

This does not describe a situation that ever happens.

First of all, I, a teacher, am not a school as defined by the law, and the word “teacher” does not appear in the law. There is not a form that a kid fills out when they decide that they want to be Ryan and not Sophia, nor is there anywhere at all where someone can file to have their pronouns changed. I find out that a kid wants to use different pronouns or a different name when they tell me, generally right after they’ve met. It strains credulity to call that a “request” to “change” anything. It’s them telling me what they want to be called, and it’s not a “request.” I have gone by my middle name for my entire life and have had to tell every teacher I have ever had to call me something other than what was written on the attendance form in front of them. By this law, even a diminutive or a nickname– going by “Andy” instead of “Andrew” or “DJ” instead of “Denise Jane”– requires notification.

There are, plain and simple, no “requests” being made here as the law seems to envision, and even if they are, they are being made to teachers, not to a school, and the law does not state who needs to make said requests and makes no requirement that I, for example, pass on said request to an administrator.

So that’s the first possibility; simply ignore the law, because as written it genuinely doesn’t appear to me to require me to do anything and does not bother to make itself clear enough to make it possible to figure out how to comply. It doesn’t even define “provide notification” in any coherent form other than saying that it should be by writing.

The second option is some form of malicious compliance. Again, the law does not specifically mention trans students, and as such it seems to apply to all of them. Which means that every “Andrew” who wants to be “Andy” or “Emmanuel” who wants to be “Manny” triggers the law, and if Bill wanting to be Bella gets a notification, that means that Robert wanting to be Bob gets one too. The law makes no distinction. It also– and this is potentially important– makes no requirement that the actual new name or pronouns be identified.

So I can either:

  1. literally send a letter to every single parent I have at the beginning of the year stating that I will call every student I have by the names and pronouns they prefer; or
  2. put said policy into something distributed to every parent (or at least accessible to them) at the beginning of the year, such as a syllabus or parent letter or my class website.

When you consider that the law also says that notification is required for any “word” used to identify the students? Shit. Granted, no kid is making a “request” to be called “you in the green hoodie” by anyone, but again, I don’t think “call me Evan” is a request either by the normal definition of the term. So am I notifying every single parent in the building? Because it is entirely within the realm of possibility that I might be using a “word” to refer to literally every kid in the building on any given day that school is in session, and given that I don’t know most of them those references will almost certainly not be using their names as spelled out on their birth certificates or school registrations.

And can I find a way to get every teacher in the building to notify every parent in the building, thus leading to an utter flood of mail and a nice little bit of civil malicious compliance designed to demonstrate how fucking stupid this law is?

Maybe.