Write it up regardless...

Some things will never make sense because they were made to be confusing

A few weeks ago I sat at my friend’s kitchen island over lunch and a poetry class zoomed in from the Writers Grotto. We were invited to begin with a meditation about a tree in a gentle zen garden and then to write, with no further prompt, for about twenty minutes. My friend did just that, channeling the vibe into a beautiful lyrical piece and I urged her to write it up and send it to me.

“Write it up,” I yelled, as I left her house, while my own pages sat crumpled in the front of a journal. The journal got filled, it got stored away, I pulled it back out for another story and found the pages still folded into a little square. Some things, I decided, are just hard to face. 

Today I typed up the pages:

I wanted to smash that meeting but instead, I couldn’t sleep, I had written. Good beginning, but what do I mean by smash?

3 hours in a room, no burritos, mostly the seats weren’t filled, either side of me, empty. I’m describing the Board of Ed meeting here. Somehow I had gotten myself into one by way of the parent coalition and my own ego, in partnership. Something about a public comment and wouldn’t I like to make an impact on that night’s decision to arm teachers with a new assessment for literacy.

“Now how old is your baby?” a warm bodied woman asked, with her notebook open and her pen ready. She had red lipstick and big earrings and a patterned dress. You can tell that she’s done this before. I’m jumping here to a woman who took my hand at the end of the meeting and led me out of the room to sooth me after I stuttered at the podium. She gave me her card. 

On my way back into the room some other guy blocked my way, claiming to be with a group of Japanese students who were studying conflicts between parents, teachers and administrations, and wouldn’t I like to be part of the study? He also held out his card. 

“I’m a new member of the Parent’s Coalition,” I said, “so I was invited here just to make a statement about literacy.”

“Oh,” he said, seeming disappointed, and pulled his hand and the card back toward himself and stepped aside. 

“I’m just not sure that the assessment tools suggested tonight are the right tools for the assessment,” said a medium sized white man taking up too much space with his legs. He sat in the U-shape of the board in the very bright lights. A red light noted the time in digital numbers at the top of the wall. The meeting was three hours long and public comments, at two minutes a piece, were invited at the end. 

“Who is this guy?” I asked another woman from the council who sat across the seats on the other side of the room. I crouched down beside her as her face narrowed and she explained that he was the bane of all of our existences and had been as long as he’d had a seat on the board. 

“I knew it, I knew it,” I thought to myself, without knowing what it really was that he was saying. 

You just get a sense, you know, about what pure evils sounds like after so many years. In this case it was that incessant questioning and second guessing, the kind that you do to yourself when you don’t want yourself to get ahead, not even a smidge. When you make yourself have to prove something obvious over and over. When your bad self wants to remind you just who is in charge. 

In this case, a man wanted acknowledgement that the tool suggested for measuring progress was not related to the current tool for measuring progress, even though that was the point of the whole meeting to begin with.

“Now, is it ALL students of color?” one board member asks. “Or is it just SOME students of color.” The board member is talking about student outcomes, which has shown through both qualitative and quantitative means, that the current practices overlook students of color who might be doing fine if they were attended to in equitable ways.

“I just want people to know we did our best,” said one grown-ass adult.

The non-board members speaking tonight are sitting in a line that’s parallel to the public seats in the darkened side of the room and they are not here to make sure anyone knows they are doing their best, rather they are here to introduce nuance. The board is not interested in nuance. The board is interested in answers. 

“How can we be sure that the new practices suggested here tonight will be successful?” the head of the board says in a somewhat rhetorical way. The speakers lined up for the meeting are rightfully speechless as they can’t be sure of anything before they have the opportunity to try new things out. I remember an old critique of corporate culture back when I bothered to try to squeeze blood from a stone: it too spoke of the way people in power will ask you to prove that you can be effective without giving you the means to prove you can be effective. It’s just one of those old tricks.

“I’m concerned that we’re including dyslexic students in our numbers,” says another board member that has not opened her mouth in most of the meeting and now I see it’s been for good reason. 

At the podium, I said, “I’m shaking because I am so angry,” and I don’t remember the rest. I do remember looking at the Superintendent in the eyes and saying: “I’ll address this to you.” Sometimes one thinks one’s in a very dull action movie and one can be the big hero. 

Thank you, the timer said, after two minutes of me speaking. Thank you, thank you, thank you, he said three times again when I didn’t stop.