Humanity is at a low point. We can’t stop killing each other over arguments.
Bonobos are a matriarchal society who are friendly to each other and to strangers.
Chimpanzees brutalize all of the females in their group and hold grudges across generations.
So I've been thinking about how I could begin this and I keep thinking back to my experience over the last many years I guess since 2017-18 was the last completely good school year where I felt like I don't know what my next steps were but I was on a pretty good path and then of course we celebrated Heidi's Teacher of the Year Award with a trip to the college football final in January of 2019 and it was really at that point where things began to accumulate in a way that began my reflection on what was happening with Humanity. and I know that sounds too grandiose for what I was doing which was being an assistant principal of a high school but if you think back to when President Obama was elected and what students were like in the years from 2008 to 2016 it seemed like there was a general positivity about the world that might be possible.
Now I know of course that horrible things were still happening drone strikes and things like that and even worse. And the proud boys were gaining prominence and people who felt comfortable speaking as racists became more comfortable. But it felt relatively okay and my personal life and my work life felt okay. My kids were young and they were growing. Things were wonderful. Overall it seemed like my life and the world were going in a generally positive direction.
But a lot of things were happening at the end of the 2018-2019 school year there was a Concord High School teacher who had raped a 12 year old and he was getting arrested. but then that summer all public anger turned on a wonderful man named Tom Sica and he was eventually fired. It was as though the public turned their anger not on the rapist but on a wonderful man who had no way of knowing what the criminal could have been doing because the criminal was a psychopath and a psychopath is effective at covering up what they're doing.
At the same time the public seem to be having an ever-increasing difficulty with their role in public education. The days of parents trusting and administrators were long gone but the ability of them to completely go against teachers and administrators and give them no respect were fully upon us by that point. Over the course of the spring of 2019 on the fall of 2019 I was accused of being an anti-semite, a misogynist, a friend of the teacher rapist and someone who would have defended Owen LaBrie who was a Saint Paul student who forced himself on a 9th grade student when he was a senior.
In the world at large I saw more Confederate flags flying than I ever had before and I don't mean belt buckles and stickers I mean people who had a flagpole in their front yard and had a Confederate flag on it most of these weren't in New Hampshire but seen them as I drove around upstate New York certainly concerned of me. I even saw someone wearing a hat that said 6 million wasn't enough in reference to 6 million Jews being killed in the Holocaust wasn't enough.
Then when the pandemic arrived and we of course could have come together as people we immediately once again And couldn't agree on science. and I'm not saying that we should blindly follow science but the fact that science is something of value and that science is a process was disturbing to see. and it was disturbing to see people not wear masks and not come together and yell at each other. and I suppose the part
that is making me feel
The worst aspects of humanity have been on display in Gaza over the last few months. As part of that attack human beings killed babies raped women shot women in their vaginas with guns and kidnap people refusing to release them. I think also it's part of getting older I turn 50 last year and knowing that they're only so many more years and thinking that I've taught about climate change for nearly 25 years and I don't know how much change is happening one begins to wonder did they have any effect and so they're certainly points where I get low thinking about humanity and are we going to make it as a species.
Those are the kind of things I've been thinking about over the last several years and to be honest my professional career has been a little odd over those years I moved away from being assistant principal of a high school and into a teaching job that I moved to be in a central office job for 2 years and now I'm in a quasi teaching / central office job.
But the big difference this year—and why I wanted to write about my experience this year—is for the first time since 2012 I'm a classroom teacher in the traditional sense I'm not a pandemic classroom teacher I'm a regular classroom teacher with 24 students that show up every other day and I need to show up for that so I thought that I would write a little reflection every day about how the year is going. and at this point I have about 41 days of reflection so I want to start putting them out.
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