Off Route; An Introduction

Education in America was in trouble, constantly swerving and veering off the road...(go home school, you’re drunk) and that was back in the good old days of overcrowded classrooms, outdated textbooks, decrepit buildings, and cell phones in the classroom.

Then, along came the global Covid-19 pandemic. Now, instead of simply making the occasional wrong turn, school has hurtled off the road, landed in the ditch on its side, and is leaking fuel. 

What’s up with the car analogies? This might take a minute.

I am a high school science teacher in my 13th year of teaching. I began my career as an educator at an alternative high school which had: 

• a day care for student’s babies
• AA meetings twice a week
• a self-paced curriculum executed primarily through Google Classroom
• a free PB&J station in the cafeteria for kids who didn’t even really have enough of their own information to qualify for free and reduced lunches (how can this happen you might ask??? Imagine a parent withholding a social security number from a kid who ran away from horrific abuse...)
• a “smoke hole” that was loosely monitored by our security guard because, well, you need to pick your battles
• a van which could pick kids up and drop them off at the local career tech. center for classes, at the doctor’s office for an ultrasound, at court, or at “home.” 

I could have happily taught there through retirement, but as a long term sub my position was not permanent. Teachers in environments like that either last 2 weeks, or stay for a lifetime. When Mrs. C. inevitably returned, I had to go. I hugged the kids and we cried and promised to keep in touch; I still have the card signed by every single student. It was insanely difficult, but I could not have had a swifter or more straight forward introduction to what education in America both should and should not be. It SHOULD be all encompassing, supportive, diverse, and authentic. It should hold both students and teachers accountable for delivering the very best they have to offer regardless of how that looks on any given day. It should NOT be based on a system where kids are forced into ‘alternative’ and often stigmatized settings because ‘normal’ schools cannot accommodate or service their needs, and where teachers are held accountable for an inherently broken system in which they are mostly just trying to put out engine fires without an extinguisher... much more on that later. 

So, I relinquished the room back to my friend and accepted a position at a tiny rural K-12 building ten miles from the house in which I was raised. By tiny, I mean that in my ninth and final year there, the graduating class consisted of six students, (one of whom was severely emotionally impaired and simply the most challenging child I have ever taught, and another who, despite being born with a chromosomal disorder and a plethora of physical and cognitive challenges including legal blindness, made me prouder than any student I have taught since). This school, despite its small size, had a rather diverse population, including a wonderfully talented and charismatic African American athletic director and phys. ed. teacher, (something of a unicorn in rural Northern Michigan,) the children of the Indian grocer and gas station owners, (who literally saved me with their homemade spicy curry chicken one awful parent teacher conference night when I came in to buy DayQuill with no voice and tissue hanging out of my nose) many students of Native American ancestry from the nearby Reservation, and several Hispanic children of the migrant families who came to work in the surrounding cherry orchards and vineyards. There is so much more to tell about this experience, which consumed so much of my life and nearly led to the end of my teaching career...but again, another time.

As a graduate of both Wayne State University and Eastern Michigan University I became familiar with the metro Detroit area in the early 2000s, where I did my student teaching. In 2017 I followed the love of my life back to that area, and began my journey into what many refer to as ‘Urban Education.’ (I have so much to say about just that term alone...but not to jump ahead). I continue to work as a science teacher in Detroit, (yes, IN Detroit...so many folks say they’re in Detroit and really they are in Novi, Grosse Pointe, Downriver, etc.) I live and teach IN the D; What up Doe?

Teach313

I also followed this man into the world of off-road stage rally, becoming the top regional codriver (navigator) in the Eastern United States by the 2019 season. Hence the title of this blog; From the Silly Seat.

In rally, there are two people in the car; the driver (henceforth referred to as Handsome Race-car Driver) who is responsible for exactly what it sounds like...driving. And the codriver or navigator, who is responsible for everything else. To put it simply, a codriver must call out the route to the driver, at full speed, on a single track dirt road, in uncertain conditions (which can and have included snow, ice, fog, mud, total floods, darkness, and 100+ degree heat), while potentially battling crippling motion sickness. If the codriver says left but means right (misses a note), it could lead to; a high speed impact with a tree, a ‘full send’ off what we call a ‘drop’ (cliff), a ripped off wheel, a punctured gas tank, or many, many rollovers. It is for all of these reasons that the passenger seat in a rally car is called “the silly seat,” implying that you have to be a bit nuts to sit in it.

Many might say that buying your own supplies on your 40K a year salary, (if you’re lucky) so that you can walk into a high school classroom in September that contains 40 students but room for only 28 is equally nuts. Teachers are in their own special ‘silly seat’, especially when student reading levels for these 40 kids range from 4th grade to college ready, 10 of them require special education services, 50% of them do not have a working parent contact number, and nearly all would rather use their phones all hour than try to process what you are trying to teach. And that’s just in one of the 5 or 6 classes you will see in a single day.

Codrivers are typically highly organized type A individuals with excellent memories and attentiveness to detail. They can work with a great many different personalities, and remain focused on a task or goal despite constant noise and distraction. They are forced to make creative and critical last minute decisions which, in a literal way, can be life altering, (Do I call “stay in’ to my driver and risk him cutting the turn too much, or do I say “drop outside” and risk him staring at it to the extent that he loses confidence and we blow the turn altogether?). 

Photo: Jason Swboda

It is the same for teachers; challenging and ever changing conditions at best, dangerous at worst. We are forced every day to make decisions on the fly that could end in heroics or tragedy. Don’t think teaching is that serious??? Some day I will tell you what it’s like to experience a school riot in the age of technology, or explain what happens when a parent who no longer has custody of their child shows up at school with a loaded rifle to retrieve them. You will learn about what happens when it is discovered that the young lady starting fires in the bathroom is being sexually assaulted by her stepfather, or the action that must be taken when a child with epilepsy begins seizing during an unannounced fire drill, or how you maintain some semblance of order when a student drowns in the school pool and must be taken out by paramedics during lunch period. Maybe another day.

And now, after finishing decades of rough (Ruf) and challenging stages, teachers, parents, and students arrive here on the road to global pandemic. It’s the equivalent of “The Ranch,” a rally stage at the Snodrift Rally in Northern Michigan which is so awful, so rough, that at one point I recall Handsome Race-car Driver just screaming into the mic “goddamit I can feel my shit BREAKING!!!” (We have those moments in teaching, but usually what is breaking is your heart, your hope, your patience, or your sanity.) 

Except we have driven The Ranch before. Even the rookie teams know what is coming thanks to recce passes (recconasance, which is done the day before a race in a non-race vehicle so that teams can see the roads on which they will compete and take notes) and legendary tales. 

There are no notes for this stage in education, there isn’t even a route. We are making up the race as we go, and it doesn’t look like anyone is winning.

Unlike in motorsport, in life it is the least fortunate, the most underserved, the neediest of all who are often the last to receive help. Actually, maybe this is something we can learn from rally. When a car comes upon a competitor who is off the road, they stop, ALWAYS, and give aid. (Cars are spaced one minute apart according to speed...roads in rally are not wide enough for side-by-side racing.) It doesn’t matter if they’re the fastest car or the slowest, the most expensive professional rig or the most amateur jalopy, they stop, immediately, and help. I fear, however, that in education, as is so often seen in society as a whole, those who have the greatest disadvantage will be left standing on the side of a road, holding an “OK” sign, when they are truly anything but.

My hope for this blog, and whatever it subsequently becomes, is to reach teachers, parents, students, and hopefully anyone who cares about the future of our country. As in racing, the realities of public education are often tragic, frequently unbelievable, and occasionally triumphant. This is not meant to be an expose, but rather an inside look into what it means when we say that education is failing, inequitable, unrealistic, watered down, homogenized, undervalued, and yet critically important. Enjoy the ride, and welcome to the Silly Seat.