Looking over my shoulder

I Can Pinpoint The Year when English became the subject I wanted to teach. 1970 found me in a classroom where poetry made sense, Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” captivated me, and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was ridiculously non-relatable. (Teenage love should never end with poison and a dagger in a burial vault).

History was added to the undergrad degree plan as a result of some excellent secondary teachers. This subject made the perfect blend. Years later, I combined my two passions of studying the past and seeing it portrayed in poems, short stories, and novels.

In previous columns, I have referred to my classroom return after a threeyear retirement. Meeting with students two or three days a week who are on the UIL speech and debate teams is a focal point of my job. Another group, UIL Social Studies team members, join me as well. To do justice to the objectives, students must research current issues and write and present speeches from more than one point of view. The students in Social Studies read a novel—this year about the United States during the 1920s. This history book’s contents include innovation through technological progress, economic growth, educational opportunities, women’s right to vote, unbridled capitalism, and literary and musical explosions.

To cover the book effectively, my high school students and I have also had discussions about Prohibition, political grift, racial injustices, the peril of propaganda, and crime.

Teaching is meant to be enlightenment.

Today, this method is considered “indoctrination.”

Many school board elections are now driven by agendas of what and how a teacher is supposed to communicate knowledge. With my UIL Social Studies class, should I have omitted the discussion of flappers, speakeasy establishments, and jazz music? Was it a mistake to talk about our presidents’ turning a blind eye to acts of racism? What about workers who were forced to put in twelve hour shifts in the steel industry, six days a week, and the bosses who labeled them Communist Bolsheviks for wanting better conditions?

I am a Christian and a teacher by choice. Ageappropriate materials are always a priority, and faith and facts have colored my objectives as a speech/English/ history teacher now for almost 45 years. To question that is humiliating. It is insulting, as if I or most every other teacher sets out to harm a child.

Looking over my shoulder, I see a wave coming. It is white-capped, foaming at the mouth, and shouting “Protect the children!”

This politically driven, media-induced storm has engulfed us and is only growing stronger, fueled by the heat of a propaganda machine interested in harnessing power.

Can you answer this two-question test? 1) Why aren’t we spending more time and resources on a broken foster-care system and the needs of severely disabled children who need special educational settings?

2) Why don’t we start with protecting children from bullets rather than books?

I couldn’t care less what pronoun a student or a person asks me to use. I do care that every student knows in my room they can be heard, they are safe, and that they understand my expectations for learning. Most of all, I try to protect them from ignorance—the hardest job of all.

Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.