The minotaur, bastard freak child of Pasiphae, shame of Minos, dark secret down-bringer of Crete, somehow the image has always stayed with me; and considering the crisis in our public schools I wonder if there isn’t a correlation between this myth and the manufactured education crisis.
So, here I am, walking the labyrinthine halls of this urban middle school to which I am confined, wondering how long all this absurdity will continue to play out. I think of the year so far, year two of teaching from a canned curriculum designed to raise test scores at all costs. I recall various episodes since the beginning of the year: a veteran teacher weeping openly when the vice principle handed an award to three first-years whose sixth graders were the only ones to show significant gains in all areas. Later, at the monthly staff meeting, the clearly chagrined principal tried to assuage his ever-silent staff saying “I heard there were tears, but please don’t worry, we’re just trying to celebrate our successes because I know how you all work so hard!”
Flashback to four years ago, to another staff meeting when I naively raised my hand and mentioned that "socio-economic factors outside our control negatively impact student learning". An uncomfortable murmur moved through the crowd, or at least it became awkwardly quiet, I can’t really recall now. Needless to say I felt uncomfortable almost as soon as I’d finished my statement and that same principal had called out “That sounds like an excuse to me, and we’re a ‘no excuses school’.” Then one of the perennial sycophants on the staff rose to his feet launching a passionate diatribe about how he only had his kids for six hours a day, but by God he was going to impact their lives as fully as he could with the time he had, etc., etc. He was met with resounding applause--that I do remember, the applause.
I am drowning, in absurdity. It increases with each passing year as one group after another of poorer, less prepared, more ignorant students enter my classroom. What I taught two years ago—before the canned curriculum—would be above their heads today; actually, a lot of the canned stuff is above their heads too. I have to constantly reinvent myself while putting on a dog and pony show for the suits who visit my room in search of differentiation in the uniform instructional program they’ve charged me with carrying out. They are strange predators my bosses, hungering for certain magical numbers they believe to be hidden in my room. They won’t find them easily, and in lieu of what they really crave they’ll devour my students or even myself if driven far enough by hunger. I toss them steaks of visible compliance with district objectives whenever they come in, just to buy a little more time.
Then there’s the kids themselves, so needy, so often angry. They are being blatantly institutionalized, disregarded as human beings, and pushed along; herded as it were. They know it too. I know it, they know it. They resist, I comply. You see they’re kids, they still have the freedom of non-responsibility, unlike myself who has, well…kids to feed. I entered teaching because I hate public schools. I entered as a secret rebel, a saboteur, an individual who’d make a difference in the stinking mire of government education. Now I fear I’m trapped in the same. How do I get out? This question rings incessantly like a bell in my mind. I don’t want to escape it, I don’t want release, I want to get at the roots of this insidious absurdity even more, grab hold of it, tear it out, holding it up for all to see. I need to find three things in order to do this, my voice, my time and my medium, and to that end I am striving.
So the motif of the minotaur in his maze, such questions he brings to mind! I cannot decide if he is like myself, a prisoner of others’ devices, or if he is the beast that must be slain, the very thing I am seeking to fight. Perhaps he is both? And the labyrinth, one thing I’m sure of, it is the mind itself, confused and deluded. The same mind that generates tears in the eyes of the underachieving veteran and a twinkle in the eye of the praised young teacher. It is the source of all absurdity, if not absurdity itself, ever winding and weaving one inward to complete nonsensicality and utter futility. At the center of it all something needs to be killed and something needs to die, but what? Who is the hero in this symbolic landscape, Theseus or the freakish victim child of a lonely queen? And, perhaps more importantly in the great battle between conscience and corporatism that we are witnessing with No Child Left Behind, is the question of who will follow the string out of the prison and into the world? A hero or a monster?
__________________________
