Two Sides of "As a Parent"

I am on this committee for school improvement since I am a lead teacher. My subcommittee is Grading for Equity. Grading is one of the worst parts of teaching. It can feel subjective, it can pile up, you can use rubrics and checklists and STILL feel like you're not quite capturing things... but one thing that has come of this series of meetings is this -- how we have graded for years and years makes no sense. For instance, the 0. On a 100 pt scale, 0-64 is failing, and 65-100 is passing. So there's like 2/3 more failing than passing in that spectrum, and a 0 hurts your grade significantly. It can halve it. So making 50 the lowest grade isn't "giving something for nothing," it's making the floor 50 and the ceiling 100. It's making the math make way more sense.

Anyway, this isn't about the grading part. 

I initially had a draft about one of the meetings from February, where there was a chorus of "as a parent" conversation, but it actually made sense. A bizarrely large percentage of the teachers in my district are also parents of students in the district. So, when talking about having a more consistent grading policy, there were many opinions due to experiences their children have had or are having as students. OK, I thought. This is one of those rare situations where "as a parent" is not about showing just how much more empathy you now have for horrific events because you are parenting, or how you now know what love is whereas before parenting you were a selfish bastard, apparently. It is LITERALLY a perspective as a parent on school functioning. I felt like, "ahhhh, I don't have to be judgy about this anymore!"

Except. 

Last week I had another subcommittee meeting, and it was very, very different. The thing that sucks about these meetings is they are during the school day, which means I need to have sub coverage and I miss teaching to talk about homework or our grading projects based on the research for the umpteenth time. So I was pretty cranky to begin with, because it's always the same classes that I keep missing, which is vastly unfair to those students. And school is ultimately supposed to be about the students, right? 

So when the meeting started with "a reflection on self care and coping strategies for stress" I started losing it. When the facilitator, an administrator, said, "think of your stress, what's taking up space in your brain, and then exhale it all away," I (somewhat loudly) said "um, can I do a primal scream instead?" 

It got worse when we were sorted into groups by color cards, and my color card matched with two very parent-centric individuals. We were supposed to get together and talk about where our projects are, what we did differently from last year, and what we might do next year. 

That did not happen. 

One person, a guy, talked about his project, and then veered into how his three sons are different and would react to these changes differently. And then the other person, a woman, started talking about her kids. And then the two of them were just talking about their kids, and parenting, and how we don't focus enough on The Family anymore and why aren't more people having kids?

I happen to know that one of the individuals went through IVF for at least one of his kids, so I was like (but in my head), "oh, you're an infertility amnesiac. Cool." 

Outside my head, I said, "well, you know, there's the financial landscape, where children (last time I checked) are super expensive and EVERYTHING is super expensive, so young people (and not so young people) don't feel that they can responsibly have children right now. And then there's the environmental landscape with what kind of future is there, and the environmental impacts on fertility, which makes it so people like me who really WANTED kids can't have them. Not everyone wants kids, and not everyone gets kids." 

They kept talking about their children while the administrator facilitating sat at our table, smiling and nodding (and to his credit, did seem to hear what I said and seem a bit surprised and appreciative about my stance). 

And then, the guy said, "you know, why do we shame young women when they say that their ambition in life is to be a wife and mother? What's wrong with that? That should be enough." 

Ummmmm, what about self-sufficiency? What about yes, great to be a wife and mother, but what about BEFORE you find that husband and father? How do you support yourself? And what if that husband and father is a dick, or something happens to him... how do you support yourself and your kids when there isn't that "breadwinner" person? AND WHAT CENTURY ARE WE IN??? (Also, this whole thing is insanely heteronormative.)

I have no problem with people who want to make family their central part of their life. But I do not think it is responsible to encourage young women to forever be dependent. ALSO, what about the men? Are you encouraging young men to be husbands and fathers? Oh, right. That's just for the ladyfolk. 

Enter serious internal primal screaming that may have become external once I got to my car. 

For this I missed out on teaching? Ridiculous. We never really talked about our projects, not really. And I felt very, very othered. And angry. 

So, I guess yay that there was an appropriate use of "as a parent" in one discussion, and absolute BOOOOO to the second discussion. Ugh.