I Smart Than You

Quotations, 100% guaranteed overheard, and transactional unionism

I’ve taught a lot of beginning ESL classes. For some reason, most of my colleagues have preferred higher levels, almost always. I love to teach kids when they first get here, and I love to see the rapid, clear progress they make. Of course that doesn’t always happen. (But it does most of the time.)

One day, a very bright young woman from China walked up to me and said, “I smart than you.” I liked her, and I knew what she meant. I made her repeat, “I’m” a few times. Then, I made her repeat, “smarter” a few times. Eventually, she got it together and announced, “I’m smarter than you.”

“Maybe you are,” I told her. “But I don’t have to be smarter than you. I just need to know English better than you.”

I don’t know how, exactly, you measure intelligence. I can’t say she was wrong. She was very quick-witted, even if she didn’t always locate the English words she needed (yet). And she had the attention of her peers. Once, after something happened (I no longer recall what), a boy said to me, “Well, she did it,” pointing to the girl who deemed herself smarter than me.

Recalling what teachers had said to me, a long, long time ago, I said to the boy, “If she jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding, without hesitation. “Yes, I jump.”

I understand blind devotion. I absolutely understood the boy’s motivation, even if I questioned his conclusion. But I recall moments like that vividly. In a job like this one, there are intangibles. There are moments that Danielson simply doesn’t measure (or even acknowledge).

The girl I mentioned was very bright. I’m sure she got high grades on tests, but I don’t recall what they were. This job of ours is really not all about numbers. Neither our memories nor those of our students are all about them either. What is it that makes you recall a great teacher, or a great student? What is it that makes you change your life?

Why did I give up a well-paying adjunct gig at Queens College to become chapter leader of Francis Lewis High School? Was I crazy? Almost certainly. But there was something important about being of service. There was something fulfilling about helping people. (You can’t put a value on that, even though TRS did. When I retired, they made me pay back 14,000 dollars I earned from QC because, back then, I had no idea it counted toward the pension system.)

The point here is this—not everything is transactional. I don’t sit around and worry about how some kid did on the Big Standardized Test. Sure, there were classes I taught that revolved around them. They were the very worst classes I ever taught.

A Chinese teacher of my acquaintance told me she heard two kids discussing the English Regents exam. At that time, it was very heavy on writing. One student was despondent because she had trouble with it.

“You should take Goldstein’s class,” said her friend.

“Why? Is it a good class?”

“No,” said the friend. “It’s the worst class you’ll ever have. But he’ll make you write until your hand is about to fall off, and you’ll pass the test.”

I can’t disagree. For years I was selected to teach these classes, though I never requested them. Still, I understood what the test demanded. I understood how to explain it, and the extensive practice it required for non-English speakers. I understood all the literary terms and devices (although I don’t recall seeing them mentioned in the NY Times Review of Books).

At that time, students were required to cite outside literary references. I focused on short stories and poems that could satisfy a lot of prompts, quotes the Regents called a “critical lens.” I got the job done, but didn’t make them love reading or writing. (I’d much rather have tried to do that.)

Getting the job done is a minimal requirement for me. Of course I do it. After all, people pay me, and they have an absolute right to expect that. But we can do better. We can, in fact, share things we love, teach kids to love reading and writing, and then, the Big Standardized Test would be more of the Big Nothing it really is.

There is joy in language. There is beauty in language. There’s even romance. And hey, when romance interests teenagers, I help, because I teach them how to speak. Honestly, there was little romance involved with being UFT chapter leader, but I loved doing it. The first time I ran for chapter leader, I had three opponents. The second, third, and fourth times I ran uncontested.

So why hold onto a job that haunts you 24/7, and pays nothing? It’s another intangible. If you have passion for something, you do it. Maybe we can inspire passion in our students. Maybe we can inspire it in our colleagues too. Maybe we can inspire them to be unionists, to stand up for our working conditions. Maybe we can make them understand that doing this, in the long run, will result in better working conditions for our students, and our own children.

Unity has a different idea about promoting union involvement:

You see? Get involved with the union and get a free shirt, or maybe a cup. Maybe you can get two cups. After all, that guy looks pretty happy with his shirt and two cups, so maybe that will inspire you to get involved as well. It all starts with the chapter leader weekend and the creme brûlée.

From there, you go to a free convention weekend in Schenectady. Or maybe Hawaii. Then you get a part time gig. A friend of mine told me he’d go to UFT, get a list of calls to make from Salesforce, do it in 30 minutes, and get paid for three hours. Maybe, you can move on to doing that full time. Nice work if you can get it. If you like that kind of work, maybe you’ll fight to protect it.

It doesn’t sound a whole lot like unionism to me, though. Unionism doesn’t come from a new shirt or cup, or even an easy gig. It comes from being conscious that we are a group and need to support one another. It comes from being aware that we are, in fact, stronger together.

That is where our caucus model fails us. Unity is the very worst, as they are elite, privileged, and invitation only. The former RTC chair, Tom Murphy, used to lecture us that we are, “Michael’s Army.” We are not Michael’s army, nor should we have an entire unelected group that finds “Michael” more important than working to make things better for us and those who come after us.

Being chapter leader for 12 years taught me a lot about union. A lot of this was because I was in such a large school that things never took a break. It was learn on the job or fall down. If you don’t happen to be running a large chapter, you can learn a lot about union reading Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse. I’d also strongly recommend The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee. While it’s not specifically about unionism, McGhee shows what we can accomplish if we only choose to work together.

I’ll bet you dimes to dollars Mulgrew has read neither. We have it within us to support and inspire one another. We have it within us to stoke genuine activism. 60 years of absolute power has dulled the senses of our leadership to the point where they no longer understand what union is. Everything is calculated, and everything is about what they can get away with.

We are fearful. We worry about tests. We fret over evaluations. We worry about the crazy supervisors running amuck in a system that targets only educators as the source of all the woes and misfortunes in our system. We look to 52 Broadway for support, as though Michael Mulgrew is gonna come riding on a white horse and untie us from a railroad track. Then we cry the union sucks when that doesn’t happen.

This is because we don’t understand what union is. Years of poor leadership has left us thinking the union is a pair of glasses, or a dentist who has to invent odd charges to be able to afford staying on the UFT panel.

My friends and I are convinced we can do better. It will take some time.

Mulgrew, seeing the writing on the wall, has designed extra free weekends for groups he largely ignored, back when he could get away with it. Everything is transactional with him. If he can get away with selling us out for no good reason, he’s good with it. But Mulgrew is not powerful. We are powerful.

We just don’t know it yet. And we can fix that. I’m very proud to be part of a group determined to do so. Come meet us on Tuesday night.