OUTSIDE THE BOX

Donna Dufresne

I have spent my lifetime feeling left out – too dark, to white, not Indian enough, not smart enough for the liberal intelligentsia, too smart for my family, working class by birth and therefore severely lacking in a sense of entitlement to carry me through life. And there is no place on earth where it is more obvious when you are an outsider than in a school. Schools are where children practice the craft of sorting out who’s inside and who’s outside. It is obvious when you study and observe mean girl behavior starting as early as kindergarten that it’s all about sorting the wheat from the shaft. And if for some reason unbeknownst to you – perhaps it’s the way you dress, or some morsel of gossip about your family – you are separated as “other”, you are stuck wearing that yellow star the rest of your life. So, you might wonder how the hell I ended up being a teacher.  I will tell you that I ask myself the same thing every day

I think that I must have gained enough self-confidence after joining the middle class by proxy of marriage, to assume that of course I could waltz in there and change the system. Never mind the fact that I hated school my whole life and got my college degree through an independent study option. Never mind the fact that had I been able to have children, I would have home schooled them to protect them from the materialism and violence of American culture.  But for some reason, after ten years of teaching environmental education, I believed that I had a gift. I wanted to give students the kind of education I never got. It would be more akin to prep school in my mind, where you would be taught to think, and lead, not to follow and march lock-step off to the factories and the wars the military industrial complex designed to deepen their pockets. I envisioned lots of hands-on learning, science labs, outdoor labs, inquiry, field trips, and creativity.  It was the 90’s and President Clinton had decreed that 21^st century schools needed creative teachers. It was like Uncle Sam was pointing his patriotic finger directly at me.  “They want me! They really want me!” I thought in my best Sally Field’s self. 

And indeed – on the university level, it was obvious that I was on the right track. I thrived in my student teaching, I won awards, I got great grades, I was a star – the one whom my liberal thinking professors had labeled “hope”.  My environmental education background had prepared me for cross curricular units of study, where students would apply reading, writing, math, science, social studies and thinking skills while investigating relevant topics.  This was way before the Common Core. I was ahead of my time.  And who wouldn’t want that?

My first job was in Stafford Springs, a dead factory town. I was the gifted & talented teacher. It was part-time, but I brought those kids on an amazing journey. But with the ominous cloud of standardized testing on the horizon, the program was cut. After all – testing is an expensive endeavor. When you are the G & T (not gin & tonic) teacher, it is expected that you are the quirky Miss Frizzle type, and your colleagues have a benevolent tolerance toward you.  But once you join their ranks in the classroom, the barricades are quickly constructed. That Trumpian wall, meant to exclude all who dare to be “other” is extremely difficult to scale.  It is the dark shadow looming behind the smooth coating of acceptance (if you conform), forcing you to become a beggar, groveling for the right to exist.

I am creative and good natured, if not determined, and spent my whole career trying to dismantle that wall, brick-by-brick. Since most of my colleagues were obsessed with sports (which I am not), I organized staff volleyball games. This was the one sport I was comfortable with. It enabled them to see me more broadly and allowed me to pop out of the “Jack-in-a-box” they’d stuffed me in. I drank beer with them and joked around. But I refused to compromise my teaching. I refused to perpetuate mediocrity, even though it’s the way things are done. And this set me up for being under suspicion. 

You can sense when people don’t trust you by the way the teacher’s lounge gets silent when you walk in. They assume that because you got teacher of the year, you are the administration’s pet – not because you work your ass off.  They don’t like the way you dress, and your singing drives them crazy. They think the guitar thing and the music have nothing to do with learning.  They assume that you aren’t really teaching, and certainly not diagramming sentences.

Of course, that was nothing new. I spent my childhood with teachers who would say things like “She’s so creative…” with a click of the tongue and a rolling of eyes. I didn’t follow directions and didn’t color in the lines. I grew up thinking that being “creative” meant that I was stupid. Being “creative” meant that I would never learn math, and I would always be one of those crazy artist types, or as my dad preferred to label them– “Goddamned crazy communist artists”.

But if I could close my door and teach my way, I was able to dance around the crankiness of my colleagues. I enabled them to a certain degree. Being a good listener, and an experienced co-counselor, I allowed them to client and gripe their way through all the dumb-ass administrative decisions, the even more ridiculous Federal mandates, and the mounting workload. I agreed with them. I felt the oppression, and when the first wave of standardized testing came along (the Connecticut Mastery Test), I became their activist – saying all the things they wanted to say but could not. I plastered the school with posters about how the CMT would be the ruin of teaching and learning. My poster had a cartoon- like androgynous kid saying something like: I am not a widget in a factory; I am not a test score; I am not a handicap; I am not a data point; I am not a pair of glasses. I am a student. I am here to learn.    

Boy – that got me in a lot of trouble. And even though I expressed everything my colleagues and I felt, you could hear them all scurry like cockroaches into the woodwork when the principal was pointing her finger in my face and yelling at me in the hall.  Maybe there was one tiny little cricket chirp – “You go girl!” from a solitary corner, but for the most part – my colleagues were happy to see me thrown under the bus because it took the attention off them. It wasn’t the only time I stuck my neck out to speak truth and stand up for what I thought was best for students. But after all that complaining by my colleagues, and the bidding I tried to do for them through the wisdom of my pen as I tried to articulate their concerns – they still turned their back when the Nazi’s came.

It was one thing to be an outsider when they thought I was still one of them. But then word got out that the work I was doing, showed up positive on the Mastery Test.  Not only was I not conforming to mediocrity, and bending downward toward teaching the test, but whatever I was doing was getting good results.  My principal begrudgingly informed me that she didn’t know how I did it, but she could always tell my students from the other fifth grades because of their higher test scores. I could tell it was a bass-ackwards compliment, because she had never quite forgiven me for those widget posters. Up until that point, I was able to escape to the underground, like the French Resistance. I could close my door and teach, knowing there were still those who didn’t understand what I was doing, and even some who continued to roll their eyes saying, “She’s so creative”, as if I were smoking pot and planning revolutions with fifth graders.

The final nail in the coffin of any outsider teacher, is when your administration begins to recognize you for your work. You walk a fine line between trying to please and trying to be true to yourself, as if teaching isn’t hard enough already.  And then the little jabs, the snide comments, the clicking of tongues begin to take their toll. You can hear the same rustling of crinolines and scuffing of penny loafers you experienced in grade school in the sixties. Rather than celebrating you for your talents, your hard work, there are rumors that you are one of the minions of the much-hated principal. It is assumed that you are her pet and can do nothing wrong. You become the topic of discussion at union meetings as a possible scab who will run to the administration and tattle. You become isolated because your colleagues have been told not to trust you.  Then the bully teachers say things right to your face, like “ well it must be nice to be the principal’s pet while the rest of us have to work…”, or the daily mantra of one teacher who nabs you every day in tears: “I know that she likes you, but you don’t know what it’s like for me and how terrible she treats me…”

What they don’t realize is that I have earned the respect of my principal not because we are friends, or I am anointed, but because I work extremely hard. I take risks to push my own learning and thinking as a teacher, and I have dived into common core strategies, developing rigorous ELA units that teach students about history and civil rights and things that matter in the world.  They don’t realize that I argue with the principal about the data driven corporate model which is sucking the life out of schools. They also don’t realize that unlike them, I have treated my principal with kindness and respect, even when we disagree, so of course she does not feel threatened by me. We can have civil conversations. I didn’t join the hate group to get her fired, when teachers riled up parents and the parents put all their misguided energy into running her out of town. Because I know the long arc of history and understand what a witch hunt, or a pogrom looks like, I refused to join the fray. This perpetuated those minion rumors which were spread into the parent community, making me not only an outsider with my colleagues, but one not to be trusted by the parents and their children who listen, watch and believe that grown-ups speak truth.

Ultimately, being an outsider comes down to betrayal. Not if you will be betrayed, but when.  If you are culturally experienced with this scenario, you know when to pack up and flee to a new village, a new country where you can start over.  My Jewish friends know better than to stick their necks out like I do, and African Americans know what can happen to them if they dare to stand up or kneel in public. Unlike my Native American ancestors, and the ever-elusive Romani, who know how to disappear, I have put myself out there my whole life. But I’m O.K. with that. Do I really want to belong to a tribe associated with murder, genocide and annihilation? The kind of people who are cowardly and fearful and unwilling to change?  Do I really want to be embraced by those who depend upon a scapegoat for survival?  I think not.  As I pack my bags and slip into the dark of night, I’m happy to place my cards in the company of the Gypsies, the Jews, and all the other outsiders who navigate this weary worn world. At least I know where my moral compass is set, and I know that I am not alone.