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| Matt and Ray |
Ever since I read My great writing dog in the Oregonian last year, Matt Love is one of my favorite Oregon writers. A quote from his essay, which is a heart felt eulogy to a companion, has stayed with me.
"For many writers, writing begins with conversations,
ones you have with others, ones aloud with yourself, ones you overhear,
and ones with documents and ancient texts."
I have the quote tacked to my wall. For Matt, his conversations started with his dog Ray as they traveled around Oregon.
Recently Matt wrote an Opinion piece Oregon's overreach: Are teachers the troops in a war on individualism? in the Oregonian. He tells a story of he and his high school students field trip to do a performance at another high school. After 18 years of teaching he is feeling "complicit" in shaping students into the American consumer corporate mold. To me he was expressing an existential angst in recognizing his discomfort as being part of the control machine.
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| Matt and Ray |
If Matt were sending the opinion piece as a letter to Dear Sugar at Rumpus , I could image Sugar responding, "There, there, sweet pea, you have been complicit, as a teacher you are absolutely part of the social control troops shaping our good children. But it's okay. You work within. It is usually easier to open a window from inside a house than outside."
The response to Matt opinion piece showed how differently we hear what is being written and what we choose to react to. The article was shared on Facebook and among my "friends" the comments were the "Nice article" kind of typical pablum Facebook comments. I read the Oregonian readers comments which were argumentative. Some responded to the word "corporate", some focused on the "standardized testing". For the most part they put Matt Love into a political caricature and argued against their own construct. They were having fun, some quite eloquent.
I wonder how we can get from dueling monologs to conversations.
As someone starting their first year of teaching in August, the idea that teachers are part of some Orwellian thought machine becomes less appealing than it did in my post-adolescent idealistic phase. I'm glad that other teachers still question whether or not they in fact are a part of some larger mechanism that destroys individualism. Perhaps this is what Debbie Miller means when a teachers scrutinize their alignment of beliefs and practices in the classroom. "Nothing is sacred."
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