A continuation from Part Two…
No teacher I knew spoke of Critical Race Theory in 2015, certainly not in 2012 when our administrators violated IDEA, and paid principals stipends not to suspend black kids. Had leadership read Kimberlé Crenshaw? I had not. SpEd teachers studied mental health, trauma, de-escalation strategies, and protecting our disabled kids’ rights. We took classes, and shared ideas and free junk. The graduate credits beyond my double master’s met PhD level, not that I wanted more letters after my name. I studied reading acquisition, belonged to associations, lobbied with my union for years, and complained about not having enough time to get things done.
Como Park High School drifted into a hellish gauntlet of equity engineering gone wrong, with a surge of student violence. The district stripped kids’ rights, and the teaching profession. Four other Como teachers were removed after me. Across Saint Paul, teachers filed suits.
To sum up: in the 2010s, we did not know what hit us.
If someone knew, they weren’t saying.
Media filled with controversial academics who were called in and censured or cancelled, beginning with Jordan Peterson in September, 2016, and Bret Weinstein in spring, 2017. Many have been ruined, but no one paid more than lip service to public schools. Neither Peterson, Weinstein, nor African American pundits Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, The Black Guys, paid much attention to K12. The media and academics’ blind spot probably had as much to do with scant sources as it had to do with living inside cones or silos. Teachers had reasonable terror of speaking up and becoming the next Theo Olson.
Facebook might not have had enough firewood for my bonfire in 2016. Today they would, but my other writing gave lots of kindling.
Enter my Google Blogger account, “Hotspvrr,” named for a Shakespeare character. I’ve written stories since age 15. Blogging kickstarted my writing career in 2013. In three years, I wrote 500-plus posts of fiction, original poetry, paeans to seventeenth century poetry, rock music, art, and about 40 short sketches on fictional teachers and students.
I don’t know how BLM learned of Hotspvrr, possibly through Google Plus, or by one or two of my public Facebook posts.
They asked for help to find it. Saint Paul’s HR wanted it, but I had deactivated it. Suddenly, BLM had it. Saint Paul Pioneer Press reporter Josh Verges texted that he mined my blog from the Wayback Machine, and had shared it with ex-school board member, Keith Hardy, a friend of BLM. My wife told Verges that move smacked of news making, not reporting. He fell silent.
I made up conversation so authentic that HR accused me of portraying real kids, and not favorably. I invented or cobbled together every character. So HR switched to accusing me of cultural appropriation as a racist. Even my union lawyer told me, “Theo, I don’t think you’re racist, but you got to admit, you wrote a lot of racially inflammatory stuff.”
We argued. She explained, “Because of using AAVE, African American Vernacular English.”
“Yeah, I know what AAVE is,” I said.
“Because no white person has the right to use AAVE,” she added. How could I argue with my union lawyer against racist accusations?
Here’s an example from my blog, a teacher calling on a student:
She blurted, “What?”
“Easy. Just checking to see you know what to do.”
“What? K, what? What I’m ’posed to be doin’?”
“There’s five different lenses. Pick one and fill in the answers on your Google form.”
“I ain’t got time for all that.”
“Donyale.”
“And don’t ‘Donyale’ me!”
Our Vernacular
This was my lexicon, my Tales Told Out Of School, my novel of short stories. After 20 years and 30,000 hours in the classroom, I knew my language and community. Speech is currency. Like a dollar bill, it does not care who spends it, if spent right. If the stories rang false and phony, I should have been trounced and made a laughingstock. But the teachers who private-messaged me said, “That is exactly what it’s like.” A couple of my students said, “Olson, that’s like real life.”
Meanwhile, BLM rallied to fire me at the school board. (Crowd photo credit to John Autey of the Pioneer Press, March 22, 2016). If I was so racist, why would I blog, “Lives Matter,” about walking with BLM and chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot?”
If I were generally an immoral person, why would I mourn my daughter’s transgender friend’s suicide?
“Get out. No one else will care about this,” teacher friends whispered. “Saint Paul is insane. It’s a sinking ship. Jump off. You could teach anywhere.” I did not jump until offered a suburban job.
South Washington County (SoWashCo) hired me on credentials alone without checking my references, freeing me from an unknown fate in Saint Paul schools, so I resigned. I told SoWashCo about BLM after seeing tweets stalking me. They suspended me immediately, and fired me without teaching a day for “falsifying my application” by leaving a two-week gap in a nineteen-year career. A charter school hired me briefly in early 2017, but cited expenses and let me go. Finally, a school far away took me on. Believe me, every day, I considered being a door greeter at Wal-Mart or driving for Uber.
End Of the Road
Last, I was hired by Grand Marais, a beautiful, almost-frontier town 250 miles up the north shore of Lake Superior. I left my wife and daughter about to start her senior year of high school, rented a bedroom, and took a $20,000 pay-cut. Kids took snowmobile and gun safety. A wolf at night loped past my window. Joyriding kids smacked a light pole and knocked out power to the whole town. AT&T’s reception showed one dot on my phone. Ojibwa kids from the Canadian border’s Grand Portage Band of Chippewa made up half my caseload. When my Native boy spit the N word at one of four black students in the biggest and sparsest populated county in Minnesota, a mostly white Facebook group, Arrowhead Indivisible, came out of the woods, howling at systemic racism inside the school. I repeat, a Native boy says the N word at a black kid, and white people go hunting for white supremacists. I hunkered down and did my job, watching the district suddenly depicted as a racist hotbed (it was not), and the clear-headed principal who hired me resigned.
By winter, 2017, Grand Marais adopted an anti-racist agenda. The town is not so remote that an anti-racism training group would not visit from the state teachers’ union, Education Minnesota. During sessions in the cafeteria, the leader stopped me walking past her and said, “It seems like I know you from somewhere. Have we met?” (Only on TV.) We had not. She saw my nametag. I feigned ignorance, saying, “I’m new here.” I recognized another presenter, my daughter’s homeroom advisor from Saint Paul, freaked out, threw up my hoodie, and quietly exited the training. This was February, 2018.
On March 7, the new principal called me in and fired me, but let me stay until June. Why? I’d had six positive job reviews. He said he didn’t have to tell me. Under Minnesota union rule, a probationary teacher may be fired without cause.
Back home with my family, I crawled through the year like an amputee. No job left to worry about losing, grinding anxiety caved in to deep depression. I missed my students. I missed colleagues. I missed knowing how people talked to each other.
To be continued…
