20 short observations from a high school teacher

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1. Students tell me they need their iPhones because their brains are wired differently than mine. One said, "Mr. Miller, we need the dopamine hit."

2. By accident, an intruder alarm warning went off in one of our district schools, and a child hid in a closet and called his dad to say, "I love you."

3. Equity and social justice initiatives continue to be handed down to teachers, and school becomes, every day, a place where the wealthiest will be educated with the wealthy, as the suburban St. Louis school where I teach systematically eliminates the voluntary transfer program.

4. Our high school continues to target the remaining Black students for enrollment in our honors and AP classes without understanding, acknowledging or studying how our suburban school system and its community were designed to exclude the very students they wish to promote.

5. The speaker of our morning announcement, before saying the Pledge of Allegiance over the announcement system, says, "You may stand if you are so inclined."

7. Almost every day, there's a shortage of substitute teachers, and regular classroom teachers are asked to sub.

8. Faculty is celebrating a solid increase in salaries for the first time in 20 years, but if you calculate the cost of inflation, it's not a solid increase at all.

9. Students are outside playing, screaming, yelling in the sunshine of the courtyard as I write this note, enjoying the end of the first somewhat normal academic year after COVID-19.

10. Still, I see a faculty member or a student wearing a mask from time to time.

11. Yet another senior faculty member was persuaded by the central office to resign for reasons that no one on our faculty will ever really know.

13. Retired teachers have returned to sub and wear a perpetual bemused smile as they meander the hallways and accidentally interrupt AP exams to ask questions about how to use Google Classroom.

14. A memo goes out telling faculty members that they are not allowed to post any classroom pictures of themselves with students on social media.

15. In the last week of classes, all students must watch the Intruder Training Video, which starts with an actor reading aloud in a measured monotone, "Each year, we practice to ensure we're prepared in case an intruder enters our school building and acts in a dangerous manner."

16. A student hands in an essay about Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" written by the artificial intelligence app ChatGPT. When I asked him why he did it, he says his brother in college showed him how.

17. A student sends me pictures from the Philippines during a family visit, and then a QuickTime video arrives in my work email inbox of a mountain scene, a student on a winding path, a cross for a grave and an angel's shadow. My student rotates his arm to show amid scudding red-black clouds Psalm 23 in cursive, scrolling down the length of his inner forearm.

19. One student's parents said the student prefers the pronouns "he/him" but would never be confrontational about it. In his mini-graphic memoir, he drew the story of starting hormone replacement therapy and titled it in big white letters "HRT," surrounded by red. In one panel, he writes, "I try to hold some hope for the future."

20. Teaching every day in our public schools is still the most important job there is if we, the people, want independent and clear-thinking — speaking, writing … with their own brains — citizens who will maintain and strengthen our frayed democracy.