How about a massive showing at a school board or city council meeting? A sit-in on the Capitol steps? … Picket. Nail your list of grievances to the schoolhouse door. Just don’t throw your colleagues and students under the bus, please.
Patricia Gordon has had it with her colleagues in the Alexandria (Virginia) school district, which was forced to shut down today because of the politically motivated absenteeism of 300 teachers.
The T.C. Williams High School teacher lit into the “Day Without a Woman” slackers for both dragging down students (and their parents) and failing to make any coherent point by skipping work.
The Washington Post reprinted Gordon’s original post, liberally sprinkled with sarcasm quotes, which said the remaining students and teachers have been “held hostage by those who want to ‘raise awareness’ or ‘protest'” with an “amorphous and undefined” form of “‘activism'”:
As a teacher and a woman, I don’t like this one bit. My first allegiance is to my students. I work for them, not Donald Trump or whomever this protest is supposed to sting. (Spell that out for me, please, if you know.) Missing a day of school negatively impacts kids. Period.
The teachers are screwing over students and parents in multiple ways, Gordon says: High schoolers can’t afford to miss class with must-pass state tests coming up; parents have “no cache of leave to pull from” to watch their kids; and some students “depend on school for two meals a day or care at our clinic or, hey, an education!”
Then there’s those students who have nowhere else to go, and may end up (unsupervised) in the street.
Instead of exercising “sloppy dissent” with no clear audience or goal, how about put “some skin in the same” if you want to protest, Gordon says:
On Wednesday, whose graduation is imperiled? Who gets docked a day’s pay? Who goes hungry? Who could be in physical danger? Not the striking adults! …
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