We Did Not Know What Was Coming Series: Teachers the Day After

PREFACE: To say the last seven years have been a journey of growth for me and this country is an understatement. To help me process and cope with the roller-coaster of emotions I have felt these years, I started writing on Medium right after the 2016 election. My last series ended December 31, 2020, after Biden won the presidential election.

Recently I realized I missed writing “in my journal” and decided to go back to the very beginning and re-read my essays. I wanted to see where I started out on November 9, 2016, and where I am now. I decided to re-post my favorite blogs with a short present-day commentary and continue onto current times.

I hope a few of you will join me on this journey of recollection, reflection, and learning. Little did we know what we were headed into.

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Teachers the Day After: November 27, 2016

I continue to drift in my feeling memories of me as a ten-year-old watching the civil rights marches on television. I am trying to remember if my parents or my teachers talked about these things with us. They may have but I have no concrete memory of any such discussions.

This led to me thinking about teachers in general. I think our teachers have one of the most important jobs in our country. I have been fortunate to work with a number of teachers as clients through the years and have been moved when they speak about their profession. They worry about the kids they teach and the challenges these children face. Many have 28–30 kids in a classroom; they use their own money for supplies, clothes and sometimes snacks for children who do without. They are not only educators but on many occasions surrogate parent, therapist, spiritual counselor, doctor and mentor. These folks work evenings and on weekends grading papers, doing lesson plans, and planning projects for their classroom. They are amazing people.

So I wondered how good hearted responsible teachers were handling themselves and their students with the results of this election. I started reading on the Internet. I came across an article written by Ellie Shechet on November 10, 2016 for Jezebel, a blog geared towards women. I have included excerpts taken from the article. Comments were presented to the author via email and phone conversations. Here is the link to the article in its entirety: http://jezebel.com/what-do-i-say-stories-from-the-classroom-after-electi-1788781296.

Noah, 7th grade English teacher, Harlem, New York:

My students voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in our mock election. Yesterday morning, I brought donuts for comfort and kept my voice low. How do you feel, everyone? Betrayed. Indifferent. Anxious. Nostalgic. (They have a test on emotion words today). All I said was “you matter and you are safe here.”

At lunch, I made individual check-ins. Jay said, “One side of me feels like it’s no big deal. But another side feels like I should be uncomfortable and full of fear.” Maria didn’t want to stay in the room with Hector because she’d heard his dad voted for Trump. Ben said he was fine with the outcome as long as he makes America better. Jaden said, “Regardless of, like, their policies, she was my choice because of the things he said about Mexicans. It seems like if the president says those things, other people will think they can say them, too.”

Their questions revolved around the actual powers of the president. Many asked about war. How is it declared? They have a vague idea of a previous president seeming to make war happen all by himself. So we will talk today about the powers of the president, focusing on Executive Orders and how they work. But first, we have a vocabulary test.

5th grade teacher at a Title One charter school, Denver, Colorado:

I spent my morning convincing terrified 10-year-olds that they wouldn’t be taken away from their families. The majority of students I work with are students of color, some whose parents were not born in this country and some who were not born here themselves. To look them in the eye and tell them that they will be safe was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do because, in reality, I don’t know that. As a teacher, to hear a child say, “I really like it here, I don’t want to leave,” hits you in a way that you can’t easily shake. As the adult in the room, it’s my job to not only ensure their safety, but to teach them about the world they live in. A world that should be full of hope and opportunity. Today I was struck with a feeling of complete helplessness. Every day, through teaching and modeling, I try to instill morals in these children, but how can I convince them that they are so important when their new leader has vocally stated that they do not matter. They are expendable. They are temporary here.

Katie, kindergarten teacher, Memphis, Tennessee:

I deal with hard to answer questions from my students everyday. “Do cows burp?” “What would we look like with teeth on our feet?” “Why don’t bees have thumbs?” Yesterday I got one of the hardest I probably will ever get. “If Trump is elected, will I be a slave?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I still don’t. Because the honest truth is, I really have no idea what a Trump America will be like. And the fact that in the year 2016 I don’t have a definite answer to a question like this, from one of my 5 YEAR OLD students, is exactly how I can’t understand that we let someone like Trump get elected.

Maggie R., high school teacher, New Jersey:

I woke up crying this morning but made it to our 8:00 am normal, weekly faculty meeting, where our headmaster said “well, we live in interesting times” and then got on with the agenda and I felt dirty and sad and like something had died but we couldn’t hold a funeral or mourn.

Then, in my first period class, a senior literature elective, over half of my students came in already teary-eyed and hugged each other as they sat down. I’d already been thinking about how I’d have to scrap the lesson I’d had on the syllabus. It felt morally wrong to pretend this was in any way like Bush v Gore; the idea of trying to pretend like it was a normal day felt complicit.

So we listened to Solange and watched “Formation” and “Revolution” and “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads and they wrote everything that was on their minds into their notebooks where no one would ever have to see it. I told them they could rip it up, if they wanted to, for catharsis. Then, for the next half hour of class, we read the last two stanzas of Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (which I let them read silently, so I wouldn’t start crying again), and I changed the music to Aretha Franklin (“Natural Woman”) and Otis Redding (“Try a Little Tenderness”), and told them to write a love letter to someone, anyone, and they didn’t have to actually deliver the letter but they could if they wanted to.

I didn’t know what else to do. The students at my school (which is only 50% white and full of openly out students and intelligent, not-yet cynical young women and men) feel like the adults in the country have let them down. It’s our responsibility as teachers to show them what it looks like to keep fighting. To “show an affirming flame.”

High school teacher, San Jose, California:

It was a difficult and inspiring day. Difficult because I felt like I had to answer for the country while I stood up to face my students (90% Latinos). But it was inspiring because I witnessed the resilience of kids who spoke of hope and love and equality. The best part of the day is when I told my freshman that in the next election, they could vote. Their faces lit up.

A teacher who prefers to remain anonymous:

Teachers and students are generally devastated. It seems to be the worst in the high school because they understand the full stakes of the election. My 7th and 8th graders don’t fully know how to react. They talked about the election all day, but they had trouble understanding and defining their views. I felt awful for everybody, especially members of all of the groups that Trump disparaged (in particular my Muslim students). I saw many of the high school students and faculty crying openly today. The most powerful move I saw at school was several senior girls wearing large posters that displayed some of Trump’s most offensive statements. It was a brave statement of protest. I’m hoping that this generation never forgets their feelings on this day.

Ryan, elementary school teacher, Seattle, Washington:

[My students are] 7 or 8 years old, so they don’t totally understand the electoral process, but a big percentage of my students are either Muslim or Latino and there’s a clear fear today. I had one little boy who was clearly affected, I just talked to him and said, I can tell you’re upset, and he looked at me and said, ‘Well, my mom lives in Mexico’ — I think he means she’s from Mexico, she lives here — ‘and she says if Donald Trump wins she’s going back to Mexico.’ Which was heartbreaking, because the way he was saying it, it was clear that he was afraid she was going to leave him, which I don’t believe is true, but it’s clearly what’s going on in his head; I had to find a way to talk to him and try and make him feel like it’s going to be okay, whereas in my own mind, I don’t feel like it’s going to be okay, like, I can’t actually make that promise.

Tamika, high school teacher, Chester County, PA:

I let my students vent. I let them see my emotions (within reason) and allowed those that needed to to express theirs. My students just kept asking How? and Why? They wanted to know why people thought it was okay to vote him in office. I had many who said they were scared. A few were sad. They discussed Trump’s statements, especially the “wall.” A few spoke about how they felt unsure of what the future held as a members of a racial minority or identifying as a member of a LGBTQ+ group]. A few were discussing how they were more fearful of those who support Trump.

7th-9th grade teacher, Denver, Colorado:

I teach 7th, 8th, and 9th graders and start the day with my homeroom students (heavily Latinx, with several white and two Asian, one Native American). We opened with a check-in circle; some students were already crying, and several more started to cry while talking about how they were feeling. Several spoke of fear around deportation for friends and family. Two normally verbose kids didn’t want to speak at all. One broke down detailing how she worried that her young brother with leukemia would lose access to healthcare. One just shook his head and said “He’s just…such an asshole. Sorry.”

A few said they didn’t care either way, but one of those got out the tissues for the others. Through my own tears I said something probably hamfisted about how much I cared about them and would fight to protect them no matter the situation, but then we decided to go outside for a walk together. Before we left, one of my Latino students, Carlos, was almost incapacitated with sobbing in the bathroom talking about how “…it could all be taken away for no reason.” A quiet older white boy named Luke was there consoling him, giving him a hug. As we all walked out into a beautiful day, many of them had their arms around each other. I looked behind me and saw Luke with his arm around another crying Latino boy,

Elementary school teacher, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

All I wanted to do this morning was crawl back into bed and be in denial of the election results, but I knew that my students would need the reassurance of having their teacher today. I was an emotional wreck on my way to work but I knew that my first priority was to make my students feel safe. Being a teacher forces me to try to present my best self, the children are always watching and I want to lead by example. As one of my colleagues said, “Even if students are too young to developmentally understand what is happening, they are processing everything and coding what is right and what is wrong.”

High school teacher, Virginia:

I have quite a few young men in my classes who are ardent Trump supporters, and that’s been difficult throughout the campaign. This morning when my emotions were particularly raw after a sleepless night and an anxious commute, a group of about five teenage boys galloped into my room whooping and shouting about how excited they were. It’s a really difficult position to be in, because I genuinely don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm for democracy, and I want to set an example about graciousness in defeat, but as a result I’ve spent all day suppressing a personal upwelling of moral, intellectual, and emotional outrage at what has happened, and it’s giving me a headache. I cried in the car on the way here, and I’m just waiting until the final bell so I can do the same on the way home.

A., high school teacher, New York City:

I wanted to cry walking into my building this morning because of the types of students I serve. Many were very upset, but some were also Trump supporters. Part of being a teacher is being able to master the balance, even when you don’t agree with certain positions. Some of my students were horrified because they identify as LGBTQ. Some were horrified because they or their parents are undocumented, and, if their parent was forced to leave…they would have to leave with them. I tried to maintain a sense of calm in my classroom.

When asked by my students how I felt about Donald Trump being president, I made sure to keep a very straightforward and general answer because I want all of my kids to feel like my class is a safe space for them to express their beliefs. I replied that what gave me hope was the fact that they would be voting 4 years from now. For some of them, it led to them feeling empowered and feeling as though they could actually change things. I think that’s what is most important: to not foster and encourage apathy. I told them to remember how they felt today and use that feeling to guide them to vote.

Liz Kleinrock, 4th grade teacher at Citizens of the World Charter School, Los Angeles, California:

My school has wide racial and socio-economic diversity, and the student and family population is very liberal. As soon as my classroom doors opened this morning, one of my Mexican students approached me and said, “Donald Trump won. Does this mean I have to leave?”

Louie, middle school teacher, Brooklyn, New York:

My students are overwhelmingly Black and Latino, but I have a few Muslim students whose parents are mostly from Bangladesh or Trinidad.

The first thing I saw when I walked into my school was two Muslim girls (I taught them last year) crying in the lunch room. Feelings from the population overall ranged from anger to disgust, but obviously nobody was happy. I cancelled all of my regular lesson plans and instead devoted each period to allowing students to voice their opinions and concerns about the election. The most common questions were along the lines of “why do these people hate us so much?”

I told my students that it mostly had to do with fear, but that truthfully I did not know and that I was just as disgusted as they were. One student asked me if I would be trying to leave the country and I simply told her that if I did that, I’d be abandoning the people that I want to help most. I told her that a figure like Donald Trump just makes our struggle for equality (this is a theme in all of the books we read and in basically all of the social studies classes in the school) more meaningful.

Taylor Reinhart, college programs coordinator, Brooklyn, New York:

I teach in a charter high school in Crown Heights, a school populated 100% by students of color, many of them first and second-generation from Caribbean islands. Today’s energy was palpable, and emotional reaction varied widely depending on the student and the grade-level. I heard jokes today. I saw memes. I saw tears. I heard that they were going to bring back slavery. Students were pulled from class. Students even walked out of class, which is mostly unheard-of here. “This class doesn’t matter,” one of those students said, which has always been code for a deeper frustration about our school and state’s ability to connect content to lived experience. Math doesn’t matter to the student who feels they don’t matter. Many of them felt that today. They did not all articulate it to us overtly, but it exploded across their Facebooks and Snap Stories. A few students close to me showed me their posts, asking me more or less if they were right, and I could see them struggling to apply what they have learned about history to something unprecedentedly horrific.

Georgia, high school teacher, Baltimore, MD:

I wrote the following letter to my students: It is so hard to know, as an adult, what to say in this moment where our country is so divided. But the truth is, our democracy is strong. It has been since, as Lin-Manuel reminds us inHamilton, George Washington abdicated from the presidency and introduced a peaceful transfer of power. George Washington knew it, Martin Luther King knew it, James Baldwin knew it, and Barack Obama knows it. It may not feel like it, but our democracy operated as it should last night. We each enjoy the privilege of that sacred political system. Safeguard that privilege. Despair will only undermine it.

Do not let your fear control your anger. Let your intelligence direct your anger, guard it, sharpen it. Direct it towards learning everything you can and using that knowledge in the most powerful way you can imagine. Read. Read everything, opinions you agree with and, even more importantly, opinions you don’t agree with.

You are in an impossible moment. You are in a moment where we, the adults in your life, are asking you to be better than we have been ourselves. Luckily, I know you, and I know that you are strong enough to do what we ask and more.

Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Care for yourselves today, but also care for one another; care for those who voted differently than you did. They are your fellow travelers in this American project. The fabric of our country is strong and broad enough for all of us. Commit the radical act of caring for and protecting those with whom you disagree. Your care will not let bigoted views triumph. It will do the opposite. Wage political warfare with compassion as your weapon.

We often quote James Baldwin, who famously said, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” But we remember less often what he said after that, that “that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even by pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.” Trust that center. As Emerson admonished us, “Trust thyself!”

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Commentary: 10/31/2023

I had to stop a few times to blow my nose and wipe away tears as I re-read the teachers’ comments. The original blog was actually a two-part essay because I chose to copy in the entire article. Today I included excerpts that I thought represented the tenor and breath of the Jezebel article. It was just so painful to read the entire piece.

I know not all teachers are great teachers, but most are. The best throughout this country were angels in November 2016 and those that have remained in the profession through 2023 are now saints. These folks have tried to help our children confront daily the travesties directly and indirectly inflicted upon this country by trump and his surrogates from the tragedies of Covid, mass shootings in schools, churches, movie houses, and shopping malls, George Floyd and the deaths of so many young black people at the hands of police, climate change, Muslim bans, immigrant children separated from their families at the border and placed in cages until they were whisked away to foster care, an attempted coup on January 6th, and the constant lies upon lies upon lies and hate being spewed by trump, his administration and maga supporters.

Two things hit me reading this essay from 2016. The first is that many of the things these precious children and educators feared actually came to pass. The second is that these same children either did vote in the 2020 and 2022 elections and/or will be voting in 2024. They are my hope this morning.

And those teachers — I love them all.