There’s no Hollywood trope that’s further from reality than
the “hero teacher” story. Movies love
the idea of a Jaime Escalante or a Joe Clark dropping out of a clear blue sky
and turning around a classroom or building full of troubled youth. Teachers—myself included—know better. We’re useful and helpful people, and we need
to be competent or better for a school to be the best version of itself. But any school that achieves anything does so
because its STUDENTS are heroes. Every
high-achieving school I’ve ever been involved with (and I’ve been part of
several) has risen on the tide of its students’ drive and talent.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged is…well, it’s many
things, isn’t it? An astonishing break
with the moral orthodoxy of its day, for one.
Prone to interminable passages of purple prose, for another. One of the more interesting things about
Atlas Shrugged, for me, is its transgressive attitude towards labor relations. It asks the question: what if capital went on strike, as opposed to labor?
Rand posits that the people putting in the important work all along aren’t
necessarily the people you’d assumed.
But she also posits a unique strike strategy. Rand’s “men of the mind” don’t march with
placards; they aren’t directly defiant in any way. Instead, they disappear into the
woodwork. They stop innovating. They remove themselves from the occupations
in which they have talent and do menial labor, working only with their
muscles. They aren’t noncompliant,
they’re hyper-compliant. In enacting this strategy, they reveal how
important their volunteerism has been all along.
As a teacher, I’ve often wondered what would happen if the uncelebrated
innovators responsible for a high school’s success—the students--implemented
Rand’s strategy. What would happen if a group of kids decided their efforts were
being taken for granted, and took an educational approach based on the idea of
doing exactly what was required of them and nothing more? In truth, this is every teacher’s
nightmare. The power of students is in
many ways invisible to them; they have no idea just how little authority over
their behavior teachers really have, how much of our power is a function of
willing partnership. With the events
surrounding the Stoneman Douglas shootings, students are awakening to the
realities of how much power they actually hold.
If anyone ever successfully organizes them as a unified block…
I knew early on, when I made the transition to short
stories, that I would at some point make an attempt to rewrite Atlas Shrugged
as a story of teen rebellion. The final product, enhanced by romantic and science fiction twists, is
“Been There, Done That,” which you can read in this quarter’s issue of TheColored Lens. I generally workshop my
stories with other writers before seeking to have them published, and edit
based on the suggestions I’m given.
Among these beta readers, BTDT is by far my best-received story. I hope you’ll enjoy it as well.
Found your site via your story, ‘Monsters in Heaven’ published in Broadswords and Blasters. Being a former teacher myself, and someone who is familiar with Ayn Rand’s work, I identified with this piece and it made me think. It astonishes me when I hear of former student’s achievements and realise that the most I achieved was to plant suggestions or give little nudges during classtime. The rest of their success was entirely down to them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your contribution, Tom! I agree; the power of students to determine the fate of both themselves and their institutions is extraordinary.
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