Starting a teaching career in New York City in 1986 wasn’t exactly an ideal time or venue, but that’s when and where it happened for me. While my classmates were going to work on Wall Street, I was student-teaching at Martin Luther King High School on West 66th and Broadway.
Sort of an oddball move, going into education in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president, and money was our unofficial religion. As a teacher, I knew that I wouldn’t make much of it, but that was OK. I also didn’t vote for Reagan, or any other Republican since that time, but their ascension to power never bothered me. Their politics might have been different from mine, but they never got in the way of my teaching what I really believed in: decency, hard work, education, respect for the truth.
It was always easy to find many members of the GOP extolling those virtues, and in same cases, even living up to them. Now, months away from retirement, I often joke to my friends and students that I’m so slow that it has taken me to the age of 57 to finally graduate. It has also taken me this long to actually articulate what I’ve really tried to teach kids all these years.
Why so long? Because I now get help from my own students, some friends, townspeople, and most of all, the 45th president. For example, my students tell me often that Donald Trump won the election and that it was Antifa that raided the Capitol on Jan. 6. My friends tell me that Trump didn’t really mean it when he … you know the list, fill in your own examples, here are a few of mine: Access Hollywood, Charlottesville, 30,000 documented lies, fake news, rigged election, and Capitol insurrection.
It’s finally hit home that Trumpism is seeking to undo not just our political institutions, but also our very concept of right and wrong. What did our parents teach us? It’s not all right to bully or to gloat. One must be gracious in victory and defeat. Tell the truth. Trust your doctor and science. Respect, and strive to attain, education.
Do I think that Trump is so evil that it was his goal to tear all of that down, along with our political institutions and the press? No. But his relentless appetite for power and attention has wounded, hopefully not fatally, our faith in things that used to be considered a given.
Now my students tell me how wrong and biased I am. People in my town are stalking teachers online because our school district has continuously had a high rate of COVID infection, and we have been teaching remotely for 10 months as a result. I want to go back into the classroom for my last days of teaching, and have voted yes every time it has come up. Nonetheless, there is a social media campaign designed to “catch” teachers without masks, and even — gasp — enjoying themselves on their Facebook pages.
Never mind that the stalkers flaunt their own refusal to wear a mask themselves. Teachers used to feel inferior from people with more education and more money. Now, we are mocked by those who believe the rants of an insurrectionist in a Viking suit instead of a reporter from the New York Times. On their own social media pages, the stalkers omit any education they might have received, and list themselves only as “self-employed,” with no discernible evidence of employment.
In the midst of that, the political “wisdom” is that we have to somehow tiptoe around these people. They are disenfranchised. They have power. There are over 70 million of them. They own guns.
I regret that the gullible have a hard time finding the truth, and an even harder time finding a job. I also regret that they have to rely on government checks while they rail against socialism.
What I truly regret is retiring in an age where truth, education and grace have somehow fallen out of favor. Thirty-five years later, I’m still the oddball.
Paul Taylor, a retired reporter for the Springfield Union-News (1999-2004), is in his last year of teaching. He spent 11 years teaching at Frontier Regional, and has been at West Springfield High School since 1998.