Hi, readers. This is an experiment. Check it out. I’m trying to read a bit of one of my novels out loud to you, synchronized with the rolling, typed words. Production is a bit tedious because I’m limited to some crusty old equipment, but I hope you find the pieces fresh! Give me feedback. I’d like to hear it. Too muffled, screen too dark, etc.
I’m not positive (about my predecessors), but I might be the first virally canceled K12 teacher, in February, 2016. First I called baloney on the school-to-prison pipeline, told parents some St. Paul kids set up beatdowns on iPads and ran a whoring train. Second, my 2014-2016 blog contained fiction sketches with kids using urban dialect, which I defended because no ethnicity owns dialect, which is liquid, and I lived and absorbed it for 20 years. I’ve heard it could take about that long for a westerner to proficiently read and write Mandarin. Also, my special education population were not honor roll kids. Obviously, all kids have dignity.
It’s redundant to keep saying it, but the fact that they cost me close to $450,000 in lost teacher wages over six years, an emptying out of our friendships, lifestyle, career, reputation, and nearly my home (wife and I had to split up for a schoolyear while I taught 250 miles north), begs, “Why such punishment for words?” The volcano needed a virgin. No disparity between black and white kids could possibly be “due to behavior.” All disparities were due to systemic racism and white privilege. Any idiot could see that was insulting not just to whites but to blacks.
These are stories. I am reading them aloud because read alouds have always knocked me out. My writing group who helped me workshop and improve them has heard some of them. But no one else has. Tell me what you think.
This one is the apologia, the defense of the book.
Tales told out of school, apologia