Yes, I Do Have a "Direct Stake in the Future"

Well, this is certainly not what I had planned to write about this week.  I wanted to write some educational wonky stuff in preparation for the coming year.  I generally try to keep this blog about education rather than politics.  But every once in a while, the two worlds overlap, like the debates sparked after school shootings or book banning arguments. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance's comments about childless women qualifies.  As a middle aged single virgin, this is also something on which I feel fairly qualified to offer perspective.

For those who may have been living under a rock for the last week, let me catch you up.  When President Biden stepped away from his run for re-election and endorsed Kamala Harris, the Trump/Vance campaign found itself scrambling for new talking points. They couldn't call her old or question her cognitive abilities, and I guess they didn't have time to research things of substance.  So, what did they go to? She isn't qualified because she hasn't given birth to children.  Setting aside for the moment that none of our Presidents have ever given birth to children because they were men and that George Washington, James Polk, Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Andrew Jackson didn't father any, let's look at Vance's twisted logic.  The statement was first made in 2021, when he was running for the Senate.  In it, he said to Tucker Carlson, 

"We're effectively run in this country . . . by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it."

The majority of the backlash over this statement has focused on the "cat lady" part, leading to some pretty fabulous memes.  A number of women from both sides of the aisle have taken to social media to point out that not all women are childless by choice and that being childless doesn't necessarily make you miserable.  Adoptive parents and step parents have made the case that they love their kids just as much as anyone who has given birth to theirs.  Vance claims to have been misquoted by the left, but given the fact that what is being shared is video of the Fox interview, that seems farfetched at best.  

Supporters of Vance have doubled down on the part about not having a direct stake in the future.  Since some of them have said it directly to me, a childless woman (who also happens to have one cat), that's the part I would like to address.    

My call to singleness was unexpected.  I very much wanted to be a wife and mother and assumed throughout my twenties that it would happen one day.  But God had other plans for me.  When He led me in this direction, I did not become miserable in my own life. I thought, "Well, that's good to know.  I can start making plans around that."  I bought a house because I no longer felt the need to wait until I was sharing a mortgage.  I did not go get a bunch of cats because I had one and it didn't occur to me to think my now permanent single state required more than that.  

Most importantly to this discussion, I didn't quit my teaching career.  I dove deeper into it than ever, knowing that the way God would use me to touch the future was through other people's kids.  I sponsored clubs, continued to grow in my role as yearbook advisor, read more about cognitive science, and volunteered to chaperone most things.  In my 25 year career, I have taught nearly 3000 students. I have taught entire families, one sibling after another.  Many of my students have kids of their own, and I have had secondary impact on them. My "direct stake in the future" wasn't expressed through a small number of kids in my home but through a large number of kids in my classroom.

You might be thinking, "Okay, but you are just one weirdo. Most people who have no children don't think the way you do."  Agreed.  I'm strange, but let me give a few examples of other strange and childless people whose impact on the future we are still benefitting from.  

• Shall we start with the obvious?  Jesus Christ himself had no children.  Okay, that's cheating, I know.  I get that's a little different because He was Divine.  How about the apostle Paul?  He not only viewed Timothy as a non-biological son, but he certainly cared deeply about the future.  Far from the JD Vance perspective, he thought being single and childless gave him more of a stake in God's mission and advocated that others be like he was in order to fulfill God's purposes.
• Isaac Newton certainly had an impact on the future, given that we still teach his work over 400 years after his death.  He never married or fathered a child.  Vance might have considered him week or miserable, but without him, we would have little understanding of physics today.
• Artists like DaVinci and Michelangelo considered their works of art to be their children, and those works are still inspiring people today.  If they had children, would we have The David, The Pieta, or The Last Supper?  Maybe.  But also, maybe not.  God had a different purpose for them than he does for many.
• CS Lewis was well into middle age when he met his wife, Joy.  He raised her sons after her death, but JD Vance would say that doesn't count (at least that seems to be how feels about Kamala's step children).  Yet, even before he met her, he was the author of many children's stories, science fiction, and theological masterpieces. He very much understood his stake in the future.
• If you have ever been through a natural disaster, had a home fire, or needed blood, you have benefitted from the American Red Cross.  It was founded by Clara Barton.  She had no children, but she clearly felt some "direct stake in the future" and had a direct impact on it.
• Women like me only have the right to vote in elections like the one in which JD Vance is running because of women like Susan B. Anthony, who wanted voting rights, not only for herself, but for women in the future, in spite of not having given birth to children.
• More recently, theologian John Stott chose singleness.  While he recognized that it was "no higher or holier vocation than marriage," he also said, "If marriage is good, singleness is also good. It's an example of the balance of Scripture."  For a full interview with him on this topic, click here.
• Dolly Parton and her husband never had any children, yet she has done more for children's literacy than anyone since Barbara Bush.  Why would she care if children read?  Because, she doesn't have the short sighted view that she will only care about that which directly affects her.
• And, of course, there are countless nuns and monks and priests who have forgone marriage and children to focus on the future.
• There is one that JD Vance doesn't seem to mind (or at least hasn't mentioned publicly).  Lindsey Graham has never been married or had children.  I would assume that his two decades plus in the Senate means he believes he has some stake in the future.  One would think he might speak out about the Vance statements, but he sold out to Trump world some time ago; so I wouldn't hold my breath.
  
  
  

Why is this hard for so many to understand?  Because we focus on our own experience, and 90% of adults have the experience of having children.  I focused on my experience earlier, and so has everyone in this conversation online. Those who are parents describe their experience of having a different view of the future after they had children.  I have no doubt that is true.  In every conversation I have ever had on this topic (and there were many prior to this week), I have acknowledged that people with children of their own have a perspective I do not have; so I get that.  Those who have suffered infertility and miscarriages have talked about how that experience changed them, and that is certainly true as well because their view of the future as it pertains to their children is eternity rather than a few decades.  Those who have adopted, fostered, or in some way raised the children of someone else have shared their experience, discussing how different it is to have choice rather than biology deepen their love for their children, and I have no problem recognizing the beauty of that.  

The world is made up of more than one perspective, and that is what JD Vance doesn't understand.  He believes his experience should be the universal experience because he cannot conceive of people who managed to have a view of the future that involves their legacy rather than their progeny.  

You may wonder where the overlap is with education.  Many of your kids teachers are people who have not had children.  Some want kids and just haven't had them yet, especially if they are younger.  Some, like me, have found other people's children to be their calling.  Whatever your interaction with these teachers is, please don't assume that they don't understand children just because they don't have them at home.  It's easy to do and it seems to win arguments, but it hurts them deeply, whether it comes from parents, colleagues, or supervisors.  

I was once in a faculty meeting where the discussion was about homework.  The head of school I had at the time looked at us and said, "If you aren't a parent, you'll NEVER understand."  I put the emphasis on never because he did.  That word was like a dagger in the middle of the sentence.  I had only recently recognized my call to singleness and was accepting that, by not having family concerns, I could focus on becoming the best teacher I could be.  I tried to explain it to him (that was before I realized he was a person who doubled down on things rather than moderate them).  I told him it was like he was saying, "Oh, that call of God on your life?  Yeah, you can't be good at that either."  But, it fell on deaf ears, and there were definitely more statements like it in future meetings.  While that statement felt like he found the soft part of my heart and jabbed it with a sharp stick, my pain was small compared to that of the two teachers weeping in the row behind me.  One was a man dealing with his wife's infertility and had just begun the adoption process.  The other was a woman who had experienced a miscarriage just three weeks before this meeting.  My point is not that you don't have a different perspective if you have had a kid crying about homework at the kitchen table; my point is that you don't know what someone else's experience is when you say things like, "you'll NEVER understand."  So be careful with that.

I got it from colleagues and parents throughout my twenties and early thirties.  It seemed to settle after I turned thirty-seven.  I think some people didn't assume I was single and childless at that point, and I also think my reputation did me a lot of favors because I had been at the same school for so long that people better understood my heart for their kids.  But, it shouldn't take that long, and the teacher shouldn't have to prove their love of kids to you after choosing a career in education when they could have worked fewer hours for more pay in another field.  If your child is in the classroom of a teacher who doesn't have children of his or her own, be grateful for the kind of time that teacher has to devote to your child.  Don't use it against them just because it is a card you can throw down when you disagree about a policy.  

Every living human has a "direct stake in the future" because we are all part of mankind.  JD Vance and his apologists don't understand the basic concept of how interconnected all humans are, so I'd like to end with the words of someone who did.  John Donne wrote these words about being "involved in mankind" in 1624.  Maybe JD Vance will like them since Donne fathered 12 children and, as far as I know, didn't have any cats, making him worth listening to.  

Data - Can You Have Too Much of a Good Thing?

When I was growing up, I had an excellent pastor.  He was deeply insightful, and he handled the preaching of God's Word with intelligence.  He showed me what it meant to love God with all my mind.  There was one area of his life, however, where he did not apply the same level of intellect - his eating habits.  He loved snacks, but he was also very concerned about his appearance.  So he weighed himself - a lot.  He weight himself before he consumed anything and decided what to eat based on that number, resulting in unusual things, like eating half an Oreo and three peanuts for lunch.  This, friends, is the weird result of too much access to data.

You may be wondering what I am going on about in a blog that is meant to be about education.  Well, anyone who has been around education in the past 5 years or so knows that we have become obsessed with data.  Some schools even proudly market themselves with the term "data driven." We analyze every standardized test score (in spite of research showing they are not predictive of success), monitor GPAs, and act reactively to the slightest deviations in the bell curve.  Some parents hover over the school's digital reports of every grade, big or small, and contact the teacher over every lost point.  Much like my pastor's strange food decisions that no dietician would ever support, our obsession with academic data leads to strange educational decisions that are not based on good pedagogy.

I'm not saying we swing the pendulum back too far the other direction.  There was a time when we had almost no access to data.  Students and parents found out what the grade was when report cards came out.  At that point, it was too late to adjust course in any way.  That is too little access to data.  Neither of these extremes is helpful to the education or flourishing of students.  So, what is the sweet spot?

Let me try to make a comparison outside of the academia.  As you all know, I take and teach indoor cycle classes at the YMCA.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought or that my average speed was lower than I had mentally calculated.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  This is the workout equivalent of our world prior to digital grade access. I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better in real time. 

Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screens.  It was tempting to stay on the screen with the information I cared most about.  After all, feedback is good, right?  I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of stress if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or how hard I was working.  This is the equivalent of reacting to every homework and quiz grade in real time. Students aren't able to enjoy learning or focus on how to learn well because they are too focused on each and every point.

Eventually, in those cycle classes, I learned to discipline myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me. I could see if I was building an internal sense of how I was doing by making a mental prediction of where I would be before going to check the number. I could enjoy the music and the instructor because I wasn't staring constantly at the numbers on the screen. Teachers and parents should keep in mind that a grade is an average for a reason.  This will prevent us from overreacting to every task score.  Parents who check the average with every entry cause themselves a lot of unnecessary stress and raise the anxiety level of their children.  Perhaps, parents and students could make checking the LMS part of a weekly routine, checking it on Fridays in order to make a plan for the following week. Perhaps that's the sweet spot between too much data and no data at all.

Let's recognize that, like most complex endeavors, education is multifaceted. It has layers of purposes and goals, and there are many aspects of schooling that don't show up in data reports.  Grade data is ONE facet, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Standardized tests exist for a reason, but we go too far when we assume they show anything other than a snapshot of learning.  Evaluating a school on standardized test scores ALONE would be equivalent to judging a movie based solely on the poster.  Just because data is easy to check doesn't mean we should think it shows us everything we need to know.  Data doesn't include classroom climate, student attitudes toward learning, growth across time, use of resources, support of struggling learners, or how alumni prosper as a result of our having taught them.  

Water is a good thing, but when there is too much of it, you can drown.  

Data's a good thing, but let's not drown ourselves in too much of it.

  

Enlist Help

For the past month, I have been working the front desk at my local branch of the YMCA.  There is a lot to learn - and I mean a lot.  From the basic functions of the computer system in making scan cards, charging people for personal training, and selling guest passes, there are rules about who is allowed to receive a seven day pass and when people can leave their children at the drop in child care.  There is simply no way to train in all of it at once, so I spend a fair amount of time doing things incorrectly.  One of my co-workers, Helena, is often the one left to tell me, and she always feels bad about it.  I keep telling her that she shouldn't feel bad and that I would much rather have a kind and well-meaning person tell me I'm doing something wrong than to keep doing it wrong.  Obviously, what I would much rather were happening is that I would be doing things right, but there is too much to learn for that to be happening yet.

We are around a month away from teachers returning to school for the inservice days before school starts.  New teachers, it is an exciting time for you, but it is also daunting.  Don't let that scare you.  There is a lot to learn. There are going to be many things you weren't taught in teacher school that will become part of your daily life.  For a while, you are going to stumble into scenarios you don't know how to handle, requests from parents that you aren't sure are reasonable, and student situations you won't know how to navigate.  My best advice is not to try to do it on your own.  Enlist help from the wisest person you can find.  That might be the mentor teacher your school assigns you, but that also might not be your most natural relationship.  If you organically develop a relationship with teacher next door or across the hall, it might be them.  It might be the principal or the librarian.  Admit your vulnerability, and seek wisdom.  It is simply not possible for you to know all the nuances of student, parent, colleague interactions in addition to your content and your pedagogy.

I've had a number of those people over the years.  In my first school, it was, in fact my assigned mentor, but that doesn't always happen.  I also had a great principal who had a story for everything, teaching me that mistakes weren't fatal.  At GRACE, I had a few over the years.  My art teacher friend, Elizabeth, was a great listening ear and wise when it came to student interactions.  The teachers surrounding my room (Zane, Melanie, Meagan, Alyssa) were often the ones I asked to look at email replies before I hit send.  My English teacher friend, Kellie, was the person I went to if I needed someone to disagree with me in order to evaluate my own position.  My history teacher friend, Amy, provided good perspective on spiritual issues.  Our librarian/media specialist, Marcia, was the person I bounced new ideas off of.  

Whether you a new teacher or an experienced one, teaching is a complex endeavor, and you never stop needing help.  In my 25th year, I was giving advice some days while still asking for advice on other days.  Keep learning.  Keep asking questions.  Keep enlisting help.