{"id":200351,"date":"2021-05-03T18:05:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T23:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/03\/just-give-them-money\/"},"modified":"2021-05-03T18:05:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T23:05:00","slug":"just-give-them-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/03\/just-give-them-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Give them Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 330px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"240\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yeVx1C73o8k\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"320\"><\/iframe><br \/><i>Essential Musical Accompaniment<\/i><\/div>\n<p>It&#8217;s &#8220;Teacher Appreciation Week&#8221;, and the I agree with Anne Helen Petersen, if you have chosen to do any of the standard teacher appreciations, doughnuts, Starbucks, socks (!), or other various gifts, you are doing it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Just <a href=\"https:\/\/annehelen.substack.com\/p\/thats-what-the-money-is-for\">give them money<\/a>, and while your are at it, fund the public schools:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">All across the United States parents and caregivers are receiving and  forgetting instructions on what they\u2019re supposed to be preparing for  their preschool and elementary school kids\u2019 teachers. That\u2019s because  next week is officially \u201cTeacher Appreciation Week,\u201d an official holiday  orchestrated by a combination of Classroom Parents and PTAs that, over  the course of the last four decades, has exploded into an intricate,  overly-complicated, largely hollow performance of gratitude.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\"><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\"><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">Am I meant to eat twenty breakfast items???<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2014 Emily (@themerriest) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/themerriest\/status\/1387811513251995651?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 29, 2021<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\"><br \/>This year, Teacher Appreciation is particularly overdetermined, because most teachers have had an ass of a year \u2014&nbsp;attempting, based on their location and particulars of their situation, to balance potential COVID exposure, extreme <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2020\/07\/scourge-hygiene-theater\/614599\/\">hygiene theater<\/a>, in-person learning, distance learning, hybrid learning, vitriolic attacks from parents on their unions, and <a href=\"https:\/\/annehelen.substack.com\/p\/what-demoralization-does-to-teachers\">generalized demoralization<\/a>. Depending on the state and strength of union, many elementary and high school teachers may be struggling to make ends meet; almost everywhere, <span title=\"Early Childhood Education\">ECE<\/span> teachers receive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/the-goods\/22360152\/child-care-free-public-funding\">truly garbage pay<\/a>. That was true before the pandemic, and as with so many jobs deemed \u201cessential,\u201d the garbage pay feels even more insulting.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026 <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">Temporarily setting aside the fact that this is <a href=\"https:\/\/annehelen.substack.com\/p\/the-mom-does-it\">the sort of labor<\/a> that almost always falls upon mothers, and serves as yet another way in which working moms, less financially stable moms, single moms, and\/or less mobile moms can \u201cfail\u201d at public performances of proper motherhood\u2026and <i>also <\/i>setting aside the many parents are already paying up to a third of their income on daycare and preschool\u2026and <i>also <\/i>setting aside the fact that those failures often filter down and serve as sources of shame for children\u2026and <i>also<\/i> setting aside the fact that making participation in these weeks \u201coptional\u201d is at once bullshit and gaslighting, <i>these gifts don\u2019t actually make the teacher feel supported<\/i>.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026 <br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026These gifts can simultaneously \u201cmean well\u201d and serve to protect parents from larger, tougher, more challenging understandings of what support can and should look like. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">So what <em>does<\/em> that support look like? The easiest route, at  least in this moment, is  money, filtered for actual use in the form of  an actually useful giftcard. Depending on your background, you may or  may not have internalized the idea that giving money as a means of  thanks is tacky or untoward. That is bullshit posturing and you should  forget it. A giftcard to Target will actual support a teacher in a way  that a desk full of breakfast items cannot. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">But that solution is  also fairly shallow. There are several ways that you, as a parent or a  caregiver or just an adult in the world, can support the teachers in  your life in far more meaningful ways. In public, you can show up and  back them and their unions at rallies. You can defend them when people  start talking shit about them and their unions in Facebook Parent  Groups. You can write them with specific and non-performative and  non-passive-aggressive ways that they have impacted your child\u2019s life,  and be <em>very clear<\/em> that you don\u2019t expect a response.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">In private, you can vote for politicians and support policies  \u2014&nbsp;especially education levi<\/span>es \u2014 that move to robustly fund public  education. You can vocally support national plans that conceive of  childcare and preschool as essential infrastructure: a market failure  that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/the-goods\/22360152\/child-care-free-public-funding\">demands public investment<\/a> in order to 1) be affordable &amp; and accessible to all families and 2) pay a living wage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Preach it!<\/p>\n<p>We under-invest in education, and we allow charlatans to extract tax dollars through charter schools.<\/p>\n<p>Show them the money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Essential Musical Accompaniment It&#8217;s &#8220;Teacher Appreciation Week&#8221;, and the I agree with Anne Helen Petersen, if you have chosen to do any of the standard teacher appreciations, doughnuts, Starbucks, socks (!), or other various gifts, you are doing it wrong. Just give them money, and while your are at it, fund the public schools: All &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,968,1003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-education","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}