The other day while I was sitting in my weekly department meeting, something weird happened. My department chair brought up that the school year has been off to a weird start, and all the craziness that is social media and the news seemed like a major part of it. Kids are, if anything, more connected to social media than us older folk, and it was just accepted as a given that they are likely feeling a lot of vicarious stress and trauma from constant exposure to world events. Someone brought up the Las Vegas shooting from this past weekend. It was a cause for concern locally because we’re approaching Homecoming week, and the planned theme for the dance at our school is “Las Vegas.”
Someone in the group let out an audible, “shit,” which was surprising because adults just don’t curse in professional settings up here in the Northwest. We were asked for suggestions on how to help the students manage all this turbulence, and one of my coworkers offered a couple of really good, thoughtful ideas for how to be more affirming to our students. We were informed that the student council had decided to keep the theme for Homecoming, but with the guidance of their faculty advisor, they’re going to try to integrate opportunities for students to process and discuss what’s happened.
I didn’t have anything to offer myself, partially because much of the time I just feel numb to current events and work is the place I go to exist in a space where the outside world doesn’t immediately impede (I totally realize this is ridiculous on its face), and partially because conversations about what happens in the news just weren’t part of the daily routine of my old work environments.
My last school had some remarkably liberal people on staff, but it also had libertarians and more typical conservatives (everyone, of course, was white), and the range of political opinions necessitated an uneasy armistice on the front of current events among staff. You didn’t bring up newsworthy things except to say that shootings were unequivocally horrible (it’s an unspoken truth that every school worries about the possibility of shootings in their own halls; just last week our school had a threat of a shooting that was, thankfully, unfounded) and maybe to comment if the local football team had had a particularly good or bad showing on Saturday (it was always college ball, never professional). This unseeing of the terrible stuff in the world (because no one could agree on precisely what was terrible) was the prime directive of professionalism: do not discuss anything happening outside the school. We all still had to work together, after all.
In my current school, the discussion of current events is still not generally encouraged, but the school culture feels different. In Georgia I felt relatively safe in assuming that I was politically farther left than most of my coworkers, and voicing my opinion would likely lead to severe discomfort for everyone. Out in Oregon, although I don’t know anyone well enough to confirm political leanings yet, I get the sense that I’m much more of a moderate on the local spectrum (this is probably an illusion because practicing intersectional feminism requires a lot of radical thought about how to undermine systems of oppression, including white supremacy; in Oregon, all of my coworkers are still white, and they would probably still be discomfited by my pointing that out). The conversation at the meeting about how to help students cope with an overwhelming, trauma inducing social media landscape (here they don’t scoff at the idea of secondary trauma) felt like something that was perfectly normal, if not common.
I’m still learning how to deal with this shift in perspective.
In a slightly related vein, I’ve been on a kick listening to music during my office hours at school. Actually having these huge swaths of time to sit and just listen to music while I’m doing paperwork is a really different experience from working back in Georgia where my planning periods were typically spent in meetings or just taking a break from work after a long day of instruction in whatever break room was nearest to where I needed to be at the end of the day (I rarely spent much time in my own room at my last school). Music just wasn’t a part of most of my downtime at work in the last year. In the last couple days, I’ve been listening to Of Monsters And Men (before that it was Vampire Weekend, and before that it was a variety of stuff from Life is Strange and Kendrick Lamar). Of Monsters And Men is a band that’s been sort of comfort music for the last five years or so. Their stuff is really haunting, and they tend to walk that line between extreme melancholy and hopeful humanism.
Anyway, I was listening to an acoustic version of Of Monsters And Men’s song “King and Lionheart,” and it really hit me emotionally. There have been so many feelings of personal high since we finished the move, and the overwhelming response to the news in the last couple months for me has been resigned numbness that I was honestly surprised to feel a pang of simple sadness. It was this one brief moment of vulnerability in a way that I’ve not allowed for myself in a long time.
I’m unsure if there’s any parallel to draw between these two incidents from my workday. I just wanted to illustrate them because they felt significant to me as markers of a real shift in my environment, and they seem like they’re worth embracing.
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