AWAKENING The SLEEPING GIANT!!

Awakening the Sleeping Giant!

Some of you may know that my daughter, a product of PUBLIC schools, lives and works in Japan. She currently works in the translation department of a rather large international brokerage firm, but when she first landed in Japan she taught conversational English at one of the many English Language Schools that operate(d) in the country. Her immediate boss was an American whose wife is a Japanese native and they had a son who was just born when my daughter arrived there and almost 2 when I first visited there and now is 5 going on a very important 6.

His name is Seth and he’s a very bright young man and has been this year enrolled in Kindergarten. Just the other day his mother reported on her Facebook page that his class had put on a play of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and that the children in the class had rewritten the tale so that the ending was happy. This prompted me to reply and say “Wait, I thought the ending of Jack and the Beanstalk was already happy. Am I wrong?” Didn’t it end with Jack and his mother going from desperately poor to wildly rich? I wondered “Have I been reading a sanitized version?”

Seth’s mother replied that the kids had wanted to end the tale so that it didn’t just happen that Jack and his poor mother came out well-to-do in the end but that the Giant and Jack became actual friends too.

I thought to myself “Wow, leave it to children to have the audacity to want peace and harmony and everyone to get along and share bean paste cookies at the end of a tale!” (Incidentally, I don’t personally recommend bean paste cookies, I’ll stick with Oreos.)

At any rate, with this altered version of the Giant’s tale in mind, I started dreaming that perhaps the brave efforts of the Wisconsin 14 and the House Democrats in Indiana and all the other protesters in all the other states against the assaults on education and worker’s rights might actually have a happy ending! - An ending where the “light” is seen by all who have the fates of our children in their hands. And we will all sit down in the end, achieve some actual progress and share the wealth and some milk and cookies. Happily Ever After-like.

In my dream, I saw “us” ( the Nation’s educators and workers) as poor Jack trying to make something out of our magic beans and the Governors of Wisconsin and Indiana and New Jersey (and elsewhere) as well as Arne Duncan, as the Evil Giants trying to kick us off of their cloud. I envisioned us climbing the beanpole up into the higher atmosphere to the Giants’ castle and somehow actually having a real dialogue with them and them realizing the truth of what we were saying and saying “oh, we’re sorry, Let’s work together!”

Ah. But that’s a fairy tale, is it not? Instead we see the Governor of Wisconsin calling out the National Guard on the Wisconsin 14. We hear him call for the crushing of the “bastards.” We hear an Indiana Deputy Attorney General calling for the protesters to worker’s rights to be shot. (In all fairness, I need to report that this man was fired.) But also, we hear Indiana’s Governor calling those of us belonging to Unions “Elite” and insinuating that all we teachers care about is money. I laughed heartily when one of my colleagues spoke up and said “Yes, i live in a very elite mobile home on my teacher’s salary.” I myself contributed that I drive a very elite Ford Focus. We then heard our State Superintendent of Public Schools issues a statement calling the Indiana State Teacher’s Association “liars” for relating to us the very real effects of the proposed Senate Bill 1 will have on our pay.

All in all, It’s not exactly the lions lying down with the lambs here. It feels much more like the lambs being led to the slaughter to me. Or in continuing our “Jack in the Beanstalk” theme, it sounds a lot more like the thunder of “FE FI FO FUM” and “I’ll GRIND your bones to make my bread” on the Governors’ parts to me.

Ah. Giants, they are not exactly likeable characters, I’m thinking. But then as often happens in real life and in fairy tales, there is a twist to the whole story-line here. I open up my email and I read of a Blog Campaign entitled “Waking Up the Sleeping Giant!” And instead of the Giant being cast as the EVIL character in this play, it’s framing the Nation’s educators as Sleeping Giants! Not evil giants but POWERFUL GIANTS! POWERFUL and AWESOME ENOUGH to band together and finally be heard over the top of the sound bites and the rhetoric about educational reform as spoken through the mouths of people (such as the Governors of Wisconsin and Indiana) who actually know very little about education and children and such things as poverty and need.

I had not thought about it all this way- that we ourselves, the educators are POWERFUL if we UNITE and STAND UP TOGETHER! It is true, we have been sleeping for far too long and living in a dream world that everyone has good intent towards education. And It is time for us to WAKE UP and realize the power we have and to stand up for ourselves and our students! Here is how you can realize that GIGANTIC POWER too- Open up your browser and type in “http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org and RISE UP with us!

And maybe the ending of the tale won’t be that we will all sit down someday with our milk and cookies on a cloud and find a way to come together. Perhaps that “happily ever after” ending is only possible in the minds of children, but we at least owe it to them to WAKE UP and RISE TO MIGHTY heights for them, do we not?