My old lawyer and I, Chris Tritico, went to a meeting together with the dumbest principal in the history of Houston Public Education. She came to her employment after a stint at a downtown charter school that was shuttered because of falsified records, including entire classes that students had no knowledge of ever taking. She worked as a "pretend" English teacher, as many people do now, in this environment of fake classes and forged records.

    Months before her arrival to the district, the school support officer hired me after I modeled a lesson on Lucille Clifton's poem, Sorrows, to a group of tough, urban, high school kids. Soon after, this amazing leader left the district with the promise that I, and other staff members, would be granted an experienced and competent principal. Instead, we ended up with this fake English teacher that was only 28-years old and had zero knowledge of anything. We all recognized this immediately, and I thought back on my choice of poems and what an ironic warning it was. I think of how these Sorrows continue and what they mean for our society and our children.

    She wanted to fire me because I implemented ten minutes of silent reading time at the beginning of class, and this activity contradicted what she was reading in Doug Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion. I've met Lemov, and I believe his book has some great ideas in it, but his important book is not that one, but Reading Reconsidered instead. In the latter book, he studies and researches 300 experienced English teachers of merit. But she wanted me doing test prep as a daily warmup. At our meeting, Tritico slides the stack of research across the conference table to her, the research that shows that sustained silent reading improves fluency, vocabulary, stamina, and a host of other good things. She angrily shoves it back to him. He asked her, "Don't you even want to look at this?" She responded with a firm no.

    At that time, most decent school systems already implemented some sustained silent reading at the beginning of class. This idea was not a new innovation, and it was not my sole idea. In fact, my mentor taught me the importance of this and why I should do it. The standards didn't change to include this requirement until much later in 2017. I like to think that me and my powerful lawyer contributed to these needed changes in state standards. I had students in my classes that had never owned a book, had never read a book, thought reading was an uncool waste of time, and, in some cases, wanted to read but didn't know how. In my classes they started to argue over the books. I heard them talk excitably and passionately about plots and writers for the first time. Because of the excitement, my donor and I packed my classroom full of books and Scholastic Magazines, and I tried to continue with the silent reading. The principal would strut into the classroom with her squad and denigrate me in front of my students. I received frivolous write-ups and hateful emails. The students would ask me why the principal didn't like me. Thirty-percent of the campus population received special education services, and the evils of poverty crept into everything. My students came to school with trauma, hunger, and homelessness. Many of my kids suffered from illnesses that are now connected to a nearby toxic dump in their neighborhood.

    My program worked, and my scores climbed, but the problems with poverty and trauma manifested in all classrooms. The squad tried to tweak my benchmark exam results, but the explanation failed during the meeting. My kids told me "we tried for you." I wanted them to try for their community, for themselves. The students asked me again and again why she didn't like me. The fact that my students worried about this is a testament to her incompetence. No responsibility like that belongs on a student's mind. She owes me an apology, especially after the standards were rewritten in 2017 to include silent reading. She owes those children a debt. But, of course, she was later discontinued for her continued incompetence. My lawyer and I lost our small battle in the beginning, but we can enjoy this victory for students and teachers. It is, at least, a massive, "I told you so."

    The issue in public education is a lack of real expertise. Now that the English major has been hollowed out and watered down, now that the emphasis is on skills that are rapidly replaced by AI and other technologies, we face a new crisis: friends of friends, and friends of those friends, and friends of relative's friends, climb eagerly into administrative positions with the speed of lightning. They might have a few English credits, so they might teach a few years, enroll into a master of education in curriculum or leadership, and then fly away like little bugs. They know so little about the subject of English, they aren't even cognizant of their own learning gaps. Because they have no knowledge of what they don't know, they teach for years and years and still learn nothing new. They sit comfortably spewing dummied down nonsense while making a big check off the taxpayer. The whole thing is absurd.

    For example, if a high schooler knows nothing of irony, satire, and ambiguity in texts, then how in the world do they comprehend anything complex? But I was told the other day that they need not know because they can tell it's there. It's like they have a sixth sense of these technical text attributes. That is one of the dumbest things I ever heard. And the source of this comment is making more money than I am and sits around in a powerful campus position. This is like the time I sat in a meeting and was told by my department chair that "we aren't cramming this crap down our kids' throats" in regards to whole class novels. If you aren't consistently and repetitively taught the parts of a text, then how are you to write with style and voice yourself? When people sit around unaccountable, all this means is that the ignorance rolls around like jeans in a dryer, making noise while slowly drying up.

    When someone like me comes around that truly loves their subject, the posers instantly recognize their own inadequacies and begin to take offense to any suggestions no matter how mildly put. This is a form of imposter syndrome, this willingness to attack someone for their accomplishments. I don't know if anyone understands the problem, but the whittling away of the English major presents with some truly horrifying social problems. Even mainstream publications are beginning to write about incoming college students and how they cannot read nor write. These publications, such as The Atlantic, point out that professors actively dumb down the curriculum to accommodate these new learners that are in some cases nearly illiterate. Meanwhile, real English teachers get pushed aside because of their intensity and love for the subject. This crisis isn't just an inconvenience, nor a disservice to our students, but it also magnifies a truly dangerous outcome: a country full of people that cannot distinguish between reality and conspiracy. After decades of neoliberal austerity, our society is under attack because people cannot differentiate between fact and fiction.

    I climbed down from a nice paying position into one that I believed would accommodate my new health concerns only to discover that the problems with expertise exist in unexpected spaces and would continue to cause me Sorrows. I am now an older teacher, but unable to retire. And if I retire this year or next, does this mean I failed or gave up? Maybe not if I keep sharing these stories. Parents understand that something is wrong with public education but placing inexperienced, under-qualified people in high schools is not a solution. If the public took the English major seriously, like they do the math major, then maybe some issues with literacy would resolve.

Let English Teachers Teach: the audacity of non-experts

Sadly, sometimes, micro-managers will try to control, even minimize, what figurative devices and literary tropes students learn. This urge to undermine faculty and micro-manage instruction leads to comprehension gaps. Imagine that I’m deep into a discussion about a text, and my students have no knowledge of the writer’s tone. No matter how hard I work the text, no matter the many times students test and write to learn, the subtle meanings, the inferences that lead to an understanding of what lurks between the lines, or even an understanding of author’s message, will become unattainable for my class. Tone is essential to understanding, yet I have been ordered to withhold instruction for this skill and others. I don’t see how an understanding of tone, a thorough and chronic teaching of this, could lead to anything negative.

This type of disturbing micro-management reveals a lack of trust in the classroom educator. Why would any senior educator ask teachers to delay badly needed concepts or insist on a lock step pedagogical approach when each teacher and each class will present with widely different gaps and interests?

It seems like sabotage.

I wonder why school districts move regular teachers without subject area degrees into executive positions when they really need expertise and experience in combination. No matter how many years you’ve been teaching a subject, if you think that withholding skills that aid comprehension supports any retainment of information, or an understanding beyond the surface, then you are completely wrong. Tone, irony, diction, metaphor, parallelism, and so forth, are all skills that require more than one or two mini-lessons to conquer. These literary devices, tropes, and motifs, require constant and chronic re-visits.

Secondary schools face two extreme challenges: the talent drain and a lack of content area specialists. Content area specialists typically earn a terminal degree in their subjects, not in education or some other off market degree that isn’t specific. A master of education is nice to have, but it isn’t the same as a subject area degree. You can teach a subject at the secondary level for decades and still not know much about what you convey to students if you refuse to invest in your own advanced education in a thorough and dedicated way.

What if you tried to teach Swift without first teaching irony and satire? Your students would think that people in 1725 were actually dining on fresh babies to avert the famine. This example, while it may seem a bit odd, is not that original and encapsulates this problem. Without a full and rigorous understanding of an author’s technique, students are left in the dark and become bored with challenging materials. You might wonder why I care, but this is my last act; I am older and becoming impatient with public school antics. Reforming education isn’t about the classroom as much as it is about the leadership.

When leaders resort to toxic and non-productive mandates, no matter the subject, students suffer and fall behind.