I read everything Chip Mosher writes. His Socrates in Sodom column has been appearing in Las Vegas CityLife virtually every week since January 2005. If you’re a Nevada teacher and haven’t yet discovered him, you owe it to yourself to check him out. Not only is Chip a talented and often hilarious writer, but he regularly turns up juicy reports on the scams and lunacies of our education overlords that will do your poor oppressed sense of justice genuine good.
All that said, however, Chip in one fundamental way is simply a nut. Now, everybody has a right to be a lunatic sometimes, and the reality is that virtually all of us ARE nuts in at least one or two areas of our lives ALL the time.
I read everything Chip Mosher writes. His Socrates in Sodom column has been appearing in Las Vegas CityLife virtually every week since January 2005. If you’re a Nevada teacher and haven’t yet discovered him, you owe it to yourself to check him out. Not only is Chip a talented and often hilarious writer, but he regularly turns up juicy reports on the scams and lunacies of our education overlords that will do your poor oppressed sense of justice genuine good.
All that said, however, Chip in one fundamental way is simply a nut. Now, everybody has a right to be a lunatic sometimes, and the reality is that virtually all of us ARE nuts in at least one or two areas of our lives ALL the time.
But I want to zoom in on Chip and his columns because Chip’s particular form of nuttiness, it seems to me, is the form that is dominant among thousands of public school teachers in Nevada and hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
His rants, thus, are highly instructive. I would even argue that they illuminate (if unintentionally) two extremely important topics for American education:
• The never acknowledged real source of the generic problems facing public school teachers, and, therefore,
• The kinds of education reforms that will, eventually, allow good teachers to escape the dire Catch-22 in which they currently attempt to work and live.
If you’ve followed the Sodom column over the years, you by now are used to Chip spending easily half or more of his prose and energy dumping creative invective on those he blames for “the pathetic plight of Las Vegas teachers during the past decade.” Essentially everyone with any kind of power is the target of Chip’s weekly excrement-flinging — district administrators, principals, teacher union officials, state lawmakers and almost anyone who doesn’t immediately agree to quickly make Nevada teachers much wealthier and compel their bosses to behave.
I personally believe that, in these “fling-fests,” there’s a lot of justice that gets served. Yet their cumulative impact, week after week, can easily lead a reader to disengage a bit, step back and become a bit more reflective. And then such rants can begin to seem symptomatic of some larger syndrome.
Chip, himself, pointed to the syndrome in a column last September:
Moan. Groan. A roomful of whiny teachers is a terrible thing to behold. The collective sound is like a million lemmings drowning in a big vat of battery acid. All so desperate. All so convincing. All so profound. Until it comes time to actually do something about their situation. Then universal silence and apathy prevail, big time.
This brings to mind Eric Berne’s 1960s best-seller, Games People Play, a book that Kurt Vonnegut not only described as “important” but also as a “clear catalogue of the psychological theatricals that human beings play over and over again.” For his own part, Berne, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, simply called these predictable, patterned and repetitive “theatricals” between human beings “games.”
It’s the very first game described in the book that is so relevant to the public school teacher scene — as described by Chip and as, repetitively, performed by him. That game is “If It Weren’t For You,” or IWFY, for short.
Berne gave this example:
This unfortunate adventure, along with similar ones, laid out some important aspects of her marriage. Out of her many suitors, she had picked a domineering man for a husband. She was then in a position to complain that she could do all sorts of things “it if weren’t for you.” Many of her woman friends had domineering husbands, and when they met for their morning coffee, they spent a good deal of time playing “If It Weren’t For Him.”
As it turned out, however, contrary to her complaints, her husband was performing a very real service for her by forbidding her to do something she was deeply afraid of, and by preventing her, in fact, from even becoming aware of her fears. This was one reason... [she] had chosen such a husband.
I’ll be coming back to this subject in future posts, but for now I just want to draw attention to a few points:
• People participate in games without fully, consciously, acknowledging what they are doing;
• People get emotional “payoffs” for participating in games. Emotional catharsis, affirmation of personal identity and reinforcement of world view are just a few such somatic or psychological “benefits.”
• People also get subject matter with which to structure, or fill in, their free time. Mrs. White, for example, gets to spend a lot of time in social circumstances playing “if it weren’t for him.”
In the public education scene, hordes of teachers structure their time by playing, “If It Weren’t for Them” — i.e., indifferent parents, cynical lawmakers, lying politicians, bullying administrators, cheap taxpayers and so on. But the actual reality is that all teachers are adults, who can stop working for the public school monolith at any time they wish. So why do so many choose to bitch, but stay? Don't they have any better alternative?
