You Are Practicing Your Politics in Your Classroom Every Day

You can't opt out.

I have not gone a waking hour this week without thinking about this class. Just look at it. Early on, nearly every student answered a question correctly. Later, nearly everyone answered this question incorrectly:

There is one approach to teaching which says, “Well, wrong is wrong and right is right. Students did something of value early in the lesson and little of value later.”

Another approach to teaching says, “Student ideas are valuable whether they’re right or wrong. Their value is unrelated to their correctness.” Those teachers might look more closely at the student answers on that later question.

Those teachers might notice that these answers are all incorrect but …

• they are more alike than different, 

• they contain a great deal that is correct, 

• they are valuable either way simply because people earnestly thought and expressed them. 

The teacher can decide to share or not share that value with the class. There isn’t a third choice. And depending on the teacher’s choice here, their students are going to learn something very different about math and something very different about their own value.

This is politics.

People frequently disagree whether or not politics belongs in teaching. I believe this disagreement results from mismatching definitions of “politics,” one of which is probably better named “partisanship.”

Politics isn’t partisanship. It isn’t which party you belong to, who you voted for yesterday, or how you feel about who won. Instead, politics is the way a society defines which people have value and which people get value. Seen through that lens, teachers are unavoidably practicing politics in their classrooms every day.

In classrooms right now, teachers are defining who is valuable, whose ideas are valuable, whose ideas are worth sharing with the rest of the class, who gets which opportunities to learn, who gets to feel like they contributed to their classroom.

Given the infinite ideas students bring to their class and the finite time available to teachers, the teacher has to decide, “Will I ask questions that invite or suppress all of those ideas?” That’s a political question. If the teacher allows those ideas to reveal themselves, the teacher then has to decide, “What will I say about all of them? Which ones do I think are valuable? Which ones will I share?” Those are political questions too. 

Unless you possess infinite time and energy, you cannot opt out of these questions. You are practicing politics—defining and sharing value with your students—every day.

I’m not of the mind that your lesson plan will save democracy. Reject that burden. Schools are far, far downstream from where we have concentrated power as a society. They are much more a passenger on the ship of state than the rudder.

But you are practicing your politics in your classroom every day. If you seek a more generous politics in your country, a more generous recognition and distribution of value, you can practice those politics in your classroom. You must. If you don’t, your odds of contributing to a different politics nationally are no better than chance, like kids who imagine they’ll play a meaningful role in a championship game four years from now without doing the daily practice when they had the opportunity.