'Sexism & School Supplies: Why Our Choices Matter' by Christine Vaccaro
Original art by Jessica Wolk-Stanley
During any other week in American history, my social media feed heralding teacher bargains in next week’s Amazon Prime Day would be a dopamine hit.
But not this week.
This week, discount glue sticks – shilled by the man whose pocket change could outfit every American classroom – hit instead like another shot fired in the currently raging, multi-front war against women.
Education is a patriarchal infrastructure subsidized and sustained by the unpaid overtime of a 76% female workforce that is supervised by a 73% male workforce. In the face of ever-increasing demands placed on us, we have institutionalized working early, late, nights and weekends to get the job done. In the face of ever-shrinking resource allocation to public schools, we have normalized using our own money to more effectively do our jobs and support our students. I can't imagine fellow civil servants (police, 87% male; fireman, 92% male; or sanitation workers, 87% male) working a minute of overtime without getting paid time and a half. Can you picture a cop buying his own radio? Public schools are carried on the backs and bucks of its underpaid, majority-female labor.
Education continues to be under-funded because we educators haven’t yet unanimously demanded otherwise. We chose a helping profession because so many of us inherently are helpers. But similar to a toxic, codependent relationship, we have facilitated this enablist dynamic “for the kids” and because we excel in “making it work”. While noble, this is of course self-defeating behavior, and we live the consequences of dedication to our profession being weaponized against us.
Like every other institution erected to support a power structure, education has experienced widening cracks in both facade and foundation these past few years. And as in any impending death throes, those threatened by their own demise are getting loud and ugly. Bullying against educators is real. It is happening in communities, on media platforms and in the political sphere. The previously binary choice of teachers being branded a savior or a slacker now includes teachers being slandered a woke mob member, groomer or worse. They are coming for our unions, our lesson plans, our personal reputations and most egregiously, the sanctity of what happens between us and our students in our classroom space. Public education’s future is in the balance, and it is dire.
Teachers are fleeing the field en masse, burnt to a crisp from the unsupported, unrelenting demands and one-way flow of our time, energy and resources. Out of passion, care, and diligence, we continue to surrender agency at our own personal and occupational peril. In order to soldier on, we have been lulled into believing that “self-care“ is a bubble bath and a pedicure. But it is not. Authentic self-care is setting hard boundaries that galvanize our best self showing up for our students each day. This means being more discerning about what work we do after contractual hours, and more conscientious about what we are willing to sacrifice emotionally and financially for this job. We must learn the power of No and Enough, because without this vocabulary we are not prepared to be fully present for our students - the only reason many of us remain committed to this profession.
So next week, when the Bezos bait reaches your Teacher Twitter and Facebook feeds, I invite you to consider how our choices as professionals enable the systemic sexism and misogynistically-rooted gaslighting that makes us believe we are not good teachers unless we are sacrificing every ounce of ourselves.
If we continue doing as we have done, there will not be many of us left. And the way things are going, it seems like that is precisely the plan.