“Yeah, the place I used to live was pretty nice, but it was kind of trumpy.”
One of my sixth graders shared this reflection about the city that she used to live before moving to Chicago and coming to my school. She wasn’t wrong. The state that she used to live in has a lot of trump supporters. This clearly bothered her. The use of the term “trumpy” was dismissive of the president and the views that he espouses.
I felt no reason to ask her for clarification, or to challenge her to express herself in a different way.
The norm in the fourth year of his first term has set in. We have a president that I need to be careful to bring up. We have a president that cannot be used as an example of any positive character traits, and we have a president who does nothing I can bring up in class as an example of leadership, culture, or values.
I show videos of the amazing musicians that President Obama brought to the white house like when Trombone Shorty visited:
I use quotes in my class from other Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, but there are no quotes from this current president that can teach my students anything of value. Also, since he uses so much inappropriate language, he is not a model of communication that I want my students to imitate, or be exposed to. The lack of leadership is felt all the way down to the way that we speak to our students about the news, our communities, and how we should treat each other.
Should trump every be brought up in school? Yes. Students need to learn about the news and current events. However, we have to be extremely careful how to we do this as trump’s voice and image is triggering to people in our community who trump has described in sub-human ways. As educators it is our primary job is the physical and emotional safety of our students, which is why managing conversations about trump in our classrooms carefully is very important.
As a music teacher and trump offer nothing to me. He didn’t go to any of the Kennedy Center honors programs. He hasn’t invited any great musicians or hosted any musical performance at the White House as most presidents before him. He doesn’t release a list of his favorite songs of the year, and he has never in my memory spoken about the importance of art or arts education.
When students do bring up trump, it’s more often than not in a joking way. In these moments, I have no problem explaining to them how making a joke about someone who has said hateful, prejudicial, and racist things about facets of identity that exists in our classroom is inappropriate, is wrong.
Teaching in the age of trump means that every single choice I make as an educator from the songs I teach, to the way that I respectfully look my students in their eyes and greet them by name is done deliberately. All I do is an effort to resist his negative effect on society and actively prevent another rise of such an immoral person into a seat of power.
This means having anti-racist curriculum, not letting boys in the classroom interrupt the girls during discussions, bringing voice to oppressed artists, and demonstrating what it means to be a leader. I am kind, I apologize when I mess up, and I focus my energy not on my own glory but elevating others. We must show our students that there is another way, that he is not the norm, and we can, and will be better then trump.
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