Year 11 – Week 5: I'm Voting For...Part 1

I’m voting for the teachers. 

Partners of teachers get it. They do dishes late at night while their wives grade papers. They struggle to make the budget work as partners have to spend their own money on classroom supplies, and they provide emotional support for the underpaid, and overworked teachers in America.

No one really understands what it’s like to be married to a teacher, unless you yourself are married to a teacher, like Joe Biden.

Teachers of America deserve a President who sees the value of the teachers, who has lived with the challenges, the sacrifices, and the tribulations of being an educator in America. The way that Joe Biden speaks about Jill Biden’s career as a teacher with love, respect, and awe in the way that he sees America’s teachers.

We have suffered at the hands of an incompetent Secretary Of Education, and a President who doesn’t care about education and teachers at all. Both of them did absolutely nothing to help teachers last spring when teachers transitioned to distance learning with little training, limited time to prepare while carrying the hopes of dreams of children and parents on their backs. In the months that followed, no leadership, no initiatives, no support, and not even a “thank you” came from these two people.

I’m voting for teachers so they can get the resources, and support to keep educating the children of American. I’m voting for teachers, so they can be successful because of the President, not despite him, and I’m voting for teachers so they can have a true partner in the White House who will stay up late with us doing the whatever he can do to help while we grade papers. 

 

I’m voting for my students.

“This isn’t about left vs. right. It is about right vs. wrong.”

For the past four years, I’ve watched trump say things and do things that would be unacceptable in my classroom. Unlike the Republicans have accepted his amorality, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and hatefulness as acceptable, I refuse to look the other way because I know how damaging his words and actions are to my students. 

Every time trump comes up in class, great care needs to be taken to discuss him because even the utterance of his name brings to mind real pain and trauma children have experienced because of him.    

I would be doing a disservice to my students if I didn’t vote for a candidate who shared the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion which are the foundation of my teaching. In the same way that I work towards these values in my classroom, I need to stand up for these values outside of my classroom. In this election, it means that I vote for Joe Biden.

I’m voting for my students, so they can see that there are consequences to being unkind, hurtful, and mean. I’m voting for my students, so they have a President that reflects the values in their classroom, and I’m voting for my students so they can see the best in themselves in a President who is guided by empathy and kindness.