A Stormtrooper’s Diary

I don’t remember exactly when the metaphor came to me, that as a public school teacher I was a Stormtrooper, one of the anonymous, shiny white and black accented enforcers of the Empire’s or First Order’s whims (I am a child of Lord Vader’s reign), but once it did I couldn’t NOT see it.

I began teaching in 2000, at the age of thirty in the largely middle class city of my youth, Westminster, California, in its southern, Orange County. I then moved to and taught in Hawaii, on Oahu at the august Le Jardin Academy, a private school as beautiful and tony as it sounds. These were light detail assignments, as the whims of the Empire found little resistance here, little to rebel against. Outside of isolated, infrequent sparks, friction between school and student was minimal (admittedly, this was also when my vision was adjusting to the darkness of my helmet’s visor). It was not here I first heard the modulated voice in my head.

In 2006 my wife Laurie (also a teacher) and I had our second child, and life in Hawaii as two private school teachers became financially untenable. We decided to move back to California, this time to its agrarian center where Laurie’s mother was from, where her cousins and their children lived, and where our teacher salaries went further than we’d ever dreamed possible.

For the last twenty years as married teachers in Tulare, California, we’ve been able to live in our town’s nicest neighborhoods, park in a parking lot full of its nicest cars, and on weekends dine at its finest restaurants, where running into co-workers is expected. In the fall, we love to share and hear stories of the exotic places visited over summer, or about the work done on condos at the coast. Our two children will earn college degrees without debt. It was not the life we imagined when we entered public education in Southern California, a decision made on a foundation of service and purpose, and a sacrifice of financial status. The Empire has smiled on us.

It was definitely sometime after 2006 when I noticed the shiny white of my reflection, although it wasn’t in the mirror; it was in a student’s glasses, a hint of rebellion gathering at the corners of their lips. I saw students cheating, and in a flash believed I played a part.

In a community like the one I live and work in, far from the Empire’s glittering cities, friction with metropolitan whims is constant. What makes sense to citizens and rulers in the urban centers don’t always jive with rural ways of living and culture, and in a state like California, where many entire states would fit inside our counties, our government takes on a federal quality, distant, out of touch, authoritarian. It was here I started to understand the effects of empire, of compulsory schooling, on the shaping of humans and humanity.

For the last twenty years I’ve taught here, and like the thick, dangerous fog that blankets our land in winter, the culture of thought that empires depend on has become visible to me. And in the sunset of my career, what the fog obscures is becoming known to me as faces appear in the disappearing mist, faces of students, in their critical time of becoming, twisted under the weight of compulsion.

The philosophy of the individual I was trained on has been revealed as belonging to the fog. Instead, a whole, relational world appears to me as the tint of my visor wears thin, atoms and the undulating fabric they form challenging everything my feeble, human eyes have told me is true. Certainty has been abandoned. Even these hard won thoughts will take new shape before too long, so like all things, I’ve learned to hold them loosely.

Consider these Substack posts as entries from a stormtrooper’s diary, one searching to find how human freedom and love can flourish in a universe ruled by force.

Welcome to Teacher Saves World!

Note: The name “Teacher Saves World!” is one I am reviving from a podcast and blog that my wife Laurie and I did from 2020-2022. The podcast episodes are still available. While the old website is not, I am restoring the domain name here and may post some of the old blog content if it seems relevant. Who knows, maybe even the podcast will be brought back to life…stay tuned!