Vaishali Poddar, the state general secretary of Delhi BJP Mahila Morcha, shared the video on X (formerly Twitter) and claimed, “A Hindu teacher served the country for 40 years. And in return, a group of fundamentalists in Bangladesh insulted him by garlanding him with slippers. This is an insult, not just of a teacher, but of the entire Hindu society.”

एक हिंदू शिक्षक ने 40 साल तक देश की सेवा की और बदले में बांग्लादेश में कुछ कट्टरपंथियों ने उन्हें चप्पलों की माला पहनाकर अपमानित किया।
यह सिर्फ एक शिक्षक का नहीं, पूरे हिंदू समाज का अपमान है।@Yunus_Centre तुम्हारी चुप्पी भी गुनाह है।
शर्म करो! pic.twitter.com/WGHS2P6eB5

— Vaishali Poddar (@PoddarVaishali) June 28, 2025

X users @MithilaWaala, @KreatelyMedia, @ocjain4 and @Vini__007 also shared the video with similar claims.

Note that these users have been called out by Alt News for amplifying misinformation on several occasions in the past.

Other X users, such as @SouleFacts, @Sudhanshuz and @IRinitiPandey, also shared the video with similar claims.

Fact Check

To verify the claims, Alt News performed a reverse image search of key frames from the viral video. This led us to a report by Dhaka Times, which had screenshots of the viral video. The report said that the victim, Ahmed Ali, a retired community medical officer in Baliakandi, Rajbari, was beaten up by an angry mob for insulting Prophet Mohammed.

“On June 15, locals alleged that Ahmed Ali made derogatory remarks about Prophet Mohammed at a tea stall in Beruli Bazaar in the morning. When the news spread in the area, an agitated mob caught hold of him and beat him up in the afternoon,” Baliakandi police station in-charge Mohammad Jamal Uddin told the publication.

We also came across the same incident reported in another Bangladesh-based news outlet, bbarta24. Its report said that Ahmed Ali was tied to a tree and beaten up by an angry mob for making derogatory remarks about Prophet Mohammed and was later garlanded with shoes. Apart from this, Baliakandi police station in-charge Mohammad Jamal Uddin said that the situation was brought under control with the intervention of the police and army and the injured individual was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

So, unlike the viral claims, the man garlanded with footwear is not a Hindu teacher but a retired Muslim community medical officer from Bangladesh. He was thrashed by a mob and made to wear a garland of shoes for making derogatory remarks about Prophet Mohammed. Social media users have shared his video with false communal claims.

The post Hindu teacher garlanded with shoes in Bangladesh? No, video viral with false communal claims appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

It is worth noting that Bihar is infamous for such ‘forced’ marriages, also known as ‘Pakadwa Vivah’, in which eligible grooms with secure government jobs are often kidnapped and forced to marry women related to the perpetrators. Over the past few decades, several such cases from Bihar have come to light.

X account @thenewsbasket shared the video of the man being dragged in front of students on June 6, 2025, with the claim that a government school teacher was taken away for ‘forced marriage’ at gunpoint. At the time this was written, the post had over 800,000 views. (Archive)

बेगूसराय के एक सरकारी स्कूल टीचर को बंदूक की नोक पर पकड़वा कर शादी करवाने के लिए ले जाया जा रहा pic.twitter.com/z1jmyoSGOu

— The News Basket (@thenewsbasket) June 6, 2025

X handle @BasavanIndia also shared the video, questioning the state of law and order in Bihar. (Archive)

The video was also shared by X user @iamharunkhan who claimed this was the ‘ground reality’ in Bihar and not a ‘movie plot’. (Archive)

Fact Check

A quick search using keywords related to the video and claims led us to a March 23, 2025, report published on TV9 Bharatvarsh that had the same video. According to the report, the video was recorded at the Dularpur Math Middle School in the Teghra subdivision of Begusarai and depicts the shooting of a film named ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The video simply shows a movie scene being shot where a teacher is forcibly dragged away. However, some had raised concerns on whether the film was shot during school hours and the District Education Officer even ordered an inquiry. The principal, cited in the report, had clarified that the filming happened on a Sunday.

We also found a video of the same scene recorded from a different angle in a March 12, 2025, Instagram post uploaded by user @rajanrddfilms, a filmmaker and actor associated with the film ‘Pakadwah Byaah’. The post’s caption also makes it clear that the video is from the shooting of the film.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Rajan Rock (@rajanrddfilms)

To sum up, social media users shared a video of a movie scene being filmed in a school in Bihar with misleading claims that a teacher of a government school in Begusarai was actually kidnapped for marriage.

The post School teacher kidnapped in Bihar’s Begusarai for ‘forced marriage’? No; viral video is from a film shooting appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Fiji cannot compete with Australia and New Zealand to retain its teachers, the man in charge of the country’s finances says.

The Fijian education system is facing major challenges as the Sitiveni Rabuka-led coalition struggles to address a teacher shortage.

While the education sector receives a significant chunk of the budget (about NZ$587 million), it has not been sufficient, as global demand for skilled teachers is pulling qualified Fijian educators toward greener pastures.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji education reports

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Biman Prasad said that the government was training more teachers.

“The government has put in measures, we are training enough teachers, but we are also losing teachers to Australia and New Zealand,” he told RNZ Pacific Waves on the sidelines of the University of the South Pacific Council meeting in Auckland last week.

“We are happy that Australia and New Zealand gain those skills, particularly in the area of maths and science, where you have a shortage. And obviously, Fiji cannot match the salaries that teachers get in Australia and New Zealand.

According to the Education Ministry’s Strategic Development Plan (2023-2026), the shortage of teachers is one of the key challenges, alongside limited resources and inadequate infrastructure, particularly for primary schools.

Hundreds of vacancies
Reports in local media in August last year said there were hundreds of teacher vacancies that needed to be filled.

However, Professor Prasad said there were a lot of teachers who were staying in Fiji as the government was taking steps to keep teachers in the country.

“We are training more teachers. We are putting additional funding, in terms of making sure that we provide the right environment, right support to our teachers,” he said.

“In the last two years, we have increased the salaries of the civil service right across the board, and those salaries and wages range from between 10 to 20 percent.

“We are again going to look at how we can rationalise some of the positions within the Education Ministry, right from preschool up to high school.”

Meanwhile, the Fiji government is currently undertaking a review of the Education Act 1966.

Education Minister Aseri Radrodro said in Parliament last month that a draft bill was expected to be submitted to Cabinet in July.

“The Education Act 1966, the foundational law for pre-tertiary education in Fiji, has only been amended a few times since its promulgation, and has not undergone a comprehensive review,” he said.

“It is imperative that this legislation be updated to reflect modern standards and address current issues within the education system.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.

But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.

The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.

In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.

Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.

Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.

Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”

Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.

Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”

Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.

The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.

The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.

The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.

The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.

“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.

“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”

New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.

Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.

And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.

Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.

“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”

Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.

A feature film about life in the occupied West Bank, The Teacher, opens in New York tonight and in theaters across the U.S. next week. The film, which is inspired by true events, centers a Palestinian schoolteacher who struggles to reconcile his commitment to political resistance with supporting his student. “It’s a fiction narrative, this film, but it is deeply, deeply rooted in reality,” says Farah Nabulsi, director of The Teacher, which is partially based on the 2011 prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel, in which one Israeli soldier was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Nabulsi and Saleh Bakri, the acclaimed Palestinian actor who stars in The Teacher, speak to Democracy Now! about the resonance of the film in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “The occupation wants us separated,” Bakri says. “I want to dismantle these checkpoints … I dream of Palestinians coming together again.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, and fellow member Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, made the announcement on Feb. 5.

The praised the nominees in a statement for their “unwavering commitment to justice, human rights, and the protection of the Uyghur people against genocide and repression.”

About 12 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs live in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region where they face repression by the Chinese government, which includes mass arbitrary detentions, forced labor, family separations, religious persecution and the erasure of Uyghur identity and culture.

“In the face of one of the most pressing human rights crises of our time, Campaign for Uyghurs and Teacher Li continue to shine a light in the face of adversity, while challenging injustices and amplifying the voices of those too often silenced,” Krishnamoorthi said.

Moolenaar noted the CFU’s “tireless advocacy and bold testimony” in ensuing that the world can’t ignore the truth about the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, and in amplifying victim’s voices to pierce the Chinese Communist Party’s wall of silence.

(AP)

He also said Teacher Li had become “a vital lifeline for free expression, courageously breaking through China’s Great Firewall to shed light on citizens' protests despite grave personal risk.”

‘Long overdue attention to the Uyghur plight’

Established in 2017 by its executive director, Rushan Abbas, the CFU champions human rights and democratic freedoms for Uyghurs while urging the global community to take action against human rights abuses in East Turkistan, Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.

Rushan said the nomination acknowledges her organization’s dedication to advocating for Uyghur rights and acts as a powerful symbol of the resilience of a people resisting oppression.

“We hope this recognition brings overdue attention to the Uyghur plight,” she said in a statement. “The Chinese government’s crimes are not just a regional issue; they constitute a global human rights crisis that demands immediate action.”

“The world must unite — governments, institutions, and civil society alike — to defend fundamental human rights for all, no matter the perpetrator,” Abbas said.

In February 2022, the CFU was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by U.S. Reps. Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, who co-chair the Uyghur Caucus.

(Campaign for Uyghurs)

In the past, other Uyghur advocacy groups and individual activists, including the World Uyghur Congress, Uyghur Human Rights Project, prominent Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, and former World Uyghur Congress president Rebiya Kadeer, were nominated for the Nobel Prize.

‘White Paper’ movement

Li Ying, a social media influencer who now lives in exile in Italy, rose to prominence during the ”White Paper" movement of November 2022, when thousands of people gathered in the streets of cities across China to protest lockdowns and mass quarantines President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

The protests, in which people held up blank sheets of paper to show they felt authorities had robbed them of their voices, were also triggered by an apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, where dozens died, apparently because they were locked in their building.

Li took to social media to tell the world in videos and texts about the White Paper protests on his X account “Teacher Li is not your teacher”. While X is banned in China and news of the protests was heavily suppressed by the authorities, young people who supported the movement still found ways to send Li footage, photos and news of the protests.

Li, whose audience has grown to 1.8 million followers, continues to post news censored by the Chinese Communist Party in China, despite Beijing’s targeting of him, his family and online followers.

When Li woke up in Milan, Italy, on Feb. 6, his mobile phone was flooded with text messages congratulating him on the nomination, he told Radio Free Asia.

“I never thought that this would happen to me, because there are many human rights lawyers and activists who are currently locked up in China’s detention centers and prisons,” he said, adding that they were more deserving of the nomination.

“At the very least, this nomination demonstrates to the world, and to my family, that their son is not a traitor, and that he is really doing something to help the Chinese people,” said Li, who has been called a “traitor to the Chinese people” by Communist Party supporters.

“So, in that sense it is a recognition of what I do,” he said.

Mongolian rights

Ethnic Mongolian Hada, an ailing dissident and political prisoner from China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region who goes by only one name, has also been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

(Photo courtesy of SMHRIC)

In January, four Japanese lawmakers nominated Hada for his continuing advocacy on behalf of ethnic Mongolians living under Chinese Communist Party rule, despite years of persecution.

Hada has been imprisoned or placed under house arrest in China since 1995 because of his activities. He is a co-founder of the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance, a campaign group that advocates for the self-determination of Inner Mongolia, a northern region of China.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in October by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, and awarded on Dec. 10, 2025.

Additional reporting by RFA Mandarin. Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.

A user named PK Yadav posted a suspension letter and a woman’s photo and claimed that she was the same female teacher of a government school in Rajasthan who had been suspended. (Archived link)

A user named Hemant Kumar posted these pictures on Facebook, making a similar claim.

Another user shared the picture and wrote that these are the same two teachers who were suspended after their video had gone viral. (Archived link)

Fact Check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of the viral picture on Google. We found this picture uploaded on November 1, 2024 on the account of a woman named Mini Golchha. When we checked the Instagram and Facebook profiles of Mini Golcha aka Mini Jain, we found that she hailed from Madhya Pradesh and had posted several photos on her profile. So, the viral photo is not of a teacher from Rajasthan, but of influencer Mini Golcha from Madhya Pradesh. She also has a YouTube channel with the same name on which she uploads videos.

We also found a reel uploaded on Mini Golchha’s Instagram account on October 31, 2024. In this video, she is seen sitting at the same place and wearing the same clothes as seen in the viral photo.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by 𝙼𝙸𝙽𝙸 𝙶𝙾𝙻𝙲𝙷𝙷𝙰 (@minigolchha)

The influencer posted a video of herself on her Instagram story commenting on the viral photo. In this, she is heard saying that her photo is being made to go viral with a false claim and she has filed a police complaint against it.

To sum up, several social media users shared a picture of influencer Mini Golchha and falsely claimed that she was the same female teacher from a government school in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, who was suspended after her video had gone viral. 

The post Chittorgarh school CCTV footage: Influencer’s photo falsely shared as female teacher seen in viral clip appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Image by Andrej Lišakov.

Under threat from Israeli tanks, the parents and siblings of Ms. Kamla (a pseudonym) were forced to evacuate al-Bureij camp and relocate to her central Gaza home in al-Maghazi on December 25, 2023. Three days later an Israeli tank fired a shell into her home, though thankfully their family was gathered in a different room of the house so there were no injuries. Since December 28, Kamla and her family have been displaced 7 or 8 times.

When the Israeli tanks finished their operation, Kamla left the tent she had evacuated to in Dier al-Balah. She went to see if her house was still standing. She found it partially destroyed, yet still she tried to clear the rubble to live in it once more. That was not the end however, as Israel returned with more tanks and bombs.

The post Hunted by Israeli Tanks and Drones, an English Teacher Protects Her Family in Central Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William Silversmith.

Dhonyoe, who goes by only one name, was expelled in early April from Meruma Central Primary School in Ngaba county’s Meruma township after he was interrogated several times by Chinese authorities, said the sources who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

His teaching license was also suspended, they said.

“Dhonyoe was accused of teaching his students beyond the national education system and was repeatedly questioned by authorities in mid-March,” said the first source.  

The Chinese government-run boarding school has about 500 Tibetan students, studying in kindergarten to the sixth grade, and about 60 teachers. The school previously taught Tibetan language and used Tibetan as a medium of instruction, the sources said. 

However, since 2018, with the movement of promoting uniformity in the use of textbooks and instructional materials, the Tibetan language has been replaced by Mandarin, which has been taught more intensively, they added. 

“Dhonyoe is a well-respected Tibetan teacher in the community,” said the second source. “He taught students the importance of the Tibetan language and Tibetan history, which is why he was expelled. Many students and their families were disappointed by his expulsion.”

Heart-warming video

A video obtained by RFA shows students running to the school gate to greet and embrace Dhonyoe after he returned from one of the interrogation sessions he was subjected to in March. 

Since 2020, the Chinese government has further tightened its restrictions on language rights in Tibetan, forcing the closure of private Tibetan schools in Tibet and banning Tibetan language teaching in various schools in Tibetan-populated areas, including in Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. 

Authorities have since intensified Chinese-language education in Tibetan schools in the name of promoting uniformity in the use of textbooks and instructional materials.

In 2021, authorities also began prohibiting Tibetan children from taking informal Tibetan language classes or workshops during their winter holidays, a move that local Tibetans and parents of affected children said would negatively impact the children’s connection to their native language. 

Earlier this year, in January, the Chinese Education Department issued a notice repeating this ban and ordering local authorities to intensify their supervision and investigation of supplementary lessons for Tibetan children and carry out strict disciplinary action against those violating the rule. 

Translated by Dolma Lhamo and edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.

My coming out as gay was a tiny part of the speech, but of course, it’s what was the headline afterwards in The New York Times, and it’s what generated both positive publicity and a lot of backlash, especially within the Dartmouth College community. One of the things that it taught me, or prepared me for, was something about the power of the word “gay,” both for good and for ill. Maybe this was more the case back then, although I think it’s still the case to some degree, but sometimes, when you say “gay” or “queer,” that’s all people can hear, and it short-circuits their ability to hear anything beyond that. That’s often been in my mind as I write about queer subjects and themes, even though, for me, they may just be part of the mix.

To stand in front of about 10,000 people at the age of 20 and come out in 1990, when it wasn’t as common or as accepted? After doing that, writing about “risky topics” or “messy truths” or “sexually transgressive topics” just seemed much more doable and much less of a big deal. Or maybe I had fewer fucks to give once I’d come out and The New York Times published that I was gay. It prepared me to think that I could take risks like that and that there was a lot of upside.

I’m interested in something you just said about how all anyone really heard within that speech was the word “gay.” Given that you’ve been circling similar themes throughout your life, do you feel like you’ve been able to manipulate the fact that, at first, people might hear the word “gay” and assume that’s what you’re leading with? Have you been able to use that to your benefit at all?

I do love a good misdirection or sucker punch in narrative. I was writing a lot of explicitly sexual material when I was younger. I do like using the queer sexual aspect as a Trojan horse, where people think they’re going to get one sexy thing, but then it actually turns into either a family drama or something much more about profound loneliness. The headline is Queer Sex, and that’s the entry point, but then I try to take it in unexpected directions.

It seems like it comes really natural to you to examine a certain set of themes from different angles. Why do you think that is? And why do you think you’ve really held on to one set of themes for decades now?

I’m not sure. I mean, I think the truest, but maybe least satisfying, answer is that they’re just my themes. And I know some artists seem to just have this incredibly wonderful scattershot view of the world and move around a lot, but I guess I’m not that way. I used to worry about it a lot and think that it was a mark against my character or my creative abilities that I was always repeating myself and looking through the same lens whenever I observe human drama. But the more I’ve thought about it, I just don’t think there’s any reason to apologize for one’s obsessions.

Many of my favorite writers tend to circle the same ideas and themes over and over. William Maxwell’s coming back again and again to childhood loss and the death of his mother when he was a kid, and I don’t ding him for that. In fact, it makes his work more profound and interesting to me. And Alice Munro has written constantly throughout her career about girls growing up in small rural Canadian towns among undereducated family members and then going to the city and becoming literary and gaining a more liberated feminist point of view. I mean, how many of her stories have a Canadian woman taking a train to the big city? It happens over and over, and I am totally there for it. Looking at their work has made me feel somewhat less self-conscious about circling the same themes over and over.

A friend and I were recently talking about dark matter in physics, where you can’t see it directly, but it’s affecting everything in the universe, and none of the equations about the expansion of the universe makes sense unless you account for it. I love looking at any situation and trying to see that hidden dark matter that is exerting this huge gravitational force, even though it’s rarely acknowledged, and it’s not part of the visible world. For example, my novel Charity Girl is “about World War I,” but I had no interest in writing about battles or the shifting lines of nation states or political calculations. What drew my interest was this whole story about how women were punished for their sexuality, how their desire was seen by the government as a threat. They were rounded up and put in camps to keep soldiers from getting venereal disease. That’s the interesting dark matter going on below these epic battles and trench warfare. I could see parallels with the contemporary situation of the AIDS epidemic. I took my pre-existing concerns and interests and themes and applied them to this historical wartime situation that otherwise might not even have interested me at all.

You’re primarily known as a fiction writer, but you’re working on a nonfiction project right now. Has this decision to work in personal nonfiction came at all from a feeling that you’d written all the fiction you could write on the themes you’d like to explore? Was it even a conscious move away from fiction towards something new?

In all honesty, I’m still trying to figure it out myself. It wasn’t a conscious move other than in the sense that I seem to have stopped, at least for the time being, thinking in fictional terms. I used to see someone in the world and start imagining a whole narrative for them. I would read a story in the newspaper and wonder what the hidden forces and the not-being-told stories were. I just don’t seem to be thinking in that way these days.

I’m thinking much more about the reality of things that I’ve experienced, trying to figure out why I acted the way I did in certain circumstances. And I wonder if it’s just a factor of aging, a tendency toward self-reflection and reassessment. In a few cases, I specifically have been looking back at things, topics, and experiences that I once fictionalized, like my novel Avoidance, which was partly inspired by a boy I knew at summer camp. Twenty years after publishing that, I’m now telling the part that I didn’t include in the novel that in some ways, now, is almost more interesting to me. The Same Embrace, my first novel, had all this very fictionalized stuff about my own family and our Holocaust history, and part of it was inspired by an uncle I knew just a teeny few facts about but didn’t know any more. Part of what I’ve written about is the gap between what I fictionalized and what the truth was.

A huge question or debate in the culture for a while has been: who has authority to tell what story and whose voice counts? And I would like to think that my shift towards nonfiction doesn’t come entirely from a place of defensiveness or fear about that. It does seem, on some level, safe or safer to assume that if I’m an authority on anything, I’m at least an authority on myself in my own experiences. I feel some calling or responsibility to try to articulate my own point of view on various topics and issues.

Who are some writers you admire who are writing about themes similar to the ones you explore in your own work?

One of my favorites now is Douglas Stuart, who wrote Shuggie Bain. I love his second novel, Young Mungo, which is definitely circling some of the same ideas, but even more. I love how a writer like Andrew Holleran has, throughout his career, kept writing at each different stage about what queer desire means: when you’re in your 20’s, when you’re middle-aged, and later in life. He has the real bravery to write about loneliness and disconnection with regard to queer desire specifically. Trans writers and people writing on trans themes, I think, are really the ones who are bringing the news to our culture, which is what novelists are supposed to do: Torrey Peters, who wrote Detransition, Baby, and Andrea Lawlor, who wrote Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Because I’ve been working on essays, I’ve been especially drawn to writers who are mixing memoir and personal story with timely cultural topics: Jia Tolentino, Cathy Park Hong, Sarah Polley. One of my favorite recent books is Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, who similarly uses personal stories as a jumping point for meditation on thematic topics.

You teach in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. When you have students who gravitate toward exploring certain things in their work, but maybe aren’t quite sure how to refine them yet, what guidance do you provide?

I try to give them reassurance and confidence that their themes are their themes, and I tell them it’s okay to be obsessed with what they’re obsessed with. I encourage people to hunker down in their obsessions but try to work on what it is that they don’t understand yet about what obsesses them. I ask, “Why does this obsess you? Why do you keep coming back to this?” And this may sound contradictory, but I also encourage them to live in the gray areas and stay there so that, even if they think they know what they’re writing about or what their message is or what they believe, they can try to let go of some of that certainty and live in the half-lit, half-knowing world, and try to be surprised by the undersides of what they thought they believe and know. And if they can embrace the weirdness and the risk and the surprise, that’s the thing that’s going to be the thing in the writing that’s the most them. It’s going to be their unique voice, their unique contribution.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

My coming out as gay was a tiny part of the speech, but of course, it’s what was the headline afterwards in The New York Times, and it’s what generated both positive publicity and a lot of backlash, especially within the Dartmouth College community. One of the things that it taught me, or prepared me for, was something about the power of the word “gay,” both for good and for ill. Maybe this was more the case back then, although I think it’s still the case to some degree, but sometimes, when you say “gay” or “queer,” that’s all people can hear, and it short-circuits their ability to hear anything beyond that. That’s often been in my mind as I write about queer subjects and themes, even though, for me, they may just be part of the mix.

To stand in front of about 10,000 people at the age of 20 and come out in 1990, when it wasn’t as common or as accepted? After doing that, writing about “risky topics” or “messy truths” or “sexually transgressive topics” just seemed much more doable and much less of a big deal. Or maybe I had fewer fucks to give once I’d come out and The New York Times published that I was gay. It prepared me to think that I could take risks like that and that there was a lot of upside.

I’m interested in something you just said about how all anyone really heard within that speech was the word “gay.” Given that you’ve been circling similar themes throughout your life, do you feel like you’ve been able to manipulate the fact that, at first, people might hear the word “gay” and assume that’s what you’re leading with? Have you been able to use that to your benefit at all?

I do love a good misdirection or sucker punch in narrative. I was writing a lot of explicitly sexual material when I was younger. I do like using the queer sexual aspect as a Trojan horse, where people think they’re going to get one sexy thing, but then it actually turns into either a family drama or something much more about profound loneliness. The headline is Queer Sex, and that’s the entry point, but then I try to take it in unexpected directions.

It seems like it comes really natural to you to examine a certain set of themes from different angles. Why do you think that is? And why do you think you’ve really held on to one set of themes for decades now?

I’m not sure. I mean, I think the truest, but maybe least satisfying, answer is that they’re just my themes. And I know some artists seem to just have this incredibly wonderful scattershot view of the world and move around a lot, but I guess I’m not that way. I used to worry about it a lot and think that it was a mark against my character or my creative abilities that I was always repeating myself and looking through the same lens whenever I observe human drama. But the more I’ve thought about it, I just don’t think there’s any reason to apologize for one’s obsessions.

Many of my favorite writers tend to circle the same ideas and themes over and over. William Maxwell’s coming back again and again to childhood loss and the death of his mother when he was a kid, and I don’t ding him for that. In fact, it makes his work more profound and interesting to me. And Alice Munro has written constantly throughout her career about girls growing up in small rural Canadian towns among undereducated family members and then going to the city and becoming literary and gaining a more liberated feminist point of view. I mean, how many of her stories have a Canadian woman taking a train to the big city? It happens over and over, and I am totally there for it. Looking at their work has made me feel somewhat less self-conscious about circling the same themes over and over.

A friend and I were recently talking about dark matter in physics, where you can’t see it directly, but it’s affecting everything in the universe, and none of the equations about the expansion of the universe makes sense unless you account for it. I love looking at any situation and trying to see that hidden dark matter that is exerting this huge gravitational force, even though it’s rarely acknowledged, and it’s not part of the visible world. For example, my novel Charity Girl is “about World War I,” but I had no interest in writing about battles or the shifting lines of nation states or political calculations. What drew my interest was this whole story about how women were punished for their sexuality, how their desire was seen by the government as a threat. They were rounded up and put in camps to keep soldiers from getting venereal disease. That’s the interesting dark matter going on below these epic battles and trench warfare. I could see parallels with the contemporary situation of the AIDS epidemic. I took my pre-existing concerns and interests and themes and applied them to this historical wartime situation that otherwise might not even have interested me at all.

You’re primarily known as a fiction writer, but you’re working on a nonfiction project right now. Has this decision to work in personal nonfiction came at all from a feeling that you’d written all the fiction you could write on the themes you’d like to explore? Was it even a conscious move away from fiction towards something new?

In all honesty, I’m still trying to figure it out myself. It wasn’t a conscious move other than in the sense that I seem to have stopped, at least for the time being, thinking in fictional terms. I used to see someone in the world and start imagining a whole narrative for them. I would read a story in the newspaper and wonder what the hidden forces and the not-being-told stories were. I just don’t seem to be thinking in that way these days.

I’m thinking much more about the reality of things that I’ve experienced, trying to figure out why I acted the way I did in certain circumstances. And I wonder if it’s just a factor of aging, a tendency toward self-reflection and reassessment. In a few cases, I specifically have been looking back at things, topics, and experiences that I once fictionalized, like my novel Avoidance, which was partly inspired by a boy I knew at summer camp. Twenty years after publishing that, I’m now telling the part that I didn’t include in the novel that in some ways, now, is almost more interesting to me. The Same Embrace, my first novel, had all this very fictionalized stuff about my own family and our Holocaust history, and part of it was inspired by an uncle I knew just a teeny few facts about but didn’t know any more. Part of what I’ve written about is the gap between what I fictionalized and what the truth was.

A huge question or debate in the culture for a while has been: who has authority to tell what story and whose voice counts? And I would like to think that my shift towards nonfiction doesn’t come entirely from a place of defensiveness or fear about that. It does seem, on some level, safe or safer to assume that if I’m an authority on anything, I’m at least an authority on myself in my own experiences. I feel some calling or responsibility to try to articulate my own point of view on various topics and issues.

Who are some writers you admire who are writing about themes similar to the ones you explore in your own work?

One of my favorites now is Douglas Stuart, who wrote Shuggie Bain. I love his second novel, Young Mungo, which is definitely circling some of the same ideas, but even more. I love how a writer like Andrew Holleran has, throughout his career, kept writing at each different stage about what queer desire means: when you’re in your 20’s, when you’re middle-aged, and later in life. He has the real bravery to write about loneliness and disconnection with regard to queer desire specifically. Trans writers and people writing on trans themes, I think, are really the ones who are bringing the news to our culture, which is what novelists are supposed to do: Torrey Peters, who wrote Detransition, Baby, and Andrea Lawlor, who wrote Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Because I’ve been working on essays, I’ve been especially drawn to writers who are mixing memoir and personal story with timely cultural topics: Jia Tolentino, Cathy Park Hong, Sarah Polley. One of my favorite recent books is Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz, who similarly uses personal stories as a jumping point for meditation on thematic topics.

You teach in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. When you have students who gravitate toward exploring certain things in their work, but maybe aren’t quite sure how to refine them yet, what guidance do you provide?

I try to give them reassurance and confidence that their themes are their themes, and I tell them it’s okay to be obsessed with what they’re obsessed with. I encourage people to hunker down in their obsessions but try to work on what it is that they don’t understand yet about what obsesses them. I ask, “Why does this obsess you? Why do you keep coming back to this?” And this may sound contradictory, but I also encourage them to live in the gray areas and stay there so that, even if they think they know what they’re writing about or what their message is or what they believe, they can try to let go of some of that certainty and live in the half-lit, half-knowing world, and try to be surprised by the undersides of what they thought they believe and know. And if they can embrace the weirdness and the risk and the surprise, that’s the thing that’s going to be the thing in the writing that’s the most them. It’s going to be their unique voice, their unique contribution.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

It’s a handful of things. One is I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just so embedded in my life. I don’t know how to not. I don’t know how to come home and just watch TV. I feel like I come home, and I work on something literary, and then that makes me seem really productive. I’ll knock out a bunch of submissions and then people will sort of acknowledge the journal’s going strong. And then some part of my brain is just like, “yeah, but I haven’t written anything in two weeks.”

I don’t have a ton of other hobbies, so my hobby is doing it for the love of the thing. It’s not really a career because I’m not getting paid for reading or running journals or writing, but it all kind of seems career. It’s different enough from my day job that it seems like this separate hobby.

I started Hobart when I was 23. At that point I was figuring out what it meant to be a human, so working on Hobart, working on a journal, was just there from the get-go of what it meant to be a person.

I’m really curious about the career versus hobby element. Do you feel like that impacts the pressure you feel to produce?

I’m in this kind of weird position where I’m not a professor, I’m a lecturer, so I’m not tenure track. And for a long time, to some degree, I felt like that was hanging over my head. It’s like at this age, with this much experience, I should probably be tenure track or whatever. And at some point in the last few years I just brushed that off. I don’t feel like I always need to get bigger or have more. You’re allowed to be happy at the level you’re at. I really like the classes I teach and there’s lots of aspects to being a professor and tenure track that I would love too.

But a part of being a lecturer is I get paid less. But part of getting paid less is I don’t have to do committee work. I don’t have to go to meetings and my job is not really tied to my creative output.

Writing for me has really been able to stay as this thing that I just love doing. A lot of writers think of this word hobby as kind of demeaning. It’s like, “it’s not my hobby, I’m a writer.” A hobby is a thing you do for fun. And I write for fun. I embrace thinking of it as a hobby.

I love HAD. There’s sort of this careerist or writerly despair that gets projected online around the act of writing and HAD feels like it’s a reminder that it’s okay to be silly and have fun and writing doesn’t always have to be so serious. Was that intentional?

It was a little intentional in that that is always my belief about writing, but it was also accidental. That mentality of writing goes back to the beginnings of Hobart. What I always wanted to do from the beginning of starting Hobart was publish stories with writing as good as possible, but that also allows writers to have fun. My background wasn’t really as an English major or writer. Some part of it was wanting to publish stories that my skateboarding friends who aren’t big readers would enjoy. As a 23-year-old kind of broey writer dude, having my skater friends love a story that I published felt like more of a goal than getting a story in Best American Short Stories.

The genesis of HAD was when I was still doing Hobart, I started doing these pop-up submission windows. I just tweeted something like, “Look, I’m two drinks in. I’m going to pour a third. I want to read as many submissions and reply as fast as I can. I might make a decision after two sentences. If you’re game for that, submit to me right now, and I’m going to reply to as many as I can, as fast as I can.”

I got a decent chunk and read through them, and thought it was fun. And then I would just do that every now and then. A side effect of that was writers having to wonder what is going to grab my attention under these specific circumstances.

I don’t think it was purposeful, but it became the site of weirder stuff than I would typically publish on Hobart just by nature.

How has being an editor shaped the way that you write and/or revise your own work?

It’s hard to answer that a little bit because the two are so intertwined. I started Hobart and I started writing kind of at the same time. I really started Hobart because I wanted to build a website and I didn’t really have any other kind of website in mind to build. So it became a lit journal, and I wasn’t much of a writer yet, but I built a website and put my name on it under an about page and then a comma and then editor. And people were like, “Oh, this guy’s an editor.” And I was like, “Sure.”

I feel like being an editor became a little bit of a roadblock to being a writer, because a big aspect of being a writer is writing a shitty first draft, and then you clean it up, and then you figure out what it’s about. Some part of my editor brain would just block me because I knew all the kinds of stories that I would reject. Often a first draft is full of cliches. Instead of pushing past it, I would think, I would reject this, and then I would stop writing. I would hold myself against that high bar of the kind of story that I would fall in love with, and I would be like, “I’m not as good of a writer as the thing that I just accepted yesterday, so I guess maybe I should just be an editor because I can publish better writers than I can be myself.”

How do you stay in a healthy place of being excited by other people’s work and not maybe feeling insecure or comparing yourself to others?

Some of it is just getting older and maturing and figuring out what I can do that I think others can’t. When I was younger, I could only see what other people could do and I couldn’t.

I go through the world as this Labrador retriever who’s had an obnoxiously happy upbringing and is generally pretty smiley about things. When I was younger, I thought I would be a more interesting person if I was more fucked up. How do you write interestingly about a really happy childhood? My parents loved me and supported me. It makes me a well-adjusted human, but it doesn’t make for the greatest personal essay.

At some point, I figured out there is something there to interrogate and wrestle with and think through. One of my goals as a writer has been to explore how to be earnest without coming across as sentimental.

I’ve read a lot of your shorter work, and you know I teach your attachments essay pretty regularly, so I was excited to read your first novel, Year of the Buffalo. What was the experience like writing longer form?

There’s lots of real joys and pleasures in writing something so longform. It’s the day-to-day work of it and not having to immediately come up with an ending. One of the struggles of writing is figuring out how to bring it to completion in a satisfying way. If you’re mired in a novel and on page 112, you don’t have to. You’re like, “I don’t know how this will end, but that’s months or years away. I don’t have to deal with that yet. I just have to deal with writing this scene well, and then figuring how to get from this scene to the next scene.” You’re kind of postponing that challenge of ending it. It’s also really appealing to get buried in something and obsess over it a little. I think probably one of the common traits among writers is that we’re obsessive about things. A novel lends itself to that because you get to live in this thing and keep thinking about it for months or years.

I guess the flip side is there’s a real pleasure in finishing something, even completely extracted from the publishing aspect of writing. When you’re in the middle of a novel, you don’t ever get to feel like that unless you take breaks and work on shorter stuff. In terms of publishing, there’s more immediate gratification with shorter pieces than a novel.

How do you sustain a project that potentially takes years?

I mean, at times, it’s hard. Writing groups have been really, really sustaining and encouraging for me. I have a handful of writer friends who I trade work with, and sometimes I’ll trade work that I’m in the middle of. There’s pros and cons of sharing work too soon. But sometimes a couple of your writer friends can be like, “Oh, this is really great. I’m curious what will happen next?” And then you have to write what happens next.

As much as I love external validation, writing is getting to spend a little bit of time with things that I’m interested in. A big reason why the second half of Buffalo is a road trip novel is because I love road trips. So when I am sitting at the desk and maybe don’t have any ability to go on a road trip in any foreseeable future, my characters can. There’s a joy in getting to create the world of the novel that you want to live in a little bit.

How long did you work on Buffalo for?

Oh my God, I don’t even know. I don’t know how a normal person writes a novel or I don’t know how a normal novel gets written. In grad school, I wrote a novel for my thesis, and it didn’t totally work, but it taught me that I could write a novel. That was one of the benefits of grad school. I met with my thesis advisor between my second and third year, and I was like, “I’m pretty close to having a story collection of stuff that I’ve been writing for MFA workshops for two years. I could spend a year writing a couple new stories and just making this as tight as possible, or I have an idea for a novel, and I could try to write a novel.” I expected her to say “do whatever you want,” but she goes, “write the novel.” So I did, and I think that was one of my best writing experiences.

I sent it around to some friends and to some other people. Most people were like, “there’s aspects that are fun, but it doesn’t really work.” So then I scrapped it, probably spent some time writing stories and short shorts, and then started a new novel. I scavenged and rewrote and repurposed a bunch of material from the thesis. I spent, I don’t know, three years writing this novel, maybe a year trying to get an agent.

Every agent turned it down. And then a couple years passed, and then Dan Hoyt, who started Buffalo Books, reached out to me. He was like, “I’m going to start a new press. I thought of you. I like your writing. I know at some point, you were working on a novel manuscript, whatever happened to that?” I was like, “I don’t know, I threw it away, but you can read it if you want because nobody else is.” And then he really liked it. We spent another year working on revisions. In a way, I wrote it in three years, but then in another way, it’s like 10 years from start to publication.

How is failure important to your vision of success or to your writing practice?

Failure has often taught me that I can do something. Maybe it didn’t work, but I could do it. The first year I applied for MFAs, I got uniformly rejected everywhere. And then I spent the next year just writing and thinking about writing and trying to become a better writer. I was like, “well, I guess if I got turned down by everyone, maybe I need to spend more time on my writing.” I’d been spending a lot of time editing too. And I was like, “instead of just publishing stories that I love on Hobart, how do I write stories that I would want to publish? If they were written by someone else, what would make me want to accept them? How do I write a story that I as the editor would accept?” That year, I figured out my voice in a way that I hadn’t before. So similarly, that first novel not selling taught me that I could write a novel. In order to fail at something, you have to have done it or have tried to. I tried and I did it and I completed it.

I didn’t realize that you started writing at the same time you started Hobart. What’s it been like leaving and focusing on other things?

Weirdly, it felt less monumental than I thought it might. I did it for so long, and because it’s so intertwined with myself as a writer, stepping away from it seemed like losing part of myself. There’s a lot of things in our lives that when we give them up or when we move past them, we wonder who we are without that thing. In lots of ways, it’s been positive. It’s made me think of myself a lot more as a writer than just an editor.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shelby Hinte.

It’s a handful of things. One is I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just so embedded in my life. I don’t know how to not. I don’t know how to come home and just watch TV. I feel like I come home, and I work on something literary, and then that makes me seem really productive. I’ll knock out a bunch of submissions and then people will sort of acknowledge the journal’s going strong. And then some part of my brain is just like, “yeah, but I haven’t written anything in two weeks.”

I don’t have a ton of other hobbies, so my hobby is doing it for the love of the thing. It’s not really a career because I’m not getting paid for reading or running journals or writing, but it all kind of seems career. It’s different enough from my day job that it seems like this separate hobby.

I started Hobart when I was 23. At that point I was figuring out what it meant to be a human, so working on Hobart, working on a journal, was just there from the get-go of what it meant to be a person.

I’m really curious about the career versus hobby element. Do you feel like that impacts the pressure you feel to produce?

I’m in this kind of weird position where I’m not a professor, I’m a lecturer, so I’m not tenure track. And for a long time, to some degree, I felt like that was hanging over my head. It’s like at this age, with this much experience, I should probably be tenure track or whatever. And at some point in the last few years I just brushed that off. I don’t feel like I always need to get bigger or have more. You’re allowed to be happy at the level you’re at. I really like the classes I teach and there’s lots of aspects to being a professor and tenure track that I would love too.

But a part of being a lecturer is I get paid less. But part of getting paid less is I don’t have to do committee work. I don’t have to go to meetings and my job is not really tied to my creative output.

Writing for me has really been able to stay as this thing that I just love doing. A lot of writers think of this word hobby as kind of demeaning. It’s like, “it’s not my hobby, I’m a writer.” A hobby is a thing you do for fun. And I write for fun. I embrace thinking of it as a hobby.

I love HAD. There’s sort of this careerist or writerly despair that gets projected online around the act of writing and HAD feels like it’s a reminder that it’s okay to be silly and have fun and writing doesn’t always have to be so serious. Was that intentional?

It was a little intentional in that that is always my belief about writing, but it was also accidental. That mentality of writing goes back to the beginnings of Hobart. What I always wanted to do from the beginning of starting Hobart was publish stories with writing as good as possible, but that also allows writers to have fun. My background wasn’t really as an English major or writer. Some part of it was wanting to publish stories that my skateboarding friends who aren’t big readers would enjoy. As a 23-year-old kind of broey writer dude, having my skater friends love a story that I published felt like more of a goal than getting a story in Best American Short Stories.

The genesis of HAD was when I was still doing Hobart, I started doing these pop-up submission windows. I just tweeted something like, “Look, I’m two drinks in. I’m going to pour a third. I want to read as many submissions and reply as fast as I can. I might make a decision after two sentences. If you’re game for that, submit to me right now, and I’m going to reply to as many as I can, as fast as I can.”

I got a decent chunk and read through them, and thought it was fun. And then I would just do that every now and then. A side effect of that was writers having to wonder what is going to grab my attention under these specific circumstances.

I don’t think it was purposeful, but it became the site of weirder stuff than I would typically publish on Hobart just by nature.

How has being an editor shaped the way that you write and/or revise your own work?

It’s hard to answer that a little bit because the two are so intertwined. I started Hobart and I started writing kind of at the same time. I really started Hobart because I wanted to build a website and I didn’t really have any other kind of website in mind to build. So it became a lit journal, and I wasn’t much of a writer yet, but I built a website and put my name on it under an about page and then a comma and then editor. And people were like, “Oh, this guy’s an editor.” And I was like, “Sure.”

I feel like being an editor became a little bit of a roadblock to being a writer, because a big aspect of being a writer is writing a shitty first draft, and then you clean it up, and then you figure out what it’s about. Some part of my editor brain would just block me because I knew all the kinds of stories that I would reject. Often a first draft is full of cliches. Instead of pushing past it, I would think, I would reject this, and then I would stop writing. I would hold myself against that high bar of the kind of story that I would fall in love with, and I would be like, “I’m not as good of a writer as the thing that I just accepted yesterday, so I guess maybe I should just be an editor because I can publish better writers than I can be myself.”

How do you stay in a healthy place of being excited by other people’s work and not maybe feeling insecure or comparing yourself to others?

Some of it is just getting older and maturing and figuring out what I can do that I think others can’t. When I was younger, I could only see what other people could do and I couldn’t.

I go through the world as this Labrador retriever who’s had an obnoxiously happy upbringing and is generally pretty smiley about things. When I was younger, I thought I would be a more interesting person if I was more fucked up. How do you write interestingly about a really happy childhood? My parents loved me and supported me. It makes me a well-adjusted human, but it doesn’t make for the greatest personal essay.

At some point, I figured out there is something there to interrogate and wrestle with and think through. One of my goals as a writer has been to explore how to be earnest without coming across as sentimental.

I’ve read a lot of your shorter work, and you know I teach your attachments essay pretty regularly, so I was excited to read your first novel, Year of the Buffalo. What was the experience like writing longer form?

There’s lots of real joys and pleasures in writing something so longform. It’s the day-to-day work of it and not having to immediately come up with an ending. One of the struggles of writing is figuring out how to bring it to completion in a satisfying way. If you’re mired in a novel and on page 112, you don’t have to. You’re like, “I don’t know how this will end, but that’s months or years away. I don’t have to deal with that yet. I just have to deal with writing this scene well, and then figuring how to get from this scene to the next scene.” You’re kind of postponing that challenge of ending it. It’s also really appealing to get buried in something and obsess over it a little. I think probably one of the common traits among writers is that we’re obsessive about things. A novel lends itself to that because you get to live in this thing and keep thinking about it for months or years.

I guess the flip side is there’s a real pleasure in finishing something, even completely extracted from the publishing aspect of writing. When you’re in the middle of a novel, you don’t ever get to feel like that unless you take breaks and work on shorter stuff. In terms of publishing, there’s more immediate gratification with shorter pieces than a novel.

How do you sustain a project that potentially takes years?

I mean, at times, it’s hard. Writing groups have been really, really sustaining and encouraging for me. I have a handful of writer friends who I trade work with, and sometimes I’ll trade work that I’m in the middle of. There’s pros and cons of sharing work too soon. But sometimes a couple of your writer friends can be like, “Oh, this is really great. I’m curious what will happen next?” And then you have to write what happens next.

As much as I love external validation, writing is getting to spend a little bit of time with things that I’m interested in. A big reason why the second half of Buffalo is a road trip novel is because I love road trips. So when I am sitting at the desk and maybe don’t have any ability to go on a road trip in any foreseeable future, my characters can. There’s a joy in getting to create the world of the novel that you want to live in a little bit.

How long did you work on Buffalo for?

Oh my God, I don’t even know. I don’t know how a normal person writes a novel or I don’t know how a normal novel gets written. In grad school, I wrote a novel for my thesis, and it didn’t totally work, but it taught me that I could write a novel. That was one of the benefits of grad school. I met with my thesis advisor between my second and third year, and I was like, “I’m pretty close to having a story collection of stuff that I’ve been writing for MFA workshops for two years. I could spend a year writing a couple new stories and just making this as tight as possible, or I have an idea for a novel, and I could try to write a novel.” I expected her to say “do whatever you want,” but she goes, “write the novel.” So I did, and I think that was one of my best writing experiences.

I sent it around to some friends and to some other people. Most people were like, “there’s aspects that are fun, but it doesn’t really work.” So then I scrapped it, probably spent some time writing stories and short shorts, and then started a new novel. I scavenged and rewrote and repurposed a bunch of material from the thesis. I spent, I don’t know, three years writing this novel, maybe a year trying to get an agent.

Every agent turned it down. And then a couple years passed, and then Dan Hoyt, who started Buffalo Books, reached out to me. He was like, “I’m going to start a new press. I thought of you. I like your writing. I know at some point, you were working on a novel manuscript, whatever happened to that?” I was like, “I don’t know, I threw it away, but you can read it if you want because nobody else is.” And then he really liked it. We spent another year working on revisions. In a way, I wrote it in three years, but then in another way, it’s like 10 years from start to publication.

How is failure important to your vision of success or to your writing practice?

Failure has often taught me that I can do something. Maybe it didn’t work, but I could do it. The first year I applied for MFAs, I got uniformly rejected everywhere. And then I spent the next year just writing and thinking about writing and trying to become a better writer. I was like, “well, I guess if I got turned down by everyone, maybe I need to spend more time on my writing.” I’d been spending a lot of time editing too. And I was like, “instead of just publishing stories that I love on Hobart, how do I write stories that I would want to publish? If they were written by someone else, what would make me want to accept them? How do I write a story that I as the editor would accept?” That year, I figured out my voice in a way that I hadn’t before. So similarly, that first novel not selling taught me that I could write a novel. In order to fail at something, you have to have done it or have tried to. I tried and I did it and I completed it.

I didn’t realize that you started writing at the same time you started Hobart. What’s it been like leaving and focusing on other things?

Weirdly, it felt less monumental than I thought it might. I did it for so long, and because it’s so intertwined with myself as a writer, stepping away from it seemed like losing part of myself. There’s a lot of things in our lives that when we give them up or when we move past them, we wonder who we are without that thing. In lots of ways, it’s been positive. It’s made me think of myself a lot more as a writer than just an editor.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shelby Hinte.

When Archway Editions and I first started thinking about how to market Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, my editor Naomi Falk and I came up with this term, fauxtofiction, like autofiction, but fake autofiction. There’s various Claire avatars in the book. There’s also a voice that my colleague Christopher Rey Pérez generously characterized in an email as feeling “close to the self” that I think a lot of the stories maintain. But the stories, even when they contain actual memories, are fiction. Memory is always a form of rewriting, and therefore a combination of experience and fantasy.

As I wrote Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, I was in a six-year psychoanalytic treatment. That treatment involves refining and sweeping my unconscious. Pretty early on in the treatment, I said to my psychoanalyst, “You’re going to write a book. It will be called: Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts.” My psychoanalyst is also a writer. I posited that my book would be her book. And now six years later, her book is my book.

Regardless as to what that Claire avatar does in the stories, my unconscious—the unthought known—guides the prose. I trust that my unconscious is more clarified than it was before I began the treatment, and that I’m more in touch with it—however in touch one can be with that unconscious wilderness. My namesake also means clear, and that etymology arises in some of the stories. I hope the clarity, or the claire-ity, of the work is autobiographical, if nothing else is.

Please speak more to the emergence of clarity.

Clarity doesn’t burgeon from knowledge for me, but from listening to the gymnastics of thought: the peculiar back flips and balances that thoughts do as I’m writing. As I’ve gotten to know myself more, I trust those impulses or those thought-gymnastics, and am less afraid to transcribe them to the page.

When I began to write, there was so much unprocessed within me. A lot of my early work possessed a kind of opacity. Some of that opacity has, I hope, fallen away. Again, that’s come from sweeping the unconscious, really trying to re-narrativize and understand my life. It has also come from sitting with a lot of pain I hadn’t sat with when I wrote my first two books. I’ve been watering myself crying, becoming.

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is rare in its form insofar as it is composed of a series of short stories with a novella at the end. Could you speak to the overall shape of the collection?

I didn’t begin writing Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts with this shape—a series of short stories with a novella set during the COVID-19 pandemic (called Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and The Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian) at the end—in mind. It was only late in the revision process that I realized what I thought were originally two separate books were one. Perhaps I was unconsciously influenced by my late peer Mark Baumer’s posthumous anthology, The One on Earth, which also takes the same shape, and for which I wrote a foreword.

The novella is a maligned form, in ways, though of course there are people obsessed with the novella who devote their lives to the form and teach classes about it. And there’s presses that do a beautiful series of novella publications. But there is still a resistance on the part of the large corporate publishing machine to really risk publishing novellas, for the most part. Maybe they’re too feminine, too nebulous. I appreciate the Deleuze and Guattari essay called “Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” wherein the theorists posit that novellas are consistently overshadowed by a question of what has happened, and therefore “[play] upon a fundamental forgetting” as a form—an amnesic form perfect for ruminations on the COVID-19 pandemic, a time I can barely recall.

Short stories are also a kind of maligned form. Historically, they’re hard to sell. Putting together two forms that are hard sells, and trying to interlock them, trying to make them something that’s greater than the sum of their individual parts—that is one project of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. I hope my maligned forms interlock into something novelistic. The Gravity and Grace novella builds so much on the preoccupations of the short stories: images crop up again and again within the short stories and the novella, as do themes, and there are set of selves and references to artworks that to run through that longer work. The novella is also the digital breakdown of the book. It feels a little bit like Claire is a glitching computer by the end of the book.

My interest piqued when you were talking about maligned forms within prose, and I’m wondering, is there a desire to sort of flout the broader cultural rules about writing prose that directs you rebelliously towards the maligned?

Perhaps not consciously, but maybe also consciously. At the time I was a student in Brown University’s MFA Literary Arts Program, from 2008 to 2010, the program was always referred to as “experimental,” a place where maligned work was often being made. I remember my work being referred to around that time by family and some friends as being weird or too difficult to understand. I was very young and insecure in my writing practice, and I internalized a lot of those descriptions. I don’t think my work is necessarily that difficult, whatever that means, but I think I just took some of that on and over-identified with it. Of late, my work has been more so described as deeply upsetting, chic, and somehow good-humored.

You’re also a renowned teacher who won Pratt Institute’s 2020 Distinguished Teacher Award. How do you support students who have similar desires to find their own non-standard forms of art making in the classroom?

In the Writing Department at Pratt, where I’ve taught since 2016 and where I currently serve as Acting Chairperson, we try to celebrate myriad successes and don’t emphasize one modality of what success might look like for a writer, which I think some programs do. As a teacher, I try to cultivate a space where students can experiment across forms and media. This means approaching the classroom as a kind of laboratory where we’re trying things out without the pressure of an end product.

I place a lot of emphasis on generative making and process. Of course, institutions also give us rooms. A lot can happen in a room if we don’t let ourselves be limited by the expectations of what should happen in the room. A stanza, too, is a room.

It’s one thing to have this space constructed for you as a student in a classroom. Is there departing advice you give to students when they exit school and enter the real world?

Two pieces of advice come to mind. I try to impart that the communities my students form at school may be really, really, really important down the line, and to cherish those communities and to continue working together. Of course, that may not always be the right advice for every single student, but I think there’s resonance for many students who carry their undergrad communities forth into the world, lean on them, let them organically expand, et cetera.

The other piece of advice is that to be a writer, you need to be really obsessed with what you’re making. And again, a book is not necessarily a measure of success that everybody desires or wants to achieve, but to write requires a level of obsession and dedication and devotion. You have to make the time to do it. Sometimes there will be deadlines, but for the most part, that work is going to be self-motivated.

Finally, it’s okay to fail, to come up against rejection, to not publish, to want to keep things private. And it’s also okay to want to be seen. A lot of writing practice resembles doing nothing, or waiting for something. And some things that seem antithetical to formalized writing training are also important lessons.

It strikes me that if, say, when Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is published, the United States government bans you from writing, you would not cease to be a writer.

Let me explain. As I’ve observed you over the years, I notice you bring a writerly attention to everyday activities. You are highly skilled at creating connections between and illuminating events of daily life. How much of your self-identification as a writer means sitting down and typing on a computer, and how much does it mean an attentive approach to life?

In a percentile breakdown?

Yeah. Maybe you start off with the percentile.

I think it’s maybe like eighty-twenty, wherein eighty is daily life, and twenty is actual writing. [laughs] That’s just off of the top of my head. I need to think more about it.

In your own words, could you describe the eighty percent?

Deeply inhabiting a day in such a way that I’m able to understand how my breakfast plate connects to something I see on the sidewalk as I am walking to the bus, to a conversation I overhear when I get off the bus and am looking at overpriced candles in a shop that I’ve decided to enter because it’s hot and I need access to a brief moment of air conditioning, to the dream I have at night wherein an image from the day recurs. I’m always looking to tie up these moments or looking for reverberations between moments that might braid into something greater, and that something greater doesn’t necessarily have to be something that gets taken to the page, though it may be. It can just be something that delights me or mystifies me or raises questions or raises questions that raise questions that I later take to the page.

Were you always capable of drawing the thread? Is this something you’ve done since childhood as a coping mechanism, or is it something you’ve learned?

It might be a deranged response to the pain of living in the world, or it might be a totally unproductive form of clinging to memory. I do think I’m writing when [my boyfriend] Nik and I make up goofy songs, which is all of the time. I regard it as a form of writing or when we make our troll dolls practice nonviolent communication with one another. There’s lots of ways to write, and for me, they always involve play.

Your apartment comes up several times as a kind of character in the book, both as a miniature reproduced for “The Analyst,” but also in a variety of other ways as an environment. What do you think about the space in which you live as a kind of literary character within your own life?

I’ve always liked the word apartment and the separation it denotes. In terms of the book, the apartment space is sometimes that which makes characters or selves feel lonely or distant—or maybe feel a healthy sense of solitude, on a bright day. So the apartment becomes a space of affective resonance, right?

Describe that, what that means.

It’s a space where the character can come a bit closer to herself. But also the apartment becomes this alienating thing by the very nature of it being an apartment. So it’s her apartment, but it’s its own entity, its own separate force from her, even though it’s hers. I don’t know that I particularly imagine or project my own apartment into any of the pieces in the book beyond Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which concludes the book. That novella does feel distinctly set in my own apartment. And the existential apartment was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. And it so happens that the apartment in which I currently live is the apartment where I survived the pandemic in New York, so that’s imprinted here too.

I’m thinking extemporaneously now. There’s so many valences in my own apartment, as there are for many of us. Several relationships that took place here are ghosts in the space. So much has happened. As with memory, and with writing, there are imprints atop imprints atop imprints.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Anastasios Karnazes.

It’s not even “winning” that matters, because in truth there is no winning when it comes to war, just ongoing preparation for the next one. Good ol’ George W. Bush described the phenomenon with such clarity in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he said that North Korea, Iran and Iraq – three countries the United States once controlled – constituted, in their defiance, “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

We all know what happened next. We invaded and shattered Iraq. A million or so people died. Nothing changed. Certainly nothing was learned.

For instance, these are the words of George W… excuse me, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking two-plus decades later before the Israeli Knesset, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel:

“Hamas is part of the axis of evil of Iran, Hezbollah and their minions. They seek to destroy the State of Israel and murder us all. They want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages…”

From Netanyahu’s point of view, the Hamas attack was completely unprovoked. It had nothing to do with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, turning Gaza into a concentration camp for two million people, continually “mowing the lawn” there, etc. After all, the enemy always bears 100 percent of the blame.

And how national leaders love their enemies – just not in that “love thy enemy as thyself” way. A good enemy – and a war against that enemy – create national unity: “Our goal is victory,” Netanyahu declared, “a crushing victory over Hamas, toppling its regime and removing its threat to the State of Israel once and for all.”

He added: “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

Law of the jungle?

These words made me pause, oh so briefly. Netanyahu – murderer of children – actually uttered a sliver of truth, unintentionally, of course. His genocidal war on Palestine is, indeed, a struggle between humanity and the law of the jungle. It’s a struggle between brutal force – this is the “humanity” part, simplistic and domination-obsessed – and transcendent sanity: the law of the jungle, i.e., the laws of survival that have evolved into our global ecosystem.

“The jungle environment, a complex and diverse ecosystem, embodies a myriad of interconnected laws that dictate the survival, interactions, and equilibrium of its inhabitants.”

So writes Brandon Angel at the website Nutritional Diversity, noting that “the jungle’s resilience lies in the abundance and diversity of species coexisting in a delicate balance.”

My heart pounds. All I can do is scream the words: What if?

I hear a billion human beings, maybe more, joining the cry. Most of humanity is, by now, oh so ready to move beyond the suicidal stupidity of war, the stupidity of the belief that we can kill the world’s evil and thus create some sort of pretend heaven, which of course will never happen. What if, instead, we committed ourselves to understanding the interconnectedness of life – or as Brandon put it, “the interplay of dominance, territoriality and cooperation…”

No, there’s nothing obvious here. There’s nothing simple and clean-cut. Life is a complex, mortal struggle; competing interests arise. But what if we stopped valuing – and funding the hell out of – war? What if we conquered our impulse to kill the problem of the moment and looked deeply within it, not simply for a temporary solution but for transcendence?

I ask this question, as an American, of my own government. What if we decided to learn, not just at the margins, but officially and politically, from our own horrific history of genocide and racism, and acknowledge that we have survived not by killing the enemy within but we expanding our sense of who we are? And what if, empowered by this awareness, we refused to be complicit with Israel in its own attempt at committing genocide? What if we chose not to dance with the possibility of war with Iran?

What if, at the starting point of conflict, we began by acknowledging, in the words of the International Union for Conservation of Nature: “In the spirit of nature, everything is connected” . . .?

What might that mean? I don’t claim to know, but the first step is to loosen the grip my own certainties have on me, especially when those certainties are armed.

Instead of sending more bombs and weaponry to Netanyahu, the United States – if it had the courage – could send him the opposite, the words of Martin Luther King:

“And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula…who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.”

The post The Law of the Jungle: Our Teacher? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.

The post Being an Undocumented Teacher in America Comes With Undocumented Struggles appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Well, just a couple of things. It’s not that the importance of the glimmer is not apparent to me right away. It’s that the reason for the importance is not apparent to me right away. And that’s kind of an important distinction, because I trust so much the process of noticing the glimmer, even if I don’t know what it means or why I’m noticing it.

And so I do know that it’s important. I just don’t know why, and I don’t really care if I ever know why. I mean, usually in the course of using it in writing, the reason it was important to me will reveal itself, but not always. And that’s okay with me because I believe in its power to carry its meaning to the reader, even if I’m not in control of that transfer, if that makes sense.

It does. What’s the most recent glimmer you’ve come across?

My husband and I went on a walk with the dogs this morning, and he found a wild onion in the pasture and he broke it off and handed it to me to chew on. Is that vitally important to any story I will ever tell? I’m not sure. But that was what popped into my mind when you asked, and it happened just about an hour ago. They can happen constantly.

The last glimmer that I think I’ll probably use in my writing, though? Let me think about—oh, I know. That’s an easy one, too. On Sunday—no, Monday morning—I gave a reading. I went out to Yosemite for about 36 hours to give a reading at a historic lodge there in Tuolumne Meadows. And even though I knew it was going to be tight in my schedule, I wanted to go because I knew I could stay up there in the meadows with the ranger, which would mean that, in the morning after my reading, I would be the only person in Tuolumne Meadows basically. And it was every bit as perfect as I imagined it being, to be there, in a place that’s visited by so many people, all alone. But I wasn’t alone. I saw a whole lot of deer, including several does with fawns, including a doe with two tiny spotted fawns who were just having the zoomies all over the meadow. It was just so cool to see that place without people, even though I was sort of wrecking that. They weren’t really scared of me because I was only one of me, and there were so many of them, marmots and pine martens and all kinds of birds and all these deer. That would’ve been the last thing that I know I’ll write about.

How do you know when a glimmer is going to make its way onto the page? What’s the difference between the morning in the meadow and the onion in the pasture?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know until it does. It’s important to me to be in the practice of noticing constantly. That’s really the important part of my practice. And if I were being Buddhist about it, the onion would be equally as vital as the morning in Tuolumne Meadows, but I’m not a Buddhist, nor do I exactly strive to be. But the most important part of the practice is to notice and, no matter how big or small or major or minor, to keep a running recording in my head or on the page.

Having said that, there are just things that feel more significant, either because they’re a major life event, like falling from a horse and not dying at a full gallop, or if it’s something that’s more daily, like the onion in the pasture. Sometimes those daily things can be just the metaphor. The honest answer is I don’t spend a lot of time evaluating them because I think that’s counterproductive to the process. The process is really about collection and having them at my disposal if I need them later.

There are certain glimmers that seem like the reason to write an essay. They will propel me into an essay because I so believe in how big they are for me. But aside from that, I sort of feel like they’re all kind of equal. And getting to be alone in Tuolumne Meadows after this very wet spring, the road just opened a week ago, and here we are in August. They had 15 feet of snow up there. Everything was all renewed and revitalized. That all feels big enough to propel me into an essay about the earth and its potential for rejuvenation if we would leave it alone. It’s got a lot of big ideas in it, and I feel like I could write that essay today, but at least equally important to the process is just collecting little things that are going to be momentary drop-ins in other pieces of writing that might inform it or change it or reveal it.

Have there been seasons of your life where you’ve fallen off the practice of noticing?

Honestly, I’m pretty good at it. Certainly there have been times, but it’s my driver. It’s kind of the definition of me. Wherever I am, I want to go for a walk. I want to go out and look. I want to go see. It’ll say on my tombstone—not that I will have a tombstone—but it would say, if I were going to have one, she always wanted to go see. So it is something I’m good at. I’m not that good at sitting down and writing, honestly, but I’m quite good at noticing. And I think the reason I’ve been a writer all these years is because I’m good at noticing, because I am not good at sitting in a chair.

I guess one time that was really scary in recent memory was when I had long Covid for about a year, and I had so little energy. The thing I’ve always had in abundance is energy, I can always go for a walk. I can go fly in somewhere to give a reading, and even though I’ll only be on the ground for eight hours, I’ll still find a way to go out and walk around and look at wherever I am. That’s really important to me. Whether it’s a city or a beautiful natural area, it doesn’t matter. I want to know where I am. I want the details of it. I eat them. I am always hungry for more of that.

When I had long Covid, I didn’t have energy for that, and it was scary. I couldn’t get off the couch. I had such deep fatigue, which I had never had in my life. I didn’t know anything about it, because I’ve never had an autoimmune disease or anything, and I have many friends who have. The idea that I couldn’t take the dogs for a walk or cook dinner or anything–I was scared. And honestly, I was so scared that I wasn’t even living that it honestly didn’t freak me out that much that I wasn’t writing, because the living part was so much more important to me. Even though the writing’s very important to me. It was sort of the first time in my whole life I gave myself a break for not getting writing done because I couldn’t even take a shower.

I think my brain is still a little weird after that, and I think my heart’s still a little weird, but basically I’m like 80 percent better, which I’ll take. 85 percent maybe. I’m not as good at multitasking as I used to be, which I think is probably the good news. Ultimately, I think multitasking is probably not that good for us, but I am easier on myself as a result of going through that, in two ways. I’m easier on myself if I don’t do every single thing I think I’m supposed to do, which feels good at 61. And also, I’m kind of easier on the writing. Not that I don’t want it to be excellent, but there’s less negative self-talk than there was before Covid. There’s less, “Oh, that’s so stupid. Oh, that’s so boring. Oh, you’re boring everyone. Say something interesting or get up and leave the computer behind.”

All that sort of self-hating talk, which I used to think was just what my friend Fenton Johnson calls “the price of admission for being a writer.” It’s calmed down some. I mean, not entirely, but just being able to write again, having the energy to write again, not to mention having the energy to go out in the world and collect glimmers—I feel so grateful for that. I don’t want to spend energy on the super self-criticism, which is not to say I won’t revise and revise and revise. I’m a compulsive reviser, but just in terms of getting the first draft down, I’m easier on myself, which I think can only be good.

I’m so glad you’re continuing to recover. Now, I know you’re a writer who loves a good metaphor. When I write, I always feel like I’m wrestling metaphors onto the page. For you, is it a matter that the metaphor will come together on the page?

Glimmers are my source of metaphor. We’ve all had times where we’ve witnessed something or been involved in something and we go, “Oh my god, that’s such a metaphor for life,” or, “That’s such a metaphor for what I’m going through right now.” I was just teaching and writing near the Great Sand Dunes, which is a national park near me, and there’s this one dune that’s way up on the side of the hill, and it’s called an escape dune. So there’s the huge dune field, and then there’s this escape dune that got away, and I swear to god, every single student put it in their piece the next day. It was such an appealing metaphor to everyone. There are going to be times like that, where a metaphor suggests itself to you, or you even have a scene that you feel wants to be a little more visual or lyric, and you go searching for a metaphor, which is when it can feel like you’re forcing them.

That’s why I start with the glimmers. We’re back to that little onion now. I don’t know what it is or what it means, but if it turns out that I put my husband breaking it off for me to taste it in a scene, I have to count on the fact that that meaning is going to get conveyed to the reader without me having to ram it down their throat. For me, the best metaphors are the ones that grow naturally out of the scene or out of the glimmer without me having to go, okay, what metaphor goes here? Because then it starts to feel a little mechanical or a little forced or a little overdetermined. I like the meaning to float a little. If the glimmer makes it all the way to the reader without me even really understanding its meaning, then I know I haven’t manhandled it.

Are you a daily writer?

I’m a daily writer right now because I have a book deadline, this mini book I’m doing on Roe v. Wade. I don’t do that very often. I usually just try to let it come when it comes, except when I’m on deadline and I’ve sat down and I’ve just made myself write 500 words a day no matter what. Again, this is so not my writing style. I’m just trying it, and it’s going okay. And I think that’s connected to what I said before about not being so hard on myself. When I get this book done, which I will in the next month or two, I might try to continue at this pace. It would be the first time in my life that I did daily pages. I’ve never done it. I’ve rolled my eyes at the idea, honestly.

What about it has made you roll your eyes?

A few reasons. One is because teaching is super, super important to me, and my identity is really bound up in teaching, and that’s the thing I do every day. I mean, of course I don’t do it every day, but my dedication to teaching never wavers, and there’s always student pages to read. But I also think I rolled my eyes at it because I was so sure I would write badly if I forced myself to write every day.

I don’t like writing badly. Some of my good friends who are writers will write 10,000 words to get to a thousand, and I’m not like that. I like to get it in the room the first time. I do revise incessantly, but it’s kind of going from eight to 10 instead of from two to 10. And I think I always thought that going from two to 10 was just a waste of time. If I don’t have anything to say, why would I even sit down?

I’m now rethinking that. Even in these 500 words a day, a lot of them suck. But there’s good ones in there that have arisen because I made myself sit down and write 500 words, which I realize is what every book on writing has said since the beginning of time. I just didn’t really believe it.

You mentioned your dedication to teaching. How do you keep writing in spite of the fact that teaching can feel so much more satisfying?

It is so much easier to put my students’ writing first, especially now. I’ve had my moment. I’ve had my say, and they’re all coming to try to save the fucking planet. Of course their work is more valuable than mine, particularly my students at the Institute of American Indian Arts, but not exclusively. The work I do with mentoring these books into the world—I just feel like they’re so much more important just by virtue of being new. It’s new ideas and it’s new reactions to the world.

That said, that set of feelings can be convenient when I’m really afraid to write or when I’m not making the time to write or when I’m afraid of the thing I’m about to write. But I have all these things in the queue that I want to write, which feels like happy news. I have eight or nine essays, and some of them might turn into short stories, and I am excited to write for the first time in a while.

You said that some of the essays might turn into short stories: is that how your work typically starts? Does it begin in essay form, then turn into fiction if you decide you want to take more liberties with it?

How it usually works is that I just start writing something and I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about whether it’s an essay or a story. I’m usually just playing a shell game with glimmers, and then they sort of fall into connection to each other. Then, somewhere in there, I decide whether it’s a story or an essay, depending on how it’s going, depending on whether it wants made-up characters or not. I mean, I wrote the book Contents May Have Shifted, got all the way to turning it in and said, “I don’t know what you want to call this.” The character’s name is Pam, but I made a lot of shit up. Sometimes the work really never identifies itself. Or sometimes, like with a short story I wrote recently, a dog starts talking, and then it’s like, okay, this must be fiction. There’s a few things in the queue, and I keep bouncing back and forth as I’m thinking about them while I’m driving or whatever. That’s just a way to keep my mind active around them. I won’t really know until I start writing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I think I was talking about being very careful about using the right word. Taking time with language. Some things are intentionally unclear, though. I think about that myself, and I talk about that in terms of being as precise as possible. Sometimes in class, I’ll ask questions about what is actually going on here under the surface, as in, “What are you getting from this?” It all comes back to clarity. Thematic clarity.

One way to get clearer is to step outside and try to see the work with new eyes. One idea is looking at the writing from the perspective of a different character within it. Just a way to compel looking at what’s going on from a different angle and to remember that there are different angles.

With your own work, when you feel like you’re really, really close to it, how do you get some distance?

Sometimes things are very simultaneous for me. The idea of figuring out the structure is very much connected to figuring out what the story is about. It takes me a really long time sometimes just to figure out what the structure is. I’ll think I know what I’m writing about, but then when it comes to how I actually express it or represent it on a page, I realize that clarifying to myself what it is I want to say is really intrinsically tied to how I mean to say it, or how am I going to actually put all this together in a way that makes sense and also feels right to me.

I tend to overwrite, and I tend to just do that out of habit. I’ll look at things from as many different angles as possible. For me, it is very connected to, I guess, sort of a search for clarity. What is the proper shape? I feel like a lot of times when I’m writing, it’s like I’m trying to figure out what I think about something. It will be something that I’m kind of obsessed with or an image or a person or some dialogue or something that’s going on in the world, and trying to write it is really part of the process of trying to understand what it means to me.

What does your day-to-day writing life look like?

I usually wake up really early and try to write for at least an hour or two every day. I try to get up at five every day. I’m in a much better mood for the rest of the day if I do that. It’s good for everybody involved if I just try to carve out some time in the beginning of the day to write before I have to drive my son to school and stuff like that. That’s what I try to do.

Before I started recording our conversation, you told me you did a month-long residency this summer. What did your writing schedule look like during the residency when you didn’t have anything else going on?

It was really nice to be able to do that and to not have to necessarily get up at five. No, it was great. It was really great. It depends on your situation at home, but certainly for me, because I have three kids, it was just a revelation like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing ever.” You can actually make your own schedule and stuff like that. Residencies have been really important for me to get a lot of work done.

A lot of writers, myself included, can get intimidated when met with that much sprawling time to work on something at a residency. My reaction to that is putting pressure on myself and setting overly ambitious goals, like, “I’m going to draft a whole novel in three weeks!” But then I realize, no, that’s impossible. How do you set realistic expectations for yourself during a residency?

Oh, I don’t know. I remember when I was younger, people would say, “Oh, I procrastinate so much,” and dah, dah, dah. When I’m in residency, I’m very aware that this is borrowed time. It is really precious. Again, I think so much of writing for me often is trying to figure out what it is I’m trying to say. Maybe it is because I overwrite, and at this point I am aware of how I work, trying to look through different scenes and find what will work for me. That actually takes most of the time, probably, in terms of writing novels. I just try to do that and ask myself different questions or put characters in different scenarios.

I definitely set deadlines for myself and goals for myself, but I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m also very aware that I have to figure it out before I can do all of that. I feel very happy and satisfied if I can just get it clear in my mind. It’s not that I don’t wish I could write faster sometimes, but it doesn’t really help to write fast, and then I can’t feel it. It’s not really what I wanted to say, or it just doesn’t feel right, or the language doesn’t sound right. I personally have nothing to do with what anyone else thinks about it.

Writing every single day no matter what—for you, it sounds like it’s all about discovery and being immersed.

It really, really is. I know everybody has a different process and a different relationship to writing, but that kind of is what mine is. That doesn’t work for some people, but it depends on your relationship to what you’re doing, and everyone has a different process. You try to figure out what works for you and what is really satisfying for you. That’s a question that’s really personal, and you have to figure it out for yourself.

I want to ask about setting and place in writing. The settings in your work are so evocative. You spent time in a lot of different places growing up—has that had an effect on the way you incorporate a sense of place in your writing?

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then, when I was two, we moved to Oakland, CA. Then when I was around seven, she moved to the Virgin Islands. Then I came back and I actually went to high school in Poughkeepsie, NY. My mother moved around a lot, and I think in part that’s probably why I write about Florida so much—every summer, I would stay with my grandparents in St. Petersburg, FL. Even though that was not where I lived with my mother, Florida had some continuity for me.

Moving so much and being in so many really different social contexts made me aware of how the way people respond to you can be so radically different depending on where you are. It made me aware of how identity changes, depending on where you are, and how people respond to you. How people interact with you can be very, very different depending on where you are and what they think of you. That’s part of, I think, my own sensitivity to setting: how it affects the interpretation of identity.

That’s part of the reason why my kids and I have lived in different countries. I really wanted them to understand that there’s not really sort of a fixed definition of how they would be perceived in the world or who they were. There are so many different definitions that exist now. I never wanted to feel very fixed in terms of, “Because I am this race, this gender, this, that, this is how I’m perceived, this is who I am, and that is a specific set of circumstances that I have to contend with.” I think that it made me very aware of that.

Being a teenager in Florida versus being a teenager at a really tiny Quaker school in Poughkeepsie versus being an African-American on an island where everyone looks like me but isn’t culturally alike but we’re not culturally—it wasn’t even like, “Oh, I feel alienated.” I think it very much impacted my awareness of the relationship between character and setting.

It’s interesting hearing you talk about this, and I find myself thinking about it through the lens of your most recent book, which is a collection of linked stories set in the same place, exploring one community over the course of several decades. I want to ask a question about that book: what made you decide to write it as short stories rather than a novel?

See, that’s really interesting. I started thinking about it when I was much younger. My mother was so excited when Obama was elected, and I could not quite muster the euphoria that she had. Writing that book was almost like an investigation of my own cynicism about what was going on in the country at that time. It sort of stayed with me.

Also, I was really interested in the ways that, in the eighties and nineties, people talked about race and class. Just thinking about how language has changed. I always say that book was, for me, about communal grief, but I think it also had to do with a loss of language. The emptying out of a lot of words and terms that I feel like, maybe 20 years prior, had been a really potent means of expressing yourself. I just felt like the language had been so eroded. I wanted to talk about that as a communal issue. Maybe you can see that as part of my process itself, because it’s told from so many different perspectives.

All of the stories in that book are really, really different in terms of structure, and that was part of what was the hardest thing to write: to be as true as possible to each specific perspective in terms of how those stories were shaped.

Does revision usually look similar from book to book for you, or is it drastically different for every project?

It’s different for every project, but most of what I’m doing is revision, if I’m honest. There are initial ideas, and then it’s like, maybe in the morning, I’m just writing to myself and trying to work through characters, but most of it really is revising and trying to figure out what the point is, and then find the clearest and cleanest way to get to it, the most immediate way to get to it. A lot of times I’ll have an idea and a basic sense of a shape, but then it’s like, how do you actually figure out what you’re saying and actually put it on a page that makes sense to you? That, as you know, can take years.

Most of it is really revising. We said that everybody has a different approach, but I must find, on a certain level, something deeply satisfying about that process. I do it every day.

When you draft, are you usually going back and changing a lot before you move forward? Or do you try to push through to the end of a draft and then look at it and start again?

I’ll get very hung up on the language, so if the language doesn’t feel right, it’ll be very hard for me to push forward. Sometimes I try to force myself to just get through the whole thing and not do that. Then it’s really just a summary. Sometimes, when you look back, that’s really helpful. A lot of times I’ll put things down, and then when I look at them, I don’t know, months later, I’ll be like, “Oh my god, I’m so glad that at least I wrote it all out.”

Is that the most amount of outlining you’ll do, or do you do traditional outlines?

I usually don’t do outlines aside from that. It just feels like a really rough summary. “Then they went there and they did this, and this happened, and somehow they wound up over here.” Again, it’s like a revising thing when I understand everything, but I just want to check in terms of themes or if there is repetition of images or something like that. It’s just to keep track of everything, but usually that’s very close to the end that I can.

I’m trying to be honest about my own process here. Again, everybody works so differently. I understand that, and I respect that, but this is what works for me, and I think that’s a big part of it. Just taking yourself seriously as a writer wherever you are in your career can be hard enough, and part of that is respecting what works for you and knowing you don’t have to do anything the way anyone else does it. Just whatever works for you: that’s right and good.

It’s a lot of work to take writing seriously for a very long time. You’re not getting paid for it, but it is work. It’s literal work that you’re doing. I think it’s important to cultivate. It’s also important for your own writing and just allow yourself to be the writer that you are. You don’t have to be anyone else. You don’t have to write about things that other people write about. Just figure out what you are doing and respect it, because it’s important. I think it makes you a better writer, actually.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

Keo Sovannrith, 20, was demonstrating alone at the Ministry of Education on Monday when local authorities in civilian uniforms pulled him into a car and beat him.

He told Radio Free Asia that he tried to file a complaint with local police in Phnom Penh’s Daun Penh district on Wednesday, but they refused to accept it. The same security guards who roughed him up earlier this week then took his phone, he said.

He filed the complaint with the Interior Ministry on Thursday. He said he will follow up with ministry officials after the annual Pchum Ben festival, which ends on Monday.

“I urged the ministry to speed up a solution on the matter,” he told RFA. “It seems the district guards have more power than police and other authorities.”

Keo Sovannrith was admitted to the National Institute of Physical Education last November despite standing 162 centimeters (5 foot 4 inches) tall, under the 165 centimeter (5 foot 5 inch) minimum requirement for applicants.

He was removed from enrollment with no explanation in December, along with 11 other prospective students.

In July and August, Keo Sovannrith and several others protested several times in front of the ministry to demand readmission to the teacher training program. They said the institute’s enrollment requirements were too opaque and randomly applied.

Police surrounded and beat them on Aug. 21. Video of the incident was widely viewed on Facebook.

Soeung Sengkaruna, a spokesman for the rights group Adhoc, said that the Daun Penh security guards aren’t police officers and don’t have the authority to confiscate people’s belongings.

“Only the judicial police with the court’s order can arrest people,” he said. “The ministry should look into the issue to avoid any criticism from people and the international community who are watching over the law enforcement of Cambodia.”

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

An appeal court in Vietnam’s Dak Lak province on Tuesday upheld an eight-year prison sentence for music lecturer Dang Dang Phuoc, his wife Le Thi Ha told Radio Free Asia.

The 60-year-old instructor at Dak Lak College of Pedagogy was convicted on June 6 this year of "making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” 

He was prosecuted under the penal code’s controversial Article 117, which rights groups say is frequently used to suppress free speech.

Police arrested him on Sept. 8 last year after he posted on Facebook in support of activist Bui Tuan Lam, known as “Onion Bae.”

His wife was also questioned about songs he sang and posted on social media, including one by a former political prisoner and another with lyrics about the problems faced by Vietnam under the Communist Party.

Speaking to RFA Vietnamese on Tuesday Le Thi Ha called the appeal a sham.

"There is nothing different from the first-instance hearing,” she said.

“The examiners of the province’s Department of Information and Communication continued to be absent while the court panel did not respect the defenses of my husband and his lawyers."

Over the past 10 years Phuoc campaigned against corruption and for better protection for civil and political rights. He signed pro-democracy petitions and called for changes to Vietnam’s constitution, which grants the Communist Party a monopoly on power.

“Dang Dang Phuoc shouldn’t be in prison for simply calling for better treatment and justice for the poor and vulnerable Vietnamese, and demanding the government provide better social services and a cleaner environment for all,” said Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson, ahead of the appeal.

“If the Vietnamese government cared at all about the welfare of the people, they would be listening to principled activists like Dang Dang Phuoc, not imprisoning him.”

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

Updated to add quote from Phuoc's wife Le Thi Ha.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Not everybody who reads Refuse to Be Done is doing it because they’ve ever read any of my fiction. A big difference in promotion that was interesting to me is that Refuse to Be Done has this direct applicability to the reader. The people who read it are trying to learn how to write a novel. Promoting an actual novel, that sort of urgency is less evident. Readers might ask, “Why is this the novel that I need to read right now?”

I really privilege the conversations I had around each book, which were obviously different. With Appleseed, we talked a lot about climate change, about some of the intellectual ideas about the book, things about manifest destiny and other topics that are interesting or fun. To be in conversation with someone who was thinking on top of that kind of work with me was enjoyable.

Events for Refuse to Be Done were more teacherly events. That book grew out of a lecture I’d been giving for 10 years, so it was sort of interesting to have that lecture go back out in that form. It’s been interesting to watch both books find their audiences. I think both have done similarly well, though the Venn diagram of people who read both books is smaller than it might be if I’d come out with two novels in the same year.

Did you find that you enjoyed talking with audiences about one book over the other?

In some ways, the novel is the thing that means the most to me—my own words. You never know who’s going to be interested in your novel. The conversations that happen around a novel aren’t always the things you think as you’re writing it. With Refuse to Be Done, I knew the questions people would ask because I’ve been teaching novel-writing for a long time.

If money wasn’t a factor, do you feel like you would still be a writer who teaches? Or would you focus more on your own creative work?

I really like teaching. I get a lot out of teaching for my writing. I’ve been teaching for 15 years or so, and I often think, if all things were equal, if I didn’t have to teach, I would still want to, but maybe I’d do it entirely on my own terms. The thing I would quit from academia is not teaching, but administrative meetings. I love the teaching. And one of the things about being in a good MFA program is that every year, a new group of smart, interesting young writers moves to town and talks to me about writing. It’s restorative and interesting. Even in the short time I’ve been teaching, I’ve observed that different eras of students have different concerns and different interests, and that’s invigorating. There are certain things in my own writing that I would not have thought about if I hadn’t been in these sorts of conversations.

Also, I was a reasonably poor undergrad student. I graduated undergrad in eight years at three schools. But I liked being on campus and I liked being part of the university life. I like that there are events and lectures and different things happening all the time. The university has given me access to lots of other people’s ongoing thinking in a way that’s great, especially as someone who doesn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Phoenix is great on its own, but it’s obviously a different cultural space.

Being a novelist doesn’t always feel super useful, either, and being a teacher does—even if I’m teaching other people to be novelists, which is not useful! I totally believe that a life of making art is super useful, but it doesn’t feel like it every day.

Since Refuse to Be Done was released, you seem to have taken on a beat as “the novel revision guy.” Some folks have called you “a writer’s writer.” I’m wondering how you feel about a term like that.

Oh, I’m not going to argue with that. You can become an expert in something by deciding you are one, to some extent. You can publish a book on novel revision, and then people ask you questions about novel revision. That feels good. It’s been great to see people find the book useful and to see people achieve things that they want to do through it. Refuse to Be Done has helped people I admire finish their novels, and I think that’s just great. Anything I can do that makes things more achievable for other people seems fantastic.

I feel the same way about the craft books I love most. There are books that help me think about things or show me the way or clarify. And there are lots of ways to be in community with people, and one of the ways is the ways in which you’re helpful or useful or adding something to your community. And it does feel like Refuse to Be Done achieves that in a way that’s different than my own fiction does.

What you’re saying about community is interesting, because you’re one of the more extroverted writers I’ve met. I don’t know if you identify as an extrovert, but you’re certainly a lot more bubbly and outgoing than most writers.

[laughs] Sure, yeah.

And it makes me wonder, thinking back to when you first started writing, if you felt like you wanted to utilize that part of your personality as someone who also helps other writers, or if you were more focused on your own writing and teaching somehow found its way into that.

I like talking about writing. I know there are writers who are like, “That’s, like, the worst thing.” There’s sort of a false modesty thing, and we live in a culture that considers the claim that you want to be an artist or that you care about art is somehow verboten—even among other writers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You’re in a room full of people who are all writing, and you have to pretend that you have no ambitions and you’re not trying hard? That seems a little silly to me.

I’m enthusiastic, and I do think that’s part of it. If writing was miserable, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t enjoy talking about this, I would talk about something else. I write because I think it’s fun. It’s an entertaining thing to do. It’s an interesting problem to wrap my head around. Talking about those things is useful.

Plus, it’s amazing how often just talking about what you’re doing is helpful to other people. Some of it’s just making the way the thing is done visible. I feel like the way creative writing used to be taught was like, there was a genius in the room and you just spent time around that genius, who didn’t necessarily ever teach you anything directly or talk about how they did things. And that seems a little ridiculous to me. It seems like it can be more direct. It doesn’t diminish my process to share my process. In fact, talking about writing has made me a stronger writer.

Is there anything you find challenging about being open about your process with students and other writers?

There are two things that are hard to teach. The first is the stuff that you do most naturally, because you don’t have to think about it. So then you go to teach that part of the process, and it’s often very challenging to put it into language. The second is the stuff that’s hard for you, that you can’t talk about because you don’t know how to do it yet.

There are things that I realize I teach poorly just because they’re hard for me. For example, I don’t think I’m the most natural dialogue-writer. I work hard at dialogue, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. And when I first started teaching creative writing, I’d think, “Well, it’s probably time for a dialogue lesson.” But then I’d show good dialogue and ask my students, “Why is this Denis Johnson dialogue good?” I couldn’t even explain it.

You said earlier that being a novelist doesn’t always feel useful, but being a teacher does. How do you manage that feeling in terms of your approach to your own creative work?

When I’m writing long-form fiction, the book is mostly bad the entire time I’m working on it. The big satisfaction comes very, very late for me, but there’s daily pleasure in surprising myself and playing with language and writing a sentence, trying to get seen and making a thing that is well-constructed, indulging in my weirdness. A huge part of the daily process for me is creating a space in which to think my own thoughts. That’s incredibly gratifying.

A lot of the satisfaction from teaching is watching people take these sorts of leaps in their work, and it’s fun to be around that. It’s fun to be around their enthusiasm, to feel the kinship of a bunch of other people who are trying to do the same difficult thing. When I teach novel-writing, I teach it in a generative fashion. Students usually start from scratch and write forward together. The idea is that they go through the stages at the same time. They hit similar problems. For example, first chapters have similar issues when they’re in a generative phase, and I have enough experience to lead students through those stages. But it also is good to be reminded, “This is what everybody’s first draft looks like.” Teaching keeps me from getting discouraged in my own work.

Speaking of students, I recently heard you speak on a panel with the writer Allegra Hyde.

Oh, she’s so good.

She’s so good! She’s had marvelous success over the past couple of years, and she happens to be a former student of yours. I’m wondering how it feels to watch a former student achieve in that way.

It’s always exciting to see students go on to succeed. The best students, of course, just keep getting better after grad school. I think it is reasonably hard to guess who those students will be, though I’m not surprised that Allegra turned out to be one of those people—she was publishing extraordinarily well as a grad student, and it was sort of obvious that she was on the path. I do think there is a sort of Venn diagram of ambition and drive and raw talent, and you just have to make that whole thing come together.

The early career’s an exciting place. They’re really more interesting at the beginning than they are in the middle! The middle is actually the hardest part. Most people who want to publish a book can eventually, as long as they have a certain baseline of talents and work at a certain level. I really do believe that. I think a lot of people have the talent to write a book, but I think fewer people have the long-term persistence to publish, like, five books, which is half marketplace stuff and half—well, they’re hard. You finish a book and you’re like, “Am I going to do this again?” I’ve had some of those checks in my own career, which has gone as well as I’d wanted it to, where I’m just not sure if I have it in me to do it again, because it is so much.

It interests me to hear you say that, because I notice that you tweet a lot about long-distance running. I saw a tweet of yours a few months ago that was like, “Heading to the airport, just ran 20 miles,” and I was like, “What?!” I would just never, ever do that. You’re clearly someone who is really accustomed to endurance, and I’m curious how you became that way both on and off the page.

I’m hard to discourage, so maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know that I feel overwhelmingly confident, but I do believe that effort over time adds up. Every novel is just a certain amount of effort expressed over a certain amount of time. I didn’t become a runner until my mid-thirties, but it does feel fairly similar in mindset to writing books.

I think the writing is the part you can control, and running is the same way. There’s a book on ultra-running called Relentless Forward Progress, and that’s all you have to do: continue to move forward at pace for a long time, and you can run any race. I think there’s something similar in the writing light. It’s not about who writes a book fast. It’s not about who publishes first. You just continue forward in your practice over time. That seems to me to be the real goal in my own work.

What is your writing schedule like during the teaching semester? Are you the kind who packs in more writing time during the summer and winter breaks, or do you try to keep a fairly steady pace throughout the year?

It depends. Ideally, I write from breakfast to lunch, five days a week. Even during the semester, I do that a lot. I’ve been lucky to teach in the afternoons and evenings and do a lot of my other work there. And so I do, more often than not, have that time, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t always get lost to catching up or something else.

When I’m drafting, I think I can only productively draft two or three hours a day anyway. That’s the farthest I can see to the book. My brain gets sort of sloppy after that. I’ve had some experience at residencies and stuff where I can write really long days, but that requires all of the rest of life to be cleared out of the way. In the summer, I might do a little more, but not a lot. I just read more and things like that.

At the end of a draft, and certainly in deep revision, I work really long hours. That’s the phase where I need to be able to see the whole book. In late-stage revision, I can work eight to 12 hours spread over different parts during the day, but only for a couple of weeks. That’s the phase where I’m most like a writer in a movie. I look a little haggard. I’m not fun to talk to. I’m drinking and eating too much. I don’t want to do that all the time.

Mostly it’s a couple hours a day, and then I do everything else. That way, I don’t spend the rest of my day going, “I wish I was writing.” I don’t resent being in the classroom. I don’t resent being with my students or doing errands around the house or doing other things. I don’t need all day to write, but I do need my time. And when I’m not getting that time, I feel pretty frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be eight hours a day. And I don’t even think that would be useful most of the time.

Aside from that privileging of creative time, what advice do you have for artists who help fellow artists? How can they keep their own projects afloat while helping others with their work?

I think you have to be sure that you’re doing what you want to do, and you have to be willing to say no. One of my own guides for that is imagining when it comes time to do the thing that I’m being asked to do and asking myself, “Will I resent doing this? Would I rather be writing? Would I rather be doing something else?” I think I’m a little wiser about knowing which opportunities are okay to let somebody else do. It’s easy to fill your life with service to other people, and I do a fair bit of that, but I try to do it in a way that helps me finish what I want to do.

That’s always an ongoing balance, and I get it wrong, of course, all the time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I try to balance promoting other writers or helping other writers and working for myself. I get a lot of the same energy I get when I’m in the writing zone, when I’m editing someone else’s work, or when I’m promoting someone else’s work that I believe in, so I definitely get something back from helping other authors. It’s really easy for me to promote other people. And I enjoy doing it. There really isn’t any formula to it, but each day I like to spend my time either editing student papers or promoting someone else’s book or reading a draft of someone’s work. Then spend a couple of hours a day on my own work.

I totally agree that there is so much energy that being part of community gives. And in some ways I feel like that’s where I go when I need inspiration. But I also feel like sometimes, when I’m having a creative block with my own work, it’s procrastination, or just a fear of returning to my work. How do you make sure you keep coming back?

I’m probably not doing this well. I hear you on the procrastination aspect of it. And so, sometimes you’re dreading going back to your own work or reading it again. But I’ve been trying to make deadlines for myself.

I’ve realized how important other people’s work is for me, but I’m trying to learn how to value my work and carve out time for myself. I just spent a week in Joshua Tree where I tried not to use my phone. I really blocked out everyone else’s work. And for one week I just focused on my own work. I couldn’t believe how much I got done.

Honestly, if I got my phone out of the way I would get so much more done. I think that my distractions are more like Instagram and being on my phone than other people’s work because their work keeps me in the zone. When I’m editing someone else’s work I can really see clearly what they’re doing wrong or how they’re not evoking emotion. But when it’s my work, I’m like, “Oh, I can’t tell,” But I can learn from someone else and I come back to my work. It really balances out.

How do you stay level-headed or right-sized when you’re editing your own work? I hear you saying that reading other people’s work you can see clearly areas for suggestion, but how do you do that for yourself? How do you stay editorial while also being kind to yourself?

I feel like in some ways that’s easy for me because I do think everyone’s story is important. I really do just believe in self-expression. I have a genuine enthusiasm for other people’s work that I think I’ve always had.

I’m studying craft all the time to teach a lesson to my class. This week we’re talking about the “descriptive pause,” and how to add tension with no action. As I’m teaching this lesson I can see the class’s head exploding like, “Oh my god. That’s an amazing trick or move.” And then, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, let me go back to my chapter and find the tense place and create this descriptive pause.” And then it’s like, “Oh, this is fun, it’s working here.” I feel really lucky that it’s all communicating with each other.

Yeah, of course. I know that on top of all the creative work you do, you’re a mom, which is a big theme in your short story collection, The New Low. How do you balance your writing and editing with your other adult responsibilities?

Now my kids are older, but what I will say is that most of the collection was written in my car waiting on a soccer field. I got a lot of it written in these small increments of time. Most of my graduate school classes were at night to 7:00 or 9:00. And I’d come home and write until 1:00 in the morning, when everyone was asleep. So, for a very long time, I lived with little sleep. I needed that intellectual fill to become a better mother. A lot of motherhood was trying to be present for it because I knew my writing would always be there.

The moms you write about are not your typical mom characters. They’re sneaking cigarettes and taking edibles in Palm Springs and having these existential identity crises about how to be a parent and a person. What was that process of writing into some of those more nuanced spaces of parenting?

That’s it exactly. Compartmentalized motherhood. I do think we were all so many other things before becoming mothers. When a man becomes a dad, he continues to be all those things. There is a tone of resentment in the stories I tried to explore a little bit. I think there’s been so much balance in the world because of conversations like this. And because of stories like this. I felt like there’s a whole different batch of mothers. So here are these people [asking], “What is motherhood? Is motherhood just driving kids around? Motherhood has changed a lot? And is motherhood providing care and providing love? Does motherhood means staying home with your kids?” I don’t really have any of the answers. But I’m just trying to show this variety of mothers and how in some ways everyone felt like they’re failing because they’re not this ideal mom.

An idea that kept coming up as I was reading your collection was the split-self. The character Amme comes to mind. She’s this yogi, but then she’s doing all these drugs and smoking. I think that’s something a lot of people could probably relate to—this idea of trying to become more than one thing. What drew you to that particular topic?

I think a lot of it that I explore is contradictions. Can you be a yoga teacher and still smoke cigarettes? It’s like the image you’re projecting and the reality. I think a lot of the times where there’s so much fragmentation is when there’s this diverse image that you’re protecting in reality. But can there be this whole self? Can we hold space for these two different things? Can you be a flawed mother without being absolutely torn apart? Is there a space for you to be imperfect and be a mother and trying to be an artist and trying to make money from your art because you have to live in the city?

One of the things that I hear a lot is this sense of imposter syndrome that comes with how one spends their emotional time versus all the unpaid or low paid labor that comes with a creative practice. How have you found balance between those two things?

When I became a mother, I think I was so present with it that when I was having conversations with people, I didn’t necessarily have to talk about it all the time. I feel like there’s so much work with motherhood that it becomes all-consuming. When I go out in the world I don’t want to talk about those things. I want to keep some identity of myself as an artist, as a writer, and as a human. I was 28 when I had my daughter, but a lot of people I hung out with in the world weren’t mothers yet. In fact, some of my friends are just starting to be mothers now.

When did you know that you really wanted to commit yourself to being a writer and to doing the work?

I always knew I wanted to write. I just loved reading. I love the craft of storytelling. And then, you have to go through this like, “Am I good at this?” kind of questioning. But I really did commit to writing every day. I think I did The Artist’s Way writing pages for like five years in a row. I would write those three pages before I did anything else. A lot of that, for me was just organizing my thoughts. But I committed to it. Some of the stories in my collection I started 18 years ago. So, I’ve committed to writing for probably more than 20 years. Writing has always been a love of mine.

What was the moment where writing those stories shifted and they became a book? What was that shift like?

A lot of it was just studying collections and asking “What is a short story collection?” It’s usually just what we can get away with. I think when I read Olive Kitteridge, and saw it had the recurring characters, I was hooked on that. The thing about a short story is you may love it, but at the end the characters are done. The 14 stories in my collection are standalone, but the characters come back and you get to see them again. I had a lot of fun and they arc like a novel in some ways.

What is your process like when you’re writing a story?

I’m not an outline writer at all. I’m definitely more of a “seat of your pants” writer. I like finding out the story from within the story. For many of the stories in my collection I was like, “I want to do a craft move, I want to do a monologue.” So, I practiced a monologue. For some others I wanted to write an omniscient narrator or I wanted to play around with point of view changes. I probably have my own process, but I’m definitely, not someone who has an outline and says, “This is where it’s going to start. This is where it’s going to end.”

What is your revision process like?

I mean, there’s a lot of play. I love dialogue, so much of it is asking when something becomes dialogue and when dialogue becomes summary. A lot of it for me will start with dialogue, going back and forth, and then coming back to the scene and then realizing 90% of that dialogue I did was unnecessary and not needed, and then scaling back the dialogue, and putting in more of the scene. How I revise is different for each story depending on what I’m trying to do with it.

A major theme that I saw in the book was around the relationship between youth and beauty and becoming. I think about this a lot with art where there’s all these “best under 35” or whatever lists. What do you think that obsession with youth and productivity and blooming as early as possible is?

I think I’m just picking up on something like this cultural pressure. I’ve overheard conversations with people saying, “If I’m not published by 30 I’ll kill myself.” There is this pressure to make a great piece of art while you’re still young and attractive enough for the book cover or whatever it is. I do feel there’s a cultural pressure. I think in general people believe we lose our intelligence or our work decreases with age. I don’t think any of those things are true. Those are false beliefs that have been pumped into our heads, maybe for women more so than others. There’s this fear of irrelevance—that we’re losing something. I guess in my mind, I feel quite the opposite. I feel I’ve become more empowered. I’ve become more whole. I’ve become more connected to myself and my work. I’ve carved out that time for myself. That’s been a really great thing about getting older.

If you were getting a lot of that messaging, did you ever feel the pressure to publish by a certain age or finish something by a certain age? And what was your relationship with that messaging?

I do trust in divine timing of things. Even with the stories. I’m really happy they came out so much later, that I have this distance from them, and I can approach them differently. I don’t know. I’m not in a huge rush. But with that said, talking about the novel, I also feel like, “Okay, I need to put a little bit of fire under my butt to keep myself accountable, keep myself on these deadlines.” Because the novel is good and I want it to be out in the world. And it’s fun having people engage in your work.

How do you get to that place of having a bit of pressure to stay accountable, but not so much it makes you crazy?

I’ve had a meditation practice for around five years. I’ve been doing that 20 minutes, twice a day situation. I think that helps me a lot. I am a big believer of not being precious with my words, of just writing a lot, because I know I’m going to write more. I try not to be attached to the result. Of course, I want it to be good. But I also know that there’ll be another book after this book, and I’m constantly improving.

What are some of the ways that meditation has shown up for you in your writing?

I can give the example. I was in Joshua Tree working on my novel, and red-tailed hawk flew into the glass window, there were no stickers on the window, and it flew into the window where I was sitting typing. It just sounded like a brick, and it fell on the earth. I was looking for some metaphor of how this character felt and I was like, “Oh, we felt like a red-tailed hawk blindly hitting a glass window.”

I guess I allow the story to come to me more. I try to be a vessel for the story. In a way, I never felt that writing was something I was doing. It’s something I’m witnessing. If you’re quiet, sounds are going to appear. You can use the sounds that you’re hearing to put them into your work. A lot of it is just being present.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shelby Hinte.

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.” The school district said Tempel’s firing was not about the song but about the way she protested the decision. Tempel says the Waukesha school district’s so-called controversial content policy, which bans discussions about race, LGBTQ identity and other speech considered political, is “disturbing” and “dangerous.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Obo Prison Court prosecuted Ei Shwe Sin Myint, the teacher in charge of the Federal School Of Aung Myay Thar Zan, under anti-terrorism laws.

“We are sure about the 20-year prison sentence,” said an NUG official who didn’t want to be named for security reasons, speaking of Monday’s court decision. “We are still trying to confirm which section [of the Counter Terrorism Law] she is being punished for.”

The school was established by Myanmar’s shadow government as a place for teachers and pupils boycotting the junta-run education system, as part of the civil disobedience movement.

On March 22, four female teachers, including Ei Shwe Sin Myint, were arrested at their respective houses in Mandalay. Later, 15 teachers from the school were detained in a string of arrests.

Locals claim that only Ei Shwe Sin Myin has been given a lengthy prison sentence; although they said the other 14 detainees' situations are still unclear.

They were arrested because they were involved in unlawful teaching at the direction of the National Unity Government, according to a report published in the junta-backed New Light of Myanmar newspaper on April 5.

The report states that teachers, parents, and students who attend NUG schools, as well as those who provide financial support, face serious action.

The Federal School of Aung Myay Thar Zan has been providing multi-grade online education since the beginning of 2022 but has been forced to close following the arrests.

More than 19,500 civilians, including pro-democracy activists, have been arrested since the February 2021 coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Thailand-based monitoring group.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

During the Lao National Assembly’s 5th ordinary session, from June 26 to July 18, lawmakers spent a lot of time discussing the teacher shortage.

Representing the southern province of  Savannakhet, Xayxomseun Phothisan urged the assembly to hire more state employees and approve budgets to pay teacher salaries so that each school would have the adequate number of faculty needed to function.

“If the government does not have any solution to this urgent problem,  more schools in many provinces will be closed and students will lose access to education,” she said.

This year, the government is allowing recruitment of 285 new teachers nationwide, down from the 340 it hired last year. The downward trend in teacher hiring began in 2017, when the state employee quotas were reduced each year due to limited budget.

School closures

Savannakhet province has only 223 teachers on its payroll for the entire province. More than 430,000 people in Savannakhet are aged 19 or younger, though not everyone in that demographic goes to school. 

Though the province ranks first in the nation for school attendance between the ages 6-11, only 68.7% of Savannakhet children between the ages of 6-8 are attending school. For ages 9-11, the percentage rises to 85.2%.

There are also 21 schools in the province that are staffed by unpaid volunteers, many of whom quit when they learned, sometimes after eight years of working, that they would not be able to transition into paid roles.

Because of the teacher shortage, the province is expected to close 25 schools.

The Lao government has approved the province hiring 47 new teachers, but spread over 15 educational districts, it means only three new teachers per district, nowhere near enough to serve the student population.

Most of the schools experiencing teacher shortages were primary schools in rural areas, because teachers have little desire to work there, representatives of Savannakhet province’s Department of Education and Sport told RFA’s Lao Service. 

The capital Vientiane also faces a teacher shortage, with 900 on payroll – far short of what it needs. There are around 3 million youth aged 19 or younger in Vientiane, yet the central government will allow hiring only 16 new teachers. The capital is expected to close seven schools.

“The lack of teachers is widespread,” an official from Vientiane’s Department of Education and Sport told RFA. “We need over 900 more teachers in order to meet our plan. …The only thing we can do is to inform students to go to schools in other villages and dissolve the small schools, where there are no teachers.”

The official said that Vientiane had already merged seven schools since 2021 including three last year as the teacher supply dwindles. 

Aging teachers

In Luang Prabang province’s XiengNgeun district, volunteer teachers are quitting in large numbers, an education official said.

“We need about 100 more teachers for primary and secondary schools,” the official said. “The quality of our education in the district, according to the national indicators, may not meet the plan.”  

He said that many of the paid teachers are old and close to retirement, and some of them face health problems. However, development of younger teachers to replace them is lagging. 

Though the district has not seen a school closure yet, when the old teachers retire the problem will get worse, he said.

“The quota from the central government to the province to recruit new state employees has been reduced,” the district official said. “We only received permission to hire 10 new teachers this year. … For primary schools in the city areas, we have a solution by assigning one teacher to teach in 2 or 3 schools. But in the rural areas, that kind of thing is very hard to do.”

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

Ngoc, 38, was once a nutrition teacher in the southern province of  Lam Dong. The Lam Dong police summoned him on July 10, and he was detained the next day, his wife Bui Thanh Diem Ngoc, told Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese Service. 

The police said the detention is for an investigation on charges of anti-state propaganda in connection with videos he posted to Facebook and YouTube.

The exact law he is charged with violating is the vaguely written Article 117, which Amnesty International has described as being “commonly used to suppress legitimate dissent in Vietnam” and “a favored tool of the authorities to arbitrarily imprison journalists, bloggers and others who express views that do not align with the interests of the Communist Party of Vietnam.”

So far this year, at least six other activists, independent journalists and Facebook users have been arrested under Article 117 with prison terms ranging from five years and six months to eight years in prison, according to RFA statistics.

Mrs. Ngoc said her husband was called in on July 10 when police received an anonymous accusation that Mr. Ngoc was selling drug-related products on his Facebook account. At the police station, Mr. Ngoc was asked to admit that an offending account belonged to him.

“He said that he did not do anything wrong,” Mrs. Ngoc said. “The next day, we were asked to appear at the police station again without any stated reason.”

On their second visit, the husband and wife were put in separate rooms for interrogation. Later that night, police searched their house and confiscated phones, laptops, computers and cameras.

Mrs. Ngoc said that she was allowed to keep three of her own phones, and was let go after two days of interrogation, during which she was asked if she had helped her husband edit his online posts. 

She has not seen her husband since the 11th, nor has she been allowed to send him clothes or anything else he might need. On Sunday, she received the written police notice of her husband’s emergency detention. 

Long list of accusations

Signed by Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Thai Thanh on July 15, the notice accused Ngoc of a litany of alleged crimes, including attacking socialism, distorting history, denying revolutionary achievements, slandering the socialist regime, defaming national founder Ho Chi Minh and infringing upon the lawful rights and interests of the state – all in violation of Article 117.

However, the police did not specify which social media posts or videos broke the law, she said.

RFA attempted to contact the Lam Dong police for an explanation, but the person who answered the phone said responses to inquiries could only be given in person.

Mr. Ngoc’s most recent Facebook post, on July 10, praised a lifestyle close to nature in Vietnam’s countryside. His personal page has more than 45,000 followers and has an introductory description declaring, “I have rights as a citizen. You have rights as citizens. Citizens are the rightful owners of the country.”

His YouTube account “Freelance Education” was established in July 2019, and he has around 34,000 followers and hundreds of videos about health, medicine, and life in the countryside.

Ngoc’s wife said that the couple had previously lived in Ho Chi Minh City, southern Vietnam’s economic hub, but they recently moved to Lam Ha in March 2022.

They both graduated from Ho Chi Minh University of Economics and hold master’s degrees. 

Mr. Ngoc taught college students online. He has made more than 684 videos and posted thousands of articles on medicine, health, education, economy, and many other social issues.

Prior to Mr. Ngoc’s detention, the couple sold a variety of organic and medicinal agricultural products. Since moving to Lam Ha, they have focused on gardening and producing organic goods, and selling them on social media.

Authorities targeted Mr. Ngoc because he was a champion of raising awareness of human values, an activist from Ho Chi Minh City told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“The teacher aims at human values, truth and liberal education in the clips he makes,” the activist said. “I feel that he only wants to contribute to the community with a correct view about the country's situation. Besides that, I don't see any sense in the charges they put in the detention notice.”

The activist said that in Ngoc’s videos, he never mentioned any specific part of the government or any named person, so the charges don’t make sense.

Le Quoc Quan, a former prisoner of conscience-turned-lawyer, told RFA that she has been following Ngoc’s videos for a long time.

“I am very impressed and have sympathy for Mr. Duong Tuan Ngoc because I think his presentations on social issues are very interesting, humorous, and very true,” she said. “After all, I find that Duong Tuan Ngoc is a talented person, and what he reflects is true and humorous. He deserves to be applauded instead of being arrested.”

Quan said what Ngoc said was true, even if it was sometimes sarcastic and humorous. 

She described application of Article 117 as “a net dredging up everything so that anyone can be attributed with slander or libel.”

Translated by An Nguyen. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

In what is described as a “significant relief”, seven Papua New Guinea teachers and their families were rescued from an attempted kidnapping in the remote Mt Bosavi region in Hela Province.

Hela Education Director Ronny Angu said the teachers and their families were rescued safely by the Hela Education Division from their attempted kidnappers.

He said the teachers are from the Wagalu primary school, the same primary school where 17 school girls were recently kidnapped, raped and held hostage for ransom.

• READ MORE: PNG gunmen ‘kidnapped, raped’ 17 schoolgirls before freeing them
• Other PNG law-and-order reports

Angu said the teachers and their families have escaped from an organised kidnapping and potential harm by criminals after a successful rescue operation, executed with the help of key stakeholders that demonstrated “unwavering commitment and collaboration”.

He said the “heroic efforts” from Hela police and Moro police, the Hela Provincial government and the Hela Education Division, ensured that the teachers and their families were successfully relocated to safety.

“Their dedication and selflessness significantly contributed to the success of the rescue mission,” he said.

“To commemorate the safe return of the teachers and their families and for God’s guidance and protection, the Hela Education Division organised a welcome party. It was a moment of immense joy and relief, where experiences and challenges were openly discussed, and tears were shared.

Support for healing
“Hela Education Division is committed to providing the necessary support to the staff members to help them settle back into their respective homes.

“We aim to provide an opportunity to the teachers to reconnect with their families and begin the process of healing from the traumatic experiences they endured.

“The success of the rescue mission is a powerful testament to the unwavering commitment of the education division to serve the community and provide quality education in Hela Province.

“The division expressed sincere gratitude to those who supported and made the rescue operation successful, especially the Hela police, Moro police, Hela Provincial government, and Hela Education Division,” Angu said.

“This successful rescue operation is a significant relief to Hela Province. The safe return of the teachers and their families after such a perilous experience cannot be more relieving news.

“We wish all of them a speedy recovery from their ordeal.”

Jeffrey Elapa is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The video was shared by a user named @MunnaBhai114 on June 21. The caption said that the aged man was in love with a girl young enough to be his daughter.

ये हैं संतरों के चाचा अपनी औलाद के बराबर लड़की से इश्क लड़ा बैठें हैं जी
*कौनी सी गाली देनी चाहिए इन दोनों को pic.twitter.com/b2whtFBv2k

— Syed (@MunnaBhai114) June 21, 2023

Twitter users @GaneshS38500793, @SoniDurgaprasad,and @MAYANK8090 shared the same video on June 19 and 20 with the caption: “Can’t think of how I should abuse these two Don’t know where this video is from”. 

*कौनी सी गाली देनी चाहिए इन दोनों को याद नही आ रहा है* ए व्हिडिओ कहा का है पता नहि है pic.twitter.com/e11Dv64kP9

— Ganesh Suthar (@GaneshS38500793) June 19, 2023

The video is also viral on YouTube. It has been recently shared by OFFICIAL143, Our Family, banaras ki tasveer, KATTAR HINDU, Public News 2.0, teesri jung world, Munna Bajranji RRR*, Pooja Maurya and other pages.  

Fact Check

When we ran a reverse image search on one of the key-frames of the video, we found a longer version of the video on YouTube. This video is 7.26-minute long. It was uploaded by a user named Sourabh Verma (@SourabhVermaa).

Verma also has an Instagram page, where he is described as a ‘video creator’.

The video was also shared on Facebook on a page titled Preet Dhillon Official on June 15, 2023. The page category is mentioned as ‘Artist’, which suggests that the video might be a work of creative art and not showing a real incident. 

We called up the phone number mentioned on the page and spoke to the page owner. He said, “This is not a real incident. The girl is not pregnant.” Some time after this, the video was deleted from the page.

We came across another video of the same man and the girl posted by Shivam_short_195 on YouTube on February 26 this year. But in this case, they are standing and not sitting while speaking to the man behind the camera. The conversation is exactly the same as in the one mentioned above. Most of the videos on this channel uses the title ‘golden bhaiya prank video’. We checked individual videos and can confirm that this channel is a ‘prank’ video channel.

We found another video containing the same man and the same girl posted by Kausar Khan on YouTube on March 3. This video, too, is same as the previous one, except for the fact that the girl is wearing a different school uniform.

At the 0:28 second-mark in this video, there is a disclaimer saying: “This video is purely made for entertainment purposes only. The video has no intention to disrespect or defame based on race, color, ancestry, national origin, ethnic group identification, age, religion, marital or parental status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual, orientation, gender, gender identity or expression.”

In December 2022, Alt News had done a fact check on a video shared by a Zee Hindustan journalist featuring the same man. Here, he is seen married with a much younger woman. There is a similar disclaimer 39 seconds into the original version of that video.

We can thus conclude that the viral clip showing a 55-year-old man and an 18-year-old school girl in love with each other while the girl is pregnant with the man’s child is from a scripted video. The actor who plays the school teacher has played similar parts in many other scripted videos.

Shreyatama Datta is an intern at Alt News.

The post Schoolgirl married to aged teacher & pregnant? No, it’s a scripted video appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shreyatama Datta.

The 60-year-old instructor at Dak Lak Pedagogical College in Vietnam’s Central Highland, frequently posted on Facebook about educational issues, human rights violations, corrupt officials and social injustice.

Police arrested him on Sept. 8 last year, and charged him with "making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” which carries a maximum 12-year prison term. Even though Phuoc didn’t receive the maximum sentence, lawyer Le Van Luan said the court should have been more lenient towards his client.

"With the circumstances of the case, that sentence is too heavy compared to what Mr. Phuoc did," he said.

Phuoc’s case has drawn international attention, including from Human Rights Watch, who's deputy Asia director Phil Robertson described the sentence as “outrageous and unacceptable.”

“What it reveals is the Vietnamese government’s total intolerance for ordinary citizens pointing out corruption, speaking out against injustice, and calling for accountability by local officials,” he said on hearing the verdict. 

“Those were precisely the things that Dang Dang Phuoc did in Dak Lak, and now the government claims such whistle-blowing actions are propaganda against the state.”

During the past decade, Phuoc has campaigned against corruption and advocated for better protections for civil and political rights. He has signed several pro-democracy petitions and called for changes to Vietnam’s constitution, which grants the Communist Party a monopoly on power.

“This unjust prison sentence reveals General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s anti-corruption campaign is a sham game that is really more about holding on to power, and marginalizing political rivals, but does not care to address the Communist Party of Vietnam’s widespread malfeasance in its ranks,” said Robertson, comparing Trong with China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping.

Police kept a close watch on Phuoc’s wife Le Thi Ha ahead of the trial, warning her she would lose her job if she talked about the case on social media.

She was allowed to attend the trial, along with Phuoc’s four lawyers.

Ha told RFA her husband plans to appeal the verdict.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Dang Dang Phuoc, 60, an instructor at Dak Lak Pedagogical College in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, often writes on Facebook about educational issues, human rights violations, corrupt officials and social injustice.

Police arrested him on Sept. 8 and charged him with "making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” He faces up to 12 years in prison.

His case has drawn international attention, including from Human Rights Watch, which also urged Vietnam’s government to release him Monday. 

In a statement, the rights group slammed authorities for targeting those who highlight corruption in the Southeast Asian nation, despite claims that they are working to eradicate graft.

Speaking to RFA’s Vietnamese Service, Phuoc’s wife Le Thi Ha said that her husband’s arrest had caused her family to lose its “primary pillar” and left them in a state of shock.

“In Vietnam, whomever [the authorities] arrest, when the arrests take place, and how many years in prison the arrestees are sentenced to ... all are in their hands,” she said. “However, to me, my husband is innocent. My wish is that my husband be released unconditionally.”

Anti-corruption advocate

During the past decade, Phuoc has campaigned against corruption and advocated for better protections for civil and political rights. He has signed several pro-democracy petitions and called for changes to Vietnam’s constitution, which grants the Communist Party a monopoly on power.

After Phuoc’s arrest, police summoned Ha for interrogation at least twice and threatened to have her fired if she shared information about his case on social media.

According to an indictment obtained by RFA, the Dak Lak Provincial Police’s Investigation Security Agency examined a recent recording of Phuoc’s and found it to “slander the government in order to reduce people's trust in management and administration of the government and the state.”

On Monday, Ha said that her family and close friends plan to attend his trial on Tuesday, but questioned whether the court will allow it.

“Although the authorities said the trial would be open to the public, there are many precedents in Vietnam that show that even family members were not allowed to attend trials for political dissidents and activists,” she said. “I don’t know how my husband’s trial will go.”

Home under surveillance

In the meantime, she said, police have kept a close watch on her household, sending plainclothes officers to document the activities of her family members over the weekend.

“Their people are still stationed at the road leading to my house,” she told RFA. “Being aware of many previous cases in which family members of prisoners of conscience received invitations but were still prevented from attending the related trials, I have left my home to increase the chance of being able to attend my husband’s trial.”

On Monday, Phuoc’s defense lawyers met with him and said that he has been “well-treated” in detention, describing him as “optimistic, positive, healthy, and showing no signs of depression or psychological crisis at all.”

“Of course he admitted to the act, but as for the crime, he said he was exercising his right to speak the truth,” lawyer Le Van Luan said. “For tomorrow, he prepared the content of his defense. Basically, the defense is strong, covering the entirety of his case.”

In a statement on Monday, Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson echoed Ha’s call to set Phuoc free.

“The Vietnam government makes use of its abusive and overly broad laws to prosecute people who call for reforms,” said Robertson. “The authorities should immediately drop the charges against Dang Dang Phuoc and other activists who play a critical role in rooting out the malfeasance and corruption that the government claims to oppose.”

He slammed the government for its contempt for freedom of expression, noting that it is extended “even to activists who sing a few songs criticizing them.”

“The European Union, which concluded a free trade agreement with Vietnam containing human rights conditionality, and other trade partners, should call out the government for its unrelenting rights violations,” he said.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Quoc Phuong for RFA Vietnamese.

Residents of Bogale township told RFA Tuesday that 30-year-old Theint Theint Soe was arrested on May 23. She has been working as a teacher for eight years and participated in the civil disobedience movement following the February 2021 military coup, the locals said.

“Her husband was arrested a week earlier. The teacher was arrested on the same day that her husband was released,” said a resident who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisals.

“She was arrested for allegedly supporting participants in the civil disobedience movement.”

Residents said Theint Theint Soen was being held at Bogale Police Station but it was not clear what laws she had been accused of breaking.

Telegram channels that support the junta said she was arrested because a document certified by the shadow National Unity Government board of education was found with her.

Nearly 300 civil disobedience movement teachers have been arrested since the 2021 coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

On June 4, likely more than half of the students of the 1964-66 elementary school class of Charles Silverstein will attend his memorial in New York City. This man was a truly innovative, original, and life-changing public school teacher. Our class day, in a New York suburb, began with Mr. S reading the New York Times and discussing the many important issues of the day.

We were fortunate enough to then get to work on one of the many amazing projects this teacher presented to us: learning to grow hydroponic vegetables, presenting a play to help us understand the meaning of propaganda: by educating our fellow students about the evils of bubble gum, as well as a heavily rehearsed modern dance performance for the school. The moms (who mainly were stay-at-home at that time) loved him because we all were so excited about attending school, so many moms volunteered to come in and teach to their strengths. He also took us all on a yearly trip to his alma mater, SUNY New Paltz, to learn about geology and use the science equipment like microscopes that our school did not own. I was a very insecure child, and having a teacher for two years who encouraged us to be ourselves and helped us to learn in a creative way was a life-saver for me.

Mr. Silverstein stopped teaching in 1966, grew his hair, got hip glasses and co-authored THE JOY OF GAY SEX with Edmund White. He went back to school to get a PhD in psychology and proceeded to live a long and important life as an out gay therapist. He was one of the major voices in getting the American Psychological Association to eliminate homosexuality as a disease. He wrote one of the earliest guides for families coming to terms with accepting their gay son or daughter.

Those who are LGBTQ+ deserve to have role models who are able to help them survive the challenges of the pre-teen and teen years.

Even as he was probably the most beloved teacher in the school, I feel certain that the idea of an out gay man teaching in 1966 would likely have been a non-starter. In the nearly 60 years that have passed, it seems we have come almost full circle, in a terrible backlash. My children attended schools in Vermont from 1985 through the early 2000's. Many of their finest teachers were lesbians or gay men, a few of whom are still teaching in our district. I have not heard about any kind of negativity towards these educational professionals in Vermont, but what a contrast to the "red" states.

So many truly important social advances are currently targeted by the far right. Joe Biden actually spoke out at the end of April publicly recognizing the damage done by the "lavender scare" during the 1950's. Dwight Eisenhower signed a declaration banning LGBTQ citizens from working in the federal government- opening the door to invasive investigations as well as loss of jobs. The far right has been trying to challenge the general societal acceptance of lesbians and gay men by banning any books for kids, even board books for babies, with any images, stories, or voices of same sex couples or gay individuals. By using the term, totally inappropriately, "groomer" for all non-straight people, the far right is trying to make your aunt, or brother, or buddy into a threatening figure. Imagine living in Florida and being an out gay teacher under the "don't say gay" rule: you cannot refer to your partner, you are not supposed to provide assistance when young gay students approach you for help in staying sane, sometimes even in staying alive. It is probably necessary to slam that closet door that has been open for so many years if you are to keep your job.

Mr. Silverstein was not the only gay educator who was an absolutely phenomenal teacher. It is remarkable that the "parent's rights" crowd seems to have zero interest in their children being taught by talented teachers who are preparing them for the 21st century instead of the 19th. The 2022 Kentucky teacher of the year, Edward Carver, is on sabbatical this year and is afraid to return to his classroom. He states in an article in Education Week, that the troubles began 4 or 5 years ago- that as a gay man, he was not harassed before that. Many of the finest, most exciting teachers are not heterosexual. Given the huge teacher shortage, driving out a large class of qualified educators makes you think that maybe the right does not care about public schools. Of course, as the schools deteriorate, the elite can send their kids to private academies. Many of the most far right ideologues don't even believe in public schools.

The gay rights movement was built from a need for personal and societal authenticity. To be a healthy human, your actions need to line up with your identity and your beliefs. The closet was never a healthy place for non-binary people, and the reason for the high suicide rate among gay and trans folks is generally a lack of ability to live their identities. Our children are living through a horrible time—with all the gun violence and the fears about climate. Those who are LGBTQ+ deserve to have role models who are able to help them survive the challenges of the pre-teen and teen years. Driving out gay teachers, passing fascist laws like "don't say gay," and violently attacking drag shows will never lead to a healthy society.

We should all raise a glass to the brave teachers who continue to take the abuse from the MAGA crowd. One of these teachers could save your child's life.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Nancy Braus.

“I would like to see the Mississippi River clean and not full of chemicals, because the industries, they dump benzene in the river, in our drinking water. They dump formaldehyde in our drinking water, and other chemicals. But my dream is to see St. James the way it was when I was a little girl. That’s what I would love.”

– Sharon Lavigne

Episode transcript

Sharon Lavigne lives in St. James Parish, Louisiana, in an area known as “Cancer Alley.” If you haven’t heard of it, Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch of petrochemical plants, oil refineries, and other industrial operations that runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River. Air pollution in the area means that residents face a lifetime cancer risk estimated to be up to 47 times higher than what the EPA deems acceptable. And Black communities are hit the hardest. 

Sharon spent most of her life as a special education teacher. But as the years went by, the air quality in St. James Parish got worse and worse. Eventually, Sharon learned the connection between the plants, the air and the terrifying rates of sickness and death in her community, and she decided to do something about it. This is her story.

My name is Sharon Lavigne, and I’m 70 years old, and I am an environmentalist and the director and founder of RISE St. James. 

I grew up in St. James Parish in a little area called Chatman Town, and we had gardens of vegetables. My daddy raised cattle. We ate off the land. We grew everything … just about everything. In the wintertime we would have figs. My momma would cook the figs in the summer and preserve the figs. And that would be for our meals in the winter. And by then we would have the fresh cow milk. You’d milk the cow and the next day, we would have this fresh cow milk, because we put it in the refrigerator and it’d be nice and cold and taste good. We didn’t have to buy eggs or milk or anything like that. We got it off the farm. And my daddy raised the hogs, we ate pork. And to me, it was a dream come true.

The air was clean. I could breathe the air when I walked out of the door. And we weren’t sick. We didn’t have any type of illnesses or anything. We didn’t have any sinus problems, I can tell you that much. We didn’t have sinus – I didn’t even know what sinus was. I didn’t even have headaches. I didn’t have anything wrong at the time.

When the first plant came, my daddy was in politics and he was an environmentalist or leader, whatever you want to call him. And I could hear him telling my momma, “Ooh we got a plant coming to St. James and blah, blah, blah,” all excited. And we all started to smell things, but we didn’t let it worry us, because we really didn’t know what it was anyway. We just smell something.

Plants line the Mississippi River in the area known as “Cancer Alley.” (Giles Clark/Getty Images)

You better not take a deep breath today. You will get a breath full of chemicals going down your throat. And you see, within a ten mile radius we have 12 industries, and that’s all you see. At night it looks like it’s lit up like Christmas time it’s so many lights out there. And flares. Sometimes flares late at night, sometimes early in the morning, and sometimes during the daytime. I’m so tired of driving down Highway 18 and get a smell of these chemicals. Ammonia, different smells, and sometimes it smells like a rotten egg. A smell that goes down to your throat. And sometimes my throat burns.

I have a friend right now with liver cancer and it’s spreading. We have another friend that used to cut the grass in the graveyard. He is down with cancer right now. He can’t work anymore. I have two brothers with cancer. One had the prostate taken out. And they both worked at plants. My brother’s wife, the one that had the prostate cancer, his wife died with cancer in the breast, and she worked at industry. That was a friend of mine, we were the same age. Sometimes I don’t like to talk about it. It hurts. And I feel like .. I feel like we are next. I just feel like that. 

I’m going to a funeral Saturday. I have a funeral tomorrow of a friend. I imagine myself laying in that casket. I really do. Especially friends that I know that died because of industry. We just buried one of my friends. He was working at a plant, and his wife says she know the plant caused him to get sick after 40 years. And she say – she hugged me so tight and she told me that she think it came from there. That’s what I think so too. Other people say, “Oh, no, it wasn’t because of that, it was stress.” I say it might have been stress because of that. So I have people are trying to dispute it. If we only had the proof, if we only had a toxicology lab that we can take samples and have people working in there and really let the world know what they’re doing to us. I know it’s industry. It wasn’t industry before. People were stressed. They wasn’t dying because they was stressed. You pray and you get over the stress. But you can’t get over those chemicals in your body. 

I started teaching back in the ‘80s and I didn’t pay attention to the industry. All I know I’d pass in front of them, but I used to smell things. I said, “What that smell is?” and just go on about my business. And I thought everywhere was smelling, I didn’t know it was just St. James. I know that sounds crazy for me to say something like that, but I thought the world was smelling, not knowing that we have industry here and it could be the reason why I’m smelling this. I never once thought that when I first started teaching. 

I was a special education teacher and I taught regular ed for one year. My first year I worked for Assumption Parish. I taught the severe profile. They were really special ed. And then – I stayed out a year, then I started back in St. James Parish. My daddy told a school board member that his daughter paid tax in St. James and she wanted to get a job in St. James. They created me a job, and they asked me what school I wanted to be at, and I told them “the high school.” So I was at the high school. When I went to the high school I was teaching English, science, social studies, and math. It wasn’t to the severe profile children. It was children – they were regular ed but they might have been weak in one subject. They might have was weak in English or reading or math. And so those are the ones that I taught that was called “slow learners.” And then I left from there and they asked me if I wanted to work with the severe profile. I said, “I don’t care.” When I retired, I was teaching the severe profile. 

I was a teacher that showed compassion. I was a teacher that really cared, and I wanted the students to learn. And when they didn’t come to school, I called the house to find out why they didn’t come. One lady said, “You the only person that does that.” You gotta care about your job, care about the children, not just doing it for a paycheck. Trust me, the children know if you care. And don’t talk down to them. If you talk down to the students then they’re not going to want to listen at you teaching them. So you try to build them up. Like if your child in the classroom and he made a D on his test, and his friend made a B, they might make fun of the one that made the D. And I would tell him something nice to make him feel well, you know, you made a mistake this time, but it wasn’t that big of a mistake. Next time, you’re going to do better. 

I really enjoyed the students. And for Christmas, I’d like to give them a little Christmas party or something. And I used to bake a cake and bring it to my classroom, give it to my students. And sometimes I’ll give them a hug. They were nice. They were nice students. And I loved them all. I really did. 

It was years ago when I started noticing the smell. But as the years went on, the smell got worse. It started off a little bit and it got more and more and more. I noticed the last few years of teaching school that the students had so many doctor appointments. And I also noticed the increase in students in special ed, especially with asthma and different illnesses. And I thought maybe it was too many. I thought maybe you should have a decrease in students diagnosed as special ed. But it was an increase. I didn’t know what was going on with them. I didn’t think, you know, to even ask at that time. 

In the year 2015, I noticed funerals. A lot of funerals. And I kept wondering, why all these funerals? And a few times we had a funeral twice a week. And once or twice we had funerals three times a week between Ascension Parish, St. James Parish, and St. John the Baptist Parish. Sometimes I’d call people over there, they going to a funeral. Call people in St. John sometimes they have a funeral on the same time with us. And it brought attention to me. Why so many funerals? Why are people dying? What’s going on? I didn’t know what was going on. The funerals didn’t stop. 

I had a friend named Robert. He lived two houses down from me and he would go in the Mississippi River and fish. And I said, “Robert, the water is polluted.” And Robert said, “Well Sharon, you just have to cut the belly of the fish out.” It was just like jelly. I said, “Robert, I’m afraid to eat that.” He thought I was playing. I said, “No, you can cut the belly out all you want. I’m not eating that fish, Robert” And Robert say he was gonna eat it. And then he ate it. And then Robert passed away with throat cancer. That was my friend. He passed away. Yes, it was scary. I thought the world was coming to an end. 

In 2015, I went to a meeting. Never been to a meeting in the public – never had a reason to go to a meeting. So I went to this meeting and they asked me if I wanted to join HELP. And I asked them what was HELP. They told me it was Humanitarian Enterprise of Loving People. And I said, “Okay.” So I joined. I I just didn’t want to sit at the house when I retired, because I was getting close to retirement. And then I said I might as well join this organization and see what’s going on in the community, and I might figure out what I want to do. I said, I might want to help the senior citizens. I might want to do something. I might want to drive people to the doctor that don’t have cars. 

So when I joined HELP, they had so many stories about the plants and the industry, the refineries and all that in St. James. I didn’t know we had all of these things in St. James. I didn’t know we had that many. And so I learned, and I learned that it was Cancer Alley. I started learning about it and reading about it and hearing about it, reading the newspaper and stuff. And the more I read, the more I was disgusted. One day we rode down Highway 18 within a ten mile radius and we counted 12 industries. And that blew my mind away. It just blew me away. Twelve? We breathing this stuff? Twelve? Oh my God. When I realized that this was called Cancer Alley, I felt like we didn’t have long to live. I felt like it was a death sentence to us. I really felt like that.

In 2016, I went to the doctor for my bloodwork – my annual checkup – and the doctor said, “What’s wrong with your liver?” I thought she was joking. You know, she’s a nice lady – I thought she was joking with me. I said, “My liver?” I said, “My liver is fine.” She said, “No, these numbers are not right, Sharon.” I said, “Not right?” I said, “What’s wrong?” And she said, “I’m going to send you to a gastrologist.” That’s when the gastrologist diagnosed me with autoimmune hepatitis. He gave me some medication to take. And then he told me I have to take that for the rest of my life. One article said it came from industrial pollutants. And I said, “That’s my answer.” These plants are killing us. That’s why I’m sick.” 

In 2018, a company called Formosa Plastics announced plans to build a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in St. James Parish. The plant would be two miles from Sharon’s home. 

I asked HELP if they would do something. Can we stop it? And they said no, because the governor approved it. And they said no, because the parish council is going to approve it. And they said, “No, when the governor approves it Sharon it’s a done deal.” And that angered me. And I said, “Well, the governor don’t live here. He lives in another area and he’s not going to be polluted. It’s going to be us.” It’s like they’re making us a sacrifice for them to make the profit to run the state. 

We would have the meetings – the HELP association meetings – once a month. And we would go home, me and Geraldine and Beverly – and we would talk in the meeting about why we don’t do something, and they would say this and that – so we’d get in the car and we would argue in the car angry. We don’t know why they don’t want to stop this. This plant should be closed. This plant shouldn’t do this. The plant is polluting us. We’ll be arguing, you know, amongst each other in frustration. Geraldine said, “Lavigne, you need to start another organization.” I said, “Not me. I don’t know anything about starting an organization.” She said, “Well, Lavigne, somebody’s got to do something.” I said, “Well, Geraldine, you could start one and I’ll come to your house.” And she kept telling me that. She didn’t just say it one time. And Beverly said it a couple of times, and we would talk about it. Oh, we was so angry and upset. 

So I would go home at night from that meeting. I would take my bath, get ready for bed, and lay in the bed and talk to God. But God didn’t answer me. I guess I didn’t wait for an answer. I just told him what was going on. I told him the problems and I told him people are already dying and I just spilled my guts out to God. Then I’d fall asleep. But I didn’t wait for an answer. 

Then, I think it was a Sunday afternoon. I watched the cardinals – the red cardinals. It was so pretty. Going from one tree to the next. And I said, “Just look at that. It’s so beautiful.” And we say the red cardinals means change. So I said, a change is going to come. I wonder what the change is going to be. I thought maybe the plants would go away or shut down or something. That’s what I thought. I used to read my Bible – sit on the front porch, read my Bible. People pass and wave. People in St. James are very friendly. They’ll wave at you. 

So I sat on my porch that Sunday and watched the red cardinals. Then I was talking to God like I’m talking to you. And I said, “Dear Lord, do you want me to sell my …” I had already been talking to him, but I remember these words, and I said, “Dear Lord, do you want me to sell my home?” And I did my arm out like that toward the house. And I said, “A home that you gave me.” And I wasn’t waiting for an answer. But that time I didn’t run to the next question. I just waited a second or two. And he answered me. I could have jumped out the chair. But it startled me, and his voice was mostly in the right ear, like he was sitting on my right side. 

Then I said, “Dear Lord, do you want me to sell the land, the land that you gave me?” And I said, “My grandparents’ land.” And he said, “No.” Again. And lord, when he said no again I didn’t know what to do. And he was still on that right side, right next to me. And then I said what did he want me to do? And he said, “FIght.” Fight? “I don’t know how to fight,” I said. I didn’t know how to fight. And the birds kept going back and forth. And then I started crying. The tears just flooded my face. 

After that, days later, I told some of the people as a member of the HELP association that we’re going to start our own organization. Geraldine was so happy. Beverly was so happy. And I said, “We gonna have a meeting. It’s gonna be at my house.” 

It was almost ten people there. And so we had it at my house, and Shamell took the notes. Shamell is my oldest daughter. Everybody was talking and expressing their concerns. Lynn Nicholas was there. My brother Milton was there. And Geraldine, and Beverly. And then I sat in the chair in front and I asked them, “What do you all want to do? How are we going to fight this?” Not knowing anything about this and everything just came from the top of my head. And we started writing down what we wanted to do, and we’re gonna have another meeting and all that good stuff. 

So I went to a meeting at Southern University law school. They invited me to come. I went – about four of us went. And that night Shamell and I spoke to the people to tell them what’s going on in St. James. They didn’t know. I thought they knew. I thought everybody knew what was going on in St. James. I didn’t know the people didn’t know. The attorneys, counselors, NAACP, these people were there and listening to us. So the next day, I went back to the meeting, and then me and two other ladies stood up in front of people with a poster to show them different things that’s going on in St. James with the industries. And the people gave me their cards. They came up to me and wanted to talk to me. I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was they’re listening to us. And that’s where I knew it was going in the fast lane. It just like God was in charge, and just like God is the pilot in the jet plane and we are the passengers. And God is going fast. It’s going real fast. It’s going so fast until I look – I didn’t know what I was doing, but God was doing it and everything was being done right.

Back in 2018, on November the third, that was our first march. And that’s when we first speaking as a RISE member. We had the bull’s horn and I spoke on the bull’s horn. That was the first time I ever spoke in public. And then I said, “Formosa, this is the stop. You will not be built here.” And I mean it. They will not be built here. And then we marched in May of 2019. That’s how fast things were moving. We marched for five days from St. John the Baptist Parish to Baton Rouge, where the capital is.

But in September of 2019, Wanhua, a chemical plant from China – they were trying to be built on the east bank of St. James Parish, and they pulled out for some reason with the land, and also because we made noise. We went to the parish council meeting, we had marches, wrote letters, and they pulled out. That was our first victory. And our theme song is Victory is Mine.

I was surprised about that victory, because we had just started. And it came to an end so fast, because the newspapers said RISE St. James and other organizations were fighting against it, so they had community opposition, so that helped them to get out of here. And then the next one was South Louisiana Methanol. That was in September 2022. But the focus was mostly on Formosa, because Formosa would be two miles from my home. 

We did videos against Formosa. We called out the H.R. person that’s working with Formosa. And we talked about the people that’s over LDEQ – Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. We wrote them letters, went to the office to do an action. They wouldn’t even come out the office. And we protested against the governor. He still won’t stop Formosa. We did a billboard and signs saying “St. James is our home. No Formosa.” “Formosa you are not welcome here.” We went to the parish council meeting, asked them not to vote for Formosa. They totally ignored us and they voted for Formosa. Our own parish council members. And we voted them in. They are supposed to protect us, not protect industry. To listen to these council people vote for Formosa … it was heartbreaking. It was like an arrow went through my heart when our councilman said yes for Formosa. 

We went to court three times, twice on Zoom. And Judge Trudy White was the judge. And then the last time we went in person, and then it was four months for her to come back with her decision. And Judge Trudy White is a thorough judge. She goes through every little sentence. And I like that about her. 

And so she came back in September and gave us the ruling. And my lawyer called and said, “Sharon, have you heard the news?” I said, “No.” She said, “We won.” I said, “We won?” She said, “We won on all counts.” I said, “On all counts?” She said yes. I was so happy. I said, “Thank you, dear Lord. You said you were going to do it. Thank you. Thank you.” He did it. And Formosa is at the point where I think they are ashamed, because they have all this money and they lost. And we didn’t have any money. And we won.

When you go back to the Bible, you can read about how David won over Goliath. David shot that bow and arrow and Goliath fell. And so one time we sent out an article saying “Goliath is wobbling.” And the lawyer called and said “Sharon, that’s a good title.” Somebody wrote that for us. And she says, “Wobbling is almost down.” I said, “That’s right. It’s almost down.” And in September, it fell all the way down. Because David was so little. Goliath was so big. And we are small and industries are large. They have billions and trillions of dollars. The dignitaries, all of that’s for industry. The laws is in favor of industry, not to protect us. So it’s just like a David and Goliath fight. We are fighting a giant. Formosa is a giant. And just little people like us destroy this giant. 

So we not going to celebrate until it’s completely down, because they are appealing it. 

If RISE St. James and other organizations hadn’t stepped in, Formosa would be built. Not completely finished, but it would be started on already. And the pollutants would be triple the emissions in the Fifth District and doubled throughout the parish. It would be like 800 tons of greenhouse gases per year and it would be 14 plants inside of the complex. That’s how big it would be. The complex would be sitting on 2400 acres of land. And that’s a lot of land. And we have to pass by that industry every morning. Probably smell the stuff and they were going to dump more chemicals into our drinking water. So it would kill off our birds, our animals, and the people.

I think if you want to be successful in anything, you have to do it with the whole community. Not by yourself, but with people helping you and joining forces with you. The power’s in the people. And to be successful, you have to get your facts. You have to know what you’re fighting against and what the reasons are, the consequences. You have to know all of these things before you just step out there and be that voice. If nobody else is speaking up, you speak up. You be the voice. Do your homework. Talk to God, and you will be successful.

I feel like I’m doing what God want me to do. And sometime I pray and I ask God not to let me lose track of what he want me to do. Sometime I pray and I ask him to continue to guide me, because the devil gets in the way. And I mean people that try to come and help us for their own gain, not because we are being poisoned. They come. They help us to make money off of our lives. And I  ask God not to let me hate them. And not to let me lose sight of what you told me to do. And I have to pray hard to keep the vision of what God gave me. It’s a hard fight, because you’re fighting people that’s fighting against you. But I’m not afraid. God put this in me. He gave me the strength, the knowledge, the courage. And the faith. And that’s what keeps me going. 

What’s next for RISE St. James is to stay on top of what’s going on, to make sure we get it firsthand what industry is trying to come in. And as I speak, they have some right now that’s trying to come in. And so we want to try to get it first so we can stop it before the parish council approve it. 

I want reparation for the family members who lost people due to industry and all the pollution. And I want the industries that are not following the rules and regulations, I want them to be shut down and moved away. And bring back our houses, our grocery stores, our post office, and bring us clean air. Clean air is the main thing and clean water, and be able to do a garden again and eat your vegetables from your garden. Butter beans, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash. Oh, boy. That would be nice. And string beans. I would love that. I would like to see the Mississippi River clean and not full of chemicals. But my dream is to see St. James the way it was when I was a little girl. That’s what I would love. 

Oh, my God. That’s the answer. That’s the key. Having faith, having God on your side. That’s the answer to anything that you want to do. And I mean, before I felt like this, it changed me. It changed my inner being. I look at people now. People that say something of the worst person. And I always say, there’s some good in that person. You just have to dig a little bit deeper. And the same way with my students, when some of the teachers didn’t want the students around them. And I said dear Lord, how could they think like that? That’s a human being. But now I see good in just about everybody, even the worstest person. I look at people in a deeper eye. Like a deeper eye. I just go deeper into their soul. I see things different in life. I see life different. And I feel like this is my mission to save the life of the people in St. James Parish and throughout Cancer Alley.

In March, RISE St. James, alongside other organizations, sued St. James Parish. They’re demanding a moratorium on the construction of new petrochemical plants. If successful, it would be the first ban of its kind in the state of Louisiana.

More reading on this topic:

• ‘Goliath is wobbling’: Louisiana court strikes blow to Formosa’s giant plastics plant
• EPA finally calls out racism in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley
• Cancer Alley campaigner wins Goldman Prize for environmental defenders

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Listen: In ‘Cancer Alley,’ a teacher called to fight on Apr 25, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

We get an update on a major victory for progressives in Chicago’s mayoral race, where union organizer and former teacher Brandon Johnson narrowly defeated Paul Vallas in a runoff election Tuesday. Johnson called for community investment, while Vallas, who was backed by the police union, focused his campaign on crime. “Now comes the difficult part of governance,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who is in Chicago and notes Johnson faces a hostile police force and skepticism from the city’s business community.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Marissa Barnwell, a 15-year-old high school student in Lexington, South Carolina, was joined by her parents and the family's lawyer on Thursday as they spoke publicly about a federal lawsuit they filed against her school district, the state Department of Education, and a teacher who they say assaulted Barnwell late last year for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Surveillance footage from River Bluff High School shows Barnwell walking through a school hallway on November 29, 2022 when the pledge began playing over a loudspeaker.

A state law passed three decades ago requires public schools to play the Pledge of Allegiance over their intercom systems each day at a specific time, but it prohibits any punishment of people who refuse to recite the pledge as long as "they are not disruptive or do not infringe on others."

Barnwell continued walking and was quickly confronted by a special education teacher, Nicole Livingston, who yelled at her and pushed her against a wall before sending her to the principal's office.

"I was just in disbelief," Barnwell said at the press conference Thursday. "You can hear me say in the video, 'Get your hands off of me.'"

Barnwell's parents learned about the incident when she called them in tears, according to the Associated Press. The school did not talk to them about the alleged assault and has reportedly "never responded" to their requests for an explanation.

"It will not be tolerated, and we will get justice for this action that [Livingston] did," Fynale Barnwell, Marissa's mother, told News 19 WLTX, a local CBS affiliate.

The lawsuit was filed last month, with the family arguing Livingston violated Barnwell's "constitutional rights by yelling and demanding that M.B. stop walking and physically assaulting her by pushing M.B., on the wall and forcefully touching M.B., in an unwanted way without her consent."

The Secular Coalition for America applauded the family for taking legal action.

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— (@)

Tyler Bailey, the Barnwells' attorney, said Barnwell was "threatened for exercising [her] constitutional rights."

"The thing that's beautiful about America is we have freedoms," Bailey said Thursday. "Students in our schools should feel safe."

According to The State, a local newspaper, Livingston is still employed by the school.

"Nobody did anything," Bailey said. "This is why the federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Demanding an end to "the international embarrassment" of low teacher pay in the United States, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation to guarantee a minimum salary for public school educators of $60,000 per year, moving to fulfill a pledge he made during his 2020 presidential campaign.

The Vermont Independent senator called on the federal government to take accountability for chronic staffing shortages in school districts across the country, which he said is linked to the fact that "the starting pay for teachers in almost 40% of our nation's school districts is less than $40,000 a year" and that the average weekly wage of a public school teacher has gone up by just $29 in the past 30 years, adjusting for inflation.

More than half of the nation's schools are understaffed, according to the National Center on Education Statistics, and Sanders noted in a fact sheet about his proposal that "hundreds of thousands of public school teachers have to work two or three jobs during the school year to make ends meet." A recent report by the Teacher Salary Project found that 17% of educators work part-time in retail, restaurants, or in the gig economy to supplement their meager incomes.

Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, called the statistic "simply unacceptable."

"The situation has become so absurd that the top 15 hedge fund managers on Wall Street make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America combined—over 120,000 teachers," said the senator. "Wages for public school teachers are so low that in 36 states, the average public school teacher with a family of four qualifies for food stamps, public housing, and other government assistance programs. We have got to do better than that."

The Pay Teachers Act of 2023 would significantly increase investments in public education, beyond teacher salaries—tripling Title I-A funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students and funding for rural education programs; providing an additional $1 billion for the Bureau of Indian Education; and investing in grant programs to improve teacher preparation and development, among other investments.

States would be required to establish a "minimum salary for teachers" of at least $60,000 per year, with increases throughout their career, and to ensure teachers are paid "a livable and competitive annual salary" that's comparable to professionals with similar education requirements.

"Educators are nation builders," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.7 educators. "They have a vital role in educating and caring for our next generation. But they are neither treated nor paid commensurate with that role. Teachers earn nearly 24% less than similarly educated professionals, and when adjusted for inflation, many [earn] less than they were making a decade ago."

"Even with their need to take second jobs, educators spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on supplies, snacks, books, and other items for students," she added. "Chairman Bernie Sanders's bill, the Pay Teachers Act, will help close the pay gap by significantly increasing federal investments in public schools and raising annual teacher salaries."

Co-sponsors of the Pay Teachers Act include Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Alex Padilla of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Peter Welch of Vermont.

Ellen Sherratt, board president of the Teacher Salary Project, applauded the legislation and lawmakers who are"fighting for teacher salary levels that are professional."

Sanders introduced the legislation a month after holding a town hall with labor leaders and teachers from across the country regarding chronic low pay in the field, where educators talked about completing hours of work per week outside of the school day for no extra pay, purchasing snacks for low-income students, and facing barriers to working in schools that have many open teaching positions and have resorted to hiring people without teaching qualifications.

"Students of every color, background, and ZIP code deserve qualified and caring educators who are dedicated and have the resources to uncover the passions and potential of every child," said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), as Sanders introduced the bill Thursday. "America's schools are facing a five-alarm crisis because of the educator shortages that have been decades in the making and exacerbated by the pandemic. Together, we must recruit large numbers of diverse educators into the profession and retain qualified and experienced educators in our schools to support our students in learning recovery and thriving in today's world. To do that, we must have competitive career-based pay to recruit and retain educators."

"On behalf of the three million members of the National Education Association, I thank Chairman Sanders for introducing the Teacher Pay Act," she added. "We urge senators to support educators and cosponsor this commonsense legislation that invests in our students, educators, and public schools."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

He even collaborated with a group of educators who specialized in the Turkic language spoken by the more than 11 million inhabitants of the region to work on literature textbook project for middle-school and high-school students. Kerim worked with other scholars under the leadership of Sattar Sawut, the head of Xinjiang’s Education Bureau.   

Kerim, now about 52, loved teaching so much that he also wrote a book on his own titled My New Classroom, based on his classroom experiences while teaching the material in the textbooks at Atush’s No. 1 Middle School.

He also wrote stories for the Uyghur publication Kezilsu Literature and was a social activist who gave public talks on his book of recollections and teaching methods at literature and art events.

Just before Kerim was about to retire in 2017, his career came to an abrupt halt when authorities arrested him for promoting separatism in his books, local police told Radio Free Asia, without mentioning specific texts.

“Setiwaldi Kerim’s only so-called crime was his exemplary role of teaching these new textbooks,” said Abdulweli Ayup, a Norway-based Uyghur activist and linguist, originally from Xinjiang’s Kashgar, who maintains a database of detained Uyghurs. “He represented a group of teachers who supported the new textbooks.”

Attempts to erase Uyghur culture

In 2017, Chinese authorities intensified their crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim Turkic minorities and began detaining them in prisons or “re-education camps” to receive what they said was vocational training to prevent “religious extremism” and “terrorism” in the restive region. 

They targeted Uyghur intellectuals, including language and literature teachers, prominent businesspeople and Muslim clerics in a wider effort to erase Uyghur culture.

Kerim was sentenced to 19 years in prison, a public security employee in Atush, capital of the Kezilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in western Xinjiang, recently told Radio Free Asia.  

“We arrested him when he was about to retire in 2017,” said the person, who declined to be named so she could speak freely about Kerim.

“I cannot tell you why we arrested him,” she added.

The teacher’s name is included on the list of detained and missing Uyghurs compiled by Ayup’s Uyghuryar Foundation, an advocacy and aid organization also known as Uyghur Hjelp in Norwegian. The organization has identified more than 20 teachers and listed their names on a list of imprisoned Uyghur scholars.

“Setiwaldi Kerim was an outstanding implementer and interpreter of the newly compiled Uyghur literature textbooks,” said Ayup, the organization's founder.

Kerim, who hailed from Otyagh village Ustunatush township began teaching at the middle school in Atush shortly after he graduated from Xinjiang University with a degree in literature, and taught the subject until his arrest.

Ayup said his detention was likely due to the Uyghur literature textbook project for middle-school and high-school students during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Excellent teacher award

Kerim was an outstanding pedagogue who played an exemplary role in demonstrating the success of the newly compiled textbooks, Ayup said. Kerim even won an “Excellent Teacher” award at a conference on the new textbooks in Atush in 2004.

“The impact of the newly compiled textbooks had been deep and wide,” Ayup told RFA. “These textbooks became the Chinese government’s target because they described Uyghur history, culture and customs very well.”

“The Chinese authorities used these textbooks as an excuse to directly target and attack Uyghur scholars and writers like Setiwaldi Kerim,” he said. “People like him supported these textbooks, and they passionately taught their contents in their classrooms.”

As part of the widespread crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities not only prohibited school textbooks they had previously approved, but also arrested scholars who participated in their writing and compilation. 

Chinese authorities also handed down jail sentences to Yalqun Rozi, Tahir Nasir and Wahitjan Osman, other Uyghur scholars who worked on the textbooks, according to Ayup. 

Authorities also imprisoned Abdurazaq Sayim and Alimjan Memtimin, former publishers who directed the compiling of the textbooks, while Sawut Sattar, head of Xinjiang’s Education Bureau, received a death sentence with a reprieve. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.  

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur.

In this bonus “Dispatches from Project Censored,” Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon, two of the most acclaimed media literacy educators working today, offer no-nonsense tips for teens to protect themselves against surveillance. As technology floods into the classroom, teens often fall prey to invisible violations of their rights to privacy and free expression. These rights should not be left at the school’s doorstep, but today’s technology make snooping and spying in the classroom easier than ever. Butler and Higdon’s “Is Your Teacher Spying on You?” gives teens a primer for taking back their rights and protecting them into the future.

By Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon

As internet and social media users, we know that digital platforms monitor all our clicks, likes, and hovers. We know this because when we do a Google search for say, concert tickets, within moments, concert ticket advertisements start popping up in our feeds. While this may feel slightly cringey, it is also pretty innocent and may actually benefit us if we do, in fact, find a good deal on concert tickets. The reward for this benefit – we found what we were looking for – may encourage us to ignore the more insidious and pervasive forms of monitoring.

It is not clear if you feel the same way about the technology companies your school has contracted to monitor your clicks, likes, and hovers. Maybe your school uses Gaggle, Bark, TurnitIn, Class Dojo, or Illuminate Education. Maybe you are given ‘free’ or low-cost equipment such as ChromeBooks or MacBooks that come with pre-loaded software. Maybe you have learning accommodations and are given a program like Glean to help you transcribe class notes.

If your school contracts with any of these companies’ products and you have, at one time or another, plugged in one of your own devices (for example, you need to charge your personal phone and use your school-issued laptop to do so), you are now sharing your private, personal data with the company that runs the software, the company that manufactured the hardware, your school administrators, and your teachers. You have opened a door that can never be closed: Once you make a single connection between devices, all your information is now accessible to those companies. From now on, if you use any term that is deemed ‘concerning,’ this will set off a series of pings.

‘Concerning,’ by the way, is pretty vague which means that each company can develop their own definition regardless of accuracy or impact on the learning process. Maybe you’re searching song lyrics late at night, and the site from which you are searching is connected to the software provided by your school, and you enter a word that is deemed ‘concerning.’ Your teacher, and possibly local law enforcement, will get pinged and you may be registered as a person of concern. If you are economically unstable or of color, studies have shown that you are more likely to receive this ping for a wider variety of ‘concerning’ terms’. Research shows that big-tech platforms and programs are designed in a way to reinforce inequities and justify the disproportionate policing of people of color.

Schools and big-tech claim that these pings are designed to protect you and your classmates. For example, in the wake of mass school shootings, these technologies are touted as prevention tools: The next school shooting can be prevented by monitoring students’ online communications, even outside of school hours and even on their own devices. However, there is no evidence that this monitoring actual decreases acts of violence.

It is not clear if the hardware and software that surveils your searches and postings gathers your data for your safety, but what is clear is that these companies analyze and aggregate your data so it can be monetized and weaponized. Tech-companies’ analysis of data is sold to data brokers, governments, industry, researchers, and any other party offering to pay the right price. Technology companies view you as the product and your privacy is a wall to their profits. They put a positive spin on eroding your privacy so they can share your innermost details with the highest bidder.

These technologies ostensibly make the school environment safer for you and make grading and academic progression more convenient for your teachers. However, there is a dearth of evidence to support that claim that these technologies improve the learning process. What can you do about this? Admittedly, your options are limited. We live in a world where digital technologies are not a luxury; they are a necessity. ‘Limited options’ don’t mean nothing! There are small changes you can make that add up to big differences:

1) Work really hard to keep your personal devices separate from your school devices; only use your school computer for school tasks.

2) Turn off notifications on your phone; instead of letting all that information passively wash over you, exercise your agency to choose to seek it out. This way, you are more in control of what you watch, read, and listen to.

3) Clean out the cache on your phone/computer regularly. This clears out some of tags that monitor you.

4) Check in with your parents/guardians, teachers, and school administrators: What do they know about these technologies and their surveillance tactics? Are there options for greater privacy control?

ALLISON BUTLER is a Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Advising, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She is a contributor to the forthcoming book The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.

NOLAN HIGDON is an author and university lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of numerous books and is a contributor to the forthcoming The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.

Image by Gordon Johnson

The post Is Your Teacher Spying on You? appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Though states are seeking to reduce the teacher shortage, the problem only seems to be getting worse. Recently, the National Education Association reported that 55 percent of teachers are planning to leave the profession earlier than they planned. This means that, if current trends persist, the gap between the number of working teachers and the number of open positions will widen significantly by 2030. This is where Bernie Sanders, the new Senate Chair of Health, Education, and Labor, comes in.

In late February, Sanders proposed the “Pay Teachers Act,” which would increase the base salary for teachers across the country to $60,000. “In America today,” the senator wrote in a mailer, “the starting pay for teachers in almost 40% of our school districts is less than $40,000 a year. Further, 43% of all teachers in America make less than $60,000 a year.” While some critics of the proposal say that wage increases in education should be handled solely at the state and local level, federal action would provide an immediate response to an entire system in crisis, rather than a slow, patchwork response. Legislation that would improve the starting wages for many teachers, especially early career educators, is much needed and a welcome step to stabilize the educator workforce.

Privatization initiatives—such as voucher and charter expansions, along with legislative efforts meant to intimidate teachers—have made teaching in public schools more difficult.

For the first years of my own teaching career, I made below $40,000. Back then, like many other educators, I had to balance the costs of everyday life with the steep learning curve of a new career. For many educators, the financial, emotional, and professional stressors of the first five years simply become too much. The result has been a staggeringly high percentage of teachers leaving the profession before making it to the half-decade mark. The pandemic and anti-public school political campaigns have undoubtedly made this trend worse.

Pressure from the privatization movement also adds to the crisis by accelerating the departure of public school teachers from the profession. This churn is in line with the movement’s goals, which are to disrupt and destabilize the public education sector, regardless of the human cost. Privatization initiatives—such as voucher and charter expansions, along with legislative efforts meant to intimidate teachers, like proposing jail time for teachers who have the audacity to have books that show the diversity of humanity—have made teaching in public schools more difficult. Undoubtedly, these shifts have contributed to potential teachers deciding on other careers where they will not be demonized for providing a public good.

College students who might be aspiring teachers have taken note of the hostile conditions of the profession as well. Education departments in colleges and universities nationwide have seen student enrollment in their programs drastically dip since the pandemic began. Survey results have found that parents are less likely today to encourage their children to pursue a career in education. This is a problem for schools, both in the near and long term.

With the challenges facing public education, the Pay Teachers Act is a step in the right direction for the nation. But before we can pay teachers, we must make sure that there are teachers who will be ready to enter the classrooms of tomorrow (and today). Increasing the total number of students enrolled in university programs and internships leading to certification must be a focus going forward. And no, we cannot accept lower standards for teacher preparation programs or the use of National Guard members to keep schools open. We can do better—we owe it to our students to do better.

Improving teacher recruitment and retention requires easing barriers for aspiring teachers. It is not uncommon for aspiring educators to take on debt for college classes, which include part-time or full-time internships training side by side with an experienced educator. While internship experiences are an excellent way for new teachers to learn, paying for the training experience on top of transportation, food, rent, and other living expenses is an economic burden. It’s critical that those entering the profession not be saddled with debt that may make a career in teaching out of reach.

Paid internships and residencies can place needed money in the pockets of aspiring teachers and reduce financial friction on the pathway to being a certified educator. Along these lines, legislative action at the state level may aid aspiring teachers with paid internships. Existing loan forgiveness programs may supplement these new measures. Those who want to contribute to the betterment and development of the next generation should not have to be buried by debt.

Reversing the declining ranks of public school teachers will take a concerted effort by federal and state agencies, local school districts, and universities. But most importantly, it will take current and aspiring educators, because without their passion, dedication, and willingness to do the tough heartfelt work communities across the country need at this moment, no amount of policy will make a difference. Let’s do all that we can to encourage and support teachers in this time, including getting behind Sanders’s Pay Teachers Act.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jacob Goodwin.

Chicago-based Democracy Now! co-host Juan González gives an update on the Chicago mayoral race after incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to advance to a runoff election. The two top candidates are now Paul Vallas, the former head of Chicago Public Schools, who has been endorsed by the local police union, and Brandon Johnson, an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. González says the race pits progressives in the city against centrist and conservative forces and could be a bellwether of where the Democratic Party goes.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The family is related to Win Soe, a secondary school teacher who is also an activist with the anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement, often called the CDM. The Feb. 22 killings shows that activists – and their families – are also being targeted in urban areas, not just the countryside.

A person close to the family, who refused to be named for security reasons, told Radio Free Asia that six people in civilian clothes came to the house on two motorcycles and asked whether household members were related to Win Soe, who has been in hiding since the 2021 military coup d’etat.

“There was no one in the street, as the night was dark and because of the unsafe security situation,” the person said. “I thought they were there to buy some dried fish, as usual. Then they asked them to crouch down and not to look up and asked if they were the family of Win Soe. 

“I think they answered that they were. That’s when they shot three times at each of them – two times only in the head,” the person said. “They even shot at the little kid.”

Locals believe the killings in the Yeik Thar ward of Hlegu township was the work of the pro-junta groups, but exactly which group was responsible was unknown. RFA tried to contact the police station in Hlegu township, but the call went unanswered. 

Pro-junta supporters have formed militia groups with the help of the military in some townships. They often target and attack supporters of the opposition party and political activists. 

More than 250,000 education workers have boycotted their government jobs to protest military rule and have joined the CDM, the shadow National Unity Government said last year.

Of those, junta authorities had killed at least 33 and arrested 218 others as of the end of 2022, according to statistics compiled by the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

Specifically targeted

A lawyer in Yangon, who refused to be named for security reasons, said the killing of a defenseless child and an elderly man shows the failure of the rule of law in the country.

“You can see that this was specifically targeted,” the lawyer said. “What this shows is that the rule of law in the country has almost completely broken down and the people are not free, not safe, and their freedom and safety are not protected by any organization.”

These kinds of mass killings, which have been happening sporadically since the coup, are leading the country toward failed state status, said Kyaw Win, director of the Burma Human Rights Network.

“The military junta wanted to prove that it can rule the country but it cannot even protect the people from such crimes and the junta itself is also the one who commits these crimes,” he said. 

The family members were named as: San Nwet, a 50-year-old woman, Ko Maung and Win Nwe, each 30 years old, and Aung Maung, the 80-year-old man. The 3-year-old boy was not named. They were buried in Hpaung Gyi cemetery on Feb. 25, local sources said. 

RFA contacted some of the surviving family members about the incident, but they were still traumatized and wouldn’t talk to a reporter. 

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

How can we measure the work a particular society truly values? Take-home pay can make as good a yardstick as any: The lower an occupation’s compensation, the lower the esteem a society is showing for that occupation.

In the United States, our pay data show, no profession faces a reality that makes this link plainer — and uglier — than teaching.

All sorts of metrics can help us measure the level of our society’s esteem for the teaching profession. Are young people, for instance, interested in becoming teachers? Between 2008 and 2019, teacher ed enrollments in the United States plunged by over a third. Are current teachers feeling valued? Between 2019 and 2022, teacher retirements and resignations rose 40 percent.

But nothing says “esteem” more directly than paychecks, and, by that metric, American society has for years been systematically devaluing the work teachers do. Between 1996 and 2021, the Economic Policy Institute’s Sylvia Allegretto detailed last August, average teacher weekly wages adjusted for inflation rose a miniscule $29. Over the same years, inflation-adjusted weekly wages for other college graduates rose over 15 times faster, up $445.

What has this shortfall in overall compensation and esteem meant for America’s schools? In the current school year, the U.S. Department of Education reports, every single state in the union has reported teacher shortages, with 46 states citing shortages of science teachers and 44 missing math teachers.

Overall, some 36,000 teaching positions nationwide are going vacant, with at least 163,000 additional positions getting “filled” with unqualified teachers. Both these numbers, concludes a study by researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, represent “conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.”

Some observers of our contemporary education scene are contending, Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond noted last month, that the teacher resignations and vacancies we’re experiencing shouldn’t particularly concern us because they appear mostly in certain subjects and parts of the country. But that amounts to arguing, Darling-Hammond observes, that a house isn’t on fire “because only three of its five rooms are burning.”

Our educational house most definitely isburning, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanderstold a town hall on America’s teacher pay crisis at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.

“I want the day to come, sooner than later, when we are going to attract the best and brightest young people in our country into teaching,” said Sanders. “I want those young people to be proud of the profession that they have chosen.”

All teachers, the Vermont senator believes, should be earning at least $60,000 a year. Some 43 percent of teachers currently fall short of that mark. In Florida, the average teacher earns less than $50,000, just $49,583.

How do the bargain-basement paychecks that go to teachers compare with compensation for other professions? Not well at all. In Florida, accountants make $76,320 annually, 54 percent more than teachers. And software developers in Florida average $105,200, 112 percent more.

But the most stunning pay contrasts show up when we contrast teacher pay to the compensation of our nation’s most generously rewarded power suits.

“The top 15 hedge fund managers on Wall Street,” notes Senator Sanders, “make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America — over 120,000 teachers.”

Sanders will soon be introducing legislation, the Pay Teachers Act, to ensure that all teachers make at least $60,000 annually and guarantee significantly higher pay for educators “who have made teaching their profession — working on the job for 10, 20, 30 years.”

Where could the funding for this teacher pay revolution come from? From a tax revolution.

Public schools across the nation have historically relied on the local property taxes that average Americans pay. Property taxes today are still supplying 40 percent of total public education funding. These taxes all fall on the primary source of wealth for average families, the owner-occupied home. But America’s rich hold most of their wealth in financial instruments, a category of wealth that essentially goes untaxed, even after death, since the current federal estate tax asks so little from families sitting on grand fortunes.

Senator Sanders has proposed a fix: a thorough-going reform of the federal estate tax. Rich married couples last year could exempt $23.4 million of their fortunes from all estate tax and pay no more than a 40 percent tax on any dollar of wealth above that. The Sanders legislation — the “For the 99.5 Percent Act” — would lower that estate tax exemption to $7 million per married couple and up the minimal estate tax rate on wealth above that level to 45 percent.

Wealthier estates would face even higher rates, with wealth over $1 billion facing a 65 percent estate tax.

The Sanders legislation also takes aim at current loopholes that lower the rate of estate tax that the families of dead deep pockets actually face. Over his legislation’s first 10 years, Senator Sanders notes, the federal treasury would collect an additional $450 billion in estate tax revenue, “precisely how much the Teacher Pay Act would cost.”

“Let’s be clear,” the senator added at the U.S. Capitol teacher pay town hall Monday. “If we can provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1 percent and large corporations, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to make sure that every teacher in America is paid at least $60,000 a year.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced this week that he will soon introduce legislation to set the minimum annual salary for U.S. public school teachers at $60,000, a change the senator said could be fully financed with progressive changes to the estate tax.

At a town hall with educators and union leaders, Sanders called low teacher pay a national "crisis" that has gotten substantially worse during the coronavirus pandemic, which has placed massive additional strain on school staff across the country.

A survey released last year by the National Education Association (NEA) found that 55% of U.S. educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned, citing pandemic-related stress and burnout as well as inadequate pay.

"In America today, hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are forced to work two or three jobs during the school year. Maybe they are driving an Uber. Maybe they are waiting on tables. Maybe they are parking cars," Sanders said. "In the richest country in the history of the world, we have got to do better than that. It is time to end the international embarrassment of America ranking 29th out of 30 countries in the pay middle school teachers receive."

The Vermont senator, who chairs the upper chamber's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said his Pay Teachers Act would "triple" funding for low-income schools, "ensure all starting teachers across the country are paid at least $60,000 a year," and boost the salaries of those "who have made teaching their profession—working on the job for 10, 20, 30 years."

As Education Weeknoted Tuesday, the average starting salary for U.S. teachers is less than $42,000 a year. Sanders said during the town hall that "43% of all teachers in America make less than $60,000 a year."

Sanders estimated that his legislation would cost $450 billion over the next decade, exactly how much his proposed estate tax overhaul would raise. The bill, titled the For the 99.5 Percent Act, would impose a 65% top tax rate on estates worth more than $1 billion and reduce the estate tax exemption to $3.5 million, down from around $13 million.

"If we can provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1% and large corporations, please don't tell me that we cannot afford to make sure that every teacher in America is paid at least $60,000 a year," the senator said. "If we can spend close to $900 billion last year on the military, more than the next 11 nations combined, please don't tell me that we cannot make sure that every teacher in America is treated with dignity and respect."

According to recent research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), "teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time"—a gap that has been dubbed the "teacher pay penalty."

"The average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just $29 from 1996 to 2021, from $1,319 to $1,348 (in 2021 dollars)," EPI found. "In contrast, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,564 to $2,009 over the same period—a $445 increase."

EPI stressed that "providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is not simply a matter of fairness but is necessary to improve educational outcomes and foster future economic stability of workers, their families, and communities across the U.S."—a point Sanders echoed during his town hall address.

"Raising teacher salaries to at least $60,000 a year and ensuring competitive pay for all of our teachers," Sanders argued, "is one of the most important steps we can take to address the teacher shortage in America and to improve the quality of our public school systems."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

"I do not think we should accept it as 'normal' in our society that billionaires get massive tax breaks while teachers in this country have to work a second job just to make ends meet," said the Vermont Independent senator. "We must pay all teachers in America at least $60,000."

Sanders will be joined by four public school teachers, National Education Association (NEA) President Rebecca Pringle, and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten at Monday evening's town hall.

The event, titled "Respecting our Teachers: A Town Hall on the Teacher Pay Crisis in America," will place at the U.S. Capitol and streaming at the senator's Twitter and Facebook pages, starting at 7:15 p.m. ET.

"In the richest country in the history of the world, each and every person must be able to get the education they need to fulfill their dreams," said Sanders. "That means we need the best education system in the world, and that means we need the best teachers. Teachers have one of the toughest and most demanding jobs, and we must stand up and support them."

A poll taken last year by the NEA found that more than half of teachers in the U.S. were considering leaving their profession—a statistic Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, called "unconscionable."

Every state across the U.S. is currently reporting teacher shortages, and the senator pointed to "the fact that mostschool districts and states do not provide teachers with a livable and competitive wage" as a key reason for educators' departures from the profession.

According to the NEA, teachers in the U.S. now make $2,150 less than they did a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. During the 2020-21 school year, starting teacher salaries were at their lowest level since the Great Recession.

"Research hasfound that teachers are one of the most important factors in improving students' outcomes, and our nation has much work to do to ensure all students are taught by fully qualified and well-compensated teachers," said Sanders' office in a press release.

Noting Sanders' new position chairing the Senate HELP Committee, Weingarten said ahead of the town hall that the senator "is in the perfect position to do great things for workers across the country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The bill would accomplish this by lifting the cap on the maximum amount of income subject to the Social Security payroll tax—a change that would not raise taxes on the 93% of U.S. households that make $250,000 or less per year, according to an analysis conducted by the Social Security Administration at the request of Sanders.

Currently, annual earnings above $160,200 are not subject to the Social Security payroll tax, which means that millionaires will stop contributing to the program later this month. The legislation proposes lifting this cap and subjecting all income above $250,000 per year to the Social Security payroll tax. If enacted, the bill would have raised more than $3.4 billion from the nation's top 11 highest-paid CEOs alone in 2021, including $2.9 billion from Tesla and Twitter executive Elon Musk.

"The legislation that we are introducing today will expand Social Security benefits by $2,400 a year and will extend the solvency of Social Security for the next 75 years."

"At a time when nearly half of older Americans have no retirement savings and almost 50% of our nation's seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year, our job is not to cut Social Security," Sanders said in a statement.

“Our job is to expand Social Security so that every senior in America can retire with the dignity that they deserve and every person with a disability can live with the security they need," the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions continued. "The legislation that we are introducing today will expand Social Security benefits by $2,400 a year and will extend the solvency of Social Security for the next 75 years by making sure that the wealthiest people in our society pay their fair share into the system."

"Right now, a Wall Street CEO who makes $30 million pays the same amount into Social Security as someone who makes $160,000 a year," the Vermont Independent added. "Our bill puts an end to that absurdity which will allow us to protect Social Security for generations to come while lifting millions of seniors out of poverty."

As Sanders' office noted:

Before 1935, when it was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about 50% of the nation's seniors were living in poverty, as well as countless Americans living with disabilities and surviving dependents of deceased workers. Nearly 90 years later, the senior poverty rate is down to 10.3% and in 2021 alone, during the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic, Social Security lifted 26.3 million Americans out of poverty, including more than 18 million seniors.

Despite this long legacy of combatting poverty, more must be done to strengthen the program, not cut it. While the average Social Security benefit is only $1,688 a month, nearly 40% of seniors rely on Social Security for a majority of their income; one in seven rely on it for more than 90% of their income; and nearly half of Americans aged 55 and older have no retirement savings at all.

Schakowsky warned that "instead of working to protect Social Security, my Republican colleagues are plotting to cut benefits and raise the retirement age."

Contrary to the claims of GOP lawmakers who are clamoring to slash benefits and postpone eligibility, the latest annual Social Security trustees report showed that the program has a $2.85 trillion surplus in its trust fund, enabling it to pay 100% of promised benefits through 2035, 90% for the next 25 years, and 80% for the next 75 years.

"While House Republicans are willing to put Social Security on the chopping block, we are fighting hard to protect Americans' hard-earned benefits and expand coverage," said Hoyle. "With the rising cost of living, it's time to modernize and expand the program."

"While House Republicans are willing to put Social Security on the chopping block, we are fighting hard to protect Americans' hard-earned benefits and expand coverage."

In addition to lifting the tax cap to boost benefits by $200 each month for all recipients, the Social Security Expansion Act would increase Cost-Of-Living-Adjustments by adopting a more accurate measure of inflation, improve the Special Minimum Benefit to help keep low-income workers out of poverty, and restore student benefits up to age 22 for children of disabled or deceased workers.

Endorsed by 56 labor unions and progressive advocacy groups, the legislation is overwhelmingly popular among voters, who have consistently expressed opposition to cutting or privatizing Social Security.

According to polling results published Monday by Data for Progress, 78% of likely voters support the Social Security Expansion Act, including 85% of Democrats, 75% of Independents, and 72% of Republicans. The survey, commissioned by Social Security Works, was conducted online from January 27 to January 30.

"Social Security Works is proud to endorse the Social Security Expansion Act," the group's executive director, Alex Lawson, said in a statement. "This bill is the answer to any politician or pundit who claims we 'can't afford' Social Security. It protects and expands benefits, and it is fully paid for by finally requiring the wealthy to contribute their fair share."

"During the State of the Union, nearly every member of Congress stood and clapped for protecting seniors," Lawson noted. "They should prove it by passing this bill into law."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In his third State of the Union address, President Joe Biden renewed his call for a billionaire minimum income tax, demanding Congress take action on a broken tax system that rewards wealth over work.

“Pass my proposal for a billionaire minimum tax,” Biden proclaimed. “Because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter.”

Since the pandemic began in March 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth has increased by a staggering $1.5 trillion to a collective $4.48 trillion. Many of those huge billionaires’ gains will go untaxed under current rules — and will disappear entirely for tax purposes when they’re passed onto the next generation.

Under the billionaire minimum income tax, billionaires would pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, including unrealized appreciation, just like workers pay taxes on their paychecks each year.

If Congress won’t take action, state governments should make good on President Biden’s proposals and take meaningful steps towards rebalancing the tax code.

According to the White House, the tax will apply only to the top 0.01 percent of American households, which currently includes those worth over $100 million. Over half of the revenue generated from the tax will come from households worth more than $1 billion.

And while Republicans are eyeing cuts to Medicare and Social Security as a means to address the federal deficit, a billionaire minimum income tax would not only make America’s tax code fairer. White House officials estimate it would reduce the deficit by about $360 billion over the next decade.

The U.S. has no shortage of wealthy tax cheats in need of fair taxing. The 20 percent minimum income tax proposed by Biden is a 12 percentage point increase from the average 8 percent tax rate those high earners currently pay, assuming they pay anything at all.

In 2021, a ProPublica investigation revealed how little in taxes the wealthiest Americans actually pay. In 2018, for example, Elon Musk — until very recently the richest man in the world — paid no federal income tax. A school teacher, like those in West Virginia who went on strike for higher pay that year, paid an estimated federal income tax rate of 22 percent.

While public support for a billionaire minimum income tax is very strong, the probability of it passing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives is highly unlikely given the GOP’s aversion to targeting the pockets of their most generous donors.

But federal gridlock provides state governments an opportunity to take income inequality into their own hands.

Voters in Massachusetts, for example, recently elected to amend their state’s constitution to levy a 4 percent surtax on all individuals with annual income of one million dollars or more. The Fair Share Amendment — or “millionaire’s tax,” as it is known colloquially — is expected to generate an additional $1.2 billion to $2 billion per year, which the commonwealth plans to invest in public education and transportation.

Similar wealth tax proposals are on the table in other states across the country, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Washington.

The astonishing, unequal wealth gains amid a global pandemic renewed public appetite for increasing taxes on billionaires — a significant majority of Americans believe billionaires are taxed too little.

If Congress won’t take action, state governments should make good on President Biden’s proposals and take meaningful steps towards rebalancing the tax code. Let’s ensure that everyone, including the ultra-wealthy, pay their fair share.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rebekah Entralgo.

Harrowing video footage released this week shows officers with the Los Angeles Police Department forcibly restraining and repeatedly using a Taser on 31-year-old Keenan Anderson—a high school teacher and cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors—following a traffic accident.

Soon thereafter, Anderson was transported to a local hospital where he suffered cardiac arrest and died.

Footage of the incident shows one LAPD officer holding Anderson down with an elbow on his neck while another, wielding a Taser, yells orders for Anderson to turn over.

"I can't," Anderson says as he struggles to breathe. "They're trying to George Floyd me."

Seconds later, one of the officers uses the Taser on Anderson several times as he pleads for help.

Watch (warning: the video is disturbing):

Anderson, who was visiting Los Angeles on winter break, was a 10th grade English teacher at the Digital Pioneers Academy in Washington, D.C.

In a statement, the school said it is "deeply saddened" by Anderson's death and called the details of the police encounter "as disturbing as they are tragic."

"Keenan is the third person killed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2023, and we're 12 days into the new year," the statement notes, referring to the police killings of 45-year-old Takar Smith and 35-year-old Oscar Sanchez earlier this month.

Last year, U.S. police killed at least 1,176 people, the highest number on record. A Reutersinvestigation published in 2017 showed that "more than 1,000 people in the U.S. have died after police stunned them with Tasers, and the stun gun was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths."

"Keenan's family deserves justice," the Digital Pioneers Academy said in its statement. "And our students deserve to live, to live without fear, and to have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential."

Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder, said in an interview with The Guardian that "my cousin was asking for help, and he didn't receive it. He was killed."

"Nobody deserves to die in fear, panicking and scared for their life," Cullors continued. "My cousin was scared for his life. He spent the last 10 years witnessing a movement challenging the killing of Black people. He knew what was at stake and he was trying to protect himself. Nobody was willing to protect him."

Summarizing the video footage released by the LAPD, The Guardian's Sam Levin reported that "an officer who first arrived to the car collision at around 3:30 pm at Venice and Lincoln boulevards found Anderson in the middle of the road, saying, 'Please help me.'"

"The officer told him to go on the sidewalk, and issued commands, saying, 'Get up against the wall,'" Levin noted. "Anderson held his hands up, responding, 'I didn’t mean to. I'm sorry.' Anderson complied with the officer's commands and sat down on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, he appeared to be concerned with the officer's behavior, saying, 'I want people to see me,' and 'You're putting a thing on me.' Eventually, Anderson started to flee, at which point the officer chased him on his motorcycle, shouting, 'Get down to the ground, now,' and 'Turn over on your stomach.' Anderson repeatedly responded, 'Please help me,' and 'They’re trying to kill me,' as multiple officers arrived and held him down."

In a statement issued Wednesday following the release of the video footage, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she has "grave concerns about the deeply disturbing tapes."

"Full investigations are underway," said Bass. "I will ensure that the city's investigations will drive only toward truth and accountability. Furthermore, the officers involved must be placed on immediate leave."

"No matter what these investigations determine, however, the need for urgent change is clear," the mayor continued. "We must reduce the use of force overall, and I have absolutely no tolerance for excessive force."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

As the Advocate reported, critics of the hiring, such as Kathy Hischar, argued that Medford’s children “should not have to question why their teacher is a girl but dresses like a boy.” Another district resident, Tanner Fairrington, whose children are home-schooled, said that “exposure to the complexity of preferred pronouns and gender roles is not appropriate for this age group.”

But Gina DuQuenne, founder and president of Southern Oregon Pride, saw the discussions about the hiring of a nonbinary teacher as “a chance to educate.” As the Advocate reported, DuQuenne “applauded the school district for hiring the unnamed teacher,” but said it “still had more work to do.” Using a person’s preferred pronouns is a way of showing respect for that person, DuQuenne said, adding that people who are protesting should “educate themselves and get with the program.”

The controversy in Medford, Oregon is part of a broader, national debate over what classroom content is appropriate for children, including discussions of gender and sexuality. The unnamed first-grade teacher in Oregon is one of many educators who have been targeted both online and in real life for teaching about, or introducing, divisive topics such as sexual orientation, gender identity, or racism. From book bans to legislative actions, the year 2022 has seen “137 bills restricting classroom conversations and staff training about race, racism, gender identity, and sexual orientation in K-12 schools,” Education Week reported in August. This wave of legislation constitutes a 250 percent increase in educational “gag orders,” compared to 2021, according to a PEN America report titled “America’s Censored Classrooms.”

The Advocate’s coverage of the Medford, Oregon controversy was based on original reporting by the community’s local newspaper, the Medford Mail Tribune. But, beyond the Advocate’s coverage and articles in Teen Vogue (republished from Them) and Yahoo News (which republished the Mail Tribune’s coverage) the story has not been covered by national news media.

Source: Diane Anderson-Minshall and Donald Padgett, “Residents Protest the Hiring of Nonbinary School Teacher in Oregon,” Advocate, September 27, 2022.

Student Researchers: Mariana Avila, Bryson Bergal, Kate Horgan, and Chanhwi Jung (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post Oregon Community Debates Hiring of Nonbinary Elementary School Teacher appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Remember when federal, state and local governments actually seemed poised to do something about the great teacher exodus plaguing our schools?

With an influx of money earmarked to help schools recover from the pandemic, many expected pay raises and bonuses to keep experienced teachers in the classroom.

Ha! That didn’t happen!

What we have here is a crisis that cuts to the very heart of America’s identity as a nation.

Not in most places.

In fact, the very idea seems ludicrous now – and this was being discussed like it was a foregone conclusion just a few months ago at the beginning of the summer.

So what happened?

We found a cheaper way.

Just cut requirements to become a teacher.

Get more college students to enter the field even if they’re bound to run away screaming after a few years in.

It doesn’t matter – as long as we can keep them coming.

The young and dumb.

Or the old and out of options.

Entice retired teachers to come back and sub. Remove hurdles for anyone from a non-teaching field to step in and become a teacher – even military veterans because there’s so much overlap between battlefield experience and second grade reading.

And in the meantime, more and more classroom teachers with decades of experience under their belts are throwing up their hands and leaving.

Stop and think for a moment.

This is fundamentally absurd.

If you have a hole in your pocket and you keep losing your keys, wallet and other vital things from out of your pants, the first thing you do is sew up the hole! You don’t keep putting more things in your pocket!

But that’s only true if you’re actually interested in solving the problem.

Maybe you prefer the status quo. Maybe you even like it or see it as an opportunity to change your wardrobe entirely.

It’s a simple matter of cost.

The educators who have been in the classroom the longest are also the highest paid. So if we just let them go, we can save some money for other things.

Of course the problem of getting excellent teachers in the classroom is only compounded by such thinking. You don’t get more seasoned teachers by letting them leave and putting increasing pressure on those who stay.

And make no mistake – experienced teachers are incredibly valuable. That’s not to say new teachers don’t have their own positive aspects, but the profession’s expert practitioners are its heart and soul.

Think about it.

Like any other profession, the longer you practice it, the better you usually get. For example, no one going under heart surgery would willingly choose a surgeon who had never operated before over a seasoned veteran who has done this successfully multiple times.

But we don’t value the work teachers do nearly as much as we do surgeons. Or lawyers. Or almost anything else that requires a comparable level of education.

That’s really the core issue.

We don’t care about quality teaching. In fact, in many cases we actively don’t want it to occur.

Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.

When Trump was President, he actually praised the badly educated because they supported him more than any other demographic.

And even those who aren’t actively against education are more concerned with privatizing the public system for profit. They like it when public education fails because it gives them an excuse to push for more charter schools, more school vouchers, more cyber schools – anything where they can siphon away tax dollars earmarked for education into their own private pocketbooks (and no holes in there even to pay their own taxes)!

So the teacher exodus isn’t being fixed on purpose.

It is a political and economic plot against increasing the average intelligence and knowledge of voters, stealing government funding for personal gain and refusing to increase the quality of a government sponsored service.

In the meantime, more teachers are leaving every day.

There is a cost to becoming a great nation and not just emblazoning the idea on a hat.... That cost is education.

A February 2022 report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the numbers of public school teachers had gone from approximately 10.6 million in January 2020 to 10 million — a net loss of around 600,000 teachers.

In August, the national Education Association (NEA) sounded the alarm that an additional 300,000 educators had left since the report was issued. And it’s only getting worse. An NEA union poll found that 55% of educators were considering leaving education earlier than they had originally planned.

In my own district, there are several teachers who have taken leaves of absence or are sick and had to be temporarily replaced with long term subs. We’re located in western Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh, just across the river from a plethora of colleges and universities with teacher prep programs. Yet it was pretty difficult to find anyone to fill these positions or serve as day-to-day subs.

There is so much we could be doing to encourage seasoned teachers to stay in the classroom beyond increased pay.

You could cut all unnecessary tasks like formal lesson plans, stop holding staff meetings unless an urgent need presents itself, refrain from new and unproven initiatives, and/or cut duties where possible to increase teacher planning time.

And that’s before we even get to the lack of respect, gas lighting, scapegoating, and micromanaging teachers go through on a daily basis.

What we have here is a crisis that cuts to the very heart of America’s identity as a nation.

What do we want to be? A capitalist experiment in school privatization whose only regulation is the free hand of the market? Or a nation supported by a secure system of education that took us to the moon and made us the greatest global superpower the world has ever known?

What do we want to be? A nation of dullards who can be easily manipulated by any passing ideologue? Or a country of critical thinkers who can accept new evidence and make rational decisions based on facts?

There is a cost to becoming a great nation and not just emblazoning the idea on a hat.

That cost is education. It is paying, supporting and respecting veteran teachers.

Are we still willing to pay it?

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Steven Singer.

Thousands of New Zealand tertiary union members will go on strike at eight universities tomorrow over a cost of living pay demand.

The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) said its members were walking off the job for part of the day at the eight universities in the country.

Union members at Auckland University of Technology initially planned to refuse to enter students’ marks from October 6 to 21, the union said.

However, after the AUT management threatened to dock pay for two weeks, staff decided to join the Thursday strike instead, a later union statement said today.

The TEU, which has 7000 members, is demanding an 8 percent pay rise needed to keep up with the cost of living.

Each university was negotiating its own collective agreements with the union, but the agreements expired at about the same time enabling a co-ordinated industrial action.

The action announced includes full stoppage between 1pm and 5pm at University of Auckland, University of Waikato and AUT; from 12pm to 4.30pm at Victoria University of Wellington and for shorter periods at three other universities.

There will be rallies at each university and marches and pickets at Waikato and Massey universities.

On its website, the University of Auckland stated it had explained to the unions that it had made an offer that was fair and reasonable and rewarded staff, while retaining fiscal responsibility.

“The university has made a best offer of a 5 percent and 4 percent general revision offer over two years, subject to certain conditions,” the statement said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Residents of Tabayin township told RFA Burmese after the attack that the helicopters fired on the school “for nearly an hour” before junta foot soldiers let loose with guns. They claimed the nearly 80 troops who raided the school belonged to Light Infantry Battalion 368, under the 10th Military Operations Command based in Kyi Kone village, in Sagaing’s Kale township.

Two weeks later, a schoolteacher who survived the raid told RFA Burmese reporter Nayrein Kyaw of the terrifying incident she witnessed that day. Now in hiding, her name has been withheld due to security concerns.

RFA: Can you describe the events that took place on Sept. 16?

Schoolteacher: It must have been about 12:50 p.m. Ko Aung Saw Htway, who helped us with the computer at our school, told me planes were coming our way, so I yelled out a warning to the young teachers at the primary classes and … herded the children to the ground floor of the [nearby] monastery to hide. The moment we got there, a teacher said [a boy] was hit in the leg. A young teacher then brought some children over to me and told me she had been hit by a bullet in the thigh. I saw her face was covered in blood. Just then, a child who was crouching near me was hit in the neck by shrapnel. All her hair was cut off.

The shooting went on for an hour or so. The place was hit by heavy weapons as well as machine gun fire. And then soldiers, with bamboo baskets on their backs, entered the compound and reached the place where we were hiding. Then they fired their weapons towards the small [stupa] in the compound. Some soldiers ordered us to come out and said we must come out with heads bowed. “If you look at us, you’re dead,” one of them said.

I glanced towards the primary classrooms and saw children coming out. It was heart wrenching to see small kids covered in blood, some with head wounds, others with leg wounds, some hit in the back, and one hit in the eye. I tried to look for my children. I have three attending this school. I saw my eldest [daughter] and youngest [son], but I couldn’t find my middle child. My daughter's clothes were completely soaked in blood, and I asked her if she was OK. She said her friend Win Win Khine was hit in the belly and all of her intestines were falling out. She said there were many dead in the classroom. And then my son, the middle child, ran to me crying. He was crying out his friend’s name, Maung Hpone. The boy was one of our neighbors.

The soldiers said, “If you don’t want these children to die, we want two people who can drive to come forward.” One of the volunteer teachers came forward and said he could drive. The soldiers also asked the head monk for some [big plastic] bags and I saw them putting the bodies and body parts of those killed into them. They also took the seriously wounded children with them. On the way out, they shot all the men they saw in the village in the heads.

RFA: What kind of aircraft were they using? Jet fighters or helicopters?

Schoolteacher: People said there were both. Two helicopters were dropping soldiers while the two fighters opened fire on the village.

RFA: So how many children and how many adults were killed in the attack?

Schoolteacher: Four students died instantly and another one died in the hospital, so altogether five students. And then two teenagers were killed outside the school which makes a total of seven students. Six [adult] villagers were killed too. So the death toll was 13.

RFA: How many were taken away by the soldiers?

Schoolteacher: Altogether 11 students and teachers were taken away. Two men who drove the cars and another four villagers were also abducted. 

RFA: Has anyone been released yet?

Schoolteacher: No, none of them have been released yet.

RFA: One of those killed as they left was your computer teacher, Aung Saw Htway, right?

Schoolteacher: Yes, that’s right.

RFA: The military has said they carried out a surprise attack because they received reports that PDFs [People’s Defense Force fighters] were transporting weapons and ammunition through the village. Did they find any?

Schoolteacher: Yes, I want to talk about that. If they receive this kind of report, they should investigate first. This is a small village. They have drones and things. Why didn’t they look? Why didn’t they see children playing in the school compound? There are no weapons here, not even needles. We had assigned night watchmen because we were scared. Some people said that before Aung Saw Htway was killed the soldiers placed some things they brought in front of him and took pictures. It was meant to put out fake stories.

What we need in our country is democracy. We are deprived of human rights. Children in other countries are pursuing their studies in peace while the children in our country are risking their lives just to go to school.

Translation by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nayrein Kyaw for RFA Burmese.

Gontse, a teacher of the Tibetan language, was arrested on Aug. 14 at his home in Khyungchu county in Sichuan’s Ngaba (in Chinese Aba) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Tibetan sources living in exile told RFA.

“No information is available on his current whereabouts or where he is being detained,” one source said, citing contacts in Khyungchu and speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Gontse works as a teacher,” another source in exile said, also declining to be named in order to protect his contacts in Khyungchu.

“And though the Chinese authorities gave no explanation for his arrest to his family and friends, the reason is that he shared videos and other images of the Chinese government’s inhumane treatment of people in Lhasa during the lockdown.

“All of Gontse’s social media accounts have been deleted now,” the source added.

Chinese state media have reported 111 more cases of COVID-19 infection as of Sept. 25, with 60,597 people still held in quarantine in conditions described as harsh by sources inside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).

Meanwhile, 786 people have been prosecuted by authorities for violating COVID lockdown directives in the TAR since the current outbreak was first reported on Aug. 8, official sources say.

Harsh conditions in quarantine

Speaking to RFA, Pema Gyal — a researcher at London-based Tibet Watch — said that in the name of containing the further spread of the disease, Chinese authorities in Tibet have been arresting Tibetans “with the deliberate aim of silencing them.”

In a Sept. 26 statement, Tibet’s Dharamsala, India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) described the harsh conditions reported by Tibetans held without adequate food, water or medical care in China’s quarantine camps.

“A Lhasa resident recently compared Lhasa’s current situation to the worst days of Shanghai’s two-month lockdown when people were left to starve,” CTA said.

Camp managers routinely placed infected persons with others still uninfected, resulting in a further spread of the virus “at every level of society, from police to volunteers,” CTA added.

Also speaking to RFA, CTA spokesperson Tenzin Lekshey said that Tibet’s exile government has responded effectively to India’s own COVID-19 outbreaks during the last two years “with the help of healthcare workers and has learned how to mitigate the crisis.

“So we are ready to offer our assistance, whether with healthcare workers or other medical facilities, if the Chinese government ever requests them,” Lekshey said.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok and Lobsang Gelek.

The sentence was handed down on Ye Soe Kyaw, 24, on Thursday, according to sources close to the court who did not wish to be named for safety reasons.

He was ordered to serve two 10-year sentences for two separate cases under Section 50 (J) of the Anti-Terrorism Act, a source close to the court told RFA on condition of anonymity.

"He was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday. He is still young,” said the source. “He was sent straight to Yamethin prison on the day the sentence was issued.”

Ye Soe Kyaw is thought to have been detained on Jan. 5, while teaching at a school in Lewe township. He was accused of aiding People's Defense Forces (PDFs).

One Lewe resident, who did not wish to be named, said such a young teacher should not have received 20-years. He said Ye Soe Kyaw was given a harsh sentence so the junta could send a message that it is still in control of the country.

Deputy Minister of Information Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told reporters at a press conference in Naypyidaw on Sept. 20 that supporting Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government is punishable with a maximum sentence of death under the anti-terrorism law.

He said the death penalty could also apply to ousted lawmakers of the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (parliament), which is working to secure the release of MP’s along with Myanmar’s President and its State Counsellor He said the same would be true of anyone helping People’s Defense Forces.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) said on Thursday 15,598 people had been arrested since the coup, with 12,462 still detained.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Bob Niemi was one of the first people I met when I first worked a St. Michael’s College. It was 1992. He was teaching an evening class and I worked the Durick Library’s front desk. I was working with him to put a few books on Reserve for his course. The titles included some of my favorites: some Kerouac, some Ferlinghetti, and a biography of William S Burroughs, to name a few. We got to talking about the Beats and from there Bob Dylan came into the conversation. Bob mentioned that he had just published a paper on Dylan in some journal. I vowed to check it out. Our evening conversations continued each night he came into the library. As time went on we talked about many things, including our kids, baseball, rock music, and LSD. Both of us believed our youthful ingestion of the latter had been a positive force in our lives.

I left St. Michael’s for a full-time job at the undergraduate library at the University of Vermont in 1994. Bob and I would occasionally email each other, but both of us were in the thick of child-raising, work and other such things that people in their forties tend to do. One afternoon, I looked up from my desk and there was Bob. He was at the library photocopying some journals when he spotted me. We grabbed some coffee at the campus bookstore and talked for awhile. We more or less stayed in touch during that time until I left for Asheville, NC eight or so years later. Bob was writing more books on film—his passion, especially US film. He was still teaching some of the coolest literature courses in Vermont and was a member of the newly-created American Studies program at St. Michael’s.

After I moved to North Carolina in 2005, Bob and I stayed in touch via email. Often, an email from him would be sparked by one of my pieces in Counterpunch. One of mine to him was usually sparked by an article he had written or an interesting piece of criticism on the Beats or Dylan that I read somewhere. Working in libraries gives curious access to a lot of material at no cost. When I moved back to Vermont in the Autumn of 2011, I ended up working back at the St. Michael’s Library. Bob and I reconnected. We would try and get together for a few beers every couple months at a local pub about a mile from St. Michael’s. When Bob married his wife Connie, she would occasionally join us. The conversations ranged from discussions about his courses, what we were reading, the ugly state of politics in the US, the wars of Washington, and our now adult kids. During football season, Bob would keep me appraised of the Patriots ups and downs, while I did the same for him regarding the Red Sox.

Born and raised in the industrial city of Fitchburg in Massachusetts, Bob’s roots were solid working class. His father was a factory worker subject to the whims of capitalism and the bosses. This helped explain his support for the custodial staff at the college when they organized a union. Most faculty and staff members were hesitant to express their public support. Bob and I attended as many of their rallies as we could until the custodians achieved their union. Like many young people, Bob did the factory thing for a couple of years before heading off to college. Like me, he had just missed the military draft—a fact of relief for millions of young US men in the year 1973. Over time, he ended up with a few degrees and what I believe was his dream job: teaching American literature and film to undergraduates. Bob’s passion for teaching was obvious. Whether he was teaching a seminar on Thomas Pynchon, a class on working-class literature or a survey course on post-Civil War US literature, Bob gave his all. Like any teacher, he wasn’t always rewarded with mutual love by his students, but they had to feel his passion if they went to class. Those who paid attention would mention to me how much they enjoyed his classes, especially the seminars on authors like Pynchon, Nelson Algren, and the Beats. He lamented some of his more recent classes featuring film, decrying the students’ inability to sit through an entire movie.

Besides teaching, Bob was a prolific writer, especially about film. His love of the US director Robert Altman is apparent in his 2016 book titled The Cinema of Robert Altman: Hollywood Maverick. His published works are numerous. He was working on a couple up to the last month of his life, when he got too sick from cancer. His contributions to academic journals were many and he also published a couple pieces in CounterPunch, the rascally (mostly) leftist mag begun in 1995. In the last few years, he worked with filmmaker Denis Mueller on a film about author Russell Banks. I’m inclined to believe that the discussions and general hanging out Denis and Bob did with Banks inspired Banks’ 2021 novel, Foregone.

Whether that is true or not, I know he inspired many young people to go beyond the minimum expected of them and to truly explore the regions in their intellect his teaching introduced.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

I learned there’s ways to get better at traveling. After the pandemic, I got rusty with the traveling; I was just losing stuff and forgetting to bring some of the gear. It’s a thing that you need to practice and really think about. Also, going to places I’ve met so many amazing people. I feel like that’s been really special to me, if I get to stay a little bit longer, really getting into the community.

You’ve been making so much music lately. I was wondering if we could talk about your collaboration with Hillary [Purrington]. How did you two first meet?

Hilary and I met in 2015. We were housemates. We’d moved in without knowing each other, though. We responded to this Craigslist thing for an eight bedroom house, and we’ve been having this amazing friendship and this collaborative friendship since. I have hundred percent trust in her. It’s an amazing thing to have in a friendship, and then also in collaboration.

There’s two projects we’re working on now. She won a competition, so she got to write an orchestra piece, Harp of Nerves, for American Composers Orchestra. And I commissioned a solo piece from her last year, too.

The commissioned project is for an album that you’re working on to come in the future, right? Could you tell me a little bit more about that?

The album is called UNBOUND. I commissioned eight composers to each write solo virtuosic guitar music to explore what 21st century virtuosity would sound like on guitar. They’re from all over the world, and they all happen to be my friends, too, which has been really cool. I feel like I always work with people that I have a personal connection with. I’m putting a lot into these pieces and it’s a lot of empathy and connection.

This word “virtuosity” is weird. It’s a term that has really followed me around, a term that I had struggled with. As a soloist, it’s always been like, “Oh, you need to be a virtuoso. You need to play things that are flashy and virtuosic.” I always struggled with the term.

I wanted to do it on my own, with people that have amazing voices, and with their scope of the world and their perspective, to see what they thought virtuosity meant. One composer thought rhythmic complexity was a form of virtuosity, and somebody wanted to use this guitar resonance technique called campanella style as a form of virtuosity. Everyone has such a different take on it. You give them one word and everyone’s so different.

How has your interpretation of virtuosity for yourself changed through working on these pieces?

I’ve learned a lot. Even my technique changed. Some [of the] composers are not guitarists, so I had to learn my guitar in a new way to make certain passages work. In doing so, that’s another form of virtuosity, figuring things out that haven’t been done before. I love challenges. I love working on something and doing it every day. This work of discipline. It has been incredibly rewarding when something works if it’s something I hadn’t been able to do a month ago.

Do you have a practice routine that you follow?

Yes, I always do my fingerings first whenever I get a piece. What fingers am I going to use on my left hand and my right hand? And I make a path. And then I swear by this practice technique that was taught by my former teacher Jason Vieaux. It’s bracket practice. You start a passage that’s incredibly difficult—let’s say there’s a 20-note scale that’s ridiculous. I start with a three note cell, and then if you do it at tempo and you do it seven times in a row, but with breaks between, and if you don’t make a mistake, you can add one more note. While doing so, if you make a mistake, you have to do it all over again. So then you start over, and you do it until you get it seven times in a row.

So now you have a, let’s say, seven note cell that you’ve been doing perfectly seven times in a row. Now you’re going to start a new cell from the fourth note, and then you’re going to start a three note cell from the fourth note, and you’re going to keep doing these little brackets. At the end of the practice, you have these crazy brackets that you’ve made, and that you’ve built on this 20 note passage. And then you try to play from the beginning, and if you’ve been practicing really well, you should be able to have finished learning it within 10, 15 minutes.

It’s really efficient practicing, and it’s one of the things that feels like totally Zen, meditative work. I actually have videos of me doing it, so I can show to my students how to practice this way. Sometimes I feel like they [put it off] and think, “Oh, this is too hard, I’m going to practice it later.” So, I was like, “Think about it. It’s like a monster in your closet. Are you going to be scared of it all night? Or do you want to open the door and make sure there’s no monster?” You have to fight your fear.

How has it been teaching?

I’ve learned a lot as a teacher. The younger generations, they’re really asking the right questions and they’re very strong and they’re very aware and sensitive. I’ve had a lot of deep conversations with them. You know, what’s going on in the classical music world, and what they think they need for their education. I had this one student who’s like, “Oh, it’s a lot of Western classical, European men. What can we do? Is there anything that we can do to have more inclusive repertoire in our repertoire class?” And I was like, “Yes.” I totally revamp my curriculum every year. These conversations that I have with my students have helped me grow as a person.

What in particular have you loved about teaching recently?

Recently we’ve been doing a Women’s History Month annual concert that started from last year. I find the repertoire for them, but the really cool thing was that they bring their own music they want to learn. So they were the initiating these projects, or they were initiating to find these composers. It was so different from when I was a student. Just seeing that shift, that change, has been really rewarding to me.

What was it like for you when you were a student?

You were just told what to do. I had to always rebel a little bit. When I was a student, you just did it, you didn’t really ask questions. You didn’t even really think. You just played, like, “What are these competition pieces? What are the audition pieces?” That was it.

Things have changed so much recently, especially in classical. I feel like people are much more open to being more creative. And including other voices. Not just, you know, Bach.

Exactly. Everyone’s been interested in finding their own voice. That’s the shift that I’m seeing, finding your own voice and being sensitive.

In your own playing journey, how have you been able to find your voice?

Basically my biggest thing was, growing up, I wanted to play in a band. I was not trying to do the whole classical thing. I was seeing Prince, seeing PJ Harvey, and seeing Jimi Hendrix. That was my dream. I wanted to play in a band. And my parents got me an acoustic guitar and they were like, “This is on sale, this is what you’re going to do, and maybe we’ll buy you an electric,” which never happened. So growing up, I was always listening to bands. I was listening to Radiohead or Björk or Muse. And punk. One of my favorite Korean punk bands was called Cherry Filter. And that was my thing.

I always felt like you needed to compartmentalize your liking of classical music. You couldn’t embrace all these different genres of music if you’re trying to be a classical guitarist or a classical musician. And one year, it totally changed my life, and that was 2014, going to Bang on a Can Summer Festival. You didn’t have to separate those passions. That was huge for me.

So, I’ve been doing classical and electric guitar recitals, which has been super fun. And I’ve been calling them my mixtapes. I want to show you the scope of my world, the music that I like. This is the music that I listen to every day. So I start with super crazy arrangement from like 400 years ago by this really amazing Renaissance female composer named Claudia Sessa. I start with that and I do the commission pieces, and I end, always, with my own electric guitar pieces, and they’re very influenced by doom metal and Midwest emo. That’s been my jam now. I was just like, “This is it. This is who I am. Take it or leave it. I don’t care.” It’s been so great. I have a lot of musicians come up to me and say, “Oh my gosh, I love that you embrace all this different music, because that’s how I feel, too.”

I see so many more people doing really different things with their solo recitals. I’ve been just finding that voice and not being scared anymore. That voice, right? It’s like, “Oh, I should be playing this kind of thing,” or “I should be doing that.” And then I was like, “Well, no. There is no such thing as ‘I should be.’ It’s more: ‘I want to do this. And I want to show what I’m doing and what I love.’” That’s been the big shift for me. Finding that kind of courage and going forward with that has been life changing.

How did it feel once you started going along this path you wanted to be on, where you’re blending lots of genres and just doing what you want to do?

First I was terrified. I was like, “Oh my god, everything that I’m doing is terrible. Everyone’s going to hate it.” But I’ve been [getting] such great feedback. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone loves it, but the people who love it, they love it. And, I’d rather be either loved or hated than get a lukewarm response.

How do you balance all of your projects?

It’s therapy and working out. I feel like people are shy about that kind of thing, but I am aware that I can just go go go go go go. I have experienced bad burnout. I definitely felt the burnout in December. I had this big project, and I was so done. I was so burned out. I’m trying to pace myself to slow down a little bit more and also talking to a therapist and taking care of my health has been important for me.

If you could go back in time, what’s one big of advice that you would give your younger self?

I used to be more a people pleaser. I always knew what I liked, but I was always afraid. I was like, “Oh, people are not going to like this.” If I could give any advice, it’s this: It’s okay not to be loved by everyone and the people who really love you exactly for who you are matter the most. Don’t be afraid.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Vanessa Ague.

The 24-year-old teacher was a former chairwoman of the Meiktila University Students’ Union and taught in the local township.

Thae Su Naing was sentenced under Section 52 (A) of the Counter-Terrorism Law on Monday, family members and colleagues told RFA. Sentences under the law range from three to seven years.

One family member, who declined to be named for security reasons, told RFA it was unfair to sentence a young teacher to such a long prison term,

“There is no justice. My sister is an ordinary school teacher, not a People’s Defense Force (PDF) leader,” the family member said. “This sentence is severe for my sister. She has to appeal but arrangements have not yet been made. I want my sister to come back home as soon as possible.”

Thae Su Naing was arrested by the army at her home in Maiktila township on November 22 last year. She was accused of being a PDF leader and held for nine months before being sentenced.

Her family told RFA that her leg had been broken during a beating she received from the junta soldiers who arrested her. They said her leg has not healed properly because she did not receive effective medical treatment in Meiktila Prison.

Thae Su Naing was active in fighting for students’ rights during her university days. As a teacher, she participated in the anti-dictatorship CDM movement following the Feb.1, 2021 military coup.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), 12,171 people have been arrested since the military coup of February 1, 2021 up until Monday. Some 1,410 of them have been sentenced to prison terms across Myanmar.

Last month the AAPP said 12 teachers had been killed and more than 200 arrested since Myanmar’s military seized control from the elected government.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

As students return to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies – an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.

Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.

How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor’s degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida’s Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from the Philippines.

These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.

 A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That’s the widest gap ever – despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages. In Arizona, for example, teachers earned 32 percent less than non-teacher college grads in the state last year. Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.

When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. That number is even higher among Black (62 percent) and Hispanic/Latino (59 percent) educators, who are already underrepresented in the teaching profession. In the same survey, 91 percent of teachers point to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising educator salaries as a means to address burnout.

Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience – beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They’re also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don’t lose ground to inflation.

“These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes for extracurriculars just to make ends meet,” said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union. “Having this increased compensation flow down to the workers gives people dignity. It shows that their work is being respected.”

In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. have gone on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.

The educators’ union in Columbus, Ohio demands a simple, public “commitment to modern schools”: not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row. Read one picketer’s sign: “You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!”

Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.

In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander told council members their cuts were particularly puzzling, given that the city boasts $4.4 billion in remaining federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2025. “Making cuts to individual school budgets at this moment is wrong for our students, for our teachers, and stands in the way of the equitable recovery our city needs,” Lander said.

On Thursday, the Columbus teachers union came to a “conceptual agreement” with the city’s schools, ending their strike. Let’s hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Rebekah Entralgo , Bella DeVaan.

Twitter account Dalit Times tweeted the clip and wrote, “An old video of Indra Meghwal, a 9-year-old boy from Jalore, Rajasthan, dancing in the classroom is going viral.” (Archived link)

राजस्थान के जालौन के 9 वर्षीय बच्चे इंद्र मेघवाल का कक्षा में झूमते नाचते का पुराना वीडियो वायरल हो रहा है। pic.twitter.com/GuXTWbRxCL

— Dalit Times | दलित टाइम्स (@DalitTime) August 14, 2022

Users @NeerajM95532018, @AsianDigest, @NagmaniEr, and @HimanshuKadela were among many who tweeted the clip.

The viral clip has also been shared multiple times on Facebook.

Fact-Check

Several comments under the viral tweets suggested that the video was unrelated and that it did not feature Inder Meghwal. Some comments also suggested that the video in question was filmed in a government school in Taratara and not Jalore.

आप पतलकर हो , तो पहले वीडियो की छानबीन करो, ऐसे ही क्या वीडियो डालते हो , ये वीडियो तारातरा सरकारी स्कूल बाड़मेर का है

— GANESH SARAN BARMER (@ganeshsaran25) August 14, 2022

Upon a keyword search on Facebook, we found a post clarifying that the child seen in the video is a student of GUPS Gomrakh Dham, Taratara Math. The post also contained a screenshot of the video that was uploaded by a user named Tr Chela Ram Raika on July 30. The original upload had a caption in Hindi that read, “At the cultural program arranged on the occasion of No Bag Day on Saturday, Harish, a student of class two, confidently presented his dance recital.

The original uploader also re-shared the video in the context of the viral claims and clarified that the video was filmed at his school GUPS Gomrakh Dham. He requested users to not link this video with the Jalore incident.

We further looked up GUPS Gomrakh Dham on Facebook and found the video on their Facebook page as well. The video was uploaded on July 30. The original video is 2 minutes and 44 seconds long.

We called up the number provided on GUPS Gomrakh Dham’s Facebook page and spoke with a teacher who confirmed that the video was filmed at their school. “The child seen in the video is named Harish Bhil and he is in the second standard. He was performing at the cultural program that was hosted on the occasion of No Bag Day,” said the teacher.

Hence an unrelated video of a child dancing to a Rajasthani folk song is viral with the claim that the child seen in the video is Inder Meghwal. In reality, the viral video is of one Harish recorded in a school in Rajasthan’s Gomrakh Dham.

The post Video of a child dancing is not of the Dalit student allegedly assaulted by teacher in Rajasthan appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

User Pankaj Sharma posted the photo on Twitter, asking whether the government is not enraged by such incidents. (Archived link)

सरकार का खून ऐसे दृश्यों को देख कर के नहीं खोलता pic.twitter.com/9gOa6cscfg

— pankaj sharma (@pankaj3033) August 6, 2022

Twitter user Kumar Ambedkarvadi also tweeted the photo with the same claim. (Archived link)

सरकार का खून ऐसे दृश्यों को देख कर के नहीं खोलता
यह किसी भी पार्टी किसी भी संगठन का क्यों ना हो इसके ऊपर सख्त से सख्त कार्रवाई हो pic.twitter.com/U53CQnJ3Kf

— कुमार अंबेडकरवादी (@TONYSTARK6615) August 6, 2022

Another user named Imran Kamil also amplified the image and accompanying claim. (Archived link)

सरकार का खून ऐसे दृश्यों को देख कर के नहीं खोलता pic.twitter.com/I3QMam3RpZ

— imran Kamaal (@KamaalMev) August 7, 2022 

The image is widespread on Twitter with the same claim.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a reverse image search and came across a tweet posted by user Girish Bhardwaj from April 2018 containing the photo. The tweet states that the man in the picture is an “arts” teacher in a school in Tamil Nadu named M Prabhu. The teacher reportedly staged a protest against the government by burning the Indian flag. (Archived link)

Meet Mr M Prabhu, a arts teacher at a school in Tamil Nadu. He protests against the government by burning the Indian flag.
Hate any government, but never hate the nation that gives you an identity! You might be a Tamil,Telugu,Marathi etc but you’re an Indian first! pic.twitter.com/zOVhXWWYls

— Girish Bharadwaj (@Girishvhp) April 4, 2018

Upon further investigation, we found the image in a 2018 article by Edexlive, the education arm of The New Indian Express. According to the article, the man in the video is 34-year-old M Prabhu who teaches painting. He is also affiliated with the Tamil nationalist organization ‘Tamil Desiya Periyakkam’. Angered by the non-formation of the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) even after a Supreme Court order, M Prabhu burnt the tricolor in protest of the BJP-led central government. The police arrested Prabhu after the video went viral.

It is worth noting that fierce protests broke out in Tamil Nadu in April 2018 after the central government missed the deadline set by the Supreme Court for the formation of the Cauvery Management Board (CMB).

We also found a video from 2018 which contains more information about the photo. 

To sum it up, a four-year-old picture is falsely being shared as a photo of a man associated with the RSS burning the tricolour.

The post Old image of teacher burning the tricolour viral with false RSS links appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

This is a breaking and developing story... Please check back for possible updates...

A South Texas town is reeling Tuesday after at least 15 people—including 14 students and a teacher—were killed and an unknown number of others wounded by a gunman during a mass shooting at a local elementary school.

"They fucking failed our kids again," Fred Guttenberg, father of Parkland school shooting victim Jaime Guttenberg, said during an MSNBC interview after Tuesday's massacre. "How many more times are we gonna sit back?... How many more times?"

Julián Casto, a former Democratic San Antonio mayor and U.S. housing and urban development secretary, said on the same network that "this has become part of who we are as a country."

"The free availability of guns has not made us safer in the United States or here in the state of Texas," he added.

The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde, 85 miles west of San Antonio. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement that the shooter—who early reports indicate might have had a rifle and a handgun—was fatally shot by law enforcement responding to the scene.

"He shot and killed, horrifically and incomprehensibly, 14 students and killed a teacher," Abbott said of the shooter, who multiple law enforcement sources identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos.

The governor also said that two police officers sustained non-life-threatening injuries during an exchange of gunfire with the shooter.

Around 600 second- through fourth-grade students attend Robb Elementary School.

Pete Arredondo, police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, said during an afternoon press conference that several adults and students had been injured in the attack.

"At this point, the investigation is leading to tell us that the suspect did act alone during this heinous crime," he said.

According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), Tuesday's incident was the third-deadliest U.S. school shooting of the past decade, behind the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, in which 28 people were killed, and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which took 17 lives.

GVA says there have been at least 212 mass shootings and at least 7,584 gun deaths—including 411 children under the age of 12—in the United States so far this year.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Painting Source: Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895 – Public Domain

The recent victory by the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, NY is a hopeful and inspiring indication that workplace organization is still possible, even in an age of isolated and unorganized workers within an ever-expanding e-retail sector. Just through looking at their methods of communication, the working people that made the union possible were obvious students of technology and envisioned how Amazon’s own surveillance and alienation could be harnessed into turning the tide against the bosses. In this article, Daniel Falcone explains how Marx was a student of technology, not a determinist and traces the historiography of the topic. It helps us arrive at the conclusion that innovation and modernization are things that socialists and people of the left can embrace as we carry out revolutionary change.

Introduction

This article will use Marx’s own writings and secondary sources to trace the history of Karl Marx as a student of technology starting with Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal essay in 1976 through Amy Wendling’s work in 2011. The essay will provide a historiography of Marx and how scholars have analyzed his perceptions of technological development and how it relates to his ongoing objective critiques of capitalism. Peter Novick famously stated in his Introduction that objectivity in history could be like “Nailing jelly to a wall,” but this essay will argue that Marx was a dedicated student of technology and wasn’t speculating in subjectivity on the topic.

James Banner explains that Marx provides an example of “transformative revisionism.” He states that “it proved impossible to fence off [Marx] from historical thought but to prevent [his] writings from affecting the way the past was conceived, if only because [Marx’s] works made universal claims, were suffused with historical examples, it ventured to explain the past as well to predict the future.” Banner is indicating that scholarship after the nineteenth century was forced to grapple with a Marxist analysis of history, thus producing more nuanced views of his outlook on technology over time.

In 1921 Alvin Hansen claimed that Marx didn’t view history through an economic lens but a technological one. In other words, in 1976 Nathan Rosenberg was not the first scholar or economist that specialized in the history of technology as it relates to Marx but Rosenberg did help popularize the idea of studying Marx and technology from an economic and historical point of view. In 1983 in Inside the Black Box Rosenberg built on his 1976 work and examined social change and how Marx was one of the finest students of technology the world has ever produced. Rosenberg argued that Marx was conscious of technology’s historical significance. Marx, he maintained, was constantly unpacking “the inner logic of individual technologies.” He also argued that studies in technological history should begin with Marx.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, it argues that a careful review of Marx and his notebooks on the history of technology dispel any notion that he was a technological determinist. Technological determinism is the idea that a society’s technology determines its social structure. The term was coined by American Sociologist Thorstein Veblen in the early 1900s. Marx, like modern scholars over a century later, also argued that scientific and technological advancement were not individual moments but a set of historical processes.

Secondly, this historiographical essay expands on how Marx’s writing on the topic of capitalism evolved in relation to technology. Historians have treated Marx as if he was simply writing about revolution and capitalism in 1848 and science and technology in 1867. Marx’s interest in technology arrived early in his career and evolved steadily over time.

The third purpose of this writing is to demonstrate how technological, scientific, economic, and political histories of technologies change over time. Phil Gasper wrote that, “one of the most common misconceptions about Marxism is that it is a deterministic theory that sees the course of history as preordained by economic and social forces.” In other words, Gasper points out a tendency in the historical writing to associate Marxism with simply reacting to technology.

Karl Marx was a student of technology. Starting in 1976 the Marx scholarship started rethinking and analyzing his views on industrialization in making a case that refuted his reputation as a technological determinist. This countered William H. Shaw’s work in 1979 that argued that Marx was an empirical and scientific technological determinist when a broad definition of technology was applied. It also argued against Robert Heilbroner’s work in 1967 which argued that machines made history. But Marx was not just concerned with the current machines of his day but the innovations and developments and what earlier technologies meant to the worker in terms of continuity. Marx was asking essential questions regarding the history of technology: which machines make history and what was the impact of their technologies on the culture?

Arnold Pacey discussed intermediate technological movements to rethink what technology meant historically. He argued that it was a mistake to provincialize industry and technology while focusing on the inventive exchange. In other words, before this time world historical accounts of technology were discussed by country, period, and inventor, without synthesizing technologies across time, space, and people, as part of a greater dialogue. Pacey explains both the innovations as joint activities and developments that took place independently of each other. Marx as a student of technology, in my view, also challenged the provinciality of technology and provided an early global history of technology.

Steven Shapin wrote about the mechanization of nature and discussed how there is no cultural consensus of science. I relate his work to Marx’s view on technology in that both seem concerned with the doing part of science and technology not something likened to a list of floating conceptions. Marx was interested in the depersonalization of science but not technological determinism. Further, Lisa Jardine emphasized the importance of seeing technology from a distance and to not exaggerate its changes. Marx too, knew that things changed but nothing totally changed.

Thomas Misa breaks down the dynamics of industrial capitalism and society and reiterates Marx’s prophesizing “that capitalism’s contradictions would bring about its destruction with the memorable phrase,” ‘the bourgeoisie would produce its own gravediggers.’” This source is important to reinforce how technology and culture needs to be analyzed in different generations to understand its context for the time. Technology had different meanings in relation to exploitation of the worker historically. Additionally, when looking at Marx’s own writings both segments of the industrial revolution spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal how Marx was a student of technology.

In the book entitled The Romantic Machine, John Tresch debunks how prior scholarship presented romanticism and industrialization in opposition to one another. Instead, Tresch claims that both concepts worked together historically and managed to unify people’s romantic conceptions to machinery. Machines were not simply cold alienating devices to Trecsh and he explains how Marx appreciated technology and argued for “continued inventiveness in the administration of machines.” That is to say that Marx did not view romanticism and industrialism as purely separate nor was he opposed to technological progress.

The Writings of Karl Marx

The beginning of the Communist Manifesto is important for understanding Marx as a student of technology because he looks at navigation, commerce and market transitions emerging out of The Enclosure Movement. To be sure, Marx was not simply saying that these transitions of technology and innovation were evil happenings leaving the worker at its mercy. He is instead emphasizing the need to investigate the process of commercial expansion. Exploitative economic development produced navigational improvements. It was not the modernization of navigation simply acting upon the worker and accelerating misery by virtue of any machine.

Capital was written by Karl Marx in 1867. This is a transformative work within the field of philosophy. This primary source offers a criticism of the political economy and breaks down in exhaustive fashion, the capitalist mode of production while pushing back against the classicists. Readers interested in Marx’s views on technology are naturally drawn to Chapter 15 of this seminal book, where his approach to the topic historically serves as a foundational framework for twentieth and twenty-first century scholars who might argue against viewing technological breakthroughs as coming from single individuals.

A third area of primary data for Marx and his thoughts and views on technology are found in his unpublished notebooks on the history of technology. At one time the archive was in Moscow. In 1925, after uncovering the archive Hungarian philosopher György Lukács argued that Marx was not a technological determinist, but someone who analyzed technology as another form of work relations to be explored. Lukács’s study was later published in the New Left Review in response to Nikolai Bukharin’s conception, a Bolshevik who once stated, “it would be strange if Marxist theory eternally stood still.” Marx’s notebooks on the history of technology are currently held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Karl Marx as a Student of Technology

In 1976 Nathan Rosenberg argued “that a major reason for the fruitfulness of the Marxist framework for the analysis of social change was that Marx himself was a careful student of technology.” His contention is that Marx knew the implications that technology had on society historically and spent hours writing and thinking about their impacts on economic structures. Rosenberg asserts that Marx was ahead of his time and essentially wrote an introduction on the history of technology over one hundred years before modern scholars. He considers Marx’s writing in the Capitalist Production section of Capital, where in a footnote Marx wrote:

“The critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of nature’s technology, for example, in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are material basis of all social organization deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile since human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations and the mental conceptions that flow from them.”

This quote shows that Marx was thinking about technology and social relations in 1867 comparable to 1848 and his first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx writes about commerce, industry, and navigation. After reading Rosenberg’s perspectives it is evident that Marx had clear views on technological determinism, the nature of modern industry, and the social importance of evolving technologies as they applied to capital-goods. Rosenberg basically asks, what made Marx’s treatment of technology special and unique? The answer is found in the insightfulness of his methodological approach which was to analyze history through the lens of technology. Rosenberg states “the method of historical materialism which Marx utilized was one which emphasized the interactions and conflicts of social classes and institutions not individuals. Thus, for Marx, invention, and innovation no less, than other socioeconomic activities, were best analyzed as social processes rather than as inspired flashes of individual genius.” In other words, Marx held that technological progress was driven by history instead of driving it.

Marx understood technology to be a socially constructed albeit neutral tool for fulfilling societal roles within institutions in that the profit motive would adjust to any innovation. They could be embraced or contested entities for individual workers under the capitalist system. It is far too simple to suggest that Marx had binary views: socialism and the worker as intrinsically good and technology as inherently bad. Instead, he offered what socialists, social democrats, postmodernists, and contemporary scholars analyze regarding technology routinely: exchanges and responses between market forces and the economy on the one hand and technology and advanced industrial machinery on the other.

Rosenberg cites The Poverty of Philosophy, a book answering Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, as one cause for the misconception for Marx as technological determinist. In this book, Marx famously indicated that the hand mill was to the feudal lord what the steam mill was to the industrial capitalist. This, according to Rosenberg only signifies that Marx insisted on a concrete method to address exploitation, not fancy slogans about reform efforts and philosophical takes about property being theft. This is important to highlight because much of the Marx as determinist discourse comes from the simple hand mill quote. It is like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” notion, popularly cited even though Smith said it only once. D. Ross Gandy would go on to argue in 1979 that Marx was not a technological determinist but someone who saw human beings interacting freely with nature in history.

Donald MacKenzie also explains how, “the hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist,” is a standalone phrase that misleads and presents Marx as a technological determinist. So much of Marx’s work on technology, MacKenzie argues “cannot be captured by any simple technological determinism.” He points out that Marx believed that “social relations molded technology rather than vice versa.” His work shows the further need to see technological development in the context of the era.

Furthermore, as indicated in the review of the primary literature, Rosenberg points out Marx’s view on technology is found in the Communist Manifesto where he comments on improvements in navigation caused by the prior expansion in the marketplaces of commercial trade. Again, Marx isn’t preoccupied with innovations modernizing and their adverse effects per se, but he is interested in addressing the ever-increasing world of profit-making ventures that negatively impact workers and their conditions. Again, the early writings of Marx reveal him to be a student of technology and explaining how economic history has shaped it.

Bruce Bimber further explains technological determinism as it applies to Marx’s specific views on technology and culture. He is interested in the varied approaches in looking at technological determinism (TD) and explains Marx’s outlook of human self-expression and resistance to alienation while arguing that Marx was more economically deterministic than he was technologically. TD states that a society’s technology defines the growth of its social construct, overall culture, and societal beliefs and values. The phrase in this context, is often used in academia by sociologists and economists. Bimber doubts that Marx was himself purely determinist and sets out to explain technological determinism’s three faces. All three faces are considered technologically deterministic, but Bimber cites how comparing them allows for a clearer understanding if Marx was a proponent of TD or not.

Bimber cites G.A. Cohen’s notion of Norm Based Accounts of technological determinism, which are “accounts that attribute casual agency in the history of technology to human social practices and beliefs.” In short, these are aspects of technology that deal with technology as simply a byproduct of culture. He also cites Langdon Winner and the concept of Unintended Consequences Accounts that constitute the unpredictable instances of social outcomes when it comes to technological development. Unintended Consequences Accounts are not driven by technology but by social actions. Logical Sequence Accounts, or those viewing technology’s impact as universal laws are the most deterministic oriented accounts. In other words, Bimber argues that Marx’s views on technology are aligned with the first two socially constructed accounts and not the fixed third accounts. Marx did not see technology as automatically exploitative, but rather human interaction that had this potential.

Estevan Hernandez, John Prysner, and Derek Ford set out to explain Chapter 15 of Marx’s Capital to highlight the status of automation and its relevancies to capitalist economies in, A Marxist Approach to Technology. The authors think social scientists in the contemporary period have downplayed the loss of jobs as only temporary until a new technological revolution addresses unemployment to make up for lost production. This was written to explain how Marx’s views on modern industry, machinery, the working day, labor intensity, and compensation, help to better understand the challenges of current day displaced workers and alterations taking place in both agricultural and industrial production.

The interesting part about this piece is that it reads to be the most leftist of the literature I’ve seen about Marx as a student of technology and uses Capital to argue points of view that might be contrary to the previous analyses of Marx as a technological determinist. For example, it rightly and thoroughly discusses how technology and investments in innovation can be ruthless, put profits first, and make working class people more disposable, but what determines this more than technology is economic determinism. The authors are aware that Marx was not a technological determinist, but their writing shows how in my view when critiques of capitalism are at stake, subtle, internal Marxist debates take shape.

Andy Merrifield argues that Marx’s 150-paged chapter in Capital, Chapter 15, could be a book unto itself. He states how Marx provides a fascinating explanation of the mechanizations within the capitalist structure while providing a social history of technology. Merrifield also argues against Marx as technologically deterministic and says that Marx detailed the value of the worker whether they used primitive tools or large-scale industry. Marx’s ability to articulate exploitation was defined by how he analyzed the structure of employment, not the respective technologies themselves. Marcello Musto includes an important section in his edited, The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, with Chapter 21 entitled “Technology and Science,” by philosopher Amy Wendling. She is interested in studying technology and science included in Marx’s research specifically.

In 2011, Wendling provided a revisionist perspective of Marx’s concepts of alienation by reevaluating his notebooks on technology. She focused on the transformation of work, machines and the communist future, and the capitalist reality. Wendling reviews the Marx archive to uphold the notion that Marx embraced skill and technology and moved his concepts of liberation to the machine and the worker by 1867. This could be found in some instances as early as in his 1848 writing. To understand Marx, Wendling argues is to understand that work requires both human and mechanized labor. The skill concept is relative to the time and is socially constructed as Marx carefully traced capitalism’s requirements. I read this to mean that Marx was less deterministic in a sense when it came to technological development and innovation and more focused on market forces that produce technology and inequality.

In other words, Wendling states that a major misconception of Marx and his notions of worker alienation comes from too much focus on his earlier Hegelian writings. She also argues that when Marx is seen in two parts: first, simply as a younger intuitive thinker interested in history and humanism in the 1840s, and second, strictly scientific in the 1860s, that this misinforms and inhibits our ability to see Marx already interested in science and technology in his earlier writings.

Conclusion

The recent victory by the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, NY is a hopeful and inspiring indication that workplace organization is still possible, even in an age of isolated and unorganized workers within an ever-expanding e-retail sector. Just through looking at their methods of communication, the working people that made the union possible were obvious students of technology and envisioned how Amazon’s own surveillance and alienation could be harnessed into turning the tide against the bosses.

This essay used Marx’s own work and secondary evidence dedicated to Marx as a student of technology. I tried to trace the history of Karl Marx as a student of technology starting with Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal essay in 1976 and ending with Amy Wendling’s work in 2011, while incorporating essays and articles that lead up to the present. The essay provided a historiography of Marx and how scholars have analyzed his perceptions of technological development and how it relates to the ongoing depredations of state and industrial capitalism. I argued that Marx was not a technological determinist, but someone interested in studying and writing about how capitalism was altered by its relationship with technology.

Like Banner argues, Marx continues to be a source of transformative revisionism. Vanessa Wills draws from Marx and Engels to argue that racist ideology is a form of false consciousness. In other words, Marx’s impact on scholarship continues to extend in many directions. Marx was also aware of capitalism’s global reach, as recent scholarship by Lucia Pradella points out he did not view globalization in linear terms nor in a Eurocentric way. Ultimately, the purpose of this writing was to demonstrate how technological, scientific, economic, and political histories of technologies changed over time albeit subtly and slowly, while resistance to these mechanisms remained the same. Marx was a historian of technology and an economic determinist much more so than an economic historian and technological determinist.

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Notes.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Falcone.