Oh, you best believe I’m dropping some hardcore Roy Batty on your sorry selves. What? Don’t know who Roy Batty is? Then maybe you should click on his name, for it will take you to the wonderful land of YouTube, a place where everything is archived and memory is only needed to find the clip.
Did you check it out? It’s one of the closing scenes of Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott movie of many moons ago. It’s soon to get the sequel treatment by Denis Villeneuve, who just did Arrival, Sicario, and Prisoners (I recommend each). Now you know.
I thought of Roy Batty today while a fellow teacher at my school was shaken to the point of tears. I hate seeing it, I hate hearing about it, but it’s always the same reason. It’s the adults on campus that bring people to this point. I know, most would assume it’s the kids. Nah. Kids have been the same forever–pretty easy to figure out. They need to sleep and eat. It would help if they read. Most of them don’t. But they are kids, our chief reason for showing up to work.
It’s not one specific incident. You can’t point to something and say, “Oh, yeah, that was it. Let’s fix that thing and it will all be better.” That’s not the deal. Kesey likened all of it to The Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There’s the big machine that just keeps churning, and working on you, and, in the case of the novel, a Big Nurse at the controls. This Nurse has time on her side, and no matter how many battles you win, she will win the war.
As teachers, we show up to The Combine daily, and if we swallow the big pill of PLC or RTI or Common Core, or whatever else is in the paper cup, then we’re fine. But mess with the machine and you mess with order, and maybe you get more kids to sign up for your honors class than any other, yet you have to share equally those classes with another teacher, while the other honors teachers do not. You are “taking one for the team,” nothing out of the ordinary, except you’re the only one taking it. If you want to raise an eyebrow a little higher, maybe we’ll look at some of the other classes you teach.
Back to Roy Batty. That final speech of his has the famous line “like tears in rain.” That’s what should happen every time someone is sad, or frustrated, or at wit’s end. It should pour down rain. When my wife, who had been teaching at North High for 21 years, went into her administrator’s office to voice concerns that were affecting students, got to the point of closing the door, and ended up crying tears of frustration, telling the administrator, “This is a horrible place to work,” there should have been sprinkler systems set up to mix with her tears.
Because the tears are there–we just need some rain to blend in with them. That way, everyone will think that everything is fine.