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You’ve probably heard the old saying: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
That idea was popularized by Harry S. Truman, who may have gotten it from a general or a judge. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect a president, general, or judge to say. It’s a challenge. A dare to rise to the occasion. Toughen up. To many people, that’s what it means to be an American. A man. An adult.
It’s easy to see why the saying has endured. It’s a brief, powerful metaphor that effectively conveys assumptions about shared values and expected behaviors.
BUT:
What if the kitchen sucks?
And what if there is no alternative? Our entire planet is getting hotter. Deadly heat waves will be 3-10 times more likely by 2100. Exactly what are you going to do about it? Pack up your spaceship?
Just when you thought that the institution charged with helping people think their way through an increasingly complex, uncertain future couldn’t be challenged any more, we elected a president who wants to break everything.
From Forbes Teacher Funding Cut As National Shortage Reaches Breaking Point: “America’s education system is facing a crisis that threatens to undermine the future of millions of students: a severe and growing teacher shortage. This issue, simmering for years, has reached a boiling point as schools nationwide struggle to fill classrooms with qualified educators. Compounding the problem is a recent decision by the Trump administration to eliminate federal funding for teacher preparation programs, which has sparked lawsuits and intensified the debate over how to address the shortage. The stakes are high, and the consequences of inaction could reshape the educational landscape for decades.”
Teachers are not looking for Lebron money, or even enough money to buy houses near the schools where they teach.
How about just not freezing or suffering from heat exhaustion in the classroom?
During a recent strike, one teacher put it this way: “(Students) should be able to come to a safe place where there’s not rats and roaches and hot conditions… As an adult, if you go to work and it’s freezing or 98 degrees or you forgot your lunch, you’re not going to be a productive employee. And school is the same way. We can’t have kids continuing to come to buildings and not have these basic needs, and we can’t expect teachers to come work in these conditions, either.”
In 2006 I taught a summer school class at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The class was held in one of those portables that never moved. The temperatures outside hovered around 105. Inside was hotter. The air was stifling. The sweat trickled down your back. Even the flies died of heat exhaustion. I watched one stop buzzing, walk a couple steps on my desk, and keel over.
The room had an air conditioner, but the thermostat was covered by a plastic housing that was locked and could only be opened with a key. I called maintenance to ask for help. No one answered. I called the front office. They told me air conditioning costs money.
I picked the lock with a paper clip, opened the plastic cover, and turned down the air conditioning.
The next day, I arrived to find the thermostat cover closed and locked, this time with a padlock. I shattered the cover with my elbow and turned the thermostat down as far as it would go.
At that time, Monroe was one of the biggest schools in the country. 5000+ students attended on a three-track, year-round calendar. When I returned for the next track, my classroom had been moved to one of the old buildings.
Instead of a local HVAC unit with a mechanical thermostat, now I had a wall unit with an electronic thermostat that was wired into the building’s ventilation system.
I read the manufacturing labels and opened a browser tab on the internet.
The schematics were hard to understand. I don’t know much about heating and cooling systems, and less about electronic security. But I know how to read a phone number. I called the company’s headquarters in South Los Angeles. I spoke with a representative named Celia who taught me how to defeat the electronic thermostat lock code, reset the DIP switch, and turn my classroom into the freezer aisle at the supermarket.
Outside it was sweltering. Mind-melting. But in that room, we could now relax. Talk. Think.
If you can’t stand the heat, remodel the kitchen.
Once we manage our heating and cooling and training for the next school year, maybe we can start stewarding our off-campus environment so the Class of 2100 has somewhere to live.
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What do you do to keep your cool and improve your skills? Drop me a line – I’m curious!
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Open-Source Learning is yours. Free. Get the white paper here. Use what works and customize whatever you need, however you want. I’m here to help.
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Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.
Here is a taste of what I’m doing, reading, watching, and thinking about.
What I’m Listening To –
“Clampdown” by The Clash.
What I’m Reading –
Do you know the history of barbed wire telegraphs in rural America? I am absolutely loving Lori Emerson’s Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. There was life before the internet, there will be life after the internet, and people will find a way to connect and share information far beyond the corporate lobbies and firewalls and membership subscription services that currently shape what we see and how we think.
Quote I’m pondering (especially the last sentence)—
“This book (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences) first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
– Michel Foucault
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David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Header image: Our kids living the Golden Age of Childhood watching Hollywood Bowl fireworks. Via David Preston.
David Preston
