Two weeks until break
Today
- so much grading
- am head empty from the weekend
Reading
I have been reading Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by by Jane McAlevey and Bob Ostertag and it is fascinating! It fits then that “Nearly 15K NYC nurses begin strike at hospitals in Manhattan, the Bronx”. The whole union thing is so wild. Great and wild. I am struggling to compare it to the teachers union here in Germany and we come off as wimps compared to these amazing people. Great book!
I finished Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Am well written and low to the ground explainer on how/why things are how they are. Terrifying and oh my goodness people can be such shites.
There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty, especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh, vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers, and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students, patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty.
Also read Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway by Liese Greensfelder. Very good. Almost like a diary, well written, beautiful places and harrowing experiences.
But you know what? The mountains aren’t going away. They’ll be here if we ever need to use them again.
To-Do
- grading all over everything – deciding on how and why and then no one will explain anything to the kids, because that conversation happened a few months ago and was not about those particular grades
- add a one-page Dungeon to the Tock Tock Press site on this site. -prep classes for the week
Status
The TL;DR on functioning in a capitalist world is to move a little slower, with a little more intention. Your dollar helps people stay in business. Be careful where you put it. I’m not saying it’s easy. As I told at the top of the story, I shamefully let frustration get to me and I took the easy way out. This’ll happen. But every time we keep doing it, we get closer and closer to having no other options than having to shop at a company store run by white supremacists. (via Mike Monteiro)
Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it. (via A Working Library)