The Life of a Teacher: A Beautiful Mission Statement

A teacher and student reading a book in school.

Here’s what a teacher had to say to the Hernando County School District school board in Brooksville, Florida. Brooksville is one of the redist (Republican) counties in Florida where 50 teachers have quit.

Here’s what the teacher had to say:

“No one is teaching your kids to be gay. Sometimes they just are gay.

I have math to teach. I don’t have time to teach your kids to be gay. Even if I cared enough to. I don’t.

I want to teach them literacy and numbers.

If you’ve spent time in a classroom, you’d know it’s hard enough to get your kids
to put their names on their papers.

We do not have the power to change a part of them that has always been part of them.

Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Every single one of them. Gay, straight, black, white, asian, trans, all of them. And I love them all. Exactly as their weird little selves are.

So that’s who teachers are.

But now, they are fearful to teach, to answer kids’ questions, and to have a classroom library, because they could be fired.”

They thought that DeSantis was about freedom. But he’s about repression and trying to hinder knowledge, growth, and aspiration.

The people in Florida who are more mad than anyone else are the people who voted for DeSantis. Because they feel completely betrayed.

The damage that Republican politicians and their white evangelical cultural Christian billionaire backers have done is almost irrecoverable. They are the groomers. They are the ones trying to indoctrinate kids.