#michael a. moore

[blackversus]

Notes on a Scandal: Part V—Final Notes

  Despite the recent developments, my experience at NOCCA was actually a very fruitful one that brought my teaching to heights unseen prior to this year. I’ve never had students so deeply embrace the works that I’ve presented them and go so far with it. Let the record show that they are my most important critics, and as I told you in our meeting, I have never had a group of students so passionately and deeply invest in the curriculum that I brought to the table. Accolades from reputable class visitors aside, nothing’s brought me more joy than seeing what students did with Gilgamesh and Siddhartha and the entire mythological framework as a whole this year. How they truly “let it marinate” (as I always say, and they repeat with zeal), until the lessons taught have become living entities in their young consciousness.

At the end of the day, it was my passion for my craft and my love for my students that kept me more than afloat amidst adversity both direct and indirect. Despite Mr. Smirk’s excessive micromanagement that found ways to itemize every student in the classroom’s activity like widgets on a conveyor belt during his observations of the class (but oddly enough couldn’t manage morning arrival well enough to prevent two students from having sex before school started), despite my co-teacher’s speciously inadequate means of communication with me which lies at the root of much of this discourse (particularly the accusations about my content knowledge), I still managed to have a great time teaching and learning this year.

Kudos to you John for helping facilitate such an environment, one where 14 year olds can discuss things as varied as the meaning of life and enlightenment while conducting research on ancient civilizations that helps place their entire discourse into deeper context. An institution where young people can be a part of the process that cultivates them into world-class artists and intellectuals capable of blending the sum of all their parts into the constitution of amazing human beings who create incredibly ambitious and challenging work. That said, an even greater acknowledgment is appropriate for the students themselves that dare to embark upon this journey, the artists/teachers who dedicate significant portions of their lives to helping guide these students, and the even older regime of artists/teachers who helped found this institution in the first place.

It is to this final community of artists/teachers that we all owe an incalculable debt. And not just to them for their work in establishing this institution, but also to the communities of color that this institution was originally intended to serve, and whose culture and lifestyle through generations has formed the foundation of the city of New Orleans. I won’t go into detail about the deplorable state of education for children of color in America today, namely in New Orleans which ranks among the worst. These facts are well known and documented and hopefully they are to you as the leader of an educational institution.

But the fact that amidst this torrent of social injustice that renders a quality education barely acquirable in the present New Orleans milieu, and what poor excuse passes for one little more than a slash and burn corporate model that treats standardized testing like the S&P 500 of school worth in a system that looks more like Wall Street than a school system, it is a shameful and criminal act that the one artistic outlet left to African American students would be coopted from them by way of backdoor politics. When I first came to NOCCA I did not know much of its history. As members of my community made this more known to me, I began to realize that I was complicit in the aforementioned injustice.

  For a year I taught under the smiling gaze of Ellis Marsalis in the room that Homer Plessy bought his ticket to the streetcar that he was arrested in waging the first popularized fight against American segregation. The irony of the fact that Ellis’ picture hovers daily above a bevy of children primarily not the color of those he and his artistic cohorts presumably created the school for in the 70s was never lost on me. Nor the fact that the school occupies a space that should be a historical landmark for a civil rights activist but instead stands in a neighborhood that is being aggressively gentrified as we speak, and is itself a model for educational gentrification. Upon news of my dismissal, at least I can say that all of the above has finally caused me my last cognitive dissonant headache and my heretofore-sublimated truths can be set free. Free to roam and speak truth to power in the name of decrying injustices like the one that NOCCA perpetuates.

Know that all of these aforementioned parts are directly connected. Know that while I was complicit with a crime against my people that flew directly in the face of all that I champion and am a proponent of, that I was yet and still a hopeful team player for NOCCA. That I was willing to work in concert with this institution that I had so fully pledged myself to and so deeply invested in in the hopes that proper headway towards necessary change would gradually be made. Meanwhile, I had African-American students coming to me complaining about the lack of opportunities for them to be represented in their arts discipline. I had disingenuous conversations being initiated with me around race by Mr. Smirk, who never showed follow through in actually inviting me to the table when the one or two group conversations that occurred around race actually took place. This was an extreme grievance as I asked him specifically to keep me in the loop on these conversations, was asked specifically by students to be included in these conversations, and was ultimately very suspicious when I was not invited.

Some of what I have said may come off as harsh, unprofessional, or “inappropriate” as you all like to say. But understand that your standards and perception are rooted in your own subjective bias and are all but inapplicable to me now. For a year, I swallowed my truths in order to keep myself appropriate at your table. I was much more patient with you than you have been with me on my perceived shortcomings. In the end I was fired regardless. Trust that if your institution continues to try to fill its diversity quota without addressing its complicity with institutional racism, you will perpetually find yourselves on the receiving end of criticisms like the ones that I have expressed in this letter. Where you find success in filling your seats with people of color that convince you that you have achieved progress and change, you will still wreak of the academic inaccuracy that white supremacist standards uphold in all academia, and further the social injustice that institutional racism perpetuates. These seat filler minorities will only last if they swallow their truths the way that I did, in which case you will have achieved nothing but placing hollow shells in the position of educator. A hollow shell ill-fitted to lead young artistic intellectuals in the ways of critical analysis and expression.

I can tell you John that this will not bode well for the academic or artistic culture at NOCCA as whole. Some of your faculty members more beholden to you than I have already voiced their discontent with my dismissal along with the specious disappearing of Max Johnson from his position. They are not as at liberty to tell you the truth, as I am John. They probably fear what I did at the beginning of the year when I first realized that my relationship with Mr. Smirk stood to be a rocky one. The same fears and nauseating discontent I had when I realized that NOCCA’s history ran counter to my own personal morals and principals. They fear the extinction of their livelihood if they speak too loudly. I can tell you that this fear may hold your power in place in a temporal way, but as history has shown us time and again, greater truths will surface and prevail. Furthermore, fear and subjugation is no way to run any institution, much less an art school that prides itself on diversity, critical thinking and expression.

Finally, what was done to me at NOCCA is more of a testament to its current state of mismanagement perhaps rooted in the same DNA strand that wrangled its ownership from black hands to begin with than it is a reflection of my work ethic and professionalism. Throughout the year I noticed that you liked to use phrases like “In-service” and the corollary African phrase “Ubuntu” which translates to “I am because we are.” Your most recent actions and the way they reflect the deeper history of this institution that you sit at the head of, fly directly in the face of either of these catch phrases of yours and reduce them to little more than meaningless quips at the behest of your, once again, cooptation. They are as misleading as say, positioning posters of Huey P. Newton and Malcolm X in the offices of an administration that skirts around direct discourse on issues of race, and further is an arbiter of the very institutional racism that these men sacrificed their lives to fight.

My students’ decision to petition on behalf of their beloved teacher on the other hand is a more accurate fulfillment of the wisdom and commitment that concepts like “In-service” and “Ubuntu” call for. I challenge you, in the future John, at the behest of all the great shoulders that you stand on, as the head of this institution, to truly live up to and dedicate yourself to holistic service with the acknowledgement that what is done to the least of these shall apply to the whole. That the injustice that Mr. Smirk has waged upon me and that you have cosigned on, will resonate—has already resounded as an injustice throughout NOCCA—among students and faculty alike; and for that matter, throughout the greater New Orleans community at large. That the injustice of misrepresentation will always serve as a cancer to NOCCA so long as it is not courageously and directly addressed and remedied. Indeed John, I am because we are. It’s time that the actions match the words.

In sincerity,

Michael A. Moore 

[blackversus]

Notes on a Scandal: Part IV—Notes Behind my Back

In our 1:1 meeting that followed the Black History Month presentation, which he had also sat in on, Mr. Smirk first applauded my research and hard work in creating such an extensive presentation. Then he proceeded as usual with the critiques. He questioned why I as the English teacher was teaching history. “I thought that was Mr. Lindner ’s job.” I remember thinking, and may have even verbalized that as teachers of an interdisciplinary course in Integrated Humanities, we both had taught each other’s discipline interchangeably at times. Mr. Smirk also questioned why it was that I had spent so much time lecturing. This, he said, went against the whole “learning by doing” model. I told him that it was a decision based on the very limited amount of time that students had to be oriented towards material so vast and oft controversial as race-oriented subject matter. That students would still be allowed—required even—to learn by doing in the second half of the unit where they would form their own groups and select a topic from the seven different time periods of black history (from 3100 BCE to the present) that my presentation had treated only piecemeal, and create their own power point presentations on their chosen period.

Mr. Smirk seemed, or perhaps pretended to be understanding of this logic, but then accosted me with some very jolting news. He said that a concern had been voiced that somehow I was getting too far off of curriculum in my teaching. This seemed to echo a sentiment that Mr. Lindner  expressed to me quietly dead in the middle of my delivering the Black History Month presentation only a week or so prior. But now Mr. Smirk went as far as to say that Dr. Judas had chimed in on this too in some way. I was very concerned. Because while I will cop to a personal feeling of much-needed healing and successful purging by way of bringing the Black History Month piece to class, and deliberately unpacking all of the necessary information that forms a more formidable foundation around race matters in all curriculum, I never intended to derail anything that was going on and I definitely did not think that my actions could possibly do so. If anything, I thought that revealing history from this vantage point would more fully flesh out the curriculum. And it successfully did so with no more than an extra week of instruction and activity.

There are two pieces here. First there is the hypocritical nature of how my presentation was received. Secondly, there is the deceptive means of communicating the discomfort around that reception. I’ll speak to the first one. I can say that it rings awfully suspicious to me that my extra week of instruction was such a horrific grievance when my co-teacher Mr. Lindner , for example, fumbled at a snail’s pace through the first six weeks of the school year clumsily delivering an orientation to the Humanities unit. He taught this in isolation. I only bring this up because once again, I was critiqued for something on my performance appraisal that occurred just as far back, but that actually went a lot more smoothly and successfully (the “Societies in Decline” unit which took 3 weeks). I do believe that when and where vitally necessary addendums to curriculum are needed, when they have been discussed beforehand (I told Mr. Lindner  several times what I was planning to do for Black History Month and he agreed), they should be allowed for.

I’ve seen this type of give and take occur several times between the 10th grade Humanities team, and at our best, even Mr. Lindner  and I have achieved the same with no problem. I find it odd and suspicious that at the very juncture when I chose to address issues of race directly, during a month universally acknowledged as the designated time to do so no less, that I was accused of veering too far off from the curriculum. If such an action supposedly takes the curriculum so far from where it should be, then there is something wrong with the curriculum, and further still, the academic culture at NOCCA, not my teaching. Meanwhile, the way that Mr. Smirk chose to handle the apparently floating sentiment that I was veering off course was neither efficient nor professional.

I was told that Dr. Judas shared in the feeling that I was getting off course and that since he was my department head, I needed to be more proactive about seeking out his perspective. I found this especially odd seeing as how Dr. Judas had never given me any inclination to believe such a thing. I spoke to Dr. Judas on a regular basis to ask him his opinion on lessons that I was developing and other issues pertinent to teaching. Further, the entire Humanities team met as a department on Wednesdays so we were in constant communication. It seems that if he had an issue with anything that I was doing in the classroom, he would have had plenty of opportunity to say it to me directly.  Lastly, his role always seemed to be more that of an advisor than that of a supervisor with the final say on the lessons that I created. He was usually pretty passive but still supportive in his response whenever I did offer a query about something.  Nonetheless, I asked Mr. Smirk to provide me more clarity about the purpose and function of the roles at play here in case I had missed something. Finally, I sought out Dr. Judas’s take on things within a few days.

What I found was surprising. Dr. Judas seemed his usually agreeable and passive self where the recent developments were concerned. He alluded to having said something to Mr. Smirk to the effect that things were veering off a bit. But this seemed to be just as, if not more so, related to my choice to teach my texts in a different sequence than Dr. Judas had expected than with the Black History Month treatment. I had already, even prior to the meeting with Mr. Cohn, adhered to Dr. Judas and Mr. Lindner ’s strong suggestion that I rearrange the order despite the last minute restructuring that had been sprung upon me half way through the development of plans for the text that I had already selected (this act of cooperation is clearly cited on my performance appraisal). It’s important to specify that I had chosen Sundiata as the next text as I felt it matched the approaching subject matter of Era 5 best, which focuses on trade and empire. The West African epic of Sundiata was a perfect thematic match. Meanwhile, Siddhartha, which I was told to switch it out for due to its being a more apt fit chronologically (Siddhartha is set some 200 years before the end of Era 5 while Sundiata is set some 1,400 years after the end of Era 5), is heavily focused on Buddhism and thus served as a better thematic match with the final era, Era 6, which focuses on the theme of religion.

Yet, at the behest of both Dr. Judas and Mr. Lindner  during a Humanities department meeting, I stopped my plans for Sundiata dead in the middle of development and switched to Siddhartha. The irony is that as we read Siddhartha in the following weeks, Mr. Lindner  had to link the novel to the theme of Era 5, trade and empire, in such roundabout ways as to have made it counterintuitive. He showed short documentary footage about Hinduism and Buddhism to orient the students towards the culture covered in the novel, and only started to link this to trade by way of the Silk Roads as of the week before Spring Break as we finished up Siddhartha. It was only because I foresaw such difficulties that I had originally decided to wait until the end of the year to cover Siddhartha so that these connections would not be so contrived. Oddly enough, I’m the one whose content knowledge was questioned.

The irony of my being the accused of being off pace with curriculum in this scenario aside, I took most issue with the way that Mr. Smirk as well as Dr. Judas facilitated the communication. If my planning was as off kilt as they seemed to believe at the time, the most professional and effective way to handle it would have been for both of them to talk to me directly rather than about me to each other behind my back. This malfeasant, roundabout means of communication is one that I have noticed patterned throughout NOCCA faculty, especially at the administrative level. It seems to be rooted in a desire to manage communication between colleagues and avert possible conflict or confrontation. The irony of course, is that it ultimately fosters more miscommunication as communicative channels become tangled and dense. Again, I could speak to the cultural relevancy issues around this chosen protocol, but perhaps that would speak too directly to my own subjective bias around the issue. But more and more, I can’t help but think that in an institution founded by blacks and taken over by whites that claim to embrace diversity, that it’s not merely my own bias that needs to be questioned here. 

Michael A. Moore