How Astorian Became a Liberal Teacher

No, I haven’t had any kind of political conversion. I’m still the same old school Catholic, rigidly conservative, #NeverTrump Republican who’s been irritating SDMB regulars for a decade.

But I got my first high school teaching job (actually, my first teaching job ever) last August, at the age of 55. I teach Government and Economics. Perfect spots for me to impose my militant conservative ideology on kids, right? Alas, no. My students all seem to think I’m a left winger. How did THAT happen?

It’s complicated, but to oversimplify: I teach in an affluent district. Most of my kids come from well-off families. Hence, many of them live in a bubble. Poverty and crime are things they have NO direct experience with.

These kids are “smart” in that they are all well educated, tech savvy, and knowledgeable about a million things I know nothing about. But I am constantly amazed by what they don’t know, have never learned, and have never thought about.

I am not a supporter of Black Lives Matter, to put it mildly. I think Michael Brown was a punk and a bully who got what he deserved. But I know enough about the blue collar white neighborhoods that cops tend to come from (I grew up in Archie Bunker’s neighborhood, after all) and I have enough black friends (who know all about being pulled over for DWB) that I have had to explain why the Black Lives Matter movement is necessary and legitimate.

So, my students think Mr. Astorian, law and order advocate, is anti-cop and soft on crime.

The same goes for all kinds of political and economic issues. My kids tend to be uninformed about all kinds of realities. Hence, I end up being the first person ever to tell them about things like the working poor, or to show them mathematically how impossible it is for a single Mom to raise a child in Austin with a job paying $12 an hour.

So, I am now Mr. Liberal. Feel free to laugh hysterically.

Welcome to the real world which is far more complicated than political labels can define.

Loved your conversion story! :wink:

I teach history and civics to teens too, and I find that having an audience of mostly-blank slates forces me to argue both sides of controversial issues. The opposite of the dynamic on a message board, where your conversation partner has, if anything, too many facts and arguments.

PS: My students’ consensus assumption is that I voted for Trump because … I’m white, and work in a correctional facility. :(. Although I think the long-timers are figuring it out since Election Day - I’ve started flinching involuntarily when one of the kids says that.

Yep. And where you have the responsibility to try and explain that to people.

It would be an interesting experiment to job trade teachers from affluent districts into poorer ones for a week and compare notes.

But I’m not going to laugh at you. It takes guts to teach, and it takes guts to teach non-simplified view of the world.

I never thought you were that rigidly conservative. Right-leaning, unquestionably. But hardly in the wingnut bubble.

And I think the things you discuss here show that. Real True Conservatives either assume that single mom can get by on $12/hour, or never let the question enter their minds. They don’t think BLM has a point; they just think it’s an organization that wants to kill cops.

If most conservatives were like you, there would be no chasm between the two sides. We could have a healthy debate over whether conservative or liberal solutions to such problems made more sense. But by and large, the gap has gotten so wide that conservatives and liberals don’t even see the same things as being problems.

So in a way, you have crossed the divide, or rather the divide has crossed over where you’ve been the whole time. And that’s a real problem for our society. So don’t worry, I’m not laughing hysterically; hell, I’m not laughing at all. It’s just another depressing landmark of how out of whack things have gotten in our country.

Or they question why she has the audacity to have kids, yet not have a husband to support them.

You’re doing the good work, astorian. Not a “Liberal” teacher, just a real teacher, the kind that wants students to poke at the Bubble. Especially the well-off bubbles where they may not notice who’s hurting.

And just imagine if you were instead teaching at some ultraliberal bubble enclave, nobody would believe you were a NeverTrumper. :smiley:

When people started openly discussing these kinds of things, the Right/Left divide was found to be complicated enough to bifurcate, into Economic right/left and Social right/left. Now, it seems there are three way to split it. I call it Media right/left. You are defined according to whether you subscribe to the dogma of the media networks.

I consider myself to be Left, in terms of both economic and social issues, but the media wallop has led me to disavow the Media Left. I think the leftists whose voices are being heard in the media have gone way overboard. I’m ashamed to be associated with their thinking, which matches the zeal with which the Media Right ignores any empirical data or logical thought processes leading to their homogenized and pre-packaged conclusions.

As in, this is the posture I want to be seen adopting, and I will find a way to justify it. And that is most easily done by bashing the other guys, since it is way too hard to actually read and evaluate the available information.

I think its because astorian is actually a proper conservative.

While many self styled “conservatives” arent. They are atavistic, reactionary or actually fascist.

I feel as bad when my liberal friends spend their time posting links to NotNews and conspiracy theories as when my conservative friends do. And they continually loose a little respect every time they do it. And I’m as pissed about being labeled a “non-liberal” and a “racist” because I’m not completely bonkers crazy as I am that if I chose the other side I’d be a RINO because I’m pro-choice.

I feel like the edges are forcing us to choose sides - but both the edge cases are a path to crazy followed by ruin.

That kind of thinking annoys the crap out of me too. Why on earth do I have to choose sides and support the dumbass decisions made by either entrenched camp?

Man, what media are we talking about, when you talk about the Media Left?

Because when it comes to those fora where having a voice there indicates that the MSM takes you seriously (e.g. the Sunday morning talk shows), the left-of-center types I see are very, very circumscribed. You get Liz Warren a lot less than you get Chuck Schumer.

And then there are the people the MSM puts on in other fora to basically show what freaks they are. That may be what you’re talking about, but I don’t think that really counts as Media Left.

I largely agree, but I’d also point out that a political system that wasn’t inherently going to produce two major parties would also probably reduce polarization and allow people with strong feelings on fringe views to be well-represented.

Our current system is inherently going to seperate the public into three groups: left, right, and neither. Changing that would -IMHO - require political structures that are not grounded in 18th and 19th century theories of government.

(Good luck with that, snoe!)

Whose definitions of “fascist” and “proper conservative” are you using?

You’re not an idiot. You’re well-informed. You’re not completely and utterly blind and oblivious to the world around you. You pay attention to the world outside of fake news. You don’t live in a ludicrously small bubble, where climate change couldn’t possibly be real, but it’s trivial to believe that welfare fraud is everywhere.

At this point, this basically disqualifies you as a republican or a conservative.

Republican, yes - the party has abandoned reality-based policies for the foreseeable future. Small-c conservative, no - one can certainly have a conservative reality-based worldview.

Can you expound on “don’t support” but “is necessary and legitimate”? I honestly don’t think I’ve seen this combination in this particular issue. Not saying I can’t broadly conceive it, but I’m having trouble with the specifics. (The one I’m more familiar with is “they have a legitimate grievance, but the way they are going about it is bad.”)

BTW, if it makes you feel better, I don’t recall you being irritating. There are some conservatives here who only seem to enjou irritating, and some who sometimes are irritating, but I don’t tend to think of you as either one.

Facts and truth and knowledge are paramount.

As liberal as I am, I can get along with conservatives who agree on that point.

Though the Republican party is rapidly shrinking away from that point, like a vampire from a cross, so that might be why your students think you liberal.