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.