The Sisyphus Gambit
Where we make the work activist teachers have to do to indoctrinate kids heavier lifting. It's time to teach the Useful Idiots all about malicious compliance.
EduTwitter is repugnant; its combination of self-righteous and intolerant is a fount of hypocrisy I thought I’d only find on Reddit. There are some good teachers trying to honestly discuss what works best for 35+ kids at a time, but they’re shouted down as ableist, pushing respectability politics, discounting “other ways of knowing”, or as straight-up racists. This strident virtue-signaling could only emanate from people protected from the reality most adults face daily, i.e., if you serve clients poorly, they stop coming back. Good thing for compulsory attendance laws!
Just how bad is it? Here’s a fun cross-post breaking down how atrocious the latest NAEP test scores are courtesy of The 74 — a largely Gates-funded education magazine exposing the failure of public education in hopes of creating yet another Microsoft cartel that will reap your kids’ minds, but, hell, at this point, how could a corporate takeover of all education be any worse than what we have?
If teachers have time to tweet how great they are in the face of this massive failure, it’s time to employ the Sisyphus Gambit, aka Malicious Compliance.
As you probably know, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity after he cheated death: twice. Well, this feels just about right to me, since the typical teacher — as incentivized by the system, mind you — has all the benefits of a bully pulpit, no consequences for using it, and is well-remunerated for 180 days of work even if she totally fails at her mission.
The teachers will still tweet, but if parents start leaning into equity on every assignment, every scoring guide, every quiz and exam, requesting quiz and test debriefs, make-up tests, and alternate assignments and modifications, in general, harm-shaming the teacher when she assigns something questionable, you may reduce her willingness to go off-piste.
Note: Zeus was the most powerful Olympian and far from perfect but he had a huge set of brass cojones. If you want to follow in his footsteps, you’ll need to find yours because this strategy demands more intestinal fortitude than the first I offered, Honest Abe, and is riskier.
TL;DR
We will hoist the activist teachers on their own petard. Plays to consider making:
Ask for extensions on everything; equitable grading makes it hard for teachers to refuse it.
Email everything you can. If the teacher doesn’t reply, assume permission. It’s a fair assumption and teachers are REQUIRED to answer emails. If you make phone calls, take notes. You’ll likely need them.
Find out what the “essential standards” are in your child’s class, i.e. which skills and what knowledge are most heavily emphasized.
If the teacher assigns a reading outside the textbook, ask for an alternate, less-harmful reading, or one that balances the author’s viewpoint. Delay turning in any work until you get the new resource.
If your kid has to write an essay, request anchor papers so he has multiple models demonstrating all levels of accomplishment.
Ask for additional opportunities to improve your kid’s grade at the eleventh hour.; teachers and administrators absolutely can change grades after the marking period ends.
You should homeschool — you love your kid so the cost is much lower than you think and the benefits a lot bigger than you estimate. Public ed just sees him as a temporary paycheck with no strings attached.
If you can’t homeschool, enroll your kid in community college classes, assuming 8th grade literacy or better and good grasp of math facts. This will give your learner more freedom, better information, and a low-cost venue for experimentation with possible majors. (For the college-skeptical — kids can job shadow, volunteer, help out in a professional office to get a taste for the work, apprentice, or intern. Just vet the company — your child should be working with people you admire and who have solid standing in the community.)
How You’ll Win
For this article, I’m going to start with your Trump Card. Ready?
For any assignment where you think the teachers is pushing a particular view, ask the teacher if it’s all right for your child to turn it in a few days (be ambiguous here) after your questions are answered so your child has the proper time to digest her guidance. These requests must be made via email.
You should have cover on this in most public schools because of the push for grading for equity, an “anti-racist” policy whereby learners can’t be given hard deadlines because every kid is unique, and those subject to systemic racism must be accommodated to any extent.
Your goal in leaning hard on Grading for Equity is to hoist the system on its own petard. A teacher committed to social justice will have to work harder when you say your kid is harmed by something in her class. Most teachers are work averse — they need the compulsory attendance laws to feel important (and that’s a systemic problem because teachers are denied any real measurement of their efficacy.) So when you push back and cry inequity, they will most likely back off. Eventually. However, many teachers will blow off your questions, take your kid’s assignments at the end of the semester to avoid conflict with you or with management, then give him full credit without ever looking at the work. Whether implemented with fidelity or cynically used as a rationalization for totally dropping all academic standards, equitable grading practices completely undermine learning at scale.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also warn you that playing the game this way may unintentionally teach your kid that sly dishonesty is a winning strategy. Then again, given the fact that we’re fighting levels of bureaucracy even Douglas Adams couldn’t dream of, malicious compliance may be the best way forward.
If you decide to make this play, have a forthright conversation with your child. Let him know your family is engaging in a battle against a toxic ideology that is hurting his classmates and community. Tell him he’s been drafted in a war. Yes, it stinks that he has to fight it at all, but tell him you believe he’s strong enough to handle it, you’ll be right beside him, and he’s really fighting for kids whose parents can’t or won’t. He may be dismayed that none of his friends are doing this, but if they see him succeed, I can near guarantee this tactic will spread like wildfire among boys. (Sexist? Yes. In my experience, girls are much less likely to question a teacher’s agenda in order to keep their grades up and social options open.)
Malice Aforethought
Before you put The Sisyphus Gambit into play, you need to know what you’re dealing with. As in Honest Abe, start out by carefully going through the syllabus for each class your child is taking. Specifically look at the section on late work and grading. You need to know two things:
What is the teacher’s late work policy?
Are deadline extensions available when a students is struggling with a concept/assignment?
If the syllabus doesn’t answer those two questions, don’t sign it. Send an email to the teacher and specifically ask her how she implements equitable grading practices in her classroom. Tell her you have some experience with them and have seen how students use them to succeed. Sound as gung ho on this as you can. Tell her that your child struggles with x, y, and z and you’re working hard to address those issues at home, but sometimes this requires additional time on assignments.
Since our ancestry is all mixed, lean hard on any brownness you can muster — if you’re even remotely Hispanic, you’re almost certainly partially Native American (maybe central American, but run with it). If your ancestors were Irish, there’s a good chance they were indentured servants, historically enslaved. If your family hails from Appalachia, they’ve experienced the degradations of intergenerational poverty. If you’re Jewish, your ancestors have very likely been excluded if not exiled from their homeland at some point. Get creative. Remember: hoist them on their own damned petard. Praise the teacher to the high heavens for her flexibility and understanding of differently-abled learners and diverse cultural norms for children of families experiencing the legacy of bigotry. Hopefully, while she glows at your assessment of how forward-thinking she is, she’ll outline her policies with holes big enough to drive a semi truck through .
Take a deep breath and think like a teenager; your family is about to push her backward, racist policies as far as you can.
I cannot guarantee this will not hurt your child’s grades. A teacher’s sympathy in the beginning of the year is enormous, but many are so burnt out by the dysfunctional state of American schooling that their willingness to accommodate anything not required by law may flip by the end of the year. It’s imperative that you save all email communication and take notes at any in-person meetings, or of any phone conversations, recording the date and time and what the teacher said, especially anything about her willingness to accept late or modified assignments. If the teacher becomes punitive or resentful that you’re taking advantage of these ridiculous, racist, anti-learning policies (remember, they are often forced upon her too), she may try to pull the rug out from under you at the end of the year. Use her emails and your notes to remind the teacher of her words. This is also evidence you may have to share with an administrator at some point to explain how the teacher’s policies changed from the beginning to the end of the year.
However, you must understand that a teacher always has the power to use grades to punish a student for anything and everything and most administrators are spineless. Sometimes that can work in your favor, but admin may circle the wagons around the teacher and you will have little recourse, at least as far as public school is concerned. (Don’t worry, there’s a workaround for this too.)
Duly Noted
In the beginning of the year, via email or at back-to-school night, you need some key information: the essential skills and standards for the class. This begs the question, “Aren’t all the standards essential? I mean, they are standards, right?”
Yes. Yes, they are. But the modern school is so dysfunctional and reality so divorced from the beliefs of the typical political hacks at the state Departments of Education, that department teams are left to triage what skills and knowledge the kids really need, placing the rest in the “If we have time” bin. Then, in the classroom, teachers triage further. They look at their class and see that some kids are going to need a lot of practice with a particular idea or skill, so they cut more, knowing the on-the-ground reality of what they can actually accomplish with 33+ people of vastly different ability levels. (I find it humorous how the reasons for homeschooling write themselves.)
Ask the teacher which of the mandated state standards and skills will be the focus for the year. I strongly recommend asking this question without looking like you know much. Try couching it like this: “I glanced at the state standards for this class and they seem overwhelming. I don’t know HOW you get it all done! What skills and knowledge will my kid really need to work on get a good grade in your class? Do you have a list of skills or topics so I can help my kid focus?”
ProTip: Frame everything in terms of grades. The second a teacher sniffs out opposition to her ideology, she will view you as a less-than-human troglodyte which may have in-class consequences for your kid you can’t prevent. If she believes all you want is a high GPA, her defenses will be down allowing you to respond more nimbly to any lunacy presented as doctrine in class.
This strategy is meant to make the teacher rethink any proselytizing she does in class, but knowing exactly what your kid is expected to know and do gives you enormous latitude to work around an activist teacher, even if you don’t get her to back off her sermonizing. Equitable grading means that any evidence of meeting the standard should be acceptable; remember: “different ways of knowing” is real to these people. (We’re going to have fun with this in the next strategy: Mockingbird.) This is a huge defect in a universal public schooling system as it totally undermines economies of scale.
Diversity is Our Strength
Because teachers are now tasked with not only knowing their content, but remaining open to the ways in which every single cultural group, gender non-conforming child, differently-abled student, etc. might respond to a topic, we have effectively ruled out any clear standard for academic achievement — they all must be individualized, times 150+ kids for the typical high school teacher.
Let me repeat that: there CAN BE no clear standards for academic achievement anymore.
Timeliness is gone, both because it’s not a universal cultural norm, but also because of time blindness associated with ADHD. Standard English can’t be insisted upon because of its inherent whiteness and because it others kids with dyslexia, dysgraphia and aphasia. Correctness in math is no longer necessary; we’re in the business of making meaning now: math facts be damned.
Yes, there are still multiple choice tests, but those are going by the wayside. Many “educators” argue against them constantly, citing plenty of reasons (mostly social and emotional) to dismiss any data that demonstrates their poor performance. Many teachers who don’t want to change their set curriculum (remember: it’s on loop after they’ve taught for two years) haven’t given up multiple-choice tests, but have adopted a test retake policy that borders on academic dishonesty because a kid will see the same test numerous times. Not only that, a student can always request an alternate assessment because she has “test anxiety”. A project or presentation perhaps? Maybe a short paper supported by ChatGPT? AI is the future, you know.
There is no way for the system to handle all the differentiation necessary to meet every learner wherever they claim to be and make up for historic injustices to an affinity group. A teacher seriously trying to would burn all of her waking hours. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make the teacher think a little harder about just that. If she can see the end game here is the destruction of her career because she is unnecessary as an expert when there’s no expected learning standard or the kind of work hours that would prevent her from having any semblance of a personal life, she might recognize the necessity of teaching for the purpose of information retention and demonstrable skill; not just feelz.
Here’s another way you can help her come to this conclusion more quickly.
For any reading other than one directly sourced from the textbook, email the teacher asking for an alternate source of information. Explain that the reading is problematic for your child. It doesn’t gel with his cultural legacy. Pick on the author, her background, her education. Pick on the publication, the webmaster, whatever. Any weak ad hominem will work. If the teacher responds with something along the lines of “Sometimes we have to engage with ideas we consider harmful,” tell her you agree, but that you’d like her to share an alternate argument that can help your child reframe/minimize the harm created by the first reading. You don’t have to be too specific. At this point, all you’re attempting to do is make the teacher work harder to justify her curricular choices.
Give the teacher 48 hours to respond with an alternate reading. If the second reading offers balance, you get to do the work of sitting with your kid, reading both pieces and talking through them, looking together for areas of strength and weakness in the writers’ arguments. The good news is that you may have a more honest and knowledgeable teacher than you first thought. Congratulations: you won the lottery. (Don’t lower your guard though.)
However, if the second piece is just as objectionable as the first, restate your concerns and ask again for an alternate piece. Of course, this means your kid will have no homework to do while you wait for the teacher to look harder. Your 13 years of I’m-a-good-kid compliance training will balk at this, but if you’re annoyed enough to go this route, do you really want your kid writing the approved answers down as though they’re actually true for a few measly homework points?
If she doesn’t come back with anything within 48 hours, send an email asking if she can offer an alternate assignment that would allow your child to practice the skills or topic the original assignment was meant to help your child develop sans the original reading.
And here’s what she’ll probably do: excuse your kid from the assignment completely
So here’s what you’ve effectively accomplished, besides annoying a government employee:
She’s had to seriously consider that her views are causing harm to students.
She’s had to research alternate viewpoints, perhaps even reading some of them.
She’s had to consider how her ideology might actually prevent kids from learning knowledge and skills she deems essential. Seems counterintuitive, but in making her consider dismissing your kid from the assignment to get you off her back, a thinking teacher would have to question the ethicality of changing the standards for any kid.
You’ve protected your child from mindlessly parroting the party line for a dubious reward. (Getting the mark to repeat the lie is Step 1 in indoctrination.)
You may have inadvertently raised your kid’s GPA by preventing him from completing an assignment honestly that may have resulted in a lower mark.
And what if the teacher doesn’t respond at all, you might ask? Well, this is why we take notes and save emails, my friends. Check your kid's grade. If there are zeroes in any grade record, point out the numerous unreplied to emails you sent and tell her you’ll have the work done just as soon as she responds to your family’s concerns.
Maybe.
Time Is On My Side, Yes It Is
An alternate way to make it harder to roll that boulder uphill is to ask for time. A lot of it.
As a Latina, ignorant apparatchiks often hold lower expectations for me regarding deadlines and timeliness. (I should get a couple teardrop tattoos, pluck my eyebrows more severely, and say “ey, ese” at the end of every sentence to capitalize more on their ignorance.) This is also a common racist trope against Pacific Islanders, First Nations peoples, and blacks. If your kid has any symptoms of ADD or ADHD (FYI, all kids do) tell the teacher your child suffers from time blindness. Use their soft bigotry of low expectations against them. HARD.
Worksheet or essay, turn it in whenever your kid feels up to it. I do recommend turning things in both via hard copy and email; the email gives you a date stamp so the teachers can’t fall back on “Johnny never turned it in.”
If your kid doesn’t feel like working on it, or you think the assignment is garbage ideology, you can go even harder and just write a note on the assignment saying, “My child attempted this, but it created a lot of anxiety in him. The source material is harmful. Please excuse him from this work. If you cannot, please offer an alternative assignment that would allow him to demonstrate the same skills minus the traumatic reading.” Then have your kid hand that in.
The evil clown inside me who finds all of this darkly funny is giggling. A fun experiment might be to strategically write the note in the spaces where the answers were supposed to go, I can almost guarantee your kid will get full credit.
Few teachers actually check worksheet answers.
Anchors Aweigh
Here’s how you make teachers even less likely to give your kid a cultish essay ask for anchor papers.
Multi-paragraph (let alone multi-page) essays are almost never assigned and, if assigned, rarely graded conscientiously. No teacher I know enjoys grading essays. The only ones I know who do it with any fidelity are generally AP teachers. They have clear curricular support from the College Board: written prompts, clear rubrics and access to anchor papers.
Of course, this comes with the huge disclaimer that I work in California where nobody but DMV staff has more ironclad tenure protection than teachers, so teachers can and do minimize this kind of work by rarely, if ever, assigning writing and, what’s more, not strictly requiring that it be on-topic, clear, and/or coherently organized.
Asking for anchor papers requires the teacher to produce 3-4 sample papers with different strengths and weaknesses so the students can measure their work against a sample.
If the teacher tells you that students will be peer editing, ask her how she plans to fairly match students of radically different backgrounds and skill levels who can fairly understand your child’s way of knowing and writing? She won’t be able to — no one could.
Tell her you’d prefer anchor papers. Then, when your child has had the culturally appropriate amount of time, request that the teacher herself give clear, written feedback on your child’s draft, mindful of your child’s individual truth, xir background and abilities and, of course, recognizing that any insistence on the correctness of written English or logical organization is a form of white supremacy.
Here’s what will happen: your kid will get little feedback and an automatic A.
Empathy First
I bet you didn’t know this, but grades can absolutely be changed after the semester or year ends. If you’ve employed Sisyphus well, this teacher pops an extra Xanax when she sees an email from you. At the end of the year, you may find out she’s decided (too late) to hold the line on grades by saying that your kid has a low grade due to missing assignments.
But you can push her further because deadlines are white supremacy and the law in the state of California (and my guess is in other states as well, especially the blue social-justice-y ones) is that grades can absolutely be changed after the end of the semester/year.
If your child has a grade lower than an A, reach out to her and say, “I’m concerned about the harm this grade will do to my child’s future. Given the legacy of American bigotry, my kid needs high grades to minimize the effects of systemic oppression on his future, bleak as it is. How can my child demonstrate learning, according to his way of knowing of course, that would raise his grade to an A? Until systemic oppression can be fully addressed, I feel it’s my duty as his primary caregiver to ensure all doors are open to him. Please let me know as soon as possible. We can submit the work to the principal when completed if you are on vacation. Please CC the principal on your reply to this email so I know she is aware that we may be turning in work after the end of the school year. ”
The teacher might try to hold the line, but after a year of playing their game, you should be fully comfortable with the phrases, “Other ways of knowing”, “insisting on grammatically correct English discounts my child’s lived experience,” “learners work at their own pace so it’s problematic to demand all students achieve full mastery by an arbitrary date,” and “it wouldn’t be equitable to insist on a specific level of work from a diverse body of systemically oppressed students”.
You’re Right: This is Perverse
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Not only is this sick, it’s going to require a bunch of time.” Yes it is. Given the right mindset it could be fun, but we are talking about your children here and this could definitely go sideways on you.
Then again, you could have a ton of fun claiming to be a convert and forcing them to follow the diktats of their ideology precisely. Questioning your loyalty would be, well, in a word: oppressive since they have all the power in this situation. You’re using their definitions. You’re supporting equity. You’re fighting to get the teacher to respect every learning difficulty resulting from the oppressive meritocratic system she dedicated her life to changing. Plus, you’ll mostly be working via email, so you don’t have to be that convincing — all you have to do is use their language.
Hoist on their own petard.
Then again, this doesn’t solve the two basic problems of American public school in 2023: (1) your kids aren’t learning as I detailed here, here, here, here, and here and (2) they are in harm’s way. Are you sure it’s worth it to send your precious child into school ten months out of the year, placing him in the care of people who don’t love him, have their own axe to grind or are so burnt out by the other axe-grinders in the system they’re barely able to do their job? There is only one lesson successfully taught in American schools: you will comply and conform, or else.
I’m going to ease you into this — well as much as I’m capable of not beating people over the head with anything, but please know I say it with love and out of concern for the future our children will inherit. You are good enough. You are an intelligent, literate problem-solver. You have the ability to teach your children, and do it well because you love them. Our schools are so broken, yes, even dating back to the time you attended, that anything negative they taught you about yourself is probably not true — it was a failure of the system, not the human imprisoned in it. It was them, not you.
You have the technology. You know where to get the books. There are thousands of people who want to help you. Empowering your kid can be risky, but wasting the most important years of neurological growth in compliance training to conform to a system that will use and discard him is worse.
If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen
If you can’t let go of the “grades are paramount” paradigm, even though grades cannot serve as norms for learning anymore if we’re following equitable grading practices, here’s your ray of hope.
If you live anywhere near a community college, enroll your kid in a course or two. Don’t bother with high school dual enrollment — it’s a marketing gimmick. The college classes offered during the high school day are lame intro courses dumbed down further than they would be on the Community College campus.
Your kid doesn’t need high school at all really. He needs 8th grade level literacy and good knowledge of math facts, up through pre-algebra. A student can start taking lower division courses as early as he wants.
If your kid is weak in reading or arithmetic, that’s where you should focus your time. Practice math facts 30-60 minutes a day until your kid has them nailed down. Have him work up to reading long-form texts in an area of content interest. Stick with nonfiction and spend a half hour a day talking to him about what he’s learned. Encourage him to design a project that would demonstrate what he knows. This may be really hard for him at first because he’ll be stuck in the public school mindset and just want to make endless Google Slides presentations. Give him the agency to DO something with what he’s learned. You have an enormous advantage over public schools here because real individualized project-based learning doesn’t scale in the American classroom. But you can make it happen because you have a more flexible schedule and only one kid (or a couple). Have him write about the process and spend time (or hire a tutor) to improve the correctness, clarity and organization of his written work.
Then sign up for a class. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’re just getting your feet wet. Community college is now geared to get kids who went to the worst public schools through to university. It’s loaded with tutors and the profs all have office hours. On top of that, the internet is full of videos with the best teachers in the world that can help with any topic.
You can start this in the summer, and if it’s a good fit, keep on going through the school year. If your kid decides he wants to go back to high school, they’ll take him and he can make up any missing credits online in a few hours — again, it’s sick, but I get that some families will struggle with this change and prefer the conventional approach, just like most prisoners re-offend to go back to prison. It’s easier.
Your kid can also take a high school diploma equivalency exam, though I think those are mostly pointless since they’re not required by community college and most small employers care way more about what you can do than where you went to high school, but if you want a corporate office job, you’ll need it.
From 13 up, kids can start training in a trade or job shadowing an entrepreneur or interning in a professional office to learn a high-level skill that doesn’t require a college degree, but can be remunerative and is difficult to offshore to India or China. Can you do that at school? Nope. You can do it with a local tradesman or shop once you establish your work ethic. I wrote about that for older high school kids here if you need ideas about how to get started.
You don’t need high school. You don’t need junior high either, that toxic soup of low expectations and out-of-control hormones. At best, it’s bad daycare. At worst?
The options I’ve laid out here may work for your family. They may not. But hopefully, they’ll get you thinking about how you can preserve what little learning is possible for your kid if he must remain in public school and allow you to throw a sabot in the system at its weakest point: the activist teachers themselves.
Have at it.
If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they left school. The system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.