I passed the Oklahoma Anti-Woke Teacher Certification Test

And all I got was a visceral reminder that we're living in an era of cynical unreality that we need to resist at all costs (and also a certificate)

Portrait of the artist as a Certified Educator With Oklahoma Values

School began in Milwaukee yesterday. What a day, every year. At my daughter’s elementary, there was a balloon arch and a front walkway packed with students. Eager, anxious, bouncy. The unstoppable force of pre-adolescent kinetic energy colliding with the (not so) immovable object of outfits their parents begged them to please keep clean. A few pre-kindergarten wails, but mostly joy and the hope that this year might be perfect. At my son’s middle school, a mom wiped tears from her eyes. Her son is an eighth grader, far taller than her, but as she assured me, outside of his earshot, “he’s still my baby.” We had both spent the night before scrolling through old front porch pictures. They were so tiny. They aren’t anymore. But we’re still allowed to cry over them.

It’s a minor miracle, this whole business of sending your children to public school. Such an individually vulnerable act, but so dependent on trust in strangers, not just on teachers and immediate administrators, but on unseen district, state and federal agencies. Hundreds of millions of families with our own unique dreams and dreads for our kids, but above and around us a nation of anonymous somebodies charged with making a trillion decisions on our behalf.

We have been trained, thanks to a craven political project spanning an entire half century, to distrust bureaucracy. A dirty word, that one. So too “red tape.” But as a parent, I am immensely grateful for all the decisions that I don’t have to make that enable my kids walk in the door of a classroom every day. Not just the big pedagogical questions (what constitutes a least inclusive special education environment; how to train a teacher in the science of reading; what is calculus, exactly, and how does a high schooler show that they are proficient at it). I’m talking about the million accessory decisions. Which grade gets to have lunch at which time. Whether to start before or after Labor Day. Who wins the contract for cleaning supplies, for dry erase boards, for murals that say “Home of the Wildcats who READ!”

When I say that I’m grateful, I’m not pretending that these decisions are always made well, or executed efficiently. Not all bureaucracies are created equal, and yes they should be lovingly held to account. I’m just remarking on the volume of necessary but tedious tasks that ensure that my kids and their peers enter buildings and are greeted warmly by teachers and everybody gets to try their best to make it work.

It is not sexy celebrity-making stuff, the affairs of school administration. Or it shouldn’t be. And yet, the other thing that I did yesterday— after the pictures and the “happy first days” shouted at other parents— was participate in another human being’s stupid publicity stunt. I took a test, ostensibly to determine if I should be allowed to teach children in Oklahoma. I took it for the same reason that local news anchors stand outside Dunkin outlets on made up holidays like National Donut Hole Day. I took the bait. I fed the spectacle machine. I am sorry, but I was curious.

The duality of man

You have probably heard of Ryan Walters, the administrator behind the big dumb test I took. Officially, he’s the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state of Oklahoma, but he approaches that job less as a public servant and more as a news cycle alchemist, a wizard who converts outraged headlines into a personal brand building project. He is the Ten Commandments in Schools Superintendent. The Trump Bibles for Oklahoma Classrooms Superintendent. The Inserted Conspiracy Theories About The 2020 Election Into The Social Studies Standards Superintendent. The Doubled Down on Transphobia Even After The Tragic Death of a Sixteen-Year-Old Superintendent. Separately, he is also the Porn On His Office TV Superintendent and the Oklahoma Schools Now Ranked Dead Last in Academic Achievement Superintendent, but that’s “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” business.

I know that I should ignore him, this PT Barnum MAGA also-ran. I know and care about a number of educators and students in Oklahoma. I don’t have the energy to critique the dude merely to show off how smart I am. I just want him to get of TV for a change and, I don’t know, figure out how to help kids read better.

I couldn’t resist the test, though. Just layers of artifice, shellacked with lies. An exam that purports to be part of that state’s certification process (it isn’t). That is developed by Prager University (not a college, just a Youtube channel). And which we’re told has been deployed to weed out Marxist teachers supposedly streaming in from New York and California, dead-set on indoctrinating impressionable young Okies (citation, um, needed).

I passed, by the way. Take that, Ryan Walters. Garrett Bucks— a Card Carrying Woke Mob Backbencher— successfully scaled your culture war fortifications and stormed your castle. You thought I was buryable, Superintendent Walters, but I am a seed. A seed who, as per question 27, knows a thing or two about Martin Luther King Jr and how he was NOT WOKE.

“Don’t let them tell you I advocated for DEI,” the ghost of Martin Luther King Jr. whispers to Oklahoma schoolchildren. “Remember my famous quote, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards racial equality under the law AND NOTHING ELSE.’”

Speaking of knowledge I possess, I am also an expert on “areas like sports and privacy.”

You know that I wanted to choose D there. So badly. That’s how woke I am. You ask me what anything is for, and my gut reaction will be “to enhance the self-esteem of transgender children.” That’s why the Federal Reserve exists, I assume, because of all those Critical Race Theory courses I once took.

But no, I wanted to get the question right, so I read between the lines. That’s the key to succeeding on this quiz. Reading between lines, but in a world where the interstitial space sandwiched by those lines just reads “Please answer this as if you are a co-host of Fox and Friends and President Donald Trump could call in at any moment.” Consider, for example, this innocent question that definitely isn’t insinuating anything about which rights the authors of this quiz might want to strip from you and your neighbors.

Hey, remember voting, public education, reproductive rights, healthcare and freedom from data collection and surveillance? I don’t either.

Speaking of thinking like a Prager University employee, I bet you can’t answer this next one, you hopelessly woke interloper. You probably graduated from the Judith Butler College of Medicine And America Destruction, where you learned that the main difference between genders is whether you know all the hand motions to “Hot To Go.”

I nailed all those questions, by the way. Though now would probably be the right time to admit the final layer of, um, factual elasticity at play. This test, designed theoretically to separate the Patriot Wheat from the Trans Maoist Chaff, is literally unfailable. If you get a question wrong, you just go back and answer it again. If you do so three times, it pretends you answered it correctly.

It’s actually a perfect metaphor. You, the test taker, don’t matter. Lord knows the students of Oklahoma don’t matter. It’s Potemkin Policy. The point is the headline. Oklahoma Unveils Anti-Woke Teacher Test. The point is that Prager University got to take out an ad in the New York Times and somewhere, no doubt, a hyper-online MAGA social media manager high-fived his friends and chuckled, “huh huh huh, so based.”

There’s a lot of talk these days, particularly in regards to Trump, about which stunts are real and which are distractions. If you subscribe to that paradigm, the big dumb test clearly lands on the distraction side of the equation. Just as you are not actually required by law to eat a tiny pastry sphere on National Donut Hole Day, so too is this test just so much gossamer-winged nonsense.

But the problem is, the Situationists were right (terrible news, as they were smug and French). Everything once lived is now mere spectacle, but also the spectacle can kill you. The troops on the streets of U.S. cities are real, but the pretense for their deployment isn’t. Four years of AI essays can deliver you to graduation, but your degree will be just as farcical as my shiny new Prager U certificate. Donald Trump lies about everything, but he’s surrounded by a nation of credulous sycophants who will drone on for hours about how you’re the real liar, for refusing to acknowledge his lies. “Stop hitting yourself,” a nation of pundits proclaims, as they grind your own arm into your side in perpetuity.

It strikes me, in a moment such as this, that the choice isn’t between “real threats” and “distractions.” It’s all the same project. Teach us to trust nothing (not reality, not each other, not our own agency). Trick us into believing that memes have material heft, and that the work of keeping each other alive is less pressing than the work of winning the argument. Give us neither bread and circuses, just something new to comment on every day.

Yesterday I passed the big dumb test. And it was meaningless. Nothing was proven, either by my taking or critiquing it. As I did so, actual educators did their best to love my kids and people in distant offices worked to ensure that their buildings don’t fall apart and that their teachers have health insurance and that there will actually be a training planned for the next professional development day.

To Ryan Walters, none of that real work matters, just as faux populists like JD Vance and Donald Trump don’t actually want you to join a union. They want their most credulous supporters to hear the news and go “oh man, they did what? Sick! I bet the Marxists hated that.”

That’s not a distraction. Nor is it really a “cruelty is the point” situation. It’s a strategy, of weaponized unreality, one that ensnares both their friends and foes.

On the worst days, they succeed. Not because we take the bait, but because if you pump the space between us with so much slop, you lose both the forest and the trees.

We too have a strategy, though. If we choose it.

There is still, in spite of everything they throw at us, the fact that I am still here and you are still here and you can multiply that truth a billion times. None of us are fake. There is always somebody for whom you can care. There is always a new relationship to strengthen. There are (for now) legacy institutions that we can fight to make stronger and kinder. It’s how we bring truth to the subterfuge fight. It’s how we remember that the work that makes us alive is frequently boring and ungratifying, but also sacred and glorious. Because it’s real, you see, and it’s for each other.

End notes:

1. My children ARE back in school (the first day went great, thanks for asking) which means that I am now mostly somebody who can work full time during the day again. I’ve got some catching up to do, with many of you. But it just goes to show you, this newsletter is written by a working dad, often in the middle of the night after his kids have gone to bed. But that doesn’t make it any less my day job, so if you value it and would like to see it continue, that only happens one way. Consider upgrading your subscription, if that’s an option. And please know that both myself and my family appreciate it a ton.

2. Next week: Merch giveaway news! And also word about another movie watchalong. And perhaps some other very exciting projects. Stay tuned! Like I said, I’m coming out of a work hole (for other elder millennials reading this, I wrote that sentence and then sang “AND I’M DOING JUST FINE” to myself; please don’t tell my kids, they’d be mortified).

3. A repeat announcement. So many of you have already signed up to do a solidarity fast for Gaza with me and The White Pages Community the week of September 21st. Thank you! We still have spots on our “team” if you’d like to join us [and if you have questions, the registration website has great answers, for instance about whether you can do it if you’re not a parent (absolutely) as well as accommodations with people who can’t fast for reasons such as health, ED history, etc.].

4. I really do love Oklahoma, a gorgeous, complicated place, as so many are. It’s always been a culture war hot spot, though, so the song of the week won’t surprise you. I will always love “Okie from Muskogee” because none of us (especially Merle Haggard) has ever settled on a single answer as to whether it is earnest, or a parody, or a character study, or all of the above. All I know is that I think about the line “we don’t make a party out of lovin’” every damn day. My favorite version is Jeannie C. Riley’s (speaking of people with some expertise on the subject of school board grandstanding).

   [As always, the full song of the week playlist is available on Apple Music and Spotify].

5. While we’re on the topic of Oklahoma, yesterday I was also in a union meeting (shout out to the National Writers Union Freelance Solidarity Project) and I met a really cool writer from Oklahoma City who told me about the Literati Press Writers Co-op, and I’m not really going anywhere with this but it felt like a good Sooner State palette cleanser after all that Ryan Walters talk.

6. One more repeat announcement. Parents: remember that if you feel that your kids’ back to school pictures have been under appreciated, it is my life’s mission to ooh and awww at as many of them as possible. It’s the only universally good thing we do on social media. Just toss me an email that says “appreciate my pictures!” and I will promise to uphold my half of the bargain.