Peep Show

      My friend Marla is famous for the peep shows she created at work. She usually holds them right before a company layoff. She asked me once if I wanted to see one. I most certainly did. She grabbed an orange marshmallow peep and plopped it on a white paper plate. We walked out of her office to the corporate kitchen where she put the plate into the microwave and set the timer for thirty-seconds. She waved her hand for me to come closer.

       We huddled in front of the glass as the peep on a plate began to spin. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. Then, slowly, the peep grew. The marshmallow pumped up like a balloon, to four times its normal size. When Marla took the peep out after the timer dinged, it deflated into an orange and white blob, quite unrecognizable except for two tiny black eyes. Indestructible, Marla told me. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I always thought peeps were a food product that would last at least a thousand years. Who knew a microwave could change a peep into something very different: a pile of nothing, a way to push back fear, a substance fit for laughs and the trash can.

    And I thought about the public humiliation of a teacher I knew a number of years ago  recently accused of drug possession. The headlines screamed: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL BUSTED ON DRUG CHARGES. The photo showed a woman with tangled, shoulder length blond hair in need of a good shampoo, puffy, shocked eyes, and pale skin. At first, I didn’t believe this was the same person I knew. But it was.

     The article stated that Sally initially called the police to her home for help with her husband. She was afraid he was going to harm himself and had threatened to do so after acting strangely one evening. He kept guns in the house, and she called the police for help. Once the guns were secure, a police officer asked if they could search the rest of the house. She gave her permission for them to do so. They police claimed that drugs and drug paraphernalia (marijuana, a bong, six glass pipes with residue that tested positive for methamphetamine, syringes, and three Ecstasy pills) were in plain sight in an upstairs area of the house where the husband worked from home. She told the police she didn’t know what they were talking about, none of that stuff belonged to her, and she didn’t go upstairs at all.

     Their response: yeah, right. So much for the presumption of innocence. Four days later, the police arrived to arrest them both, at 11:30 at night, after he was released from the hospital. The photo in the paper was taken that same evening: after countless hours getting her husband the help he needed and at a time when most people are asleep. No wonder she looked as she did, though none of this made it into the paper.

      While a few people wrote comments in support of Sally, most were hateful attacks laced with fear, judgment and shame. Here are a few examples: ew she even looks like a druggy, They should lock her up and throw the key away…..PIG CRACKHEAD…..lol, This hag needs to be fired today, Obviously she was too tweaked to put away the bongs, etc., Principals don’t have to be that smart these days. She probably needed to get high because of the boredom from too much time on her hands. This makes me sick. It’s a product of the culture we live in, where online tirades are encouraged and acceptable, whether or not a story is complete or accurate. The humiliation of another brings readers and readers are a market for advertisers. Period.

      Sally was immediately relieved of duty from her job, pending an investigation. She told district administrators that police found a bag tucked in the back of a closet left there by a relative containing one marijuana joint and the pills. How had her life come to this?

     The teacher I knew five years ago was the first person in her family to graduate from college. She arrived by 7:30 every morning and worked until 8:00 at night, every single day. When I asked her how she did it, her reply was simple, “I’ve always worked.” Her efforts showed. Her room was well organized and pleasing to the eye. She put curtains on the windows, hung student work on the walls, made access to learning materials easy, and her students loved her. She was meticulous about teaching and determined to help the children succeed. She wanted to become a principal, so she ran after school programs, summer school, kept up with a classroom website, and took classes towards her master’s degree.

     Once she completed got her degree, she served for a couple of years as a school instructional coordinator and vice principal before getting a school of her own. As a principal, she arrived on campus early and didn’t go home until 8 or 9 o’clock at night, falling into bed exhausted. I’ve never known a more dedicated, hard working, educator. But none of this was mentioned in the newspapers or on television. None of it.

     The public shaming of teachers only adds to the hysteria and fear that engulfs public education. In fact, we live in a culture of shame, where a person’s difficulties are paraded in full view for everyone to judge, without knowing the full story. What if we could bring compassion instead, listen deeply, offer assistance and support, because sometimes it must feel to teachers and administrators like there’s no way out, other than some form of escape – overwork, alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, depression, anxiety. Educators will never be able to meet the expectations imposed upon them for perfection. Sally is the victim of a system that rewarded her hard work, but her sacrifice led to no awareness of what was happening in an upstairs room of her house.

     Which brings me back to Marla’s peep show. We laugh or ridicule others as a way to cope with our own fear. Any one of us could be next.