For a conservative (particularly a social conservative), working as a teacher in America’s public school system feels an awful lot like being an exile in a strange and hostile land.

Earlier in my career, collaboration between teachers, while encouraged, was not mandatory. A teacher’s classroom was one’s own domain. As long as one could substantiate to their principal and students’ parents that their lessons met the curricular objective established by the district, teachers were under no compulsion to teach the same lessons as their colleagues. Those days are long gone. Starting with No Child Left Behind, and accelerating under Common Core, delivery of classroom instruction and assessment is under the direct control of district and school site administration. The “perfect” lesson is one that is “teacher-proof,” sanitized of any distracting individuality, conveying the authorized and approved content with a predictable, mechanical reliability. Such lessons almost universally reflect the progressive dogma prevalent in society currently.

Of course, it is more apparent in some parts of the country than in others. In a deep blue state like mine, publicly identifying as a conservative will bring explicit verbal abuse from progressive co-workers and make one a social pariah. “Well, I didn’t want to be invited to the stupid staff party, anyway,” one grumbles to one’s self, but it extends to more than just after-hours friendships. Once “outed” as a conservative (or even worse, as a “Rethuglican!”) every discussion concerning lesson collaboration becomes a potential minefield – one misstep and boom! Every shared lesson or activity becomes a new source of tension and stress. Nobody wants to to work in an environment where they are treated like a pariah.

I love teaching. I love being a teacher, and the most rewarding aspects of my military service were those that blended leading soldiers with teaching them (particularly when I was teaching them why what we were fighting for was worth fighting for). I suppose that because of these common experiences, I cannot help but see my current situation in terms that reflect my military background. Thus, the “insurgency” simile.

The tactics of an insurgent are relatively simple.

• Phase I: When the government forces are strong and advancing, retreat. Avoid pitched battle and direct confrontation. Harass and interdict; never get decisively engaged. Protect your own forces.
• Phase II: When government forces stop advancing, stop retreating. Observe, ambush, and raid the government’s supply lines. Never let them feel secure moving around the countryside. Build your own strengths.
• Phase III: As government forces weary of tedious and hazardous occupation duty, and as public support back home weakens, they will eventually begin to withdraw. As they withdraw, attack, but always leave them a clear path of retreat.

For the time being, I am in Phase I, because the power of the state is strong, and its forces are many. I craft my lessons subverting progressive dogma whenever I can, and deliberately soften the state’s message when I have little or no opportunity to undermine it outright. I look for ways to let my students know truth exists, separate from their own limited perception of it, and that truth is worth pursuing.

Be that as it may, most of the time I feel like nothing so much as some lone partisan, like a flea-bitten wolf skulking into town, scrawny and malnourished, determinedly chalking rude and defiant graffiti on the walls of the academic citadel: “Romanes eunt domus!”

Usually the only effect I accomplish is to have those I seek to overthrow step-up and correct my grammar: It is “Romani ite domum!”

And so, having delivered a stinging rhetorical dart into the heart of my enemy, I slink back into the hills, nursing my meager resources, and praying for an opportunity to ambush any of my oppressors who might blunder into my miserable patch of forest.