“The Disposition”

The situation

The people in this case are fictional composites. Nobody here is a real person. The situation is real, and some version of it is running right now in teacher preparation programs all over the country. Daniel is twenty-six. He spent four years installing heating and air before he went back to school, because a man at his church told him boys need a teacher who knows what work is. He's a senior now in a state university's teacher education program, licensure track, high school history. He and his wife Renee have two kids under five and a rented duplex with a leaky back door. He stocks a grocery warehouse four nights a week. His student loans come due six months after he graduates, and he's already run the number on a napkin. Eleven hundred a month. Spring semester is his student teaching placement. It is the last thing standing between him and a classroom of his own. On Monday, November seventeenth, an email arrived from the Office of Clinical Practice. Subject line: Placement Hold. It read, in part, a concern has been raised regarding your progress on Disposition Four, commitment to equity and affirmation. He is invited to a meeting, and he is required to sign a Professional Growth Plan, which states that his personal beliefs created a harmful climate for peers, and that he pledges going forward to affirm all identities without reservation. The concern came from a discussion in a methods course three weeks ago. A classmate asked him what he'd say if a student asked him about marriage. Daniel said he'd keep his opinion out of it, and that he'd treat the student with respect either way, and that if pressed, he believes what his church believes. That's the whole record. The plan is due Friday at five, November twenty-first. If he doesn't sign, the placement doesn't happen. If the placement doesn't happen, he graduates a year late, or not at all, and the loan clock keeps running anyway.

The technique

Here's what's actually being run on Daniel, and it isn't personal. It's procedure. In the book, William Green's Rules for Radical Christians, this one is called a conviction redefined as conduct. Watch the move. Nobody is going to send him a letter saying, we require you to change your religion. That letter would be dangerous to write and easy to fight. So the belief is restated as a behavior. It isn't faith anymore. It's a disposition. A disposition is a professional competency, like classroom management or lesson pacing, and a program is permitted to assess competencies. Once your conviction is sitting in the competency column of a rubric, they can fail you for it and never admit they touched your faith at all. That's the whole trick, and it's a good one. Notice three supports holding it up. First, the concern was raised. Passive voice. No accuser, no date, no quotation. That's manufactured consensus. Daniel is meant to picture a room of peers who all agree he's a problem, when it may have been one classmate and one nervous instructor. Second, the deadline. Four days, over a week that has a holiday in it, is not time to think. It is time to comply. The book calls that the deadline that prevents deliberation, and it works because a tired man with two kids will sign almost anything by Thursday night. Third, the price of speech has been set. Not a fine. Not a reprimand. A year of his life and eleven hundred dollars a month. When the price gets set that high, silence stops feeling like cowardice and starts feeling like stewardship. That is the point. They do not need him to argue and lose. They need him to calculate and fold. And the paper he signs will say he agreed his beliefs were harmful, in his own hand, voluntarily. That signature is worth more to the file than any ruling ever could be.

The temptation

Thursday night. Kids asleep. Renee's asleep. Daniel's at the kitchen table with the plan printed out, a pen beside it, and the furnace ticking. This is the moment the case is decided, and there's nobody in the room to see it. The voice that comes is not a devil with horns. It's a reasonable friend, and everything it says is nearly true. It's just paperwork. Nobody reads these. Well, it is paperwork, and paperwork is how a record is made, which is precisely why they want his name on it. God knows your heart. He does. He also knows your hand, and your hand is the part reaching for the pen. Think of the good you can do inside a classroom. True, and every man who ever traded away something small for access told himself that exact sentence on the way in, and found that the price of staying inside goes up every year. And the last one, the strongest one. You're not denying Christ. You're signing an administrative form. Consider Peter. He wasn't standing on a platform renouncing the Lord in front of a crowd. He was warming his hands at a fire in a courtyard, answering a servant girl with the smallest possible words. I know him not. Small setting. Low stakes. Tired man. That's how it's always done. It is never presented as a denial. It's presented as a way to get through the night. And here's the grain of truth that makes it so dangerous. Daniel really can treat every student with kindness. He really does intend to. So signing feels like agreeing to something he already believes. But read the sentence again. It doesn't say he will treat students well. It says his beliefs were harmful, and that he will affirm without reservation. Those are two different promises, and only one of them is about conduct.

Your move

So change the ground the fight is on. Daniel is not being asked to behave. He is being asked to confess. The counter is to give them every bit of the conduct and none of the confession, in writing, where it can be read later by someone who wasn't in the room. Don't refuse the meeting. Don't refuse the plan. Refuse the sentence. He writes back Friday morning, courteous, no heat in it, and he says this. I will treat every student and colleague with respect and hold every one of them to the same high standard, and I will gladly put that in writing today. What I cannot sign is a statement that my religious beliefs are harmful, because those beliefs are a sincerely held religious conviction. Please tell me in writing which specific teaching duty requires me to affirm a belief, and which written policy makes that a condition of my placement. That's it. He has now offered full professional compliance and declined the creed, and he has asked the institution to do the one thing institutions hate. Name the duty. Cite the policy. Sign their own name to it. Most of the time that document does not exist, and the program has to decide whether it wants to invent one. Two more moves, and they matter as much. Before he sends it, he tells one brother from church and one elder exactly what he sent and exactly what he will not sign. That's pre-commitment. A man alone at a kitchen table at midnight will fold. A man who told his elder on Thursday will not, because now folding costs something too. And third, he keeps being excellent. Perfect attendance. Lesson plans early. Best observation scores in his cohort. If they ever move against him, let the only thing in his file be his convictions, because everything else in it is outstanding. He asks about the written accommodation process and the grievance process, by name, in the same calm tone. He does not threaten. He documents.

Scripture & close

Hear the word of God. Daniel, chapter one, verse eight. But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. He purposed first, in private, before the tray ever came. Then he asked, respectfully, of the man in charge. He stayed in the king's college. He finished at the top of it. Here's the takeaway. Give them your work, your respect, and your excellence without limit, and never give them your signature on a lie about your faith. This is the Education Mountain. If this is happening to you, Ask: rules for radical christians dot com, slash ask. Your first one is free. And to know which of the seven mountains you are standing on, take the free assessment at rules for radical christians dot com, slash start. Stand your ground. We'll see you on the wall.