i don’t even know what to call this feeling anymore... it's like a constant cognitive dissonance or something. my fucking history class. it's 11th grade us history and the curriculum is so... it's just so sterile. we're doing the colonial period right now and it's all about founding fathers and manifest destiny, building this amazing new country, totally glossing over the genocide and the slavery like it's a minor footnote. the textbook literally has a half-page on indigenous resistance and it’s framed as these isolated incidents of hostility not like, you know, systematic destruction and land theft. i feel like such a fucking fraud standing up there, teaching this sanitized version, knowing what i know. i got my master's in postcolonial studies man, i spent years deep diving into primary sources that explicitly contradict EVERYTHING this textbook says. and the kids... some of them just eat it up, like, "wow america is so great!" and then others, you can see it in their eyes, they're like wtf is this? especially the kids of color. i see them look at me sometimes and i just want to scream "i know! i know this is bullshit!" but i can't. i absolutely cannot deviate from the state-mandated curriculum. if i do, i get disciplined. i could lose my job. and i need this job. i’m almost 30, still got student loan debt up to my eyeballs, my parents keep subtly asking about retirement plans and if i’m gonna get married soon. it’s like i’m supposed to be settling into my ‘adult’ life and career but i feel like i'm betraying my own convictions every single day i walk into that classroom. it’s a constant pressure, this internal conflict. i try to add little bits in, like "some historians argue this..." or "another perspective suggests..." but it's like throwing a pebble into an ocean. the weight of the official narrative is just too heavy. sometimes i just want to assign Howard Zinn and be done with it but that would be career suicide. i feel this constant low-level anxiety, almost like an impostor syndrome, where i'm teaching something i fundamentally disagree with. i just... i don't know what to do. how do you reconcile being a good employee with being a morally decent human being when those two things feel mutually exclusive? it’s fucking exhausting.