Put your fucking hands together, 2020 (a love letter to Charli XCX and educators everywhere)

I've been trying to figure out why I've been so captivated by this old video of Charli XCX launching into a tirade performance at Melt Festival in 2013. It first made the rounds on Twitter in 2018, when her now-famous words "does anyone fucking know this fucking song?" became the meme of the day, and it still resurfaces from time to time (which explains how I encountered it on my feed two years later). Witness it in all its raw glory:


The easiest way to read this video is as a confrontation rife with schadenfreude: here's a pop star with a #1 hit, bewildered by this lot and how incredibly unwilling they are to "put their fucking hands together." Unstoppable force, meet immovable audience. And sure, it's fun to imagine ourselves as a part of that big crowd. Get your ticket. Find your seat. See Charli yell, jump, scold, flail. One YouTube commenter points out, not without satisfaction, that if you pause the video at 0:13 you can see a woman in the front yawning. 

What's surprising is that the more I hit replay, the more I found myself not just cackling, but nodding. Something about this video was resonating with me on a deeper level - but what?


Let's talk about the last ten months of 2020. We're in the middle of a pandemic that started off in many people's minds as a two-week pause on life but has since extended into what seems like an unending chapter of uncertainty and suffering. We've seen the story of COVID-19, as with so many other things in our country, playing out differently depending on your ZIP code and your job title and your access to money and resources. While everyday people scramble to hold onto their homes and jobs while risking infection on a daily basis, our noble leaders jump the line for vaccines after a long day of work stalling negotiations on $600 stimulus checks. (Karma is a lie and Mitch McConnell's Twitter feed is proof.) The people in office bang the drums, scream that the show must go on as we all try our best to keep our jobs and schools and Wednesday happy hours going, all while trying our best to ignore that the fucking sky is orange. 

If you work in K-12 education right now, this dynamic might feel especially familiar. That's how it's felt for me most of this school year (and I say this working at a school where I'm fortunate enough to have supportive leadership and incredible colleagues). You see parents on Facebook groups screaming about reopening schools, the health of students and staff be damned. You hear about rich white families creating "pandemic pods" (the 2020 equivalent of hiring an educational au pair) and think about your sophomores, many of them logging into class from the good corners of their apartments and taking on part-time jobs so their families can cover rent. You pore over a spreadsheet of Common Core ELA standards, wondering how many you can realistically cover in a truncated 17-week semester. You spend your weeknights cobbling together colorful Google Docs, step-by-step videos, and authentic work samples of every single assignment your students have to do. When you finish, you time an alarm so you at least get an even six hours of sleep after planning from 10PM to 1AM. 

And then you roll out of bed, wash your face, and put on your best smile for the Zoom camera. 

You do all this because it feels like the right thing to do, even when doing the right thing, day after day after day, feels like swimming against a current leading into resignation. If you are an educator in the United States in the year 2020, you are Charli XCX on that stage: screaming does anybody fucking know this fucking song into a void of black boxes, hoping that at least one kid out there is picking the signal up, shouting those words back. On the best days, you get most of your students to sing along; on the worst days, you weigh the possibility of throwing your hands up and walking off-stage. Despite your best intentions, apathy leaks through your window, seeps into the air in your room. How is any of this fair - for students, for families, for educators? What's even the point of trying in times like these?

This year has tested my "why" more than any year before: on the days when my voice was glitching, 3 kids got logged out, and I spent my nights writing lesson plans, I feared that I had lost sight of my purpose. But we're educators. We're used to working through the chaos: hell, our kids are too, aren't they? Isn't that why they've shown up each morning, even when it's 9AM and you can see them rubbing the exhaustion out of their eyes with their pajama sleeves? Together, we push through the awkward moments, the radio silence, the drama in the background, because like me, I know my students need that sense of purpose as much as I do. I still believe in the power of reading and writing to help us process our feelings, to reflect on our lives, and to reimagine our world. I wouldn't show up to my job otherwise. Neither would they.

And as I look back on a semester that has stretched me to my limits, I find comfort in looking at some of the beautiful things my students and I got to create together. We used Celeste Ng's story "How To Be Chinese" as a model for their own second-person point-of-view narratives. We built our knowledge of inequities in the American school system and used our argumentative writing skills in letters to the Hayward City Council. We created powerful research projects ranging from presentations on COVID-19 to bilingual poems about the Mexican American immigrant experience. When I see their creativity, their passion, and their persistence, I see the future. The old world may conspire to drown our voices in a wall of noise: an endless four-on-the-floor beat blasting our eardrums to shreds. And despite it all, we will continue to remind each other how to jump, to shout, to sing, to scream. We know this fucking song. And you can't stop us from dancing.

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