my suburb is trending on tiktok and i couldn’t be prouder.

The “big incident” at Batavia’s school district shows what can happen when we speak truth to power.

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It’s not particularly common that my suburban town lands in the national or even Chicago metro news. Sure, occasionally there is a regionally famous controversy over a therapy pig, but for the most part this is a relatively sleepy little river town. So you’ll imagine my surprise when Batavia popped up on my fiancé’s and my #fyp pages on TikTok this week.

The TikTok post in question, shared by user @jonbxfinity, is in response to another user’s question of what the “big incident” at your high school was. In their post, @jonbxfinity shares that when they were a junior in high school, a non-anonymous survey was distributed to students questioning whether they “smoked weed, drank alcohol, self-harmed, had depressive thoughts.”

In response, @jonbxfinity recalled, a social studies teacher at the school advocated that students not fill out the survey because it violated their constitutional right not to incriminate themselves. The incident raised so much ruckus it received national news coverage and landed on the front page of Reddit twice, @jonbxfinity says.

Screenshots of @jonbxfinity’s viral TikTok post.

The teacher in question, who @jonbxfinity describes as looking “exactly like The Dude from The Big Lebowski,” is Batavia’s own John Dryden. The incident, which took place in 2013, led to Dryden being formally admonished by the board and docked a day’s pay by the district. In response to being censured, Dryden called the survey “unprofessional and inappropriate” and the over 9,400 people signing onto a petition in support of the beloved teacher agreed. Among Dryden’s biggest supporters, the TikTok video says, were his students.

Ultimately, Dryden retired from teaching the next year and then — as the viral TikTok notes — he ran for the same school board that had punished him and was elected in 2015. In that position, he went on in 2018 to vocally defend a transgender middle school student in the face of community members who had complained about the student using a school locker room that was consistent with her gender identity. 

As encouraging as it is to see this little piece of modern Batavia history go viral specifically because of Dryden and the community’s pushback against more backwards ways of thinking, it’s also encouraging to see the comments on the TikTok post. With more than 500,000 views and 124,000 likes, the post has reached a range of current and former Batavians who clearly feel proud of what the incident says about B-town. Multiple comments from individuals identifying as former students call Dryden “one of the best teachers I ever had.” One popular comment argues that “social studies teacher are a different breed,” and another goes as far as to call Dryden a “local hero!”

This impromptu celebration of Dryden has also had me reflecting back on my work with the Batavia Community Diversity Initiative over the past year. In that time, it has become increasingly clear that Batavia has a rich if overlooked history of contributions from many individuals whose lens on the world is not so antiquated as one might expect of Chicago’s western suburbs. 

On our social media channels this month in partnership with the Batavia Depot Museum, we have been highlighting the accomplishments of influential Black Batavians over the years, including the election of Kane County’s first Black alderman, Arthur Boyd, in 1975, and the impacts of community servant Roy Bailey Sr. and educator Janet Williams over the years. The poetry of another Batavian — “Lady on the Bicycle” Cora Mae West — is also being celebrated this month, including this excerpt from West’s poem “Table of Nine,” published in the Chicago Tribune in 1994:  

I, lady nine, Goddess of time for whom

The bells shall not chime, for I master

My fate and brew my own sweet wine.

This excerpt speaks, to me, to the power of the decentered and disenfranchised among us taking matters into own own hands. To not simply accept the sour and, instead, to forge ahead in pursuit of sweetness. And it also reminds me of the power of education to arm communities with information and of educators to protect youth and help them grow their own knowledge and curiosities.

And it also reminds me why I started #QueeringTheBurbs and made it a point to get more involved with local organizing this summer. The work is hard and the obstacles are real, but stories like Dryden’s show that those of us doing this work today aren’t starting from zero. Instead, we’re drawing from a local tradition of questioning authority and demanding a seat at the table that is endemic to our town. It’s been a long cold winter, 500,000+ Americans are dead, but there’s so much reason to believe there are still better days ahead.

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Watch: The Golden Globes are tonight so this seriously bizarre awards season is officially in full swing. We’ve been trying to catch up on most of the major contenders and finally gave Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal a spin last night. Aside from Riz Ahmed looking incredible with bleached-out hair, his performance as a metal drummer experiencing sudden hearing loss is shattering. Ahmed also reportedly learned both American Sign Language and to drum for the role. Along with Nomadland and Mo Rainey’s Black Bottom it’s probably one of my favorite award-buzzy movies I’ve watched this year.

Read: The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City just ended its inaugural run on Bravo with a three-part finale that belied explanation (It had a spray tan fail! A meatball cheers! Someone — the same person, actually — ate fake snow and also fell asleep!) and I can’t stop thinking about these women. They are strange, stunning, problematic and (endlessly) quotable. If you haven’t read it yet, The New Yorker published an essay from Doreen St. Felix a few weeks back that explores the “culturally sensitive trash” that is the latest spinoff of Andy Cohen’s reality TV empire. And if you haven’t dug in yet and are looking for something else to binge watch while we wait for spring to arrive, here’s an introduction to the series:

Listen: It’s pretty shocking that I haven’t yet (as I recall) used this space to highlight the music of singer-songwriter Valerie June yet, so here we go: June has an out-of-this-world voice and craft that belies genres (though it pulls from the worlds of blues, folk, bluegrass and soul) in a way that many artists talk about but few genuinely exhibit. She’s got fairy-like energy (think Joanna Newsom, but swap out the harp for a guitar or a banjo) and a new album (The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers) on the way in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, give this track (“Call Me a Fool” featuring Carla Thomas) a try:

A Bonus Listen: If you don’t mind feeling totally gutted, NPR recently launched a “Songs of Remembrance” series honoring the lives of Americans lost to COVID-19. The series featured victims’ loved ones discussing their lives through the lens of the music they loved. It’s a devastating listen, but a beautiful way to remember the tremendous human toll of this pandemic.