For Tyler, the final straw was a dustup over a video he showed his class a few months after he collected his prize. The video was about the seventeenth-century English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. It was hosted by John Green, author of the 2012 young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. Green has engaged in some leftish activism, but the video, the third in a series called Crash Course U.S. History, isn’t notably didactic. It is, however, irreverent and funny in a manner intended to appeal to adolescents, and if you look closely you can see, on the back of Green’s laptop, a sticker that says THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS. The words are borrowed from Woody Guthrie, who, feeling patriotic one day about America’s war against Hitler and Tojo, painted them onto his guitar; factory workers producing war materiel had scribbled these same words onto their lathes. Tyler received an email from a father complaining that the sticker, which you can barely see, was a call for violence. A nonmetaphorical way to use a laptop (or guitar) to kill a fascist does not spring readily to mind, but that wasn’t really the point, Tyler explained to me. “He just doesn’t like John Green.” Green’s sticker had previously drawn criticism from a Republican state legislator in New Hampshire, and Green’s 2005 young adult novel, Looking for Alaska, had been targeted by Moms for Liberty, an influential hard-right group that’s active in book-banning campaigns.
As a result of that single complaint, Tyler’s school barred him from showing his students any videos in the Crash Course series, even though he’d been using them for years. Eventually, the school backed down and permitted Tyler to show some of (but not all) the Crash Course videos; however, the damage was done. “It showed me that just one angry parent has a heckler’s veto,” Tyler said.
Tyler talked to his wife, Delana, and his adult stepson about seeking greener pastures. Delana was a teacher, too. She wasn’t particularly eager to move. But she understood what they were up against, and, at the end of the school year, all three moved to Tyler’s native Michigan, where he took up a post teaching seventh graders in Petoskey, a small resort town on Little Traverse Bay. He got a 35 percent raise, too. “I could tolerate the pay,” he told me, “but the culture wars are what finally convinced me. Things are so much better here.”