From the moment it was clear that my partner and I were moving to Illinois, I started learning Spanish using Duolingo. I had used Mango languages in my last job to learn a little Swahili when that was the most prevalent language in my classroom.
But Spanish has been much easier than Swahili, with less linguistic distance between Spanish and English, and so many cognates. It’s so much easier.
I actually spoke in Spanish with a mom on a phone call last week, something that I was terrified to do when I was learning German in the 1980s or Chinese in the late ’90s. Without the visual cues, I just didn’t feel up to the task. And now, it just works.
It seems silly that this gamification has me coming back, morning after morning to continue to play this language game, but there are so many payoffs:
Parents appreciate the attempt, even if it’s messy.
Students are more likely to make a connection, knowing that I’m willing to take the same risks they are.
Maybe–just maybe–we can actually communicate.
Now could all this be done with a translation app or Google translate? Maybe. And I do bust out my phone if I get stuck. It definitely helps me communicate more clearly. But I’m just thankful that I’m gaining the skills to help make this really difficult journey sometimes a little easier.
One of the most important things I’ve learned is how Spanish works as a language. It helps me to know WHY they make the mistakes they do in English. And that’s an important piece of information to have. I can explain weird English better when I know where they are coming from.
Another essential thing, and possibly the most important: It’s humbling. It reminds me daily of the struggles my own students are going through on a daily basis. Would I feel confident enough to talk about biology or math or literature with my current level of Spanish learning? Likely not.
And that’s an important piece of wisdom to carry with me daily.
I have to admit that I currently hold the hardest job I’ve ever had. I moved during a pandemic to teach at a middle school. I took this position while looking for an elementary role because I connected best with the hiring committee through Zoom. Zoom interviews are a whole thing on their own. But this team made me want to be a part of what they are doing.
But the work is definitely work.
Middle school kiddos are always going through a tough time, no matter one’s economic status. For many, this not-quite-a-little-kid, not-quite-an-adult stage is just hard. And teaching those kids is also difficult. It’s a time of physical and mental change, a time of rebellion in small and big ways. And it’s also time of feeling a lack of control. Friends. Family. Teachers. Community. Nobody quite gets it.
I used to joke with my colleagues when I was in high school, parents of young adolescents themselves, that it would be so incredible to just put those kids in stasis until they learned how to get along with the world. They look for acceptance and at the same time push others away. They love and hate at the same time. Pushing/pulling with the same fervent rage attached.
Last week, I found some of that joy, of that realization of self, when I finally was able to bring a monthslong project to end.
We built benches and garden beds. Things for them to create and know they had a hand in building; things that will stay long after they are no longer at the school. And these kids were awesome.
When I first wrote the DonorsChoose grant for drills–after securing offers of help from Sara, my principal who bought the wood for the benches, and volunteer extraordinaire Dan, a carpenter who had just moved in across the street who agreed to teach us how to use the drills, design the pattern off one I found on the internet and cut that wood–some of my colleagues told me I was crazy for wanting to put power tools in middle-schoolers’ hands. But I had had this discussion before, years ago, with a friend and colleague in Vermont who had a hand in running a program called Rosie’s Girls, a summer camp that took its name from the World War II icon Rosie the Riveter, that did exactly that: Empower middle schoolers (in this case, girls and now gender-fluid youth) to connect to their inner strength through power tools.
I can only hope that my students are taking home with them the esteem and confidence that Rosie would be proud of.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I went back to delete this post (originally posted April 15, 2021, a month before the end of school) in an effort to put a better foot forward, to show my professional life in a better light. But after rereading, I just can’t. It is what I was going through at the time. I hear the frustration in my words, and to delete them is to deny this happened. School wasn’t right. And many people knew it. The pandemic is/was/will be difficult to live through and live beyond. I still feel these things. So I’m keeping the post. But I hope that the wins I’m experiencing now will show my path forward. I’m still fighting the good fight. And hope to do so for a long time to come.
I am now a middle school teacher.
It’s nothing I aspired to be.
Ever.
It takes a certain kind of caring, and a certain kind of crazy, to do this level of teaching just because of the instability of youth at this age. They are struggling somewhere between being a kid and an adult, wanting to push the envelope one minute, then have their hands held the next. It’s a rollercoaster of a ride. They don’t like who they are or where they are and feel very little capital to change their situations. It’s also crazy because people don’t really think about the middle schools. In high school, there’s a goal to get them college-ready. In elementary school, there’s a schoolwide goal to get them reading and thinking.
What is the goal of middle school?
To keep them from killing each other? Maybe?
They are tough to teach. And, sometimes, they are tough to love.
This is when they learn to shut off. To roll their eyes. To pretend they don’t care. Or to really not care.
How do you stop that?
Teaching-wise, middle school is really the last to get support. They are different from the other levels. The mission is unclear. Mushy.
What I’ve noticed is that elementary teachers tend to be highly regulated, so ESL teachers at this level can generally find their place in the world. When I taught at that level, I decided that I was going to teach reading because students needed to be able to read to get content. Simple. We were able to get the resources we needed by writing grants and making demands. We built a storehouse, my partners and I. I was able to use dance, drama, art… all sorts of things to reach students. I mostly loved my job all those years.
In high school, I had full autonomy. I didn’t always have what I needed for resources, but I was also accountable to pretty much nobody after I created my class and decided what to teach the students in front of me. Students who were at the beginning stages of learning English needed emotional support, opportunities to learn vocabulary and practice how to do life, and they needed exposure to technology. I was able to use all sorts of things to reach students. I mostly loved my job all those years.
I have only been a middle school teacher once before, in New York City. I was assigned to the school. People always talk about behavioral issues. I had little trouble with that, but I did have trouble with the adults who wanted to stir things up. I had some resources, loads of autonomy, but also little support to get done what I needed to get done. It all felt like a fight…
And here I am in middle school again. But this time, we’re in a pandemic, in a district that wants me to demonstrate my use of standards and summatives and formatives yet doesn’t have a curriculum I can look at. I have a book. But I’m flying by the seat of my pants. When I ask for time/space/guidance, nobody knows what to do with me. My thought is that if you want me to do this right, you will guide me there, rather than to assume that I know my way or will stumble onto it.
They say they want excellence. But they throw curveballs at you all the time. We have a minimum number of assignments–and types of assignments–that must be posted each quarter, and there is no collaboration/correlation among the middle schools. It’s been hard to find my niche.
In addition to teaching, I am the social worker who finds out about living needs. I am the secretary who makes sure they can make it to class or that they are not counted absent. I am the main line of communication for everything. My days are filled with trying to make sure that my beginning-level English learners know which bus they are supposed to get on. And I’m supposed to know that through osmosis because nobody gives me that information. There’s always a problem to fix. And I’m running out of steam…
I don’t quite know the ropes, yet. And I’m getting tired of trying to figure out who I am supposed to ask to get what. It seems like I am just supposed to know things.
This week, just after I got my kiddos set last week on when and where to get the bus, the transportation department decided that students weren’t getting on the bus and buses were traveling empty. So they cut three of my students from the lists. They changed route numbers for the rest of them, as well as the times they were supposed to be getting on the bus. My students were texting me, sending me desperate messages about wanting to be at school and that the bus isn’t there. I don’t even have access to the system to find out when they are supposed to be riding which bus. And when I ask, it takes days to answer my questions. Meanwhile, my students are standing on the curb waiting for a bus that never comes.
And then there’s the issue of testing. That we’re testing at all in a pandemic is just crazy insane. Who thinks this is good pedagogy? How do I teach students to grasp a new language when nobody unmutes or turns on their cameras? I’m just lucky that I’m making connections at all, that they trust me at all. That they will do anything for me is a miracle.
And when do I teach? I still can’t figure out how to do that in half-hour class increments when it takes me four times as long to do anything.
For me, it’s that I come to this profession from a place of privilege. And that every child deserves to be listened to, understood and loved.
I have never had to wonder where my next meal would come from.
I have never had to worry about whether I would be deported.
I have never had to stand in a food line.
I’ve never been orphaned by war or violence, or had to leave my family behind.
I’ve never had my life seriously threatened.
I have a country to call my own.
I have the right to speak freely, even if my beliefs don’t align with yours.
I’ve celebrated every birthday and holiday knowing that I was relatively safe.
I can walk through pretty much any store without being watched out of fear that I am dangerous.
I own my car and my house. I have laundry facilities in my house. My bills are paid on time. I have some savings for retirement. I am secure in my job, my health, my family.
While playing a game on Blooket yesterday on Zoom with my students (awesome game, btw, to get students interacting with content!), I found myself having to repeat a lot to one particular student messages of kindness.
When this student won a game, we would hear the annoying laugh made famous by The Simpsons bully Nelson Mandela Muntz. When he would not know the answer to questions, we would hear constant complaining, about how it was too hard and how he was just guessing, how I should change to the other question set that he had already memorized (conjugation of “to be” in English) rather than the words he was struggling with (story elements vocabulary). I had started with the simple content in order to learn the platform. I moved to the harder content to turn our gaming session into a learning session. He asked repeatedly to switch back. I gently refused.
I let his complaining go on for a while.
But I eventually told him that I would mute him if he could not stop; the vocabulary we were studying was being used in his reading class daily. It was new to the other students in the group, who are in a pull-out reading class, but he should know what author, narrator, conflict and first-person narrator mean. His teachers used those terms all the time, and if he couldn’t define them, that meant he was missing out on what his teachers were trying to say to him.
I explained that the game was an opportunity to learn. By moaning about how hard this was, and by not actively using this chance of getting repeated questions with no real consequences connected to it–other than not winning the game–he was wasting a learning opportunity. He instead was insisting on guessing, rather than improving his understanding by paying attention to his mistakes–which, I admitted, was his right. He would say that he wasn’t going to play anymore because this was not fun. He could choose to play further, learn the target vocabulary and have fun, or he could wallow. I would not force him to play a game. But he shouldn’t ruin the learning opportunity for his classmates. Learning is more important.
His answer was, “Not for me. Winning is important.”
😦
Why? And how do I effect change?
His attitude was coming from a place of relative privilege. He was happy to play the game as long as he was comfortable with the content. The moment it became challenging, he was no longer working toward self-improvement. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water…
But as queen of the Zoom meet, I can mute that attitude.
In the end, I didn’t have to. He muted himself because he wanted the fellowship, no matter how unrewarding it was for him in this current state of needing constant positive reinforcement and complaining when he didn’t get it.
He stayed to the bitter end. He still complained, but a little less fervently. I’d like to think that standing up to his negativity made a little bit of a difference.
But this whole thing troubles me–the idea that things should be easy, the idea that we can complain until things go our way.
It is my hope–and this might not happen until we are actually face to face teaching again– to get my middle-schoolers to see their learning as paramount, as a road to self-improvement, to see challenges as just that: a challenge, rather than an unsurmountable problem.
And this carries over to all the other people in my life, complaining that things are not as they want it. They want Zoom meetings not to conflict; so they will yell about it. They want the pandemic to not affect them personally; they’d rather ignore it or not wear masks. They disagree with whatever is going on politically.
We can work for change in a positive way.
We can face challenges with an attitude that we can learn from it or we can gather the strength and unite with others to change it.
This has been a heck of a year. And now we need to unite for whatever cause we espouse with a positive attitude, even if we don’t like what we are presented with. We don’t have to meet it with hate and anger and violence. We can learn. And we can work to change from within.
We can all learn a little from middle-schoolers’ inflexibility.
And from the Notorious RGB:
“So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.”
This year, I moved halfway across the country, to a home we bought remotely. I started a job I interviewed for remotely. And I’m currently teaching students who I’ve only seen icons for, or have seen only in passing as a drop things off at their homes.
I feel like the past year of teaching online (we started this nonsense in March 2020 in my old job) has sapped joy and energy out of my teaching. It’s aged me. And it’s made me renew again my negative self-talk that defines imposter syndrome.
But there is room for hope.
Since my move to Illinois, I took a meditation class with the Mindful Teacher Foundation and tapped into using Calm (currently offering a free 30 Days of Mindfulness for the Classroom–complete with recordings that could be used with a class in person or online–as well as a Wellness Guide for Teachers, both available here). The two combined have given me space to stop myself from the madness. And this month, I started Breath, a 30-day yoga challenge with Adrienne.
All these activities that I would have never looked at twice before are now my reason. My reason to get up in the morning before I take my walk with my 4-footed child. My reason for coming home to breathe deeply just before dinner.
What meditation and yoga have brought me to is to find a space to listen to the glimpses of vulnerability that my students message to me, like whispers of truth. And these. tiny spaces where these preteens open the door just a crack provide me reason to come back and come back and come back.
Like the day I read with my English learners a book that ended with the question, “What does your mother do?” One messaged me privately and said, “Nothing.” She put exclamation points and a smiley face after it. It made me think more deeply about this student who had not really been participating. How much undiagnosed trauma are we dealing with here? What is her story. She is here with her dad and siblings. There is no mom in the picture. I don’t know why, but I know that I’ll find out, once COVID is under control and I can have deeper conversations with parents and students. Opportunities like this, though, that have presented themselves through private messages on Zoom lead me to ask more questions, to find out if everything is OK, to see if they have what they need. Like coats. And food. And socks. And hats and gloves. Or just someone to listen.
As we’ve moved into 2021, I have breathed a sigh of relief for my students. Refugees had it hard under the last administration. There were threats of making people pay more for green cards, or for the right to take citizenship tests. People were afraid to get public assistance, even when they needed it, out of fear that they would never be eligible to pursue the right to live here permanently.
I’ve been avoiding social media mostly. I need to turn inward a bit for now and focus on my mental spaces.
I feel out of touch. But I also think that this time that I’m taking for me is my lifeline.
Today, this last Sunday before returning to work after the holidays, I’m spending a little time doing some professional development, reading about growth mindset. And my worlds seem to be converging. I’m a serial podcast listener by default, because I walk my dog Zippy every morning, and I need something to distract me from the idea of exercise. I don’t mind walking as long as I’m distracted. And podcasts do that.
This morning, I was listening to No Stupid Questions, a Freakonomics podcast hosted by Steven Dubner (who co-wrote Freakonomics) and Angela Duckworth (who wrote Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverence). And this particular episode, titled, “Is Optimism a Luxury Good?”, addressed, sort-of, a question I’ve long held: Is “grit” (“passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way,” direct quote from a profile of Duckworth by Leah Fessler) something that is really only for people who can afford to be “gritty”?
Is optimism really that useful if the deck is really stacked against you?
–Steven Dubner, No Stupid Questions, episode 33
I have, for the past decade-plus, taught primarily refugee students who are learning English. And even though many of the students I’m teaching now are not labeled “refugees” in my current district, they fit the definition. They have come from war-torn countries. They are here because life where they came from, like Guatemala and Congo was pretty awful. They have experienced interruptions in their education. And they are not, in most cases, very “schooly”.
When my former district handed out Mindset: The New Psychology of Success as a professional development reading, we ESL teachers started having deeper discussions about the idea that our students had plenty of resiliency. But not grit. And was that wrong?
Our students had lived through hell to get here, in many cases. A colleague related a story about an elementary student we shared, whose face lit up when trying to describe the word “camouflage” by explaining that she and her family members had camouflaged themselves while hiding in the ditch from soldiers. Another father whose teen I had in my class claimed that she had no trauma even though her mother had died when she was 5. “That was a long time ago,” he said. “She’s over it.” (My mom died six years ago. And I’m still not over it. And I’m far from being a teenager.)
And now, for districts to cling to the idea that all our students need is for us to help them develop “grit,” well, that is a slap in the face. These babies don’t need more grit. They need a lot of things, but not that. They have endured no heat in the winter. They have endured losing track of or being separated from family members, or not being able to properly mourn and say goodbye to those they have lost back home, when they know what has happened. They are living in poverty, which on its own is debilitating.
2020 brought us the book Maslow Before Bloom: Basic Human Needs Before Academics by Dr. Bryan Pearlman, a book title that has become a meme.
In this episode, Dubner asks Duckworth to defend her position on grit: “Is optimism really that useful if the deck is really stacked against you? … Convince me that the style of grit you espouse isn’t a luxury good, but it’s something that you can afford to reach for when things aren’t already going pretty well.” Dubner goes on to talk about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how they fit into this question. Can one really reach for self-actualization if the rest of the pyramid is not in place?
Duckworth replies that she honestly doesn’t know, that she studied grit in pretty well-off places, where all of those needs were taken care of: West Point; the National Spelling Bee and the like.
A teacher from Romania contacted her with the same question my colleagues and I were asking in Vermont. Is this useful when students are dealing with so many other struggles? And Duckworth’s answer was that the students are facing structural problems, and the only answer to that is structural solutions. To talk about grit and ignore those other problems would just be wrong. The structural issues are outside the students’ control. She goes on to talk about coping strategies, control what you can…
But that still brings me back to the thing that we were complaining about when we were given Dweck’s book. Is [insert keyword of choice here: grit/growth mindset/optimism] a luxury good?
Poverty is awful. Chemically, it produces imbalances in the brain, putting kids in a perpetual fight-or-flight state. Emotionally, it leads them not to trust people. Physically, it eats away at one’s soul. Poverty leads educators to promoting institutional racism in schools when we expect kids to behave a certain way, to learn according to a schedule, to adapt, to assimilate. Poverty leads us to lecture kids on things like growth mindset, when all they can really think about is that they didn’t get to have a birthday OR Christmas this year because of COVID and all the fears that surround it, for good reason. And that makes them sad and lonely. And angry, because the teachers just don’t understand. Or maybe, they think, we don’t care. It leads educators to not understand when students can’t see their way to turning on their Chromebook cameras, even though they know that the wifi can’t handle the load, or that they just don’t have the ability to be on display. They just don’t have the words to tell us.
Yes, growth mindset is a good thing. Yes, optimism and fortitude and ability to learn from failure are good. Yes, we’d all love it if our students had this kind of resiliency. But can they? Is this really the key? Or is this another luxury good that my students just can’t afford?
Many social media posts were out there asking people to come up with their One Word for 2021. Mine is gratitude. So on this day, I find myself grateful for many things. So I’d like to offer up thank yous:
Angela Duckworth. Thank you for talking about this. I’ve been dying a little inside every time the topic of grit comes up. And thanks to Steven Dubner for posing the question.
Thank you to my administrators and to my colleagues at Franklin STEAM Academy, for hearing me asking about help for my students, who are all struggling. Thanks to all offers, promised and received. Nancy, you rock. Really.
So I’m going to return now to my professional development sessions about growth mindset. But I feel like I’ve just had a little win thanks to No Stupid Questions.
I was looking through photos yesterday and saw how normally it started. And now I feel somewhat adrift.
Here are highlights of what’s happened this year:
Our school went remote in March, and I couldn’t get my kiddos to log in or do much. But it’s OK. Because nothing counted. And nothing mattered. We were all just adrift. The shutdown happened right as I was getting ready to go to TESOL. But then that didn’t happen. I just couldn’t make myself attend online. I was too sad.
Along with the trauma of not having school and not being able to socialize, my students were hit by other issues, which I tried to help them work through, including food. Including money and job losses. One struggled because the auntie she had called Mom for most of her life, who she left behind when she immigrated to the United States, died, apparently in shady circumstances. I met her to walk and talk. and social distancing was not possible. Some wouldn’t do school at all. Eventually, I just started visiting all of my students, checking in to see if they were OK. And that was glorious.
My husband took a job at the University of Illinois, so I started a job search. I had to tell my boss I needed to start looking. That was not fun. And I can tell you that virtual job searching is awful. And there is a right way and a wrong way to do a group interview. I was offered a job in a smaller district sometime around the end of March, but I chose to not take it because I would have been earning just over half the salary I was making in Vermont with easily twice as much responsibility, working alone in a district with more than just a few English learners. And the job search continued. I accepted a job in Champaign, IL, somewhere around April. Better salary than the first offer, with another teacher doing my job at a magnet school. I was to have a colleague! But it was at a middle school. I have only taught middle school once before. And the teachers were the worst part of that job. But I didn’t really want to do middle school again because middle school all on its own is traumatic for everybody. Yet here I am.
I gave notice, found out that it didn’t matter that I rarely took sick days or personal days during the 13 years I had worked there, because I had to let the district know in December that I had planned to leave if I wanted the 50% payout. Also found out that not keeping my own school records in order is a pain in the patootie if I wanted to get another job. I knew I was on the pay scale at masters + 30, but it was tough going finding out where I had earned those 30 credits. No one could give me access to my file because of COVID. They just weren’t going into the office. Sorry. So when the new superintendent was hired, I wrote a letter pleading for his help, copied in all those who couldn’t help me before, and suddenly had everything I needed. Why can’t people just be nice?
I taught summer school, something I desperately wanted because I wanted to say goodbye to my students. It was hard because most of my students chose not to come. Remote school had left a bad taste in their mouths, and they weren’t up to playing school right now. Half of the students I ended up teaching were 8th-graders, some of them rising 9th-graders, but others who just had nowhere else to go because they were being retained (and that’s a whole ‘nother story…). But we had no relationship. Add to that the fact that I was interviewing candidates for my replacement and training the woman who was ultimately chosen. Extra stress I didn’t foresee. I had three goals, the least important of which was teaching content. The other two were to stress the importance of taking the COVID pandemic seriously (one of my students asked me if I had heard early on that Black people couldn’t get COVID), and to teach them about the protests that had been happening ever since George Floyd was killed. I tried to teach them about BLM because, like it or not, these Congolese students would be lumped in with other African Americans. They felt as though it was not their fight, and they are right. But it’s important that they know. But that, too, ran into some issues. My students were fighting me about wearing masks indoors. And when we started on the same day as the mask run-in reading about a student who a judge kept in juvenile detention because she didn’t do her homework, my students decided I had chosen that lesson out of malice. They thought my lesson was to teach them not to stand up against the teacher or they would go to prison. Ugh. So much not my intention. And that took a week to clear up…
We sold our house after much back and forth-ing, and bought a new house remotely in Illinois. We’re still sorting that out…We moved in late July. This experience also was the worst. I never want to do that again.
I worked out a schedule in theory to teach with my new colleague and other administrators, but I had an issue with co-teaching. The way the schedule was set, we would be attending grade-level meetings of grades we were not teaching, which made no sense to me. So we made some changes. And then when I got here, she really wanted to change things back, which meant the entire schedule had to change.
I started and then deferred pursuing National Board Certification. Such a wrong time to start this…
I was “co-teaching” in 25-minute long classes. In writing, I was in a class with someone who only taught at the school part-time. Why my students had been assigned to him was beyond me. We had no time to plan and I didn’t quite understand what the bigger idea was. My students were not participating. I found out later that it was mostly because they couldn’t. There were no accommodations. I was the accommodation. And that wasn’t working. I was also “co-teaching” in a combined class in order to help teachers better deliver content. I didn’t know how to do this. I quickly found out, though, that I had been assigned to the wrong teacher, or that my students had been assigned to the wrong teacher. Most of my students were enrolled in the class where I was not assigned. Such a mess. But again, there were no accommodations. I was the accommodation. And I didn’t know what I was doing there, either.
I have pulled my students out of their writing and reading classes so that I could go at a slower pace, and actually give them the opportunity to participate. And that is half-working. But I have no curriculum. And no time to plan one. And expectations are that I give them 2 formatives and a summative and cover three standards each quarter. I don’t know how to do that, either. In my last job, I was teaching a class I created and graded pass/fail. I was there to teach my students how to be students. And when they could talk to me, they moved on to other classes. I had not actually “graded” for more than four years. This was all so fascinating. And weird.
One daughter started college. After we got her re-diagnosed as an adult with spectrum disorders. It was super hard. And still is. And school is hard. And everything is hard.
One daughter left all her friends and struggled mightily to leave the only place she has ever known to move somewhere with no mountains and no lakes and no friends. It has been hard. And still is. And school for everybody just is awful.
Partner struggles with the idea that this was the right move sometimes. Even though the job there was not progressing well under a new boss. And that’s still hard.
The one absolutely positive thing that I have done for myself this year is to take a class on meditation. And last year, when Calm was offering free access for teachers to their app, I signed up. These things have saved my life, I think. I am meditating every day. And I still get out with the dog every day. And I still hit my 10,000 steps most days.
So now, it’s New Year’s Day.
I’ve been doing a puzzle. I’ve played games with my family. Cooked. Watched some interesting and not so interesting TV. I’m doing some professional development, watching Ditch Summit videos and learning about a lot of cool things. But I still need to come up with some curriculum for four classes.
Here are the things that I am working on in this next year:
Learning how to better teach in Illinois, which means getting to know the standards better and figuring out where my students fall in their needs. How do I individualize for them and help them learn when I barely know them?
Getting to know my students better. As soon as we get the vaccine and spring warms this place up again, I’m going to start to plan home visits to interview families. Their teachers need to know about the cultural expectations and hopes and dreams that they come from. They need to know what is important to these kids and how best to teach them. I need to get that information.
Fighting (still) to get more access to information for teachers.
We need to know more about the families these students come from. The district has these answers. Why can’t we see that?
We have to find out by trial and error whether our parents can communicate without an interpreter. Why is this so hard? The district already has this information?
How can we get our parents to know how to become better partners and advocates in education? I know they would want to know if they knew the could know. But it’s all so foreign…
Teaching online. I hope that I will become an expert in flipping my classroom, if nothing else. I have found some amazing mentors who are helping me. And maybe I’ll meet them someday.
It’s a year to branch out. To find new connections. To try to find my place in this new system.
A couple of weeks ago, when I was mulling over how to teach my New American students about MLK Day and all the history that that implies, I found an email in my inbox from the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. They were offering a teacher workshop with Damien Sneed, who was performing with his group. If I paid $20 for a teacher workshop after school, they would give me 2 tickets to the evening performance, We Shall Overcome, for free:
Join visiting artist Damien Sneed for a workshop inspired by the words and actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sneed is at the Flynn presenting student matinee and evening performances of his work We Shall Overcome, which ties together a living lineage of music and culture that includes traditional and modern gospel, classical, jazz, Broadway, and spirituals, all interwoven with excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches. Fee includes two free tickets to see the evening performance of We Shall Overcome. This workshop links to civil rights, activism, music history, African-American culture/tradition/history, voice, expression.
I thought, “Why not? I need a date night. And maybe I’ll learn something” So I emailed my partner, secured a place on the calendar, and planned to go.
And then I totally forgot about it. And my partner got confused, because I also that same week had asked him to get tickets for me to see Dr. Ibram X. Kendi who is speaking as headliner this week for UVM’s 2020 MLK series. He wrote the book How to be an Antiracist, which is on my list of things I need to read, ever since I heard about in during the #leadingequitysummit at the beginning of the year. But I have a conflict with my afterschool commitments. So I told him that I didn’t need the ticket after all. And my partner thought our date night was off the books. But I did register to see Damien Sneed; our date was still on, even though I had forgotten.
Wednesday morning, I looked at my calendar and realized that my evening plans needed to be altered. I wouldn’t just be going to bed early. We had a concert to go to, and I was going to make it happen.
I am so glad I went.
In case you’re interested, here’s an interview in which Damien Sneed talks about the tour:
The first hour of the workshop was all about his story and how he got here. I wish that were something my students could hear in a language they understand. He spoke of his adoption, of his parents, particulary his mother, dying, of the power of music and of opportunities lost and gained, struggles and triumphs. And, yes, of music.
The second focused on what we might hear that night and how it connected with moments in history. We sang and marched together. He remarked how lovely the people of Burlington were (which we are) and said he really needed to look at properties. 🙂
Then he asked if we had questions.
I asked how to make this relevant to students of color who did not grow up with this historical context.
I struggle with this, being white.
In my last blog post, I talked about my approach to teaching MLK for real, that instead of reaching for elementary-school-aged materials, which consists of the kumbayaya that we settle on for kindergartners (I have a dream… people couldn’t sit where they wanted to on the bus, so Rosa got arrested and Dr. King fixed it), I wanted to help my students understand why they might feel uncomfortable today, about our country’s more than checkered past and present when it comes to race relations, and about why many people just prefer not to bring up those uncomfortable ideas of race and racism (because of course, we in our white fragility do not have a racist bone in our bodies) and prefer focus instead on images of MLK preaching love and unity and celebrating identity. I want them to understand that claiming colorblindness is not OK.
So how do I get there? How can I take this rich history of music and turn it into something my students can sink their teeth into, in a way they understand?
I told Damien that recently resettled refugees have to live with the stigma of color without having the context of history. This is really hard. And it shouldn’t be a one-day introduction to Everything Black U.S. History. So how to I teach them? How do I make them understand that sometimes they might be watched in a store, just because they are African? How do I explain why white people might not sit next to them on the bus? How do I explain that just by walking with a group of friends, they might be perceived as “dangerous” or “suspicious”?
He found my question “interesting” and asked the person who was documenting to film while I asked my question (which I pushed back against because I was emotional, as I always am when I talk about things that fire me up) so that he could think about the answer a little later.
For me, this has become an issue of necessity, of security, of safety. My students need to know. And we can’t just celebrate the positive and paint pretty pictures.
He talked to us about resources offered by the Smithsonian Folk Ways resources, about Eileen Southern and her research on Black American musical history. But he said that he liked my question. He liked a challenge. And that he would be in touch through the Flynn.
So I’ll wait for more answers.
But in the meantime, I went back to the Flynn to listen.
And the concert was outstanding. Music blended with historial speeches. We listened to music from the past, from gospel standbys to pop hits. The group of singers who traveled with Damien were artists worthy of headlining their own concerts, including all these amazing people. My partner, a lover of all things musical, nearly jumped out of his seat when Damien announced that one of the singers, Linny Smith, had won a Grammy for his work on The Greatest Showman. “Can we hear that?” he whispered.
Damien Sneed’s style was one that left all of his compatriots guessing. They didn’t always know which direction he was going to go next. He’d play a few notes, and they would stare at him until they finally nodded with recognition at the song he wanted them to croon. And he made his keyboardist get into the action a bit, sliding in to take his place on the keyboard has he handed him the microphone and asked him to scat. This fly-by-the-seat-of your-pants performance made it all the more real. You had to pay attention. Damien told the audience that the elementary and middle school crowd from that morning had danced in the aisle, then they challenged us to dance.
And we did.
We didn’t really have a choice. But it was delicious to be invited to jump up and move. It was exciting and exhausting and lovely and beautiful.
I’m excited to see if I actually will hear back about how I can connect my students to this rich musical history.
But in the meantime, I will rejoice in the fact that I spent a glorious Wednesday engulfed in music and story, and be forever grateful for my opportunities to connect with such amazing people.
Thank you, Flynn Center for the opportunity and the tickets. And thank you Damien, et al. For everything.
I think this project is super important and I’ve tried to incorporate it in a number of ways. I haven’t gotten the chance to actually have my learners do the project, but I’ve done it where I present mathematicians for a warm up, where I had a bulletin board of it, and where I used them as table/group labels after seeing them from Pam on her blog here: https://pamjwilson.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/table-labels/
But then I moved to a new room with desks instead of tables and got the idea from the teacher who had been in the room before to have colored tape on the feet of chairs to label the groups. So I put the 8 table labels (A-H) up on my wall to display since I wasn’t using them…
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