Mr Rad's Neighborhood

A week ago, I reached over to pick up an empty backpack after a night sleeping on a cot. A moment later, I was spitting swear words through my teeth as the muscles in my back felt like they were attempting to change places with each other.

In that week, I have spent more time not moving than I have spent in the whole rest of this year. So, just because nobody asked for them, here are my reviews of all the things I’ve watched, read, and done while unable to do just about anything else:

Books:

Star Wars Books:

Last Stars - Way good. It’s essentially a love story with space ships blowing up and stuff, following childhood BFFs that eventually love each other and then fight on different sides of the war.

Blood Line - The best Star Wars book I read. Just well written with characters that were easy to care about and some really thoughtfully done critique of polarized political debates as well as the idolization of horrific pasts.

Aftermath Trilogy - Yes, all three of them.  These were good. It felt a little like a Clive Custler novel or something like that. A group of scoundrels with good in their hearts traveling around and punching people in the face who suck at stuff. By the third, it is legitimately messed up and digs more into loyalty vs. fanaticism. One time, just one, there’s a side chapter that stars Jar Jar Binks. It is the most obnoxious thing that has ever happened.

Other Books:

American Street (by Ibo Ziboi) - This book was beautiful, just gorgeously well written with masterfully drawn characters. This was the best book I read, probably the best book I’ve read since The Children of Blood and Bone.

How Schools Work (by Arne Duncan) -  I have thoughts. I’m writing a whole piece about it.

TV and Movies:

Mindhunter -  FBI guys interview serial killer guys. Super good.

Extinction - Aliens blow everything up. Dude shoots his way out. Awful. Just, really freaking awful. 

The Signal - Idiots follow a signal, end up trapped and there are aliens and everything is crazy.  Pretty good. Way better than Extinction, which was awful.

Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee - I watched just about all of them. Often, while watching, I would say to myself, “well, this is delightful.”

Youtubers (generally listened to from the iPad across the room that my daughter was holding, or on as background on the TV while she was drawing). In the Venn Diagram of “Youtubers” and “People who are not the worst” the circles do not touch. I hate Youtubers. I’m worried that they are in her head too much, but also, it’s not like we can go for a walk. Ok. I kinda like The Odd 1s Out.

Other Random Stuff:

Pokemon Go - Less fun when you can’t walk.

Socializing -  I did not do this.

Social Media - Depending on my mood in the exact second, it was either great and helped me feel connected and stuff, or just sucked and I hated everything. So… my experience with social media did not change in the slightest.

Muscle Relaxers - Yes.

Racism - I spent a lot of time online, and my god. White people are super super pissed right now, and they can’t be quiet about it. They are shouting, sometimes in the same posts, that we all need to ignore Race and they just don’t see it and also that they are really upset when people of color are doing well. Or they are talking about Democrats “buying” the votes of Black people through Welfare. Whether it’s the comments sections, twitter, or the actual, real world, everyone’s racist uncles took the summer off and won’t shut up. I’m hoping this is a “dead cat bounce” sort of thing, the last gasps of a dying way of thinking. 

My Daughter’s Art - She’s been drawing and doing stuff all summer, and she’s getting super super good. Every time she finishes a piece and shows it to me, I’m blown away. I remember, before she was born, thinking about the fact that at some point there would be this new human that would make things that had never existed before, that would have original ideas and stuff. Now, on her way to turning 8, she’s doing it, and it’s the most beautiful thing. She even started an Instagram, @junipermysticvlogs_art .  She will draw pictures of your cat for a small fee.

I watch the videos. The ones that show officers punching, kicking, choking, tackling men for having cell phones, for walking, standing, being while Black.

They are awful, the videos, but I watch them.

They are wrong, the police. Wrong to use such force, to use violence so readily to subdue someone. I cannot imagine them reacting to a white guy like me with such fear, with such an immediate assumption of generalized guilt. I cannot imagine what I would do.

And I’m wrong. I’m wrong because I see those videos, and so often, I see the person being arrested, and I see them lock their arms in place and refuse to bring them behind their back. I see them struggle to stand instead of laying down as ordered. They are not so much fighting as they are refusing to surrender.

The police scream, “stop resisting,” and a part of my brain says, to the man on the ground with a knee in his back, why don’t you? Wouldn’t this just stop if you did what the police say? If you didn’t do anything wrong…

... but you didn’t do anything wrong, aren’t doing anything wrong, and all the sudden you are approached by someone who means you harm.

And maybe they don’t mean you harm, and maybe you don’t even consciously assume so, but maybe your body knows the stories of all the times this exact sort of interaction ended with the person in your position dead. Maybe your body carries those stories with it, and your body hears the aggression in the voice of this blue-shirted man with the gun and the badge and the chest puffed out from body armor, and your body tells you there is danger.

You put your hands up, palm out, to push the danger away and to show this screaming man that you are holding nothing. You put your hands up to say, if you just give me one minute and listen, you will understand that everything is fine, that there is no reason for you to kill me.

But the man doesn’t seem to listen. He grabs your extended hand, immediately starts to pull it behind you. It hurts. It hurts and is unnecessary, you know that it is, and it is dangerous and now the man is screaming in your ear. He is saying “stop resisting,” but you are not. You are not resisting. You are trying to keep your arm where it does not hurt. You did nothing wrong, are doing nothing wrong.

Your body is screaming to you that it is in danger. Your muscles are flooding with adrenaline.  You are being attacked, and you did nothing wrong. You try to say so. You scream for him to wait, for him to listen. He does neither.

He sweeps your legs out from under you, or shoves you against a car, or the road, or someplace hard or someplace that cuts your skin. His partner is on top of you in seconds, digging a knee into your back, making it hard to breath, to talk.

“Stop resisting” they scream, but you have no idea what your arms, your body is doing. You are under attack, in pain, in terrible pain.

Your body is not designed to meet this kind of danger with a forced calm. It is designed to fight, or flee, or freeze. It does these things as reflex, hard-wired.

Your mind is not designed to understand the shocking dissonance of someone punching you repeatedly in the face while telling you to relax, telling you to stop moving. But they punch you and punch you and tell you you are doing something wrong.

You are not trained for this. You are not professionally responsible for this situation. A few moments ago you were just walking, just existing, and now you are being kneed repeatedly in the ribs and told that in order for the attack to stop you must, immediately, make yourself defenseless to that very attack. When you do not, when you won’t surrender your arms to be bound behind your rapidly bruising body, it is called resisting.

And you will not make more than a breath of the news. There will be video, from a friend or someone passing by who thought to bring up their phone, but it will do little more than be passed around the internet. One commenter will scream “brutality” from his couch and another will say “just stop resisting” from his toilet, and both scroll on to the next video. Some months later they will drop whatever they charged you with to excuse the beating you took, but only because now there is video.

This piece is in progress. So am I.

I am in progress, trying to figure out how to best be a guy right now. I understand some obvious don’ts, some obvious do’s, but there’s a whole lot of mess in between. I’m trying to figure those things out. Trying to figure out how to stumble through these things without doing more damage.

Admittedly, I am behind. I’ve done a lot of work on what it means to be white, to understand how race and racism work in our country. I’m no expert there either, but I’ve been putting in the work. I have a lot more to learn about gender, a lot more to do to see, really, the ways that sexism shape our experiences. I, like many, I imagine, have found this moment to be one I cannot look away from, cannot stop thinking about, but I’m not sure exactly what it means yet for men, for me.

I see men struggling with this everywhere. They want to supportive, yes, but also that’s hard when it seems so many men everywhere, most likely all of us, have been some part of the problem.  Men are hearing phrases like ‘toxic masculinity’ and worrying that all of masculinity is being labeled toxic. I see men acting like an awful lot is being asked of them.

We need to be better. This much should be glaringly obvious. This moment in history is not about us, it is from us. So, men, we have work to do. We do. Me too.

It is ok to be a man.

Seriously.

No one is telling you that it’s not.  When someone says, “men have hurt me,” or “men can be dangerous and damaging,” or, even, “men are trash,” we feel it. We feel like they are saying it’s not ok to be a man, but that’s because brains are dumb, and any time we feel a little uncomfortable we go into full on oh-my-god-i’m-being-attacked mode. We run away from what’s been said at moments that we should be listening hardest.

But no one is telling you it’s not ok to be a man.

It is ok to find women attractive. Have you seen them? They’re very good looking, and it is ok to think so. No one is saying that you can’t think or hope for or share sexy things sometimes, but the purpose of women is not to be attractive and have boobs around you.

But we shouldn’t comment on the bodies of the women around us, shouldn’t reduce them to being objects of attraction, shouldn’t stare or grab or send that text that says, “hey, we just met, let me tell you the things I think about your body,” or “what an interesting spreadsheet of cost analysis you shared in the meeting today, also, here’s that picture of my penis you didn’t request.”

No one is saying that you shouldn’t find women attractive, but your attraction to women does not excuse actions that make women around you feel unsafe, uncomfortable, or undervalued.This is not a high bar for us to climb over. Like, this should be the easy stuff.

Part of the work ahead of us is to figure out how much we’ve internalized some concept that women are less-than, that their value as a colleague or friend or person has anything to do with how attractive we may or may not find them. This is harder stuff. We grew up in this, we swim in it all day. This is part of the process of this piece, that I had it out there and was checked on how much my “don’t objectify women” stuff still objectified women. Yes. Yep.

So it needs to be ok to be sexual, right? But also we cannot do it at the expense of respecting the whole real humanity of the women around us. Yes. This shouldn’t be the hard stuff, but it is kinda the hard stuff.

Look, sometimes work crushes and work flirting is the only thing that gets us back in the door the next day. But also, look, we need to know when it’s ok and welcome. We need to understand where lines are, need to understand that silence isn’t consent, that silence is often the loudest “no” that can be made without all the “just joking just relax just complimenting just guys being guys.” It’s not that hard, really, to know if someone is interested in that kind of attention from you and in that moment, not hard to ask or be clear or know people well enough to   but if you do think it’s hard, if you do believe that every interaction you have with a woman is a potential trap to you being branded a pervert and predator, then trust your instincts and leave women alone.

So I think that’s what people mean, that’s what I understand that they mean, when they talk about toxic masculinity. The phrase is not an attack on all of masculinity. The phrase is meant to highlight that there are pieces of masculinity that have been perverted in a way that encourage and excuse causing harm to others and yourself. Icky masculinity.

We may feel like the options in front of us right now are to behave as we’ve always behaved and blame the outrage machine or over-reactions or political correctness for all these stories being such a big deal, or we can chop our genitals and sit at home alone for the rest of our lives.  But, actually, there’s a whole bunch of area between those two things, a whole magical space called “being a decent human to other humans.” Again, this should be the easy stuff.

Men. Think about the times you’ve been the most angry in the last few weeks, the last year, the last time you called someone “Bitch.” How much of your anger, or even discomfort, was caused by someone saying you didn’t get to have or do something that you really wanted? And why does that make us so damn mad? Why does it scare us so much?

A lot of guys are scared. I get that. I’m kinda freaked out. I’m sure I’ve been the guy who made someone uncomfortable, and probably unsafe, and probably unvalued. I know that I never intended to. I know that when I’ve been called on it, I have gotten this spikey pit in my stomach that made me want to give up on talking to women forever, but I also know I didn’t mean to, which only kinda makes it a little better.

And though it may feel like every interaction with women we have or have ever had is this minefield we are all certain to stumble in, the reality is that the women in our lives are giving us thousands of chances to get this right. They want so badly for us to be one of the good ones. They want us to try. A witch hunt doesn’t typically have a thousand second chances for the hunted.

I’d like to be one of the good ones. I’d like to be an ally, you know? But that’s not a word I think should be self-applied, and I have most certainly not earned it yet. I’ve been that other guy. I’ve never meant to, never had the intent to make someone uncomfortable or use my body or my voice or my position to make any woman feel uncomfortable, and certainly not in any way that she would feel there is no option but act like it’s fine. I’ve never tried to be the guy on the other end of #metoo, I would never want to have done that, but it’s also impossible to imagine I haven’t. Fuck. I didn’t know.

Still, though, it was my responsibility to know, right? Before the flirty comment or the joke, or whatever I did that was creepy. It was my job to know it was ok before I did those things, to know the impact those jokes and comments, that where my body is and the danger it could represent, to understand how my interactions with women are impacted by the history of interactions between all men and all women.

Maybe we don’t start at “he’s probably a good guy” and we don’t start at neutral. We start, very often, at “This man may do, say, or try something that may harm me.” Listen to the women of the world right now. We’ve earned it. Now, it’s our job to do better. It’s our job as men to do whatever is necessary to prioritize the safety and comfort of the women around us.

And you know what?

Most often, I write and share things about the big ideas in education. I don’t tend to share a lot of stuff about, you know, what I teach. But, hey, you know what? I just did an analysis essay unit that worked really well, so I thought I’d pass it along to anyone who may want it.

See, 8th Grade is a real big year for the brain. Many students are becoming increasingly capable of abstract thought. For most districts, this means that students start tackling Algebra in 8th grade, moving away from the more concrete concepts of years-prior.

Anyone who has taught Algebra, or at least next-door to it, knows the process can be downright painful for students whose brains are telling them they aren’t quite ready to figure out what the hell x is.

The same is true in Language Arts class, where we start to move past book-reporty projects and sentence-starter worksheets and towards things like literary and cultural analysis. It’s our Algebra, the concept that will be a foundation to nearly all upper-level work in our subject. As I wrap up my first major unit introducing Analysis, my students are widely showing that they are ready for that next-level work so long as it’s scaffolded, and show they can thrive when given freedom of what they read and how they read it.

Intro to Analysis:

    To introduce analysis, we spent a few fun classes practicing deconstruction on lots of different pieces of media. We watched commercials, movie trailers, and music videos (with one class-discussion-type-assessment around Beyonce’s Formation video). Students practiced writing down the pieces of what they saw, and were introduced to Critical Lenses (if we watch this commercial and isolate race, what do we see?  Ok, now, let’s watch it again and look only at Gender).

    My favorite intro day is when I gave the students copies of Picasso’s Guernica without any background information and had them deconstruct (literally, with scissors) the painting into the pieces that they see, and then create an analysis by re-constructing it on another sheet in a way that created meaning.  The discussion that followed in nearly every class led to some brilliant insight on the work.

    Oh, a note here about “bad” English students. Years ago I noticed that students that came to me feeling like they were not very good at reading and stuff often thrive at analysis. Also, some students who are very good at playing school and doing worksheets struggle mightily at questions for which there is no right answer. So, you know, keep an eye out in these discussions for new leaders.

The Analysis Essay:

Books:

    I’m convinced this project wouldn’t work half as well if I told the students what to read. Instead, I gave them a few days to look up books they may want, read excerpts and reviews, and do their best to choose a book they were truly excited about. I approved them, but did my very best not to say “no” to anyone. I started the process early in order to give students a chance to track their books down at libraries and track down copies of books myself as best I could. I also put in a bunch of work over the last couple of years to build up a classroom library that is full of new, high-interest books that students want to read, specifically books by and about people of color and women.

    The results were pretty sweet. Students continually surprised me with their choices and the lengths they would go to track down a book they were interested in. All this meant that students were, more often than not, excited to have time to read.

Reading:

    I didn’t require a lot of students during the reading phase of the project. I had students write out a hypothesis for their essay, what they thought their essay was likely to be about, and suggested rather strongly that they figure out a way to track lines and quotes from the book that matched that hypothesis. I also gave students choice about how to track those quotes while they read. Some took and annotated pictures on their phone, some used tabs and post-its, and many folded a sheet into their book and wrote down lines as they came across them.

Writing:

    As we got towards the end of the project, I realized that it was more important to me that my students wrote a few great analysis paragraphs rather than longer essays that were less wonderful. I decided to keep the whole project to four paragraphs, with an introduction and three analysis sections.

    Again, we did some all-class practicing, reading a short piece of text together (I used the Dave Eggers forward to my book, because I really really love it), deconstructing it into an argument and three pieces of evidence, and then writing a paragraph.  Students did those in a day, and the next time they came in, I divided them into two groups; one that needed more help on creating the analysis, and a group that got the analysis right and was ready for a challenging writing activity.  I sat mainly with the first group, helping them work together to construct an argument and find quotes, then checking with each student to make sure they wrote an effective analysis paragraph.  The other group was introduced to the concept of Active vs. Passive voice through an activity they could do in a self-directed way in small groups.

Active Voice Quickly Activity

    Once we got through those activities, students were ready to start planning and writing. To get them thinking about Thesis Statements, we had a class discussion about a rule or law that should be changed. Many groups picked Dress Codes, and we worked together to come up with a main argument (“Dress codes should be eliminated”) and supported arguments (“They are sexist, poorly enforced, and limit expression”). We used our conversation to write a thesis statement (“Dress codes should be eliminated because they are sexist, poorly enforced, and limit expression”), they got over the fact that I tricked them into talking about thesis statements by getting them all worked up about dress codes, and I set them to writing their own using this planning sheet:

Introduction Paragraph Planner:

    Once their Introduction (with Thesis statement) was done, students could break up the supporting arguments of their thesis into different paragraphs and add quotes from their book as evidence, then write them into quality analysis paragraphs using this planner:

Analysis Paragraph Planner:

    Quite honestly, I struggle getting kids to edit (and peer-edit) well. This sheet was my attempt for this project to focus some of their efforts in cleaning up their rough drafts before turning them in:

Editing Doc

Wrapping Up

    Now that we’re wrapping up and 156 essays are finding their way into my inbox (and, soon, taking over any free time I may have dreamed of having for the next week), I’m feeling really good about how this project went.  If I were to do it again, I would give them more time to read (many students had to start organizing and writing before they were all the way done with their books), and would keep the end due-date from bumping right up against the end of the quarter.

    That said, trusting the students with a lot of choice in what and how they read, in where they sat and how they used their time has worked really well for a great number of kids. Funny how when you give kids freedom over their learning, they tend to do more than when you force them all to do the same thing.     Especially when trying to push them to new, challenging kinds of thinking, giving them choice seemed to be especially important.

For a few months now, I’ve been operating with a rather pleasant disinterest in people who don’t like me. It’s like a hater shield, and it’s been pretty nice. If I’m honest though, it’s starting to crack.

In many ways, I’ve had a really great half a year so far. I recognize that. I released a book, and it’s been generally really well received. It got me a ton of press, especially locally, and just about six months into the release my press is about to pull the trigger on a third printing. So, yeah. I mean.. Shit.

I was also asked to be a featured writer for Education Post over the summer, and was allowed to write ten articles about topics of my choosing, some of which did quite well, and all of which I was damn happy with.

In a little more than half the year, I’ve also been flown to Dallas, D.C. (twice), New Jersey, and Philly to either present-to or to attend-and-write-about conferences.

I’m kinda just writing all that down because it feels crazy to do so and I haven’t often taken the chance to reflect on how good the good stuff is. Usually, when people ask what’s been up, I say “meh… not much,” but, I mean… that’s a crazy six months. During that six months, my hater shield has been strong. So many more people than I had any right to expect were reading and appreciating my stuff, so the people who weren’t didn’t bother me much.

So far, 2017 can’t have been an easy year to not like me. I know I’ve got haters. There’s my old bully, and the old co-teacher with the hair, and the one person from the one thing, and that whole group of Minneapolis teachers who branded me the enemy like four years ago. They’re all pretty easy to ignore, honestly. I’ve also got the maybe-friends  who really just show up when they need something, and a whole bunch of people in the education/teaching/writing worlds who I have no idea what they think, except I assume they all secretly hate me all the time.

Ok, so a lot of this post may be coming from my anxiety right now, and I may as well own that. My anxiety tells me that people who don’t like me are a lot more interested in me than they are. It has tracked, without me asking, who has made steps to comment on or support my book in some way, and who has been really quiet about it. It tells me, and I’ve been really good at not listening for months now, that people I care about and respect don’t care about or respect me, because otherwise why are they always so quiet whenever I do something? Anxiety keeps me from being too proud for too long about anything I’ve done.

A lot of it may be jealousy. We all have those people we are jealous of, and that jealously squeezes out of our sides and comes out in so many weird ways. If someone was watching my last six months, or last few years and was thinking, “why did he get all that stuff? He doesn’t deserve all that,” I’d understand. In fact, I’d agree.

Also, I get the exact same kind of jealous all the time. When people are at conferences I didn’t get to go to, when someone is named to a thing or whose writing is being celebrated, I get jealous.  I try to notice it and remember it means that someone probably did something worth celebrating, and I try to be happy for them. I try to keep my head out of my ass, but it’s not easy.

All this isn’t super new to me, either. When I started working with some reform groups, I had uniony friends and colleagues who suddenly wouldn’t speak to me (but would talk trash about me, I heard way too often).  Then, I left the reform groups and lost a good chunk of friends there (though not nearly as many or nearly so roughly, though sometimes I feel like they just really want me back because my name means something in some places).

Without an organization that benefits from supporting me as a commodity, it’s interesting to see who doesn’t show up anymore, or who shows up only to disagree or detract. For example, of the ones I can see, the lowest ratings for my book I’ve found online have been done, by and large, by people I know.

I got a text recently from a woman I worked with for ten years, who at one point I would have considered a very close friend. She didn’t mention the book or really ask how I was doing, she just wanted me to go speak at her friend’s event. Ok. So she’s in a long list of people, people who I have often supported in a bunch of ways at one point or another, who I would have assumed would have been happy for me and supportive, but who truly seem to be neither. That shield is cracking and I’m starting to notice and, sometimes, it stings.

But also a few people have surprised me, because I didn’t think it was like that and they’ve been loud and wonderful and ridiculously supportive. The list is different than I would have imagined it would have been five or two years ago, but the crowd that I know will rally to me is the biggest group of badass genius revolutionary weirdo muppet maniacs ever.

In other words, my crew is deep. Maybe. I don’t know. I have a ton of people who I’m pretty sure have my back and have been really fantastic, really, but also I just sat and made a list of people in teaching/ed I trust without reservation and it was seven people. Seven feels pretty good, except, you know, a few years ago it probably would have been around twenty.

An elected official friend of a friend told that friend this thing, and she gave it to me when I needed it: It’s a tricky thing when success happens. There are people who you thought would be behind you forever suddenly disappear, and people you never would have expected show up.

"With fidelity" are some of the most dangerous, damaging words in education.

Districts spend a ton of money paying people to pick out massively expensive packaged curricula, as if every one of a thousand classrooms needs the exact same things, then says, over and over again that they must be implemented "with fidelity," meaning that teachers better not do something that would serve their student's specific needs. When that curricula (which is almost universally garbage) does nothing to increase student achievement, it is not blamed, the district whoever person who found it and purchased it is never blamed. Nope, they say, "well the teachers must not have been implementing it with fidelity."

It keeps happening because standardized schools would be massively easier to control and admitting that schools are messy and students are human and teaching is creative and artistic means you have to trust teachers and let them have control and power. Also, because there’s some really crappy teachers out there, and we often push programs for everyone in order to push that worst-case-scenario line a little higher.

Plus, the further away you get from a classroom, the more the numbers matter, or seem to matter. If everyone’s doing just what they’re supposed to, we’ll get such good, clean numbers, and isn’t that worth a few, and a few, and a few thousand more through the cracks.

I was talking with a friend yesterday, a teacher at an urban school on the East Coast. He had been called to task by his Principal for splitting his kids into groups to offer differentiated math instruction based on students need. “But,” the Principal said, “did the pacing guide say to differentiate? You need to trust the system.”

I don’t trust anyone who can say “trust the system” without literally vomiting.

Our leaders are terrified of change, are terrified of teachers who think they might know something, so here, let’s try this online reading program instead.

Last year, my old district implemented Reading Plus, an online reading program that forces students to read at a pace determined by their scores. The trainers promised, literally promised us, that there wasn’t a single reading selection anywhere in the program that could be considered offensive to anyone. God knows I never learned anything from a book that made me feel uncomfortable. Oh, and students were supposed to use this program, forced-paced reading of benign crap followed by multiple choice questions and more forced-pace reading, for 90 minutes a week. We heard a lot about fidelity when the program did almost nothing (and, I believe quite strongly, did far worse than encouraging independent reading of high-interest books for 90 minutes a week would have done).

At the end of that year, I was handed copies of next year’s great adventure in fidelity. I’m not in that district any longer, but the whole district was all switching over to Springboard in their Language Arts classes. On came the emails about implementing with fidelity and everyone on the same page. We were promised flexibility, you know, so long as we also stuck to the pacing guide of the workbook.  I gave it a look, I did, because only idiots and assholes turn down potential tools, but, man, it seemed custom built to keep thinking, especially any creative, critical thought from either students or teachers to a bare minimum. The worst kind of garbage is the kind you pay a lot for and then hand out to children.

I just got an email, just today, from two students from last year. They said hi, and they missed Creative Writing, and that they hated SpringBoard, the “evil twin of Reading Plus.”

That district ran out of money and had to cut teachers (including me) at the end of the year. But if they hadn’t, I don’t think I would have lasted long if forced to teach from a pacing guide. I’m a good teacher. Good teachers love to be challenged and supported. They take feedback well, but man do we hate mandates for stuff we know isn’t best for the kids in our room.

From inside a classroom full of dynamic, chaotic brilliance and flaming struggle, from the classroom where that kid just shared that thing that broke all of our hearts and that other kid figured out that that they’ve been working on for weeks...

And from that classroom where  that other kid doesn’t know enough of the language, and hides how hard they work to keep up and still misses things...

And where that other kid isn’t sure if they trust you yet, and that other kid trusts you too much, too easily, because their bar had been set too low after years of teachers that didn’t care enough...

When I was seven or eight, I told my mom I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write a whole book. She told me that all good writers read a lot, but I hated reading.  So, I told her I wanted to be a fireman, which was running a close second anyway.

My fifth grade teacher introduced me to the first books I loved. Many of us, I’m sure, can point to that one book that made us a reader.  That one book that hit the sweet spot in us, that first book that was distinctly ours.  Mine was a book about little toys that came to life (I don’t even want to share the title, because I’m pretty sure that if I re-read it now I would think it was super racist). I read it, then every book in the series, then every book I could find about little toys that came to life.  There are a surprising amount.

I became a reader, though not so much a writer yet. In middle school, I spent about two years reading one book, just one, Jurassic Park, over and over again, every night. Then, one night, before laying down, my brain demanded something else from me. It said I should write down a bunch of feelings and images and stuff on a piece of paper, just because. I was, remember, an 8th grader. My brain was almost always telling me things I didn’t understand. But, also because I was an 8th grader, I never seemed to question the things my brain would ask of me.

I wrote a poem. It was at least a year before I would put that name to that thing. 13 years old or so, and I had no real idea what a poem was. Instead, I carried around some suspicion that I had, in fact, invented a thing.

I wrote the thing, folded it about a million times, and hid it on a shelf in my room.  Occasionally, I would take it out and read it, but more often I would just take it out to look at it, outside of the folds. It was this secret and powerful thing I had done, and I had no idea why. At some point, I lost it, because things like that get lost eventually. It’s probably for the best, because I can remember it fondly as something wonderful.

So, I had written, but was not yet officially a writer. That moment did not happen until the summer after my freshman year of high school. I signed up to go to an art camp, because I had done some theater and occasionally drew funny pictures of cows and stuff, and because, I think, my parents had started to get worried about me.

When I signed up, I had neglected to sign up for a primary art, the one thing I would be studying and working on every day, so the camp people took me around to all the different classes and had me choose one.  Theatre looked good, and the art class was held in the sculpture room and had these floor-to-ceiling shelves full of every random thing in the world, and could hardly have been more appealing.  But, in the end, I chose writing. I ended up choosing to be a writer.  See, in the writing class, I was going to be the only boy.

That week transformed me. I was a writer. It was who I was, it was this most important thing. It was this badge on my chest, and I was sure everyone could see it. By the end of the week, one girl from my class called my dorm room, invited me to sneak down to hers to make out, and I told her no.  I was working on a poem. By the next day, she was holding hands with someone else, and I was ok with that, mostly. Poetry was powerful and dangerous, after all, but girls were absolutely terrifying.

Since then, I have always written. Always. I wrote poetry until my dad died, and then couldn’t seem to find the muscle to do so anymore. I wrote stuff no one read, and stuff that wasn’t for reading, other stuff I sent bouncing out and around the world. That badge on my chest sunk into me, became permanent. I will never not write. I know this.

The first time I sat down to write about teaching, I thought I would write a comprehensive philosophy of teaching. I thought it would be a book, at least one long one, to hold everything I knew and understood about teaching. It ended up being just over 500 words.

So, teacher writing became more about exploring than explaining. I tried to fit together all the random, darting, flaming pieces of each day together into something that started to make sense. I wrote to understand why certain stuff seemed to work and others didn’t. I wrote about good days and bad days, squeezing them until some sense of meaning came out.

If books about toys coming to life and dinosaurs got me reading again, it was books by Kurt Vonnegut that got me really writing. His book Cat’s Cradle, particularly, was the seed planted in my head that grew into the voice I use to write about my work. In it, he says, “When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

Teaching is full of beauty, of course, and with a little digging, enlightenment isn’t hard to find. And though there is an abundance of the opposite side of both those coins, I try to provide some comfort to those in and out of the classroom by saying over and over what Vonnegut says is a message many people need desperately to receive: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

In the Introduction to American Gods, which was one of the first it books for adult me, Neil Gaimon shares this take on an idea from Randall Jerrel, “a novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.”

A former student reached out to me. They wrote the following, but were fearful of posting it under their own name because they are Jewish. They asked if I would post it for them, and, since I could offer no honest comfort to their fears, I am honored to share my space with their words.

- Tom

The liberals who are now posting about how disgusting what's happening is are the same people who told me that I am wrong to be afraid. That I don't look Jewish. But that I talk about being Jewish too much.

They are the ones who told me that I am in no way affected.

I am white passing but I will not call myself white. I am an Ashkenazi Jew. I am part of a beautiful tradition of culture, ethnicity, religion, and race. I am racially Jewish.

No, I will never understand what non white passing poc go through. I will never understand what specifically black poc go through. But I am allowed my fear.

The entire driving momentum behind antisemitism is the idea that Jews have nothing to fear. That I am still in a position of privilege while white men in Charlottesville chant "the Jews will not replace us" while they chant "blood and soil". The words that were used by nazis against my ancestors. These actions are targeting the Jewish people.

I have never been safe.

Throughout my childhood I have had coins thrown at me. Swastikas drawn on my desk. And friends, who call themselves aware, tell me I'm overreacting. In 2017, I am not only afraid of the literal nazis. I am afraid of the people who claim to hate them. Because these people still refuse to recognize that the fear in the Jewish community is not new. We have been afraid.

No, I don’t know where I’m teaching next year. Yes, I kinda laugh about it when asked, but it’s really not that funny.

Last week, I published a cover-letter of sorts of all the things I’m looking for in my next job. It was the hopeful half of me. This week, I’m seeing too many maybes dry up into no chances. This week, I’ve passed a month since sending in applications to the district I live in with no response from anyone. This week, I’m getting pretty sick already of not having a job next year. People ask because they care and that is great, but no, I don’t know. I have no idea.

I don’t have any answers yet, but I am getting a front-row seat into why this time of the year is tough for teachers trying to teach next year:

Internal Transfers, Internal Politics.  Here I am. I am ready to look for jobs and stuff. I have a resume and everything. There are schools that know they have openings, which is cool, but some of those schools can’t talk to me yet.  They have to hire from within their district, maybe their first choice, but maybe their third, and maybe just have someone placed who doesn’t really want to be there and they don’t really want. Then I don’t get to try to get that job, even if I really want to be there and they really want me.

Budget Cuts.  Recent cuts and reorganizations have turned some district offices into a combination of Lord of the Flies and The Muppet Show. They’re too busy fighting it out with each other right now to worry about those pesky school places. Nothing makes me saltier than when egos beat out kiddos. Plus, those cuts have hit teachers hard around the region, so there are fewer spots for more people.

Top Down Culture. Especially in some large districts, it is easy to imagine that filling 300 vacancies with 300 teachers is a job well done, whether it’s now or in August. The idea that any individual teacher would matter is contrary to the culture of the district, and so there is no priority set on teacher recruitment or retention. There are leaders who did this differently, but they’ve been largely run off because they were people of color who put students first, and that pissed off a whole lot of people.

Timing. For me, this means deciding if I want to wait a few months hoping things open up in one of the urban districts I would prefer, or start answering emails from any of the non-imploding suburban districts who are actively recruiting me. I don’t need to have a job until next school year starts, which is a tremendous privilege to have, but also I have nasty dreams almost every night about not knowing where I’m teaching next year.

I got my letter this week. My principal met me at my door, handed me this thing. I knew it was coming. Still, it hurt. The formality of “terminate your contract effective…” “pursuant to Minnesota Statute 122A.40, subdivision 5” felt weird. I hate professionalism in these moments. I wish my letter said, “this sucks, shit happens.” That would have been nice. That would have felt right.

I taught in this school for my first six years of teaching, then I moved schools and this school switched districts. So, when I came back this year, it felt like coming home, even though it was my first year in the district. Now, I’m not going to get to stay.

Since getting cut, I’ve gotten requests from a few media sources, a few think-tanky organizations, a few loud voices, a few big deals. They want to hear about my thoughts on LIFO (Last In, First Out), and isn’t it awful that I, a Teacher of the Year, got cut. They want me to be the face, for now, of the anti-LIFO movement.

Nah.

I’m not the LIFO poster-boy they want me to be. I got cut because of seniority, yes, but I can’t point you to the teachers in my building who should have been cut instead. We all deserve to be here. One of the best things we could do for our students, for all of our students, would be to retain every damn teacher who wants to be exactly where they are. People who know the students, know the culture of their building, know their families, who have built trust among coworkers and kids and bosses. Not just me. I’m not special.

Each one of the teachers cut from my building, from every building, for budget reasons, is a problem.

In other words:  The order that we cut teachers is way less of an issue to me than the fact we are cutting so many teachers. There are groups that should be protected. Schools should not be forced for budget reasons to cut teachers of color, or math, or science teachers. It should also be said that we are doing no one, certainly not students and teachers, any favors by making new teachers start over and over and over again in the years that they most need stability and protection to do their jobs.

And man, I get it. It’s not the world I live in or the level I work on, but I get that when we look at how much we spend on education, it has to feel like impossibly too much. It has to seem like surely we can cut somewhere.  I get that schools and districts don’t always spend money wisely. They buy dumb curriculum that fixes nothing. They bring in specialists and consultants and trainers whose primary skill seems to be signing contracts and cashing checks. They hire communications staff that can’t communicate. They waste money we dearly need, and so it seems easier to take that money away.

I’m not without bitterness.

I’m sick of teachers and students bearing the brunt, year after year, of bad decisions made by unimaginative and uncourageous leaders. I’m sick of teachers being ignored, then being blamed when things don’t work.

We won’t do better with less money, and we need a lot more than a little bit. Schools can do what we want them to do, but we need to fund them like we believe in them. So I’m not interested in anyone calling for an end to LIFO who isn’t also calling for an end to teacher cuts.

I’m not without bitterness, but also not without hope.

Within a day of me posting one sentence online about losing my job, I had about ten openings recommended to me. I’m going to release this book thing, this whole chunk of my heart I’ve been working on for the last two years, and then I’ll really focus on where that job may be. A lot of the time, that’s enough. I’ll have work, and it’s silly to complain too much when that’s the case. Sometimes, though, it just kills me that I’ll have to leave this building again. It just kills me what all the people leaving is going to do to this building again.

Principals: If you lose good teachers from your building at the end of this year, then you are screwing up. Principals, If people are leaving a profession that no one enters without passion, that no one enters expecting to be easy, you are not doing your job. Principals, every teacher that walks away from the kids in your your building and is thinking of your face is your fault.

It’s budget time for schools, which means the beginning of perennially awful time of year that teachers lose jobs and schools lose teachers. For whatever reason, budget time this year feels like a particularly brutal bloodbath, and it sucks.

It sucks. At a time a year when almost nothing feels like enough, we get told we’re somehow going to start getting by with less. At a time of year full of sacrifice, just rounding into the time where we start to see some our work pay off, we start to learn how different next year will be, we start to learn we won’t get to come back, or that too many other people won’t be there. It sucks.

So budgets and cuts are a thing, but not the thing I’m most worried about.  What I’m really and truly disturbed by is the wave of teachers who have had enough, with their building or their boss or with the hours or with the kids. What I’m worried about is all the teachers who leave. Except for all those who really are sick of kids (bye Felicia), we are, as schools and as a system, losing teachers we need, losing teachers that could or would be better with more or different something, and you know what?  It’s not their fault, and it matters, it matters, it really really matters when good teachers leave.

Principals (and just like I use “teachers” to mean everyone who works with kids, I’ll use “principals” here to mean everyone who is supposed to be supporting teachers), the number of teachers you keep year to year says something about you. I know you’d like not to believe that, I know your job is easier if you ignore it, but teachers matter, and keeping them around is your job. When you lose good teachers, it’s on you.

It’s not a bad time to mention that I think my principal is pretty awesome, and my assistant principal too, and all the other leadery people in my building. I like my building, and I believe in the work we’re doing. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write this as a piece, I would write this as an email. Many many years, I’ve written this as an email. Many years in a row, around this time, “please care about your staff, please do something for them, please help them stay.”

Because here’s what happens. Teachers are messy because people are messy. It would be easier (and also cheaper) if teachers didn’t matter that much, if implementing systems and curriculum packages mattered a lot more. So, we, schools and districts and whoever pulls the big levers levels above us, ignore teachers as much as we can.

    It’s a handy system, because look:

  Hi everyone, we have this wonderful, innovative Whatever. Everyone has to use Whatever, and use Whatever in this way, so that everyone is the same and every classroom is the same because that is for some reason important. If Whatever works, it’s because we’re smart. If it doesn’t work, it’s because teachers didn’t implement it correctly, those damn teachers. If teachers leave, that’s ok, we’ll hire other teachers, and Whatever will still be there, so everything will be fine. Also, Whatever gives us tons of numbers and numbers and numbers that we can use to say all sorts of stuff about how great Whatever is doing. Whatever.

This model is compelling for lots of obvious reasons.  You get to pretend you’re in control of what a whole bunch of messy humans all day, and when things go wrong it is hardly ever your fault. Also, you have to do very little worry about how anyone is feeling.

    It’s too bad, really, that both children and adults are both kinds of humans, and humans don’t work like that.

    Because really, the work we need from you is this:

    Hi everyone, first of all, let me say “thank you for all that you do,” because apparently it’s, like, a required thing to say to teachers all the time, but then also let me specifically mention things you have done and how I’ve noticed you doing them and tell you why I appreciate them. Then, I will spend, I dunno... at least half the amount of time I spend looking for things you do wrong actually supporting and encouraging the things you do well. Also, let me find time to listen to you, like actually listen, to what your day is like and what your students need, because here’s the thing I totally understand:  Everything I do all day should matter to you in your classroom, because the work of any school and any district should be focused exclusively on what is best for the kids we are teaching, and should be focused on those kids, and should understand that those kids and their needs change from building to building, from room to room, from day to day. Because of this, we should value and support and encourage and inspire and recognize and push and protect the people doing the most direct version of the work.

I had lunch with my friend the other day, and we were talking about just how stalled out and technical all the fights seem to be in education when compared to the existential threats our kids are facing.  We’re still tinkering with testing and reading programs and observation frameworks and arguing about so much of the same shit we’ve created industries to argue.  My friend said, “I just want all that to be cancelled until no one is coming for our lives.”

I’m there.  Let’s do it.  Everything is cancelled until the babies are safe.

It’s on us now.  Not because it’s fair, or because it’s right, but because we have to. They’re coming for our classrooms, they’re coming for our kids. Everything else is cancelled.

No more throwing up our hands and saying, “but poverty!” No more saying that we’ll just close our door and wait for help to show up. The best of our political leaders will be playing too much defense, spread too thin on too many issues. No one is going to help us, we know that.  It’s on us.  It’s on us to take care of the kids while they’re with us.  It’s on us to focus on giving them  tools to resist that and those out to harm them, to give them a space to be accepted and affirmed.

Our President doesn’t care about our kids. Our President was elected by stoking fear and hatred about the future of our country and how it looks and how it talks and where it’s from. That’s our kids. That’s our classrooms.

Teaching was never easy, has been getting harder. But now, now, is something different. The world is getting harder. The country is turning backwards.

I’m scared, but I’m not poor, I’m not gay, not trans or genderqueer. I’m not Black or Latino or Muslim or Native or a woman. I’m going to be ok, but I’m scared. So long as I can close my eyes and my heart, so long as I can imagine that the best version of my country is one that erases whole segments of humanity from whatever "us" is, I likely have little to fear, personally. I can wait four years, I will be safe, but the same is not true for millions and millions. Millions. Humans. Children. Students. They've been told, loud and clear by the now-leader of our country, "I'm coming for you."

There is work to do, work on the way, and too many places to do it all at once. There will not be one right way to do it. No exact right place to be. There is no one retweet to save us all. We will all need to do our own work, do the work where we are best suited and situated to do it.  

To do this work, to do the work well and where your impact will be felt, where would you rather be than in schools? Where would you rather be than with kids? They will need us. They will need us to stop caring about the little shit.

Our students will need us to provide and protect their space in our schools. If that’s not the work you want to do, then this job hasn’t been for you forever. If it’s the work you’ve been waiting for, it’s time.

Our petty fights are cancelled, and so are all the things causing them. We can fight about testing later, and charters and reform or protection and common core and ed tech and teacher observations. It’s cancelled. It’s all cancelled, and all of everything we do is about working together will be together, will be against.

I’m willing to work with someone I disagree with against anything that threatens the safety and wellness of our kids.

I hope all of our big bosses and big organizations, and all the entrenched power that has been created digging in battling one another will let go. An Armistice, even, just for the babies. Take the big big things we agree on, join up for just this current now. This big battle will need many armies, and it shouldn’t be hard for us to figure out where we should be pointing.

We can protect schools as a place that celebrates cultural diversity and gives students tools and experiences to humanize people who aren’t just like them.

We can stop asking for free emotional labor from staff of color, can stop undervaluing the professional labor of staff of color, can start acknowledging how difficult so often is in so many schools to be a person of color of any age.

We can make sure our school is not an instrument of shame or danger for students for any reason, but especially because of their sexuality or gender.

We can lead with love, always. We can let the humanity of our students override the convenience of our systems, always.

We can use our classrooms and hallways to fight against the criminalization of Black people and Black culture. We can dismantle all the ways we currently contribute.

We can cancel everything else until we get these things done.

We can risk our jobs before we risk our kids. We can throw punches.

We can make sure that anyone coming from our students needs to go through us first.

We can hold each other accountable, we have to, but we can fight oppression better if we’re not fighting each other.

Later, after, you can go back to shouting at one another, if you really want. Later, after the kids are ok.

This piece was originally posted with a group of other educator responses about teaching “controversial” topics in school.  The full post can be found here:

"Last night, I watched my Grandmother in tears."

The day after it was announced that Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the killing of Mike Brown was the day before my school’s Thanksgiving break. My plan that day had been to continue listening to the then-super-popular podcast ‘Serial’ with my class. We were investigating, in a way, just how little we could get away with doing during a two day week. My plans, rather scant though they were, were quickly re-written for me by students who demanded more.

On the way into school that day, walking through the lunch room, student after student approached me. “We’re talking about this today.” I wasn’t, not at all, a question.

So, lesson plan scrapped, chairs went into circles and the day was spent, hour after class hour, with me simply stating, “would anyone like to share their reactions about what is happening in Ferguson?”

As my students talked, one student mentioned that we should be tweeting this discussion. So I sat mostly silent and kept notes as they tackled a discussion with the kind of empathy and insight most adult conversations at the time were struggling to capture.

"Social media is full of people putting black people into "they" because they are uncomfortable and worried."

The results of that discussion are well documented. Search #FergusonInClass on Twitter or Google, and you will find the voice of my students, powerful and raw, as well as articles from the Huffington Post and the Associated Press. Dig a bit, and you can probably still find local news coverage of the discussions from a story done that afternoon.

To be clear, my students are the real story here. Their brilliance and honesty and insight are what made this day in class something that had national impact. I did little more on that day than allow it to happen.

Still, there is quite a lot to know about what made that little bit work, quite a lot that I learned through years of trial and very messy error.

"There's always going to be people who see videos of people dying and say, 'get that Racism out of my face'"

It’s Not About You

An open space can be a dangerous one, and a teacher looking to cash in on engagement through controversy can be downright damaging. I’ve seen this go very poorly when a teacher near me played “Devil’s Advocate” in a discussion about trans rights and ended up making groups of students feel actively unsafe in his room. A lively conversation is validating as a teacher, but does not justify the invalidation of students’ identities and experiences.

"I laugh a lot, but in public, I minimize myself"

Look out for the quiet kids.

If you are talking about anything sensitive, if topics around race, gender, sexuality are on the table. If you are reading something that references rape or abuse, if you are teaching a history that ignores a people, and you are waiting for someone to speak up if they object, you aren’t likely to hear anything until it’s way too late.

If you notice students withdrawing or acting out in your class, take a step back and ask yourself why. Don’t go right to them. They may not be able to be able to verbalize perfectly, or you may not be the person they would confide in at that moment. As much as possible, make this work you do for yourself, about yourself.

"Every time I'm around a white person I don't know, I make myself uncomfortable so they can be comfortable"

Recognize Yourself.

It matters who you are in your room. I am a white, cisgender, straight male. That matters. I am not the first white male my students have seen in their lives, and their experiences with those white males will have an impact on how I am perceived. It is not typical (for white people especially) to be asked to understand this. Understand this. If you are going to talk about race, especially with people of color, you are going to be working against every problematic thing your uncle is saying on facebook and your cousin said at work. You’re going to have to earn some trust, and that’s ok. People who look a lot like you are all over the world advocating for devilish things. You needn’t be Devil’s Advocate in your room.

Take care of your students, first and foremost. When challenged or questioned, listen and respond without defensiveness. Show your students you will adapt for them and see them and care for them. Do this all the time, not just when you are dealing with difficult issues.

"I've heard a lot of things today that have really hit me in the stomach."

Get out of the Way

So much of this comes down to instinct and comfort. It is feeling when letting a particular voice dominate the conversation is important or awful, of knowing when a class can pull themselves back together or when they need a break or time to process. It’s learning how to facilitate a conversation without directing it. It is often embracing the discomfort of letting go. Trust your students, trust their leadership and their empathy and their intelligence. It’s not about your agenda, your message, your learning target or using something personal and painful to achieve your goals. Give your students the conversation. Give them your classroom, because it’s not for you anyway.

“Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”

-Kurt Vonnegut

We can’t fix the world today. A man has preached fear and hatred and was rewarded beyond belief.  I can’t imagine what comes next. We can’t fix that. Not today.

We can teach, but teaching won’t fix the world, not the whole world, not today. We will teach, and we will make our schools exactly what they ought to be.

We will make our rooms a place where people are welcome.  We will not let racism be a thing that happens in schools.  We will not shrug at hate speech, will not excuse it. We will not de-prioritize decolonizing our space.

We will not teach oppression.  We will not hold compliance as a goal. We will teach resistance. We will teach empowerment.  

We will not (especially those of us in no danger outside of school) let school be a place where our comfort matters more than what our students need from us.

We will not just hug and hold them and cry for our kids. We will not just imagine we can save them. We can engage in the radical act of arming the youth rebellion with skills and knowledge beyond what schools expect them to be capable of. We can let them be better than we are. We will.

I mean that.  You want a rebellion?  Make sure your black kids are reading good books, make sure your kids of color are writing and make sure every marginalized student is ready to fight and win against a world that doesn’t see or treat them as wholly human. We can’t lift our students up if our hands are full of excuses.

We can start with us.  We, we teachers, are too often instruments of status quo. We can stop accepting “because we always have,” we can stop accepting “we can only do so much.” We can, we can, we can built anti-racist, pro-love schools. We can challenge our colleagues when their spaces are too white. I can challenge myself.

We will follow people of color, of immigrant and queer and trans leaders. We will defend their leadership when it isn’t convenient to do so.  We will defend their right to speak and act as leaders in ways that make us feel uncomfortable.

We will need to be radical. Radically loving and radically accepting, radically happy and radically weird. We will need to work, and our work is clear.

We will fail, but will not accept failure.

We will teach. We will teach to fix a world we cannot fix.  

We will teach rebellion against a broken world. We can do that, starting today.