Jose Vilson's Blog, page 10

Doing Too Much Is Not Enough

Last week, I had the privilege of doing a mini-residency as part of the Las Vegas Public Education Foundation Teacher Leadership Academy. It’s a solid chunk of time where I get to flex my pedagogical skills while building community with educators who I might not otherwise have a chance to work with. It’s weirder when I’m usually the only “current classroom teacher” facilitating sessions like this because these workshops tend to be led by folks who’ve already left the classroom.

In these sessions, I leave lots of open space in my “plan” to allow for teachable moments among adults. I flourish in those uncertain spaces where I know where we need to get to, but no one has any idea how we’ll get there. In one of those moments, we were discussing the obstacles of teacher leadership. Most of the attendees shared how their roles differed based on who you asked: students, peers, or administrators.

Ursela Gavin, National Board Certified Black educator, revealed how she had often been told she was doing too much. By my count, she facilitates about seven clubs with a full teaching program. In the back of my mind, the easy – and hypocritical – thing to have done is tell her that her colleagues were right. She was doing too much and I rather she not burn herself out too quickly because she needs to stay around for the long haul.

Hypocritical because I flew across the country during one of my vacation breaks to spend a full two days with dozens of educators with activities I planned out on my own.

Instead, I threw it back to the rest of the attendees: “How many of you have also been told you’re ‘doing too much’?” Almost everyone raised their hands in unison. I followed up with “See, some of this is truly systemic. I want to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing, but you also feel responsible for making sure these elements happen because our kids deserve.” I saw lots of nodding across the room.

We owe ourselves some moments of honesty, too. When we say our schools “lack resources,” it’s partially financial, but it’s also about the number of human beings and their capacity for the work we need to be done for and with students. How many adults can run the affinity club? How many adults will sacrifice a few hours after school to run the tech club, the newspaper club, or the soccer club? Why should the same adult who already volunteered to be an instructional club during school also the same adult running the tutoring program? In an ideal world, we’d have enough adults to evenly distribute these responsibilities. In our current world, there are several gaps worth addressing, and they all point to systemic deficiencies where we’re trying to use small bandages for wounds we should stitch up.

It’s not necessarily about some adults being lazier than others. It’s more about having enough people to provide our students with a more complete set of experiences to keep them engaged in their schools and the world around them.

The same ethic that drives some educators to take on multiple clubs can drive up teacher turnover as well. Those of us with large imaginations and big hearts might keep our ideals and expectations so high, we burn ourselves out of our careers that much quicker. That’s not the fault of those who simply work their hours and clock out. Schools around the world seem to juggle this better. So do wealthier schools. Every so often, so do schools that serve children in poverty, but those instances seem few and far between.

For those of us doing too much, having spaces that support us feels like a roll of the dice. For Gavin and others, we know our work brings value, even if we can’t see the seed blossom for another decade or so. The people who run our system should recognize those who do too much because, otherwise, for so many stakeholders, our schools as they stand would not be enough.

The post Doing Too Much Is Not Enough appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

I Love Teaching, Even When It Doesn’t Love Me Back

At 2:45 pm, the students have already left the classroom. The door is slightly ajar, just open enough to let the teenage energy dissipate from this great green room. A whiteboard displays equations, diagrams, and words in different color markers. Desks once rigidly paired are slightly misaligned with untucked chairs and random doodles on them. The random handout, pencil shaving, and returned assignment lay on the floor. This teacher sits at his desk, still decompressing from another day of more than a hundred students over the course of eight periods. Two large stacks of ungraded papers and lesson plans hide his hands from the casual passerby.

He’ll need a few more minutes. He’ll shake it off. He’ll do this again tomorrow. He’s passionate. He’s tired. Millions of other teachers get it.

I get it, too. It’s February. There’s a whole litany of reasons for why children and the adults charged with caring for them are tired. After 100 days of having to with and for one another, we all need a cool-off from one another. Kids won’t sit down and pay attention to a 25-minute lecture? Adults won’t do it, either, and we’re paid to do that (kinda). Kids don’t want to wait for the bathroom? Teachers have to either wait until their schedule says they can use the potty or beg a colleague in the hallway with one foot in the door to hold down the fort.

Kids aren’t prepared for class? How’s that lesson plan from two years working out for us?

But I can’t shake the feeling of the cumulative exhaustion so many of us have in this work. No school year happens in isolation. If anything, our years are a collection of experiences from years past, pushed to the present. I know how many times I’ve said to myself that I would develop a project around a unit only to fall back into “Don’t get caught doing something your administrator won’t get.” And I have a completely different principal this year, too. I’m aware that we can change the template of our lessons, but I’m still going to fill in every box with something. I know I don’t need super-compliant children, but the aesthetic of a hyper-managed classroom soothes everyone except students.

I look in the mirror daily and recognize that I’m not a fraud (at least that’s what the students intimate), but it’s hard not to feel like it when you put so much work into it and don’t see immediate results of your efforts. That, too, is teaching.

It bears repeating that teachers bear the brunt of multiple challenges to their central work. For those who dare take this work on justly, we recognize poverty, institutional and environmental racism, high-stakes testing culture, economic stratification, the dearth of equitable resources for our schools most in need, inadequate support for students with interrupted formal education and/or special needs, and any number of elements that come into reasons why students may not adhere to strict educational norms. The people around you can make you feel like you’re supposed to work at peak levels when they’ve never known what that’s supposed to look like, have never taught, or left teaching after a brief stint just to beef up their resumes. What’s more, none of these obstructions suffice as excuses for not teaching our students well. This internal conflict creates the foundation between student-teacher relationships where we see the urgency of the work we’re doing, the passion that pushes us into doing this difficult work, and the dismay of not meeting our own enormous expectations.

A few students choose a path that you wouldn’t have recommended for them. You blame yourself. You don’t have enough time to get around to all 30 students because you’ve occupied too much mental time on a few. You blame yourself. You’re doing superhuman things and feeling subhuman over it.

So we love teaching, even when it doesn’t love us back. We love teaching, even when it hurts, when it goes directly against our ideals and visions, when we tell ourselves in the pressure-filled moments that we’d rather be doing something else. That alone should give us solace because it makes us almost exactly like the young people we’re trying to chart a course for.

I love teaching. I need fifteen minutes: five to clean up, five to restack, and five to shake off the dread and bring my energy back up. In time, I’ll realign my words and actions to my principles. I’ll bring myself back to why I do what I do.

Teaching from love isn’t perfect, but neither are we. But we’re still deserving of the love we give.

The post I Love Teaching, Even When It Doesn’t Love Me Back appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

A Room Is Enough

I should have known the minute my students tried to reroute me from my classroom.

It was my first year of teaching. At the time, someone might hand you a box of chalk and a contract to read, but the rest of the rules you learn by breaking them. I learned, for example, that bulletin boards need to be updated every month, have a rubric and an exemplar on them, and display a small but notable range of tasks to showcase student mastery and teacher feedback. I barely updated it because I was too busy learning how to teach. I had stacks of ungraded papers and half-baked lesson plans all over my desk, and every lunch I ate had a chalky after-taste.

I also had a mild but stubborn case of oppositional defiance disorder stemming from years of activism and the George W. Bush era. A bulletin board seemed quaint in comparison to my other pressing duties.

But on January 24th of that school year, my 7H3 students decided to reroute me on multiple occasions from getting to my room. My assistant principal and the math coach were also in on it because they made our small talk longer talk. By the time I caught onto the jig, I let it happen. The window on my classroom door was dark. The student desks were pushed to the walls. The student who kept rerouting me guided me into a loud room where students yelled “SURPRIIIISE!”

I wasn’t expecting much of anything for my birthday, but the rice and beans and Dominican cake came in aluminum foil, their music (not mine) blared from a set of speakers, their video games played on the projector, and the students looked like they genuinely enjoyed each other’s presence. But it was sixth period and, at the time, I had to pick up my 7A4 seventh-period students from the cafeteria. I let 7H3 continue the festivities while I tended to my adult responsibilities. As I arrived with my 7A4 students back to my room, I faced a dilemma I hadn’t expected.

The answer to that dilemma: OF COURSE, I wanted to have 60 students in a room where I normally have 30.

At the time, 7H3 had already gained a specific reputation for starting drama with each other while collaborating against other adults except for me. People expected the least of them with few exceptions. They often had to hide their intellect in favor of a callous and belligerent veneer. That resonated with me – and still does – deeply.

I had asked 7H3 to be kind and allow 7A4 to enjoy the leftovers and the music for the time being. If not for their English teacher walking over to my room and giving me the rage-eye, I might have allowed the party to continue. We cut about 10-20 minutes into 7th period before everything went back to normal, but the moment stuck with me since then.

As I’ve now had 15 birthdays celebrated (to varying degrees) at school, I’ve wondered how I’ve applied the “big room” philosophy into so many spheres of influence. In that room for just a handful of moments, I hadn’t worried about state-mandated labels, overbearing administrators, or even seating arrangements. Maybe I worried whether or not everyone had their own social circle in that room or whether or not we’d always want to replicate that moment. I definitely felt anxious that a colleague might get jealous and seek to overturn my administrator’s tacit approval and destroy my chances of staying in this profession.

But at some point, the gathering became less about me and more about them, with the adult willing to step to the side while they navigated their own experience at the time. What’s it like to eschew the rules in favor of the collective? How do stories like these keep us doing the beautiful struggle work we must do? How do we navigate a supposedly anarchic situation and hold that tension so it’s not messy? What does it mean to keep this story to myself for so long, but still walking with visions of a bigger room in mind?

I’m not sure. I’m never sure. My circles are much tighter now than ever before. I just know that for moments at a time, I have definite proof that I can hold space for an extraordinary amount of people and all the energies that come with.

The post A Room Is Enough appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

On Showing Up As Our (In)Authentic Selves

This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my sixth straight EduCon conference in Philadelphia, PA, a gathering that usually lands on or around my birthday. Unlike previous years, I decided to come on my own at the behest of folks I consider friends like Chris Lehmann, Diana Laufenberg, and the good folks at the Science Leadership Academy. For those unaware, Philadelphia public schools have been in turmoil as exemplified by asbestos discoveries in several schools across the system. So you can imagine the energy as I walked into EduCon – a conference normally hosted at SLA school – hosted at the Philadelphia School District offices. The Friday panel was on authenticity.

I’m glad I made it. I’m sure they’re glad it happened, too.

The panelists and moderator had a spirited and insightful conversation about schools, students, and what it means to show up as one’s fullest self. At one point, the moderator turned to the panelists and asked them if they had questions of each other. Crystal Cubbage of the Philadelphia Learning Collaborative turned to her co-panelists and asked: “What is your greatest challenge to being your authentic self?” The question pushed my attention away from the panel for a bit. It’s a question that seemed ripe for reflection after a year that felt like a decade.

If I’m truthful, I’ve only given 70-80% max to anyone outside of my immediate family since August. I’m still shaking off the absurdities of school years past. I’m still drawing hard boundaries for people in my past about the man I am now. I’m still having to edit and revise stories in real time about myself, hoping people will recognize my citations as evidence. I’ve had to change my practices on and offline where I seldom shout friends out on social media.

I had to stop being me so I could understand what “me” meant to everyone else. This makes me a lot more like my middle schoolers than I originally thought.

My superego tells me to never let go of my greatest, authentic, righteous self and to consistently extend myself to those who can’t pay me back. My id yells back, paranoid that those who might get shine from me will become empowered enough to disregard my efforts to elevate them. My id is angry at having to answer a million questions about who I am. My superego knows it comes from attempting to be a public figure of any nature. My ego sips his tea and keeps an eye out for vultures and bystanders all the same.

I have to protect myself from myself. Depression can do that to us, too.

Really, some of us believe we need to show our most authentic self wherever we go. Those of us from the hood understand how to “keep it real,” and also “when keeping it real goes wrong.” Those of us who’ve ever had to teach and/or lead know what it’s like to create a persona that doesn’t have to show up at home. Maybe our greatest challenge to being authentic is the environment in which we’re asked to do so. We either create environments where our best selves thrive or we center the spaces that already do.

While we’re still alive, maybe we owe it to ourselves to tell the people we love, whether close or afar, how much they mean to us. It keeps some of the challenges at bay.

The post On Showing Up As Our (In)Authentic Selves appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

I Can’t Tell Them What They’ll Do (Classrooms, Justice, and Legacies)

I arrive in my classroom every morning at around 7:20 am, 40 minutes before my students trickle in. The minute hand leans to the right while I drag my feet a few flights of stairs, coffee in hand, lesson plan in mind. A few rays of light creep into my room, usually hitting the likenesses of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. behind my desk. I glance at Detroit Red, then el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, then Dr. King Jr. I take a deep breath, then get my mind set on this lesson plan. I fill out this Word document with an objective, a Do Now / warm-up activity, the materials we’ll need for class, a lesson with an essential question, a box for modifications, an activity, a closing activity, and a homework assignment. I print it. I spend a few minutes wondering whether I told the right story about the math I’ll be teaching.

Students come in. Good morning. I never have an idea of what’ll come next.

The math part of this work is simple enough. Let’s take a ratio and find equivalent ratios in other forms like fractions and decimals and in multiple representations like tables and graphs. Let’s use multiplication and division to keep these ratios consistent and find the patterns between the numerators and denominators, the x’s and y’s, the quotients and constants of proportionality. Let’s determine that a proportional graph cuts through the origin – (0,0) if you must – and makes a straight line. Let’s put those points in a table, divide them, and see if a constant of proportionality comes out. Let’s make a rule, call it an equation, and find points that aren’t represented on the graph yet.

We can name those and build activities around those that elicit discussion among pairs and groups. It’s been almost 15 years of this. I came into the profession hoping to see more of “me” in those computer science classes and so much of it started from my misconceptions about the math I learned long before that. I wanted to step into this work to correct the course.

Yet, I’m also not teaching math in isolation. I’m teaching fully complicated human beings in a subject area that pretends neutrality and simplicity. The concepts of ratios and representation are not divorced from the strife and trauma so many of my students come in with. I expect them to acclimate to these academic standards while sympathizing with their hunger and growing pains. I hear their stories of overworked mothers, struggling fathers, children with responsibilities above their age range, and a collective collapse in self-esteem. I recognize the cut marks on arms, bags under eyes, and bouts of exhaustion. As if the plastic desktops and semi-silent rooms in my classroom were one of their few constants.

I feel the ways students prefer to be left to their own devices because they too often have adults hovering over their every move. They can’t always differentiate between those who care about them and those who can’t, and, when they do, they too get tired of adults. I know I do as an adult.

I spend hours grading papers, writing lessons, and thinking about how I’ll address this moment’s situations tomorrow. I’m warmly demanding they get this work in and end with an “I believe in you so let’s get this in.” I’m done arguing about pencils and seating, but I push them about work ethic and participation in their own learning. I remind them often how much potential they have and how they’re giving themselves more opportunities by getting their education in the moments we share.

I leave school with 30% of the energy I had coming in. I see former students, some with strollers with their youthful smiles still intact, some behind the counters of the stores they once frequented, some on the subway to the jobs that help them pay for the college courses they’re taking. I read former students’ social media, some with incisive commentary on the state of the world, others with dance memes and hood jokes.

I don’t track these effects on a spreadsheet or put them on a form, but I’m honored with the trust their parents had in me and I’m hoping they’re on their path to happiness, whatever that looks like.

At our best, teachers can create mountaintops over and again with peaks we’ll never foresee. I can give suggestions to my students. With enough pressure and bass in my voice, I can tell any number of students what to do at a time. Yet, I must prepare myself and them for an unjust world imbued with bigotry, economic stratification, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression that inevitably push my students to the outskirts. Their high schools are some of the most segregated in the country. The police meant to protect them are the sixth-largest paramilitary in the world. Their curriculum and the educators who write them refuse to reflect their identities in what they read, write, and ‘rithmetic. Their technology spies on them while they dance and rant in front of their cameras. Some of their parents who worked two to three jobs to make a better life for their families see few prospects for their children to do better than them. They’re in institutions and going to other institutions that don’t love them back.

I can tell them they can be whatever they want to be in life. I can’t control all the factors that have an effect on what they’re allowed to be.

So justice is constant work. I start my conversations with them by saying “Alright, I’m listening.” I remind them of what they should do in my classroom by saying “You can do it all on your own without me.” I refuse to have the last word in our discussions. I tell them that they’re in this to be better than me because I’m not here to know for them. I have guidelines in my classroom, not rules. I share when I’m tired, sick, exhausted, annoyed with adults (not this year, but y’all know). I thank them and ask for forgiveness when I can. My radicalness won’t show up in anyone’s manifesto, but, if I take the simplest actions to do my life’s work differently, how am I not grasping at the roots of teaching?

I know no peace in this work until all of my students have the same opportunities bestowed upon them that are owed to them. I don’t know if any of us are truly radical because we’re working within a system that filters for compliance and narrow forms of intellect at its core. I never issue forms of purity tests for people on the streets struggling to make ends meet, many of whom send their kids into my hands for growth. I want nothing more than to look into children’s faces and tell them that my classroom was an integral part of elevating the hopes and dreams of their ancestors.

All I want to do in and out of the classroom is to put my students on the path that would allow them to be better than us. I want to meet members of my teaching community, Inwood / Washington Heights community, and any number of groups to which I belong as human beings with a superhuman charge. I believe in my students enough to change my whole introverted disposition towards them.

May they, in turn, change theirs towards justice. At least I can hope for that.

The post I Can’t Tell Them What They’ll Do (Classrooms, Justice, and Legacies) appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

The Greatness [A Decade In Review]

I became a math instructional coach, went back to the classroom a few years later, graduated hundreds of students, achieved National Board certification, received the Math for America Master Teacher Fellowship, spoke at over 100 venues, was the first current classroom teacher to keynote the American Education Research Association annual meeting and the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics conference, wrote a best-selling book This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education, was the “first” or “only” in a bunch of other places, jumpstarted #EduColor (the name of the movement and the organization), went to the White House and Gracie Mansion on multiple occasions and the United Nations as an invited guest, helped finalize and invested in a Syracuse University scholarship for Latinx students, and either wrote or appeared in most major news publications including The New York Times, ESSENCE, CNN, and The Atlantic. I became a father and husband, got my driver’s license, and a new apartment, too.

I did some things.

At the end of the last decade, I wanted more teachers, especially of color, to sit squarely within their power and visibility without having to leave the profession. In the last ten years, I wrote the blueprint.

In various presentations, when people asked me if I’m a Teacher of the Year for New York or the United States, I’ve quipped to crowds that I’m aiming for Teacher of the Century, a swipe at a process that wouldn’t otherwise want a rebel raconteur to get any institutional praise. (No diss to past and present teachers of the year. In fact, I’m donating to one on a regular basis). Such a disposition often made me one of the more infamous teachers in the country. During an NYC Department of Education function, I was offered the opportunity to speak to every superintendent and network leader in the city. After my message of servant leadership, a central official remarked: “Yeah, everyone here reads your blog, but some people love to read it and others love to hate-read your blog!”

I would have to wait another four years – a total of 12 – to have my blog unbanned from all NYC Department of Education school computers. This colossus – all so splendorous and grandiose – prefers a school system where people only shine when administrators say so.

Boston. Atlantic City. Washington, D.C. Raleigh. Chicago. Baltimore. Minneapolis. Austin. Los Angeles. San Diego. Las Vegas. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Providence. So many places welcomed me with open minds and hearts. I was granted so many opportunities to spread the knowledge and the message of the beautiful, wonderful, and challenging work we as educators do. Like the time I used my keynote speech at the New Jersey Education Association – yes, another first – to speak directly about Marylin Zuniga and how we can find justice with and for our educators of color and conscience. Like the time I sat in then-Vice President Joe Biden’s chair at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (White House) and asked then-Secretary of Education about teacher leadership and teachers of color. Like the times I went to places with vociferous support for our current president and still asked everyone to be culturally responsive or we’d have more racist, sexist, xenophobic, bigoted, and repulsive leaders like the one that sits at the White House.

Or the time I sat on a panel at the US Department of Education and relayed how many male educators of color feel like overseers back when such a line incurred a gasp and a strongly-worded letter asking you to never come back. Equity talk and looking woke is in vogue now. I created a blueprint and let the work speak for itself more than I did. We’re good.

The world seemed to take sharp, dark turns, but these were just more opportunities to cleanse the underbelly of experiences we’ve known to be true for so long. Many of us were literally made for and from this.

None of this comes without serious loss. I lost my father who I only saw once a year for my entire life. My closure was a funeral with six of my siblings on his side of the family. I lost people I considered friends at the time, too. Some held their animus for days, some for months, others for years. They’re forgiven, not for them but for me. I didn’t get a proper goodbye in most of those cases, either. I stopped caring whether I should be the instructional math coach in such a precarious school environment, and, after I was reassigned back into the classroom, vowed to do better than whatever title I’d be assigned from another. Also, I lost an arbitration case against the city over whether a set of formative computerized test scores should count against my teacher rating and ended up with a Teacher Improvement Plan the year after I added “NBCT” to the end of my professional name through no fault of mine.

In time, the very law that secured my individual defeat would get struck down the year after that. I can take solo Ls for the collective W.

In some instances, those losses threatened to ruin everything I’d built. But when I learned to recenter my efforts to Luz and Alejandro – my home – I became more fearless, more honest, and more vocal. Luz taught me to speak with conviction and never let the risk of loss impede my mission. Alejandro taught me that I can only love as much as I love myself. I took their love and multiplied that exponentially. I consulted with my ancestors near and far. They fed me with the love and strength necessary to keep moving. In those moments of delusion and discontent, they put the fire in my belly to show that love, take that train, teach that lesson, not give up on that student, and smile through the foolish animosity.

Oh, and I had so many of my friends and colleagues who saw the worth in my work. The ones who saw an administrator make copies of my book in a private instructional meeting and asked me to write another one. The ones who help shift organizations to anti-racist and pro-justice work with me. The ones who sat me next to governors, chancellors, and secretaries of education so I can build this work. The ones who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the private moments when I needed it. Every individual blessing we receive is transcendent, collective work. Grace taught me so.

I don’t have to do anything alone, and prefer not to.

I’m blessed to have two feet so I can stand on them.

I gained this weight because I can handle so much more now.

I believe in myself and my principles.

I can’t change who I am because someone who’s not in my center doesn’t like it.

I won’t stop seeing the light in others even when others extinguish themselves.

I’m not done with what I’ve set out to do, though I don’t know how much longer I have doing what I love.

I won’t apologize for being myself.

I’ve earned the “the” and any other titles I’ve assumed.

In the 2010s, I changed not for the better, but for the best. An indisputable vanguard for this work.

I taught a lot. I learned a lot more. With a blueprint dedicated to education, love, and justice, I can’t fail.

The post The Greatness [A Decade In Review] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Some Thoughts on Math and A Culturally Relevant – Sustaining Education

In case you missed the news, the NYC Department of Education adopted a definition of culturally responsive / sustaining education inspired by several parts scholarship, stakeholder voice, and surveys done across the city. The writers included a coalition of parents, students, educators, and other concerned citizens, including yours truly. While the media concentrated on the virulent response to the definition, which was really another anti-Richard Carranza protest, the proponents for the definition saw it as a pivotal moment in the direction of our children’s education.

Up to this point, the definition hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves in pulling us towards a more inclusive foundation for our children.

I’ll attempt to make an argument for its proliferation through the lens of math, perhaps the most hotly contested subject area with respect to our academic core. Unlike the humanities, people love treating math as a set of absolutes, a content area apart from the human experiences we inject into the rest of our scholarship. Even though more people are starting to see how their mathematical experiences are connected to the subject area itself, we still have a way to go.

When we say “Amy can’t read,” we don’t dismiss this claim from just an academic viewpoint, but also from a moral one. Illiteracy has been treated as a scourge we ought to ostensibly destroy, even when our structures perpetuate illiteracy in our most marginalized spaces. Innumeracy rarely gets this treatment, partly because of its complexity, but also because of the narratives we tell ourselves about who deserves to learn math, how they deserve to learn math, and what math they should learn.

Too much of the argument against the Common Core State Standards, for example, starts with “students should just learn basic math.” That sounds fine, but “basic math” is often shorthand for “I have low expectations and I already know who I’m setting them for.” I used to rail against the Common Core State Standards not just over implementation, but also that CCSS came with a suite of reforms that proved ineffective at best. Our opportunity gaps persist along with the inequities.

For example, one might say that solving systems of equations in the eighth grade is too dense. We should just make sure they know how to do the four basic operations. I believe that students who can only do the basics should have boundless opportunities for success in whatever constraints success takes. Yet, I also believe that students can do more than the four basic operations and may not even need to master those to have conceptual understanding of systems of equations. In other words, we lose out on a world of opportunity by capping our students to a fifth-grade education when they have the potential for so much more.

There’s something to be said for believing that adults should have given opportunities access to systems of equations by the eighth grade. In order for that content to take shape in a classroom, the adult in the room must believe that the students in the classrooms can actually solve the two-step equation at some point in that classroom. What’s more, the adult must open themselves up to the idea that their pedagogy has to align itself to student understanding, not the biases and narratives we tell ourselves about students.

That’s where the definition lives richly. To do culturally responsive / sustaining pedagogy is to know students as people and build relationships with the people.

It’s not just about the pedagogy, however. We have staff demographics in our schools that don’t reflect their student populations. We have school leadership that both uphold antiquated understandings of how math gets taught and hold back math teachers – especially of color – from enacting pedagogies that would make students feel more connected to the material. We have peers who jeer and grind their teeth at the mere mention of anti-bias even when their students are begging for it. We have contracts with book publishers who only sell books in English, very rarely in Spanish, and almost never in the next eight most popular languages (Chinese – Mandarin, Russian, Kreyol, Arabic, Hindi, Urju, Hebrew, Gujarati). We have economic and social stratification across the board in our neighborhoods, including our homeless and sheltered people.

Oh, and we have a small window of opportunity to assure that our children get a quality education that embraces them as fully human beings regardless of their area code or local bodega.

When we say we want a “culturally responsive / sustaining education,” we’re explicitly saying we want all our students to treat each other like human beings and have our classrooms symbolize that recentering. It’s definitely for our Black students, Latinx students, Asian students, indigenous students, and our white students. It’s for our students who see themselves as mathematicians all the time and for our students who keep being told that “it’s OK because I wasn’t a math person either.” It’s to assure that we’ve created multiple pathways for discussing math as a vehicle for augmented intelligence and deconstructing perceptions of said intelligence across racial, gender, and class lines.

We believe our students can reach the heights they believe they can and we believe our students can go higher than that. Don’t miss it.

The post Some Thoughts on Math and A Culturally Relevant – Sustaining Education appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Dividing Fractions Directly and Other Things We Can’t Unknow

“Last year, we learned to keep-flip-change …”

She sees my face wince, but proceeds anyways.

“The way that goes is you keep the original fraction, change the division to multiplication, and then flip the second fraction.”

“OK, but why does it work?”

Shrug.

“Who else learned it this way?”

About three-fourths of the room raises their hand. (The other fourth still seemed to struggle with dividing fractions. More later.)

“OK, out of those of you who learned it this way, why does this work?”

I get a few “because the teacher said so”‘s, “because it just works,” “because I did well on the test” and just kept shaking my head gently while listening. Sure, the easy thing to do at that moment would have been to punch down (metaphorically, people) and tell them that their last teacher was wrong for unveiling a trick without giving them the magic behind it. The harder conversation was sitting right there, and I had it.

“What does it mean to divide?”

A few students had responses that equated to splitting apart.

I then spent about a week just showing (with) them that division is also a matter of regrouping into even pieces. In the first unit, my students determined that we use common denominators for operations with fractions because it’s fair, a simple but deep observation. With division of fractions, I’m asking students to consider multiple approaches to engaging in division. Eventually, we brought back “keep-flip-change,” but we used the term “reciprocal” instead, and only after I laid the foundation of direct division, common denominators, and modeling. (For more, check this and this.)

But once they learn to divide fractions directly, they can’t say they weren’t exposed to it anymore. They now know of its existence, at least. So do thousands of people across the country now because I told them the same thing on and offline. The knowledge isn’t new. In fact, I learned it at NCTM in 2008 (Salt Lake City). The researcher made a convincing argument that direct division helped students gain a deeper conceptual understanding of division as a whole by focusing on these numbers. It took me a couple of years, but eventually, I became fluent in direct division of fractions. Some of it was me worrying about what to do with the remainders, but a larger part of me was unlearning a topic I learned, used, and taught for more than a decade.

If I don’t have this learner orientation as an adult, how could I expect the students I teach to take a similar disposition?

Meanwhile, for years, people deceived themselves into thinking I taught the humanities, asserting that teaching math and advocating for justice were mutually exclusive. They’d say this isn’t a math blog in the way that my while counterparts’ blogs were. On the occasions where they would delve into the national zeitgeist, people would praise my counterparts for their intellect and worldliness. I couldn’t allow for my platform to continue beating the drum of math as a sterile subject while racism, sexism, militarism, and imperialism left humans around the world dead in, around, and outside of America’s borders. I’d write about math from this standpoint, only for the same people who couldn’t casually name non-white male mathematicians to suddenly find non-white male mathematicians in their history books in an attempt to disprove an argument they won for me. In ways large and small, I kept seeing instances where math teachers gave themselves permission to overintellectualize and quarantine the realm of mathematics from the complicated and messy and oppressive rules America created for its inhabitants.

Worse still, these mathematicians and math educators had some of the vaccines necessary to save the rest of humanity and kept pretending the bubble was only reserved for the already quarantined.

But now that teachers, especially those who teach post-elementary school math, have to acknowledge the complication, it’s even more critical to work through that understanding. No longer can we pretend ignorance of the doors we lock up behind us when we could easily place a wedge for more of us to go through those that come after us. No longer can we hide behind “the way we’ve always done things” to limit our students of color from getting the math they deserve. No longer can we shrink from the role mathematicians of color have played across millennia in the development and advancement of mathematics as a field, down to who deserves to chronicle math learning. No longer can we use our varied platforms as instructional coaches, writers, speakers, and upper-level / honors-courses teachers to soak up burgeoning movements for equity when the teachers who never got those platforms have more expertise than us are standing right there. No longer can we pretend that elitism in math education doesn’t exist and that we shouldn’t try our best to eradicate the straining and tracking of students so everyone can get exposure to this math.

That is to say, our students deserve to learn how to divide directly now that we all know they can get that.

And, on the occasion that a student regresses to “keep-flip-change,” I gently nudge them to consider the other ways we could have discussed this. We as a class would do well to remember the fourth of the students who didn’t respond to my original prompt at all. Remember the fourth.

The post Dividing Fractions Directly and Other Things We Can’t Unknow appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Our Own Practice

This weekend, Colin Kaepernick practiced in front of NFL scouts. One version of the practice story is that the ball seemed to float out of his hands as if carried by pigeon and dropped off to his pro athlete friends for short and long yardage. The more complicated story is that Kaepernick dismissed the heavily anticipated practice quickly arranged by the NFL and assembled his own dozens of miles away at a high school practice field. Donning the words “Kunta Kinte” on his all black outfit and an afro that moves as freely as he did in the virtual pocket, he showed with ease that he was ready to re-join a league that implicitly blackballed him from competing for the last two years. Contrary to some sportscasters’ opinions, his social justice interests sit alongside his football interests, which is why he has garnered attention for both. With an escalation in quarterback injuries this season, Kap seems a natural choice who still has enough of an arm to fit into a willing system.

But he openly questioned the overarching system and was blackballed for doing so.

To casual observers, Kaepernick’s story may have felt like just another instance of the pitfalls of not falling in line with the Shield. For others, the story of an ostensible star speaking up about systemic change in a profession that benefits from the proliferation of that exploitation rings a 2000-pound bell in us. When we take a longitudinal approach to discussing teachers of color – specifically Black teachers – in our country’s educational history, we see the oscillation of an ideological pendulum.

Should teachers of color only teach children of color, white students, or any and all? If so, what’s their pedagogy look like when they face children that were them? Do they teach them socialism, the customs of African nations, and the interpersonal skills necessary to survive in a country not built for them? Or do they teach them to put a test score above their self-care, personal responsibility at the expense of their community, and the version of respectability that centers billionaires and heads of megachurches?

What does it mean to be culturally responsive to a community where the mayor, the sheriff, the principal spout white supremacist talking points? Where the head of the school holds an anti-black sentiment even when they’re ostensibly a person of color? When the superintendent “heard about the thing you did” and uses smoke-and-mirror policies to disguise their jealousy over perceived power struggle? Does Martin Luther King Jr.’s fear of “integrating into a burning house” extend to underresourced schools and, if so, how many are willing and able to fight that fire?

If they’re teaching anything outside of the prescribed curricula, what are their prospects? If, according to research, teachers of color are leaving faster than their white counterparts, who replaces them? What happens to systems that refuse to cultivate the justice dreams of young people who wanted to serve in the spaces from whence they came? Do students win from seeing elder versions of themselves pushed out through wayward rubrics, petty post-observations, and generational poverty?

What happens when people scream “tenure” at teachers who, even with due process, can still feel shoved out because they uttered the word “anti-racism” and acted upon it in their own school building?

What happens to the educators who, through fortune and resilience, stay in systems antithetical to their core? What happens when the kids ask if they’re going to be back to teach them the next year and you can’t be 100% sure? What happens when sympathy isn’t granted to them? What happens when they’re treated not as professional human beings, but as automatons? Even by those who they believed they’ve helped? What happens to their peers’ unconsciousness when they observe this happening to them?

To you? To me?

Certainly, Kaepernick has more prospects than the average teacher of color and / or pro athlete. As a symbol for racial justice, he still collects a Nike check and any number of honors and awards from large organizations for his work. Teachers of color generally don’t get hired at more well-to-do schools once they’ve left the classroom, and often get pushed to other perilous spaces like academia or the non-profit sector. Yet, it’s worth recognizing that, if such a symbol is useful for discussing the margins of this profession we call a “calling,” then we can uproot the elements of our profession that keep our most talented and versatile professionals from getting pushed out. It’ll take a monumental shift in public sentiment, a broad coalition of educators of many stripes, and, yes, the understanding that we need to appreciate a broader skill set than simply addressing the standards on a lesson plan.

Put us in the game before we make our own.

photo c/o

The post Our Own Practice appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Juliot, A Letter

To my father,

It was one of the last times we ever had an extensive conversation. You had the news radio on blast in your car. Tim Hardaway had just revealed his homophobia to the country and the first words of wisdom you shared were “… it’s not that he thought it; it’s that he said it aloud.” You went on to dig deeper into the caverns of bigotry before I abruptly asked you how long it’d take before we got to Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. I had ridden on the passenger side of your car – typically Camrys – on average once a year, when you mostly filled the air with jazz, kompa, and meanderings about the ways of the world. You knew Brooklyn, Manhattan, Miami, and Ft. Lauderdale well enough to ignore the roads for long junctures as you hoped to remind your third child that you were his – my – father.

As a boy, I listened with hopes that you would return. As an adolescent, I listened for whatever keys you had for kindling a confidence that seemed first-nature to you and tertiary at best for me. As a young adult, I uncovered that I had aged quicker than I wanted to, through bruises, humiliation, and restraint. I had already grown angry with you through those years, resenting that our phone rang incessantly from family friends, but rarely had you on the other end. Your barely-annual visits featured those protracted journeys to whichever spot that was, the drop-off to my grandmother’s house or your significant other’s house, and agony that the man I exalted so often would leave me alone for hours on end. I thought I’d get the man whose deep gaze held the camera and expansive arms held the toddler me, who held an alligator in a trench coat named after you.

All so you could tell people you spent time with me.

On one of those occasions, I manifested my anger at you by telling my grandmother in front of the whole family that her rice and beans were too spicy. They weren’t. I said it in English. Everyone else at the table spoke Kreyol. The gasps and mutes needed no translation. My retort alarmed you still, to the point where you dropped your utensils, pulled me into your car, and drove me back directly to my mom’s apartment on Clinton St. You spent the vast majority of that ride scolding me: “If you just waited another day, we would have gone to Toys R’ Us, but you ruined it …” I waited years for you. Was my outburst such that grace couldn’t be granted me another few hours, or was it another ruse?

I get all my own things now, by the way. We good.

You came to me this morning, appearing somewhere between the new wrinkle on my forehead and my raspy morning voice. I never allowed you to occupy my son’s consciousness. He knows you passed away. A few months before you died in 2012, you called, first to berate me for not presenting him to you, as if. As if I didn’t have to find complicated father figures in strangers, priests, and professors. As if my stepfather’s abusive reign didn’t harden me to the idea of home. As if I didn’t start seeing the legacy of slavery and the remnants of this behavior in the justification of beating one’s own progeny, acquired or otherwise. As if I would ever let you disappoint my son with your disappearances, too. And then you asked to speak to my mother. I was mostly silent in response. You weren’t healthy, but you never betrayed that. I had nothing to say to you until I went to your funeral a few months after that call, at peace with the person you were to me and my seven (?) siblings from five different women.

I could never find peace until I let you and your relentless self rest.

Your spirit was conjured in a celebration for dads at my son’s school, too. Dozens of fathers flooded the Harlem block in parade form for their children. You might have derided the showing of predominantly Black and Brown men as effeminate or you might have found camaraderie in a space rife with testosterone, wood-based colognes, and distinct pan-African accents. As a youth, after another beating session with the hellraiser who would give me my only brethren from my mother’s side, I swore upon my life that I would be the father I never had. I envied the relationship you had with some of my siblings in Miami, and learned to let go of the jealousy after spending weeks in their home.

I wanted so desperately to have you in my life because it was the closest I’d come to actually being you.

I feel you looking back at me when my bloodshot eyes have had enough of being open. I’m thanking you as I embrace my son tightly, as I kiss his cheeks and forehead, as I console him of his worries. I shake my free hand of you as I hold my son’s on the other. I hurt for the children who’ve drawn eye contact me, whose fathers are more like you with me and whose fathers are more like me with mine, and who are absent all the same. I learned that I must own the reserves of my own happiness and not leave it up to anyone else, no matter how deeply connected. I know you left me gifts, some of which keep revealing themselves in my interactions with others.

I’m also attuned to the limits of my resilience for people I love.

It’s like that time you had to drive from deep in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side because I couldn’t stand getting my shots with a baby needle. My mom and stepfather held me down but to no avail. When you came in and the ounces of my blood finally made it into the nurse’s tubes for testing, I sat quietly, listening to three adults hoping they’d never have to go through that again. I learned to bleed privately. I learned the routines of what to do should someone else bleed in front of me. I took the transfusion of this moment so I wouldn’t have to feel that.

Maybe you knew the whole time that, as imperfect as you were, I’d have to know you so I could know myself. I know me now.

The post Juliot, A Letter appeared first on The Jose Vilson.