Jose Vilson's Blog, page 14

Every Morning Is An Affirmation

As a boy, I used to say my prayers at night.

Nothing and everything triggered these prayers. While a light buzz pretended silence before the eventual gunshot outside, I’d kneel on both knees, hands clasped, eyes closed, talking to what Catholics refer to as God. Maybe I just needed time to hear what He needed to tell me. Maybe I needed a respite from the emotional abuse I felt burdened to withstand. Maybe the Our Father served as a wish. Maybe these dreams needed realization. On Earth as it is in heaven, as they say.

Saturday and Sunday school gave me an approach to speak to the ethereal, but it was up to me to translate how that would inform my corporeal.

The idea of prayer came up for me more recently when I saw my student do the sign of the cross before walking into class. Normally, at 7:30 in the morning, it’s just me and whoever’s blasting from my speakers. These quiet moments where I’m prepping for class are also the moments I take to drink coffee and leave a “good morning” tweet for my colleagues and friends, those who I assume are also awake with me. At around 7:55am, I hear the screeches of sneakers and adolescent voices creep from the other end of the hallway. Kids form a human stream of emotions in dozens: exhausting, elation, and clumsiness of the pubescent as they drag, run, and trip down the hallway respectively.

But to see a sign of the cross made me curious.

I didn’t ask, either. I would have thought to ask: “What prayer would you like to see fulfilled before entering our classrooms? Who are you praying for or with? What part of your soul aches that would cause the child to do this? What fears can our school alleviate and what fears does our school inspire that would evoke such a reaction? What is the gap between the things we see about this child and the things we don’t?”

We’ve intentionally kept prayer out of the school curriculum. This doesn’t mean we still don’t need to attend to the spirits and souls of the young humans entrusted to us. School spirit doesn’t just show up in the rallies and logos of a school, but the relationships and pedagogies we espouse. We have optimism that our ratings won’t affect our paychecks and pensions, and we have optimism that we can keep doing this beautiful, arduous work for and with students despite the obstacles. We have affirmations that come in the form of “Highly Effective” on rubrics and 3s and 4s on student test scores, and we have affirmations where adults and children look themselves in the mirror hopeful that they’re up this task we call school.

We can’t operationalize soul. There’s only so many times we can toss out “it’s about the kids” without attending to the elements that we feel even before they’ve crossed our door frames.

A couple of hours after observing the self-christened child, he walked into my classroom and started taking notes. He participated in class. He did his classwork. He spoke with fellow classmates. He still flashes smiles to his classmates. He’s doing fine as far as the eye can see. He’s got the attention of his teacher, though.

His teacher feels the nerves in the room. His teacher’s already 10 steps ahead of the move he’s currently making. The students check in with the teacher … me. I’m good, too. I don’t pray at night anymore. I write. I plan. I kiss my family at night. I save my spirit-conjuring in the morning. Every morning that I get to do this work is the blessing.

We’re awake. May our spirits follow suit.

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Bring Me A Higher Love

Pardon me since I haven't done this in a while, but I'd like to quote a bit of poetry from Steve Winwood:

Think about it, there must be higher love

Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above

Without it, life is wasted time

Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine

Things look so bad everywhere

In this whole world, what is fair?

We walk blind and we try to see

Falling behind in what could be

Eleven years ago, Luz graduated from Columbia University with a degree in education leadership. Before we created our current life together, I was just a rookie teacher, observing a teacher leader transform into a building leader with baby blue tassel moving from right to left. She spent long nights reading assignments that didn't necessitate such studiousness, reminding people about the difference the U and Colombia the country, and sharing stories about her new world view on leadership.

On occasion, I'd get to glide through the mahogany hallways of Teachers College on my way to see her, intrigued by the bustle of new college students and century-old edifice. Confident as I was, I'd drop a few words in conversation with her classmates about my classroom and what brought me to TC. One time, I even had the pleasure of watching a presentation in the chapel.

I'd sit in the back of that chapel, watching these future administrators watch a speaker, thinking to myself: "I know I'd love to get up there. Now it's a matter of what it is I need to say."

Eleven years later, I'm on that stage discussing teacher voice and social justice on behalf of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Eleven years ago, that felt far-fetched in some ways. A current teacher has the opportunity at an Ivy League institution to speak freely without a doctorate. It's incumbent on me to put a wedge in the door every time I do this so the next few can get in. The door does not come down with one person. Naturally, I spoke about my past students, the ways they taught me to be a better teacher, how I used that energy to speak outside of the classroom, and why relationships matter more than content. Before I knew it, the time had passed and I brought myself back to Earth.

Humility is critical, because in a place like New York City, teachers have to wait decades to get recognized for the work. We have scores of people who get paid hand-over-fist to infer failure early and often. We have a department that deals directly with equity and access in our public school system, and a slew of administrators who believe equity means results and nothing more. We have colleagues who quietly cheer on their colleagues and others who loudly dismiss another, and everything in between. We discard words like disruption and differentiation like the plethora of photocopied passages and pamphlets from proselytizers who permeated our schools for thousands at a time. We have learned the art of nodding and dissent. We have measures. So many measures. So many of them objectionable, subjective, and inadequate all the same.

People reticent to allow educators of conscious platforms speak from places of jealousy perhaps, but definitely fear. Qualified experience and / or vetted research with corroborating stories beats obtuse and compromised deceptions in the ways we move communities.

That's why so much of this work is about approach and content. It's great when we develop work with precision and thoughtfulness. I also see how one needs to feel the work. The words we read need to pull sympathy from the believers, angst from the non-believers. When we hear people talk about "love for the work," we're not dodging comprehensiveness, depth, or progress in our students' knowledge or what people outside of our classrooms need to know about our passions. We're explicitly saying that, without this love, we might as well leave our voices up to folks with no desire to "deal" with children.

At this point, the handful of us who've spoken up about social justice have already laid the blueprint so they don't need to gain those experience via poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. They can "get it right" by looking at the metrics and move accordingly.

The love magnifies the narratives. These voices don't come off the same because our voices oscillate between tremble and shout. Some might argue that human beings are easily deceived by preternatural oratory, which has some truth to it. However, I also believe people are slowly learning to feel inspiration from the fruits of labor. These works are the legacy we leave in our resistance to people who prefer us as marionettes. Why wouldn't those of us who walk amongst the students know how to speak in front of adults with equal fervor and imagination?

In the chapel, spots of natural light penetrate the tinted windows, a small reminder to the students that, should they get lost in that labyrinthine college, they can find their way back in that space. From the back of the chapel, one doesn't notice because we're busy looking at the person on stage. From the stage, our perspectives change. The rookie from a decade ago quietly and actively listened to hundreds of folks from all walks of life, spoke pithily when prompted, and embraced the task of getting his life's work aligned with his heart over and again. Oh, and eventually working with that friend and future building leader to build this partnership, this apartment, this wonderful child.

If that's not higher love, then what are we thinking of? continue reading

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A Measure of This Teacher

This is how it had to be.

90° weather permeated a musty classroom, untouched since mid-summer when custodians and school aides moved furniture away then into the center to wax the floors. My old room's furniture found its way into this room as well. The first two days of setting up my classroom involved lifting bookshelves, setting up student desks, the teacher area, and textbook collections (because calling them "libraries" would be an insult to libraries). I wore a dark polo, jeans, and Jordans while dumping curricula older than my teaching career. Shakira and the Carters pushed me through the eight-foot wooden apparatuses in need of tender loving construction and screws. I repaired shelves and mirrors, cleaned out lockers, fixed a quick bulletin board, put up a few posters, and took inventory of the supplies I needed. I folded boxes with the contents of my old desks, dusted every piece of lumber in the place, Lysol'ed the desks, and shook the chairs to see which ones would wobble if and when my students got anxious in class.

This is my fifth classroom in five years. Each time, I'm asked to process, sort, and discard of what was left behind. Each time, I oblige because the kids need an environment where the person in charge of it looks like they care. This time was different. Last year, I walked into work with business attire. This year, I wore sunglasses and a t-shirt. Last year, I was given a room with a broken air conditioner. This year, I had an air conditioner. Last year, I had a teacher improvement plan. This year, I didn't.

No sweat.

I have every intention of shedding the gripes, too. Teacher improvement plans are as anonymous as they sound, and usually just as capricious. I won't bother you with the minutiae of every sharp Do Now / warm-up, every activity I presented, every student response, every missed opportunity for deeper questioning, every minutes of lost time due to having a broken clock in my classroom, and every moment of wit and anxiety while children and adults take furious notes with different implications. Each time, I never felt I had to prove my pedagogy, but I had to convince others that the dubious measures of evaluation from the year before weren't a reflection of my classroom. We use an evaluative rubric that provided plenty of appropriate examples in its dimensions, and plenty of wiggle room for folks to mis- and re-interpret.

But it never tells me why students got love for me. Danielson got nothin' on that. Or me.

Doubt stung my skin and made welts all over it, and, rather than seeking the appropriate ointment, I let it sting so I could empathize with the hundreds of others I'd watch in the news, the Internet, and the grievance offices down at my union. I had a hard time blaming the people in my building because I knew the numbers were out of their control, but I was enraged all the same.

In the time of my teacher improvement plan, I keynoted a dozen spaces, participated in panels, wrote thousands of published words, and helped inspire thousands of educators through any one of my platforms. There was a definite article - the - that I put on my name a decade ago, and it's finally fastened to my first name wherever I'm featured. A who's who of veritable education luminaries know and respect my work, and excerpts from my book have been used in hundreds of education classes and speeches. My work in this space as an educator and executive director of EduColor has sparked any number of people to go into teaching or teachers, especially of color, to stay.

None of this, and I mean none of this, prevented me from the disquiet of lesson plans that wouldn't comport with the whims of what I'm supposed to look like for adults. Doing things for the culture doesn't mean the institutions will reciprocate that energy. My lowest rating in observable dimensions end up being in "Growing Professionally." OK, cool.

Teacher improvement plans sounds amazing, too. "We're going to whip this teacher into shape," they'll say. "The teacher's too loosey-goosey," they'll say. "Our test scores aren't going up, so we gotta focus on a couple of you," they'll say. Even with the massive issues with using value-added measures for teacher improvement, they'll ignore the research and stick to whatever helps them avoid the gaze of central officials. Scores of teachers listened to the word "support" and only heard "imposition." These TIPs purport rigorous independence, but propound virtual puppeteering. How do we explain getting adults to get children to follow our movements, think as we say they should, talk like stereotypes of the bourgeoisie, and repeatedly punish those students who don't comply? To satisfy testing companies and the paper lobby?

Why are we being asked to teach like champions, yet we keep losing?

The constant hope remains the students. There are dozens of diatribes written about the evils of corporate education reform, high-stakes standardized testing, and the learning conditions of our students. Yet, those relationships remain. The plethora of implicit and explicit ways we demonstrate to students that we sense them pushes me daily. I might look at them, but I need to put in work to see them. I might hear their rumbles, but I need patience to listen to them. Most of this immeasurable work would have looked different if I had treated teaching according to the official rubric and dimensions. Instead, I sat there organizing another teacher desk, looking out at my new classroom, and felt my extremities tingle.

Let me be "effective" on that piece of paper. I'm cool with that, too. continue reading

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Let Me See ‘Em Up High, This Is Not A Test [Part Two of Two]

To Dulce, Tamir, Patrick, James, Jemelleh, Kelisa, Julia, Lorena, Shana, Val, Cornelius, and the rest of us, too (part 2),

Few days deliver a range of emotions like the day students receive their high school placement letters. In many towns across the country, the high school in the district has pipelines from a handful of elementary and middle schools in the county. New York City, with all its splendor and yearning for "choice," has students choose 12 from hundreds of schools in a big index and put it on a worksheet that sorts students on any criteria, from the specialized high schools to the zoned schools and every school in between. Even with the best of intentions, that wide net of schools still leaves our best and brightest from a school of their choice. When the first round of high school placement letters get ripped opened by my students, I'm there informally counseling my eighth graders on next steps. Some are nonplussed, others elated, and others still grieve because they saw that this approach to school choice did not account for their brilliance and desires.

Then, there's the peculiar case of the student who got a second choice that's better than the first.

In this case, I had to dip into my reserves to boost up the student's choice. (If you've ever been around me when you need a boost, you've probably heard something along these lines):

"YASSS, honey, YASSSS!"
"Wow, what a great school with great activities! It'll be perfect for you!"
"Oh, nobody you know goes there? Good. New year, new you!"
"Look who this school is named after! That's so dope!"
"Wait, that was your first choice? That was wack! This school actually wants you back, though! What's up, though?"

Inevitably, the student acquiesces because I gassed them. I got that effect, I suppose. Granted, I believe in student choice when done well. I also wouldn't want students to disregard the blessings on their lap. I don't know what's going to happen to the student in that specific school, though, from everything I've observed, it puts students on the path to the fulfillment of their own dreams. Striking the delicate balance of authority and facilitator doesn't always work out. I'd like to believe my joy is never from a neutral viewpoint, but from the context of a neighborhood where conditions for my kids are still perilous.

At what point do we allow ourselves to celebrate and be joyful in our struggle?

I ask you to understand the eternal struggle for equity and justice with and for our people, even when they don't love us back. We have centuries of informally fighting for reclamation of our intellectual pursuits. "Teaching" is but another level, where we're given license to both impart wisdom of the ages for an indecent salary. The fight for more of us in the classroom is also the fight for more of us to rightfully exist in our fullest capacities in a society openly hostile to our existence. Society pretends to revere us in our poverty and generational debt while lionizing billionaires and magnates just the same. If anyone wants to see the status of education reform, one only need to check the qualitative and quantitative data around teachers of color, specifically black teachers.

None of this should deter us from rowing: looking back, pushing forward.

Humility and modesty often get mistaken for each other. For all his hubris, the greatest rapper ever still has to introduce himself on the subway, too. We qualify this with any number of statements. We walk in our purpose. We have our steps ordered. We feel blessed to do the work we do and then some. "And then some" for me has been writing, speaking, web designing, organizing, and, yes, fathering. In each instances, I've found myself teetering, not wanting to reveal all these gifts because of my preconceived notions of who deserves these titles. We negate what we've been granted because we might have learned along the way that boasting attracts collective applause and systemic contempt for us. We rattle names of people who we perceive to be more brilliant thereby instilling us as mere imposters in the work we've set out to do. This perception assures we accept less pay, less attention, less loyalty, less thanked, and, yes, less humanity.

When we turn to each other and say, "We all we got," we must learn to mean it.

Over the summer, I saw the power of collective in multiple settings. We owe it to ourselves to only accept that which liberates us institutionally and personally. If we can help it, we need to create, take up, and reclaim our own spaces. We create it when two or more of us are gathered. We take it up when one or more of us uses our voices and actions to transform our conditions. We reclaim our spaces when we acknowledge the stolen land underneath us, the stolen peoples amongst us, the stolen monies that push people in and out of our country, and the stolen time our humanities were not recognized. Oh, and the stolen knowledges and stories denied to everyone that would have moved us forward. This is all recoup.

Mobbin' with a hoodie like 'Melo. Hop up in them administration buildings like "HELLO!"

This is a letter of affirmation. To my people who start out the school year in a new way every year in hopes of getting it right, I see you. To my people starting a new job where they get to affect hundreds more kids who need us, I see you. To my people losing sleep trying to move new dreams and visions, I see you. To my people building communities up and out through conversation and action, I see you. To my people in limbo about the classroom because their district has created seemingly insurmountable walls, I see you. To my people who ended up doing something for next-to-free because the old culture says teachers must elevate for "free" while a small number of hands benefit, I see you. Let's see us in this new society.

Also, if it ever feels like you're by yourself in this, it might not satisfy you to know that you're not. It's fine to stand in one's own presence and power. Our lives are miraculous. We're allowed to act as such.

The GREs, the DOE, and the IRS. We passed the alphabet groups like an eye test.

Best,

TheJLV

(photo c/o) continue reading

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Have You Ever Seen A Class Goin’ Apesh**? [Part One of Two]

To Dulce, Tamir, Patrick, James, Jemelleh, Kelisa, Julia, Lorena, Shana, Val, Cornelius, and the rest of us, too,

A few years ago, I was in the middle of a gathering of young burgeoning educators. It was ostensibly about becoming better educators, but everyone received the messages differently. Some took the presenter to heart when she tried to impart wisdom from her decades of experience in the classroom. She spoke about her experiences in the classroom with a glimmer in her eye, reminding the audience that the best parts of her profession were the moments with students. In her presentation, you felt how seriously she took her job. I watched as the audience seemed to pay attention and scribble notes as she revealed her theory of practice and how she approaches the day-to-day of classroom teaching.

During one of the breaks, however, I observed a conversation happening when the presenter stepped out. One of the participants ended the conversation by boasting "Oh, everyone, there's going to be a professional development session on Teach Like A Champion later. It's gonna be lit." When the presenter came back, a couple of the participants seemed to lose interest, even as the presenter got into the meat and potatoes of her presentation. When she asked for questions, there weren't as many as I anticipated given the expertise of the presenter and the lack thereof from the educators.

Normally, a letter like this on my site would reveal friction between races and / or ethnicities. But nope. The presenter was a Black woman presenting to a Black audience. While I understood that every teacher in the room comes from different contexts, different schools, different administration, different goals, and yes, different understandings of what we consider school, it also revealed how complicated and complicit so many of us are in spaces we consider "ours." The outright disregard of someone who'd been doing this work was astonishing to me, and I'll be the first to diss a bad workshop. This wasn't that. Even when teachers of color are more likely to believe their students' brilliance, the "more likely" does not absolve those of us who still act oppressive for our bottom lines or from our own insecurities.

The sayings go "sometimes, it be your own people" and "all skinfolk ain't kinfolk." In the education space, there's a set of people of color who prefer to receive knowledge from and disseminate to white sources. This occurs even when the person swears to the heavens that they're "about that life." It's disturbing to me, and those of us need to have that internal conversation aloud.

"For us, by us, about us" is a difficult concept as is. We're asking people to come together with common concepts of schooling and living. We're emphasizing doing and naming the "doing" as an act of love and appreciation for people we consider ours. We're constructing things without benevolent benefactors or at least folks we're willing to negotiate with. We're going deeper than codeswitching. We're moving the culture by creating our own and asking everyone else to act accordingly. In this conversation of equity, diversity, and inclusion, they need us; we don't need them.

We've grown tired of the interruptions, the ad hoc approval cliques, and the acculturation that passes for professional conduct in spaces we're asked to occupy. We get the need to let our hair down. Yet, we're seeing time and again how we replicate some of the same behaviors we despise and attribute to the American hegemony. It ain't OK.

I haven't spent two months without any number of our own people questioning the expertise and experiences of us. I've seen people of color who point to the white person outside of their circle to discuss writing for a major publication while another person of color who wrote for the same publication was sitting right there. I've seen administrators skip over their own staff of color for culturally responsive pedagogy conferences when the staff member of color was the one who wrote the proposal for it in the first place. Until recently, I've seen researchers of color get ignored when they discuss the conditions of teachers of color by people who ought to know better. I've seen how an all-Black school staff with an all-Black student body can snicker at the prospect of culturally responsive pedagogy. I've seen administrators of color throw their own staff and students under the bus to advance their own careers, and whole sets of parents disregarded until a white parent's voice said the same exact thing.

We can talk Black excellence and collectivity, but not without discussing the ways a small subset of us continue to subvert our advocacy. We can call it impostor syndrome, internalized oppression, or post-traumatic slave disorder. Whatever we're calling it, we're in need of a collective detox, and it'll start with us.

Give us our check. Put some respect on our intellect. Pay us with equity. Watch us reverse out of generational debt.

I've come to appreciate that the work does not speak for itself. If anything, the heights we reach are only invitations for any number of folks to disqualify our accomplishments. That's cool. If our core wasn't the students we serve, these constant slights from people all around us might deter us from going forward. Sometimes, we must make prophecy away from our own homes, only to return victors working hand in hand with those who first disregarded our works.

We got this. We got us. Even those of us who ain't with the program yet. More soon. continue reading

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And All Of A Sudden, I’m So Good At Math

The school day before the math state exam, we went over any number of topics: linear relationships, scientific notation, the slope-intercept form of a linear equation. In each instance, I had a few sample problems carefully planned out for whole class review. [Yes, I had a lesson plan for the session this time.] Then, I prompted students to ask about "confusing" problems for us to review together. They picked one about frequency tables. I knew the answer. It was yelling at me right there on my paper. However, at the moment, I forgot how to articulate what needed explanation. I looked around the room and saw any number of students listless about the responses their tablemates were getting. I kept asking for them to come up with an argument that worked. They still couldn't convince one another.

I almost blurted out the answer and literally cut myself off. I then pointed at the student who explained it better to me and let her rock. I then occupied her seat and watched the master at work. Some of the students kept arguing with one another until they saw the new teacher and, with some cough prompting, gave her a chance to explain her theory. The marker glided across that whiteboard while students asked the new teacher the question I couldn't answer, then the new teacher passed the mic to another new teacher who had just asked the first teacher if she could teach the answer her way.

Um, sure, what do you need me for?

After the class came to some consensus on the problem and I caught a breath, I went back to the front of the class and said "Any other questions?" They seemed satisfied. Time and again, I have those handful of students willing to challenge and confront me on the math questions in front of them. I relish the opportunity to argue with them and parse out the ideas, whether it's one-on-one or with the whole class. When it gets too tense, I might even laugh out loud to show my appreciation for them pushing back. "Winning" the argument in most of those instances isn't as important as them having argued. (Yes, I know I'm supposed to win like 98% of the arguments, but that's for another time.)

But this practice only happens if the teacher disorients themselves in their position of power. Most people I've spoken to look for the teacher to stand in front of the classroom, but this seems endemic of math teachers. We're expected to do the rote, the mundane, the practical. Even as our personalities might vary, our content expectations need not deviate from direct instruction that worked so well for the adults who ostensibly succeeded in schooling. Math teachers express the values of math in their renditions of authority. The more sophisticated the math, the stronger the penchant for outright dismissal of "those who don't get it."

That's a stereotype worth owning, deconstructing, then reconstructing something new.

What's more, I've felt the spectrum of expertise as a student and as a teacher. I've known excellence in K-12 math student only to spend sleepless nights playing catch up in Calc 1, 2, and 3. I've spent hours in professional development sessions where the organizer or peers devalued my place in the math community as a Black teacher, and I've spent more hours traveling the country to discuss equity in math. I've spent hours in schools where some students lavished praise on their teachers who acknowledged them as human beings and math students and heard older students cry to me over the disinterest their teacher had in their mathematical success. I've become a case study on the deleterious ways that numbers get used against us as teachers, too. I can acknowledge that assessments matter and still disregard measures of student learning with sizable margins of error. I can be considered one of the most professional and decorated teachers in a building, a district, a city, a country, and still be rated the lowest on professionalism in my teacher rating sheet. I've earned payment for pieces I've written on math, and handed countless letters and memos for my file.

Despite testimony from any number of peers, colleagues, and naysayers, I'm so good at math.

That's not enough. If the students in my classroom don't see themselves in the math in front of them, they'll always ask us about relevance. Rather than the teacher (me, you, whoever) insisting that students soak in a teacher's one understanding of the material in front of them, it's important that we model fault and self-correction through questions and argument. I found that, throughout the history of math, the real mathematicians both trusted each other's expertise and had heated discussions about the content. Sure, there has to be time for teachers to clarify and expound on concepts that students haven't seen as a matter of efficiency and processing, but without the time to reflect and practice on skills and concepts in tandem with peers and alone, it's hard for them to see themselves as mathematicians.

That has to be modeled by us. It's not teacher blaming. It's a reorientation. Instead of getting corrected "by accident," why not make it part of our regular practice as teachers of young people? continue reading

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An Informal, Vetted, Amplified Set of Issues People of Color at Your Conferences Already Know [Medium]

Recently, I wrote a blog post at Medium that probably ruffles any number of feathers, but if the feathers were better adjusted to their roots, they wouldn't fall off. What's more, it wasn't about any particular conferences. In fact, the people who prompted me to curate the list weren't even part of any official conferences I attended. Based on the responses, this seems to have resonated. For example:

#4?—?We’re trying to learn just like y’all. If we’re there to talk about race, it’s because we do it at the behest of the organization (that oft recognizes that y’all need it) or you decided to present on what you always present on instead of calling in / out your ppl.

Educators of color aren’t walking vessels of knowledge about racial issues to be sapped at will. Many of us will have a conversation about race with the right people, but it’s important to not take the kindness for obligation. We have a plethora of books, videos, and resources created and searchable on the web in case people want to find out more without putting their emotional luggage on our person.

And, if you’d like more time, find ways to repay us. We too would like to do learning at these conferences, even if it’s from folks who don’t want to have the equity conversation right then and there.

For more, please do read the rest of the article and let me know what you think. Thanks! continue reading

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My Students Are Already Twice As Good [Medium]

On this Independence Day, I've been thinking about the nexus of "dreams" and "ideals" in the context of this epicenter we call America. Our classrooms teach us as much about America as the flag-waving, anthem-singing pageantry we engage in for its own sake. Observe:

As someone who was once “them,” you’ll never understand how much harder you’ve made it to get full educational rights because you refuse to see me and my people as human beings.

But alas, the students are victorious. Their diplomas will land harder than the punches once designated for you before you creeped off into the after-bell. Their smiles dazzle. Their intellect astounds. Their excellence humbles. The talking points that rock you to sleep at night will not faze them. The names you’ve hurled at them under and over your breath in the classroom has diminishing returns against the names they’re building for themselves. They will take the funds set aside for walls and make them into pocket mirrors to reflect the ugliness back upon you.

For more, please read my latest on Medium and let me know what you think. Thank you! continue reading

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The Urgency of Juneteenth for Educators [Interview with Dr. James Forbes]

On June 19th, Riverside Church is holding a special Juneteenth event available to the public [RSVP here]. In addition to the celebration, the event will honor luminaries such as Harry and Gina Belafonte, Dr. Gail Christopher, Cristina Jiménez, and the #NeverAgain Youth Leaders. Below is an interview between me and Dr. James Forbes, senior minister at the world-famous Riverside Church in New York City. In the conversation, which was edited for brevity and clarity, he imparts wisdom on the importance of Juneteenth to students, educators, and the country. 

Vilson: How do you see Riverside Church in this current climate? What’s been your vision in terms of moving the church forward in terms of what’s happening in the world of our country?

Forbes: In the history of Riverside Church, there’s this constant call to be champions. It is in Riverside [Church’s] DNA to be the place of celebration of liberation. For an example, in the early days, when Mandela was freed from prison, it was Riverside Church that he chose, saying “This church has always stood with us in the midst of struggle.” When Dr. King got ready to give his speech in [1967], the clergy and laity concerned about the War in Vietnam chose Riverside. It was at Riverside that the speech was given a time to break silence in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, “There comes a point in which silence becomes betrayal,” and he challenges our nation from that place. The Dalai Lama brought representatives from 12 different faith traditions to say “It is no longer appropriate for us to think that each of us is the only one giving the word of truth,” and so, he promoted an event where all of the major religions said, “We are united in God’s truth and the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you,” and so it is in the walls of Riverside Church to be the welcoming place for that which tends towards freedom and justice for all.

V: Wow, that’s excellent.

F: I might add that I was the first African-American pastor to lead the church and there were those who thought “That’s impossible!” But because it was Riverside, the ministers felt it necessary to say “We’ve been preaching justice and now that we got a chance to choose a pastor, we can’t let race get in the way.” Freedom and justice has always been in the DNA of that place!”

V: If a young student (editor's note: I explained from Pre-K through 12th grade) asked you “What does Juneteenth mean to you,” what would you tell them?

F: Juneteenth is one of the most important, but almost forgotten, holidays in the United States of America. Juneteenth actually was the first celebration where all Americans were free. On July 4th, 1776, we were free from the crown and with the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, but that does not include black people. We were only three-fifths of a person according to the Constitution and it is true that even when the settlers came from Europe, from England, women didn’t have the vote. They weren’t free. Every so often, we discovered that every group that comes to America has to go through the same process where they are not granted full freedom: the Irish, the Italians, Jews, Catholics. They weren’t free, and clearly the Native Americans weren’t free. So, in 1865, on June the 19th, a general was dispatched to Galveston, TX to announce that although [January 1st] 1863 was the Emancipation Proclamation, only the slaves in the separated states were set free. The slaves in the North were not set free. It was not until two and a half years later that every person in the United States was free.

You ask me why Juneteenth is important?! Because it tells a very important truth: that there have always been people who tried to delay the freedom and justice of others, but, in spite of their efforts, with the help of the Good Lord and those who were actually abolitionists and those who really believed in justice, that finally, and of course, it was Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation, finally, Juneteenth is the first day where all Americans were free! That is an extraordinary thing to remember! Remember that there are always those who delay justice but that justice finally breaks through, that freedom finally comes! So that’s why it’s a very special day for me.

It’s also special because it’s the time to celebrate the fact that not only were black folks free, the Latina/o population was free down in that southern border above Mexico, the fact that abolitionists, freedom-loving people, celebrated, no matter what their orientation or their ideology, the fact that Juneteenth is the first day we can celebrate that we are all free together. It’s the day where we rededicate ourselves to working, that all God’s children are free around the world, that justice is restored after the destabilization that we are experiencing during the color of crisis in our nation.

In New York, every ethnicity has its own day, but somebody said “We need a day where we can celebrate freedom and justice for all of us!” That would be Juneteenth! In Texas, there’s a big celebration, and there’s a commission in New York City for Juneteenth, and it’s celebrated sparsely here and there, but Juneteenth should be a day in which we celebrate with praise and legislated conversation and determination to set people free. It should be the day that clemency is granted to people not threatening to society. It should be a day when we actually symbolize becoming a post-racial society.

We’re not there yet, but Juneteenth is the day of anticipation where all God’s children should be free, and my determination started four years ago to help bring this great day out of the shadows and bring it to the forefront of America’s consciousness and let it begin to be developed as a great day of celebration of a post-racial society.

V: What do you envision as an educator’s role in the “Fierce Urgency for Justice” and the work moving forward?

F: The educator’s role is to be engaged in sophisticated pedagogy. By that I mean, a good educator knows that we will not respectably address racial bigotry and economic exploitation without looking at the ugly paths of efforts to deny and to delay such justice as we are thinking about. An educator knows the power of ugly example, the power of demonic delay, and the educator would like to have an agenda that does not gloss over the past but looks it squarely in the face to the extent that we tell the truth about the history of Juneteenth! Freedom-loving people all over the world would like to say “NO MORE, NO MORE, NO MORE!”

The educator knows that sometimes the best way to start people on the journey towards a progressive agenda of freedom and justice for all is to look out at the stormy past, over the bitter roads of which we have passed, to look at the example of folks who have made money long enough to cause them to deny human beings their fundamental rights. Educators will know that Juneteenth is one of those dates that dramatizes the horror of the past BUT it is, at the same time for an educator, a moment of exhilaration that freedom finally came! It is a moment in which both black and white can celebrate together, that we are headed to the promised land of freedom and justice for all! You can’t find a better, transformative symbolism than something that makes us look squarely in the face at the horrors of the past and causes us to drink from the fountains of freedom as we anticipate a new breath of freedom around the world.

Man, it should be an educator's field day to have the students research.

“What was the delay about?”
“Why did this take so long?”
“Why did this not happen before?”

[Have students] research the different theories as to why the delay occurred and give different theories as to who fought to make this possible. [Have students] give different theories as to why Lincoln made this day possible, the different theories as to what the real reason was for the development of slavery, what the ideological reason was and what were the economic and political consequences that gave rise to the development out of slavery that gave rise to white supremacist ideology!

I mean, we should have a whole course in the curriculum in major universities entitled “Juneteenth: With and Where To?”

Educators will say it is not enough to engage in the dissemination of information, that transformation also requires celebration. That’s why we’re gonna celebrate it! People will discover that these kinds of celebrations can be cathartic. They actually can help people work through some of the delayed emotional entanglements with the evils of the past! People can come to an event like this and decide which side they want to be on in regards to current issues of immigration, police brutality, the dehumanization related to gentrification.

It is in the context of these wonderful celebrations that people get religion about being justly, that they can energize their commitments to serving just causes.

For more information, please go to the following website and, if you're there, let's celebrate. continue reading

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A Letter From An Inner City Classroom (and This Teacher Is Your Brother)

To Whom It May Concern,

Recently, you invited me into your space to discuss what it means to be an educator of color doing this work.

The term "work" is almost as ubiquitous as the word "equity," and in both instances fraught with ambiguity. When I tell people I'm up at the crack of dawn daily, lessons in mind, students strategically placed, necessary conversations placed in my frontal lobe, coffee in hand, I mean that I'm ready to educate students with all the energies bestowed upon me that day. The bell may sound twice and I might look scurried, but I'm never scared. There was a time when I thought 90 students in three classes felt daunting, but now it's 140 middle schoolers pouring in and out of my doors in 45-minute intervals throughout the day. After that wave, I still carve time to share wisdom with subscribers, develop visions with collectives, pontificate on the merits and demerits of our current slate of education initiatives, and continually work on my own definition of home with my partner and my son. Other words are done sub rosa, but all important steps towards my and hopefully our work towards justice.

Oh, and mentor folks like you, of which we have so many, of which we will have so few.

The current initiatives to diversify the profession have deeper incentives and meanings, mostly noble. We want a staff that racially and experientially reflects the student body in front of them. We've discussed ad nauseam the ways that whiteness permeates our teaching staff, not just as a reflection of the phenotypic make-up of the adults our students work every day, but also the institutional barriers and levers our education system enacts on our students. These practices, so deeply ingrained in our system-based edifices that our imaginations collapse in defeat, cannot be uprooted by simply changing the faces of the people in front of our children. We can discuss the aggressions these adults of color face, truly a microcosm of society as a whole. The simple solution, if it's any real solution, is to provide anti-bias trainings, restorative justice programs, syllabi for teacher education programs, and grants with mentorship to bolster these burgeoning adults so they may stick with us a little longer.

The harder, more relevant, and sustainable work for America would be to understand what parts of our humanity are admissible to this nebula we call the teaching profession.

What good does it do to recruit and retain educators of color if we strip away the consciences, experiences, and alternate histories that would give our students a more holistic understanding of their positions on this Earth? Who commissions 3.6 million people to transmit its values to the children of a country on stolen lands with stolen peoples and pilfering policies that create conditions for immigrants to risk our smoke and mirror? The progeny of such a journey would hopefully nudge our policies and practice to see you and me as keys to building a better, more uplifting America. Instead, we're assumed negligent and irreparable upon entry.

And we have the nerve to be teachers.

Our "struggles" are generally not our fault, but we've assumed responsibility. These checklists determine little more than compliance, but that compliance is also tied to letters in our file and our livelihoods, our hopes that we might make it out of generational debt. These data may serve as security blankets for the administrators and politicians who "are happy that progress has been made, but there's more to go," but it does little to resolve the underbelly of a culture explicit on setting children to irrational numbers. Ask people who yell to the rafters about doing an initiative "for children" if they have had a transformational conversation with a student in recent memory.

Never mind. Don't. There's enough shame to be passed around.

You asked me about my struggle, and I promised I'd tell you. I struggle with writing pretty lesson plans because I'm worried about any number of elements with the students. I struggle with paperwork that doesn't connect with me because I rather be thinking about my own practices. I struggle with my own demeanor in class because "highly effective" and "gets kids to respect him without disrespecting their voices" mean different things for different people. I struggle with advocating for my fellow educators in this imperial city while seeing so many of them, us, advocating for the subjugation of our most under-served youth. I struggle with not getting swept in this specific respectability, this specific conservatism. I struggle with writing these pieces for over a decade with readers from the highest positions in the city, state, and nation and still letting these struggles subsume me. My social media following, my testimonials in your favorite outlets, my emergence as a beacon in this profession does little to dissuade people far and close to me from diluting the relevance of this work.

Let others tell it, I never take agency in my professional growth, even as I grow the profession's boundaries. Akin to a horse race, they would prefer to put blinders on us and keep us in clearly bordered stables and race tracks. For some of us, the minute we've decided we've grown weary of the race is the minute the prods and whips in the form of letters and slips come. Because our work is rooted different, it moves different, it relates different, it means we're more likely to face the wrath our institution has for us. I remain convinced that the diversity conversation means nothing without accounting for the minds and hearts that come with.

I acknowledge that, even as I'm trying to recruit you into greatness and glory, I often feel like a case study for our disappearance.

But fret not. Hope isn't an aside; it's a challenge. Our students deserve the best and brightest, not just of us, but in us. Find solace in the chaos and irregularity of the students in front of you, each containing multitudes, each of those worthy of your time and attention. Wade in the comfort of subverting at several levels the rigid and meandering demands of folks nervous to be or return to the shoes you're in. Believe deeply in reflection. Second and third guess yourself, and self-soothe once you've come to a more comprehensive version of yourself and your vision for others around you. Be not afraid of vulnerability and love; modeling is the praxis. continue reading

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