Jose Vilson's Blog, page 15

The Work (A Poem)

The last time I read this poem was at the US Department of Education's National Summit on Teacher Diversity on May 6th, 2016. I was given five minutes to say my piece. I didn't have a title for it until this weekend, when I read it for the second time at the Rhode Island Coalition for Educators of Color (RICEC) conference. Enjoy.

On a random Monday morning,

One of my students asked me why I do this

I didn't know what he meant, so I said "What is this?"

He said, "Teaching?"

Curious, I asked him to expound

And he waved his hand at the

Mile-high notebook stack in front of me,

He snickers like, "You really want to be doing that for the rest of your life?"

Looking at me like "He musta made a mistake,

like I really want to deal with what he makes

and structured pee breaks?"

Quiet as its kept,

before I stood in front of over 1000+ plus students in a 13 year career

I stand on the shoulders of thousands more educators of color

Forebears to the heirs of ancestral knowledge, struggle,

and trails of the unforgivable

These seats my students occupy came courtesy of

wresting them without apology

Legions of Robin Hoods as politicians were robbing hoods

Educators like me were investments in children like he

Bringing parity in an otherwise unfair system

So when I drop that first comparison on my student,

please believe my rationale is all in proportion

By the time this line drops,

I've got my students calculating its rate of change

By the time this next line drops,

I've already connected their segmented learning to centuries ago

By the time this next line drops,

I've worked with 5 periods of classes, 140 students,

with enough collective grit to dispel your wayward myths

My "I heard gunshots for the first time in my life last night" kids

My "I don't have the keys to my house cuz my parents work late nights" kids

My "I know I don't smell great because my shower's broke, but

please, please, please let me into class" kids

My "I had to drive from my grandma's house because my family's going through things" kids

My "I ain't even gonna lie, I needed that bacon, egg, and cheese" kids

My "Don't judge me but add me on Snapchat" kids

My "I'm not ready to tell you what's going on with me yet" kids

My "This class is the only class that sees me for me" kids

My "I had surgery on my heart yesterday, but I still came because I need to graduate and get up out of here" kids

My "You're pushing me because you believe in me and I've never heard a teacher actually say that about us" kids

My kids who might become another mural,

a set of candles,

a hashtag,

a suicide note before I wrote this dope lesson plan

And not regretting it

Because I'm just listening for a higher being's wisdom, God, Allah, inshallah,

Looking up at the stars,

Looking into my heart,

Looking at my legacy in them,

Hoping these adolescents can take it real far

And insofar as I can mark them in attendance,

ima give them my presence, my all

While I can still instill these feelings,

I've observed keenly from the precipice while trying to do God's will

To think for a minute,

13 years prior,

My teacher trainer told me that I was too idealistic for this

As if the only people who make it through the rigorous process are realists

13 years later, I'm the only teacher teaching the very kids I went through this with

So as far as I'm concerned,

I'm the realest,

in fact, I'm a realistic idealist

I hope my kids feel this, child advocate, education activist, educator of kids of color

And there'll be many more after,

I insist

And I'm not saying white teachers can't impart jewels too

Or that teachers of color can't rob jewels from the youth

I'm saying that, for the few and the chosen for what we do

We are the embodiment of perseverance and self-determination,

reparations come true

We look past their atitud and unlock the gates to the next altitude

Whereas some folks want to make America great again,

We built it on our backs,

on our hands, on our minds, in divine plans

Pursuant to these children as people who won't ever never leave us,

please believe us

The reason teachers of color are more likely to see children of color as talented, as gifted

Is because, even when we're not paid in the murkiest led-contaminated waters,

We wrap these words, letting these governors know we deliver the gifts, 30 boxes per show

Hoping every receiver opens it

And I looked back at the kid who started this and told him, "love."

How many opportunities do we get to cultivate the classrooms where the problem solvers of tomorrow grow?

Today, they'll cross the street, then the hallways, then the classrooms,

Followed by the graduation stage, hopefully over and over, shoulder to shoulder

Looking back at the adults who called them thugs and say, "Told ya."

But the student just nodded, got it, and went back to his work

Which is exactly what seeds and students do, isn't it? continue reading

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Of Dreams and Nightmares (Free Thoughts on AERA and The Work)

On a Thursday night, I had a nightmare.

I barely have dreams, mostly illusions. This is probably a function of my estranged relationship with deep sleep. But Thursday night already felt different. On Friday, April 13th, I woke up in a warm sweat sometime around 5:10am, 20 minutes before my alarm clock usually goes off. The week needed to be over and the energies around me didn't feel right. My suspicions aligned with my intuition a few hours later when I opened my e-mail shortly before lunch to find that I lost my arbitration case against DOE, a rebuke against their formula that got me a "Developing" for reasons other than my actual job performance. My track record couldn't save me. My titles couldn't save me. Neither my connections nor my investments in the work couldn't save me. I carried the resentment and pain after a year-long battle into the American Education Research Association conference in midtown NYC where I got to see, among others, my OG Bob Moses of the Algebra Project after thirteen years of looking up to his work.

The conference's theme was "The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Public Education," conceived by the planning team of Drs. Deborah Ball, Carla O'Connor, Suzanne Wilson, and Felice Levine. For me, it also recalled Meek Mill's "Of Dreams and Nightmares." As with most education conferences my people attend, the ways we inspire people to action are also the ways we deconstruct and critique the system that's oppressed so many people like us.

The easy thing to tell you is that AERA felt like success to me. This current classroom teacher got to be the only teacher panelist among a roster of notable scholars on a Saturday morning. 15 minutes later, the same classroom teacher brought a squad of current (and recently former) classroom teachers to talk about resistance and service to the students. The same classroom teacher did a keynote / presidential session to a packed room to discuss teacher evaluations and the future of education. Throughout the conference, the same current classroom teacher recognized scholars he considers comrades in arms to this work and some who've made his work more difficult. I get to offer a voice not just for teachers, but any number of subgroups of which I'm part: teachers of color, black teachers, Latinx teachers, activist teachers, math teachers, male teachers, teachers tired of not being represented in their own profession so they go somewhere else to get the respect they deserve.

It was happening to me, to us, an enormous privilege even with all the layers of power laid out in front of me. If being at AERA was an evaluation of my work, then the "Teacher Improvement Plan" assigned to me frustrated me even more so. When I first started teaching, I used to pray for times like this, to write like this, so I had to grind like that to shine like this. Now I live it.

The reality of working with our futures drives my angst home even more. The students tell me I'm their favorite teacher, but there are days where my own consciousness can't see it. Others tell me there need to be more teachers like me, but the system says otherwise. The Danielson framework and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards suggest I was a great teacher at some point in this work, but forces around me suggest my pedagogy is too "loosey goosey," so projects and creative works went out the door in the service of keeping me in the classroom.

The research couldn't save me because there's other research to ostensibly the research we trust. Even as the system keeps making me a valid case study.

In less than two weeks, my students will take an exam on everything the math department and I covered throughout the 2017-18 school year. I'll get some sleep knowing their scores don't determine their worth as human beings, no matter how many times they're called "1's and 2's." I'll lose that sleep knowing their eventual high schools will judge their future students, superintendents and administrators will insist on the legitimacy of these tests as a marker for teacher quality, and teachers will gnash their teeth as to how these perceptions will ultimately affect their relationships with students. I'll fluctuate between grief, disappointment, and hurt.

None of this shows up on a rubric.

In my pre-coffee lethargy, I will have visions where the best of our research, practice, and policy will converge on ideas that illuminate the best in all of our young ones. I will speak to hopes and victories large and small, where schools foster those dreams and mitigate the nightmares. I must work with the people right in front of me, the ones we call students, who've all come from dreams and nightmares in their past, present, and time immemorial.

As long as I can wake up, I'll be waking that dream 'til my feet match my vision. As should we. continue reading

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Wakanda Schools and Why We’re Not Ready For A Shared Prosperity

One thing I've always maintained in this life: I'm either an early adopter or super-late, past the wave of spoilers and hot takes our culture's embraced. So, even though I barked at colonizers like M'Baku and crossed my arms like T'Challa and Shuri for weeks, I hadn't seen Black Panther until this past weekend. A few of my friends and colleagues gave me the harshest side eyes, but parenting, schooling, and life got in the way of carving out a couple of hours for the film. The lamentable element of waiting so long is that, with a movie this hot, I saw half the movie without having watched it.

But once I watched it, I got it. I completely got it.

A radical imagination is at the core of dreaming of a better world. In the midst of resisting against, we have to chime in for what we propose. It's bigger than a solutions orientation. It's using a thoughtful framework that accounts for the individual and collective humanity of time eternal. At worst, the mindset creates a new set of problems. At best, it benefits and uplifts all, especially those who espouse inhumane beliefs.

Nowhere is this energy more imperative than in our schools. The plight of black children has been well-documented for centuries as the bedrock of education and all its inequities. Educators who take a glimpse into the Afro-futuristic world of Wakanda might wonder what a land so abundant in resources and unrestricted by institutional racism and oppression would look like, and its implications for our students. The idea that "throwing money at the problem won't solve inequity" elides the history of stripping and capping resources for schools that serve black children. With a foundational principle of "all we got is us," it seems like Wakanda would assure their students from early education through university the opportunity (and structural support) to do well for themselves.

Or that's the hope. I can see how the fervor for a mythical land of prosperity entices so many of us.

However, this also means that we'd have to create a society that openly embraces the ideas we supposedly espouse. What I witness too often is that we want to create these lands with no redistribution. That’s why, for example, too many celebrities want to build up their own schools instead of upending the current school systems and the laws that keep them inequitable. Or why “school choice” boils down to how much a parent can customize their child’s education. Or why too many of the people who readily advocated for Black Panther still insulate power of various forms for themselves and anyone they consider equally or more powerful. It's this idea that we must pocket resources to only a handful of people we know, even though a fiscal and conscientious redistribution would transform the lives of many.

There’s this weird paradox where we’re tussling with the idea of creating a space where we can just be and a way to bring that to more people than just the talented, exceptional few. The early conversation was too much about whether Killmonger was right. There wasn’t enough interrogation about how we can reflect either of them or Shuri, M’Baku, Nakia, T'Chaka or Okoye. We can call spread ideas about opportunity and success, but to what extent are we willing to dehumanize our most marginalized children to make opportunity ostensible? What or who are we loyal to in this work? What does it mean to be a colonizer to the work versus an ally or co-conspirator?

Are we going to allow ourselves the space to imagine better?

As we speak, there's a subset of folks who pounce on anyone who uses key words like "integration" and "charter schools" so they can play defense for their funders. Elements like these pull us back from having thoughtful and factual debate about this work. In the wrong hands, technology has a deleterious effect on its users and its targets. We keep wishing for the "right hands" to come work at our schools.

Until we've built a society that treats everyone as valued citizens, we'll turn to each other and find the vibranium within us. It's our most undervalued resource. continue reading

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Teacher Leadership As A Flawed Endeavor [Medium]

Teacher leadership almost always looks good on paper.

Truly, I would love this model to win from an individual and collective perspective. It's tiring watching the same set of people who aren't "on the ground" get opportunities to speak, travel, and present their ideas. It's equally exhausting hearing representatives of our school systems say we lack morale and conviction about our daily work while stunting our growth as professionals for reasonable or petty reasons. But, if we're talking about "what's best for kids," we'd be remiss to not continually explore our failures to live up to the classroom intrigue we've developed.

A part of me is always curious about educators’ stories that show little to no flaws in their literature. That’s suspect given the immense new work we must take on in the 21st century of transforming our school system to lean on racial and social justice as a core tenet of schooling. Until then, teachers who call themselves leaders will always have to negotiate written and unwritten rules about the responsibilities they’ve taken on, the systems they have to fight, the adults they have to parlay with, and the young people whose gravitational pull gets more abstract the further we step away.

For more, please read here and let me know what you think. Thank you! continue reading

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Thank You For Your Service, Still

I recently wrote two pieces that I'd love for you all to read. The most prominent among them is an emotional piece from the Huffington Post about the recent mass shooting in Florida.

"I don’t think I’m special. In fact, I think I’m the norm. Like my colleagues and friends, I do what it takes to reach the children I serve. Educators like us make daily sacrifices to do our jobs, because we love the work and we care deeply about our students. Each and every one of us has asked ourselves the same question my distracted student asked me on Wednesday morning: What heroism might one day be demanded of us because we’ve chosen to be schoolteachers in America?"

The second is a musing on democracy in schools featuring Deborah Meier and Emily Gasoi.

"The question we should ask now, as we should have in 2016, 2001, 1968, 1865, and 1776, is: do our schools reflect our country’s ostensible vision to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Furthermore, to whom does democracy belong and how does one attain the ability to govern for the common good? And how are adults in buildings?—?parents, teachers, administrators, and other people within a school building?—?going to teach democracy if it’s not something they’ve experienced themselves?"

Across the country, we're seeing bold and courageous activism from our students. From organized walkouts and rallies to groups like United We Dream and Urban Youth Collective, students have rolled up their sleeves in ways that adults have not. The least we can do as concerned citizens is to become informed and responsive to students hoping to make our world better. We can vote, but we must also do the things in between elections that help us stay informed of the world around us.

For example, in light of recent massacres, NRA-funded politicians have encouraged school districts to arm teachers. The same people who almost eliminated tax exemptions for school supplies would encourage the funds for guns and firearms training? That's dubious and duplicitous. We're openly advocating for more schools, culturally relevant pedagogy and curricula, and nurturing, democratic environments. We have to hold steadfast against policies that steer us away from being better for our students.

That's my word.

Some of the best stuff from around the web:

Here are some resources provided by the NEA for how to talk to kids about school shootings. I would prefer to live in a country where we have to create such a resource. Alas.
How do we make sure our children feel "seen?" Edutopia explores. (h/t Pedro Noguera)
Audrey Watters, friend of the program, writes about the recent urge of tech apologists. Let's not wait decades to listen to our most critical and thoughtful people.
EduColor member Annie Tan came up with a phrase last year: "organizing is humanizing." This article by William Anderson explores how we can do better with love than hate in critical spaces.

P.S. - I just told the President of the United States: "Thank you for your lack of service, but we got it from here." continue reading

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I Keep Fallin’, But Never Fallin’ Six Feet Deep (The World Is Ours)

On Friday, the cafe con leche needed to be just right. The room needed to feel warm, but not blazing hot. The papers needed to work with the directions the students would be given. The prep time I had needed to feel uninterrupted and unbothered. The moon, the stars, and the energies needed to align accordingly.

On Friday, they didn't.

While my coffee tasted great, and my planning periods went according to plan, I spent a full three periods wondering what I did that didn't clique with the students. The task was for them to take the feedback they received and re-do their performance tasks. I had a usual flood of questions: should I have taught a lesson then given them time to revise their performance tasks? Should I have clamped down on seating arrangements? Should I have trusted the process less? Why am I so tired? What energies am I giving off that this doesn't feel right?

For a moment, I want to ask questions of students collectively and individually. For a moment, I want to admonish them for their arguments with one another, their inattentiveness, their lack of urgency, and their lack of cooperation. After the moment is gone, I stop. I take responsibility for failures without fail. As I am wont to do.

During lunch, I went through a few minutes of self-loathing. I hadn't looked at myself in the mirror, but I know my face. It must have looked dejected and disappointed. Before I ran out for lunch, a few students said on their way out that I wasn't to be trifled with at the moment. I ordered a chicken cutlet sandwich and grabbed a banana. I ran back upstairs to my classroom to re-strategize for the remaining two periods. I would take a little longer to set the expectation for the period. I would hold off on keeping myself busy until the students were settled in their own work. The materials they needed would have monitors so I could spend more time sitting with struggling students. I would point the early finishers to new work after they've finished revisions.

Fall down thrice, get up four.

At the end of last period, I felt like learning happened. It didn't need to happen as I dictated, but it gave me insight as to how I could improve the revision process. Before this blog gets published, no one but me will have learned that lesson. The expectation outside of my classroom is perfection. The priorities for everyone else still undercut my own. What does it look like for human beings to work in systems that ultimately dehumanize them, and all the mini-traumas we impart on one another? Why is the bottom of the barrel so seductive to adults who should know better? How much more do we need to negotiate our beliefs about the work of children before we've negotiated ourselves?

Whose world is this?

On days like Friday, educators with like minds and hearts see their own flaws and wonder whether to reveal them. They're doing what effective practitioners do: owning their practice, opening their doors, staying a few hours to grade and plan, reaching out to parents, and devoting their time to students even when they're not there. In a quest to rid schools of "bad" teachers, our operations also seek to wear down everyone's resolve. The flaws keep mounting. The dreams and nightmares fluctuate daily, nightly, thoroughly.

We keep rising, though, because this passion of ours tells us so. And on Monday, these sleeves will roll. We will learn. The world is ours, the world is ours.

(photo c/o)

p.s. - If you're in the mood to reminisce, Nas redid his whole Illmatic album at the Kennedy Center, courtesy of PBS. Check it out! continue reading

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Of Mutual Cares [An EduCon 2018 Reflection]

Most teachers don't just teach at one school. They teach at multiple schools at once. There's the school we work in, the school that happens outside of our classrooms, the school that gets presented to any number of stakeholders for pomp, circumstance, and evaluations, and the school that shows up in the data sets somewhere in a dozen offices and "great schools" websites. These schools often come into conflict because we neither have common schools of thought nor common schools of action. While many schools have missions, visions, and agendas plastered all over their walls, guidebooks, and flyers, few schools have found a way - however imperfect - to articulate it to the point of reasonable integrity.

Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA is one.

The intentionality by which Chris Lehmann, founder and principal, and the team developed the school has given it a leg up in the way of imagining schooling in Philly differently. It has a few advantages over other schools that matter as well. It's a magnet school with some institutional (and, in some ways, financial) backing in a rented building with an energetic white male leader who has the clout to host and receive plaudits from tech billionaires, esteemed scholars, and even a former president of the United States. None of this sits well with critics to the left or right of the edupolitical spectrum, if you actually read the comments in their local paper. Even when we take into account their high percentage of African-American students and special needs students as compared to other magnets, the comments about their schools put outsiders on high alert before they walk into the school building.

But, upon pushing the glass doors of their building, much of those critiques dissipates. Legendary schools genius Deborah Meier, who visited last year, has smiled at her acolyte in prior years. The school feels less like the draconian containment units with rows, aisles, and adults in sharp-edged suits, but an ecosystem where students are expected to own the responsibility of making the school community better. Most administrative doors are left ajar, as are the classroom doors. Students don't seem to seek the approval of teachers nor Lehmann in the way one might feel at other schools with strong academic reputations. Instead, at any moment, the school allows for students to randomly spark conversations with the adults in the building. The power structure feels flatter on some level. The pressure to be the "smartest" in the room is near non-existent. Conversations are both programmed and impromptu, and expertise is in the form of questions, not direct answers. The tone set by the staff, students, and parents there gives little permission for vendors to outwardly promote their wares and bother us on our way to our next conversation.

Which is what makes EduCon, the unconference / fundraiser based on the ideas of the schools, one of the best conferences still going. Is this a trap?

Because the unconference is in a school building and an assemblage of students, parents, and teachers sacrifice their weekends to make the event successful, it strikes me how it has some levels of escapism for many of us, too. Those of us who believe in student choice, student voice, agency, curiosity, project-based learning and curiosity in a public school setting - and there are many - congregate at SLA. The principal seems to give little impression that the school(s) he runs have anything to hide, including its flaws. This contrasts with the seemingly endless bandages and corks so many of us want to throw at problems when we see them.

It's made me reflect about my experiences in the aforementioned schools, and how many of the schools we currently work for conflict with one another. Can students both excel in school and have some modicum of student agency? Yes. Does everyone believe that at once? That remains to be seen. Can teachers both create conditions for deep student learning and still allow for unorthodox lesson plans that innovate and respond to student needs? Yes. Does everyone believe? Still waiting. So many of our school systems allow for antiquated beliefs about schools to resurface in the name of looking coherent. They get to lecture about kids while wholly disconnected from the student experience and voice because some outside and decontextualized research said so.

Attendees of the EduCon conference come from a myriad of schools, some of which have it reasonably together. We intentionally learn that schools can have integrity and heart both on paper and in deeds. We unintentionally learn how our actions (and everyone else's) keep us further from the mutual cares these like-minded educators have. Trust: I don't need us to build more SLAs, though Lehmann and Co. would surely appreciate that. I would love to see more people invested in the intangible aspects of the schools, not as a hand-down task to a third-party vendor or a school counselor, but at the core of the school.

Our organizing largely depends on folks with good conscience, open hearts, and vibrant minds to make schools places that students want to go, not where they feel imprisoned and incapable of learning. Of course, we're supposed to take what we learned and spoke on and change how our schools operate on some level, not just assume someone will rescue us from oppressive systems, especially our students who often have little recourse and redress.

It's on all of us. Imagining is such a big part of this work and I don't dream asleep anymore. Let's do this. continue reading

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Six Years Gifted [One King for Three Kings]

Alejandro is six years old today.

Teaching up to that point felt like an exercise in organizing students who were mine, but not mine. I had each of them in 90-minute segments with 29 other kids to keep an eye on. Though I cared for them, I used words like "daughters" and "sons" too loosely. Part of it came from the way I felt so invested in them. Another part of it was my students' insistence on treating me like a surrogate father. At that point, I had taught hundreds of students over the course of my career and thought to myself, "If I ever have my own child, I'm gonna slide right into fatherhood."

W-w-well, yes and no. On the one hand, I wasn't ready for the long nights without sleep, the constant cries as alarms, the automatic measurement of ounces and cups, the best techniques for swaddling and his creative unraveling of the wrap, the rocking back and forth until it shut both of our eyes, and the balancing act between this new element and all the other elements already in my life. On the other hand, I remember being in the gynecologist office with Luz, who, upon arrival, handed me a set of magazines and said, "Get to reading!" with a mischievous grin.

Teaching taught me how to parent in the way my father and stepfather could never get themselves to do.

In the Latinx culture, we "celebrate" all 12 days of Christmas. Three Kings Day gets a passing acknowledgment by Catholics, but when I visited Santo Domingo during Christmas as I was wont to do. In America, my family and I didn't have the means to celebrate the last day of Christmas with any consistency. Alejandro's birth brought that back for me. He sparked a warmth in me that I must have lost somewhere, eroded by the environments and interactions around me. He forced me to rethink my principles and plant both feet firmly in them. While I get my students for 45 minutes at a time these days, I have Alejandro on my mind 24/7.

Oh, and he's way above grade level in school. They say he's gifted, but he keeps gifting me with revelations and affection.

I can't pretend we haven't had rough patches either. Tantrums haven't been specific to truisms about terrible twos and threes. He's had a couple of weeks where I wondered if he'd ever wake up from his flu-induced slumber. He has parents with new visions for parenting, so everyone has had to adjust to how he chooses to greet them. Or not. He has routines he prefers not to break, and obsession around Cars, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Sesame Street that the socialist in me winces about from time to time.

Luz and I love telling Alejandro how much we love him. We get nervous at the prospect of him ingesting negative influences at school, but, as educators, we've learned not to micromanage his every move, but to give him approaches and hope he learns from that point forward.

I already love him more than I thought I ever could. Maybe he'll teach me how much more love I have in me. There's one love, one life, and he's my only king. continue reading

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Labors and Dangers [2017 At Last]

You knew I had to zoom in on one section of the super-musical and my personal soundtrack of the year Hamilton: An American Musical.

For those unfamiliar, the character Alexander Hamilton - first played by Lin-Manuel Miranda - has a debate with the character George Washington - first played by Christopher Jackson - about the merits of not seeking re-election. We're led through the story of Hamilton and, by extension, Washington where they've approached politics ostensibly different lens. The mercurial Hamilton is seen begging the disciplined Washington to stay on for a multitude of reasons, then this part hits:

Hamilton: Mr. President, they will say you're weak

Washington: No, they will see we're strong ...

In this retelling of events, we're led to believe that Washington has such a strong belief in the people of the newly created United States that he worries less what his own standing with them. Of course, such a retelling elides a large body of knowledge of the actual Washington the obsessed slaveowner who punted on this new nation's greatest sin for innumerable and still unforgivable reasons. Nevertheless, Miranda's Hamilton's strength is the focus on legacy and how, even when we pretend to not care for it, we still enact it.

For whatever reason, I care about what I leave behind. Too much, some might say.

In the context of a President Trump, too much of what we do and leave behind matters. The assault on our consciousness started long before him, but his name as pejorative and person presides over the spaces we prefer not to discuss. How much of this work matters? Where can we get wins? Who's with me and my being? Who'll stand up / sit up / be up for the rally against? In education, the phrase "for the kids" kept intensifying in popularity, but 2017 showed us who was willing to get dirty when the murk was abundant.

What parts of us refuse to get messy?

A force larger than me decided it best to test my principles. It would delete friends, family members, associates, and passersby from all around me. It would get my son sick for weeks without recourse. It would concuss and injure my significant other. It would bestow new health conditions to my eyes, ears, mouth, head, and heart. It would cause me to forget instances and events I didn't want to, and temporarily dull my senses where I couldn't read and write without the whole world shaking in front of my eyes. It assured I'd be fighting institutions from within and from outside because it wasn't built for us. Rather, it was built to wear us out in a way that even people fighting these institutions could never recognize.

I saw fragments of myself in all these pictures and places I could have flourished. Yet, the wins came when I pulled the center away from me. I challenged a lot of important people behind conference doors and out in the open to reconsider the opinions of students, parents, and teachers in the work they do. I pushed organizations to do better by their members of color, and even cancelled on some engagements because I knew what it meant for education speakers of color after me. I co-lead the first EduColor convening at a time when others were skeptical about any number of reasons why we needed to convene. I ushered (and in some cases shoved) students through graduation and to high school. Yes, figuratively.

I watched my son rock his moving-up ceremony from Pre-K to kindergarten. Luz and I pour everything into the boy and he multiplied the energy. His enthusiasm could build a nation. We are grateful. Alejandro keeps teaching me that the more we all put our faith in him, the more he flourishes.

Washington with Hamilton vocal overlays: I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

We took to the streets, made calls, held meetings, and read as much information we could so we could build ourselves up for these horrible moments. The moments when our favorite people passed away. The moments where our friends and family could no longer come back. The moments when our families changed, our thresholds changed, our voices changed. The moments where we questioned our own personal constitution at a time when fundamental scrolls seem a few more degrees meaningless. We can't separate these waves. The hope isn't whether bad things will stop happening. The hope is whether we can withstand the putrid, the inflammatory, the awful, and the institutionally oppressive.

The faith that so many students, colleagues, and family kept me afloat this year while I struggled and while I persevered. I could have done better at apologizing for not being the person I needed to be in those moments. At times, quitting all of it felt best because my personal failings took center stage. Maybe one day, I will. But, if I do, it won't be under this administration, under these circumstances, under this influence.

Home keeps me going, and I'll keep going until home asks me to stay. There's hope out there, still. continue reading

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On ELA, Math, and School, Because We Gotta Talk School

Where did people get the idea that schooling was neutral anyways?

On my newsletter, I succinctly suggest that schooling was never neutral. In recent times, I wrote about English Language Arts and all that comes with the term "literacy." I wrote about Math because I do this. What's the idea behind this writing? Simple. We can't talk about schooling without dissecting the ways we operate in it. Our policies and practices are written in thinly veiled language that suggests impartiality.

Why lie?

We keep using words like "achievement gap," "equity," and "growth mindset" to put the onus on the people on the ground level doing the most work (students, teachers, parents) and not on the system upon which the schools sits. At some point, if the results of the game never change, we have to critically analyze the game. We can talk about the players, the referees, the coaches, and the managers. But after all that's done, we may want to ask how the game gets played, what we're using to play it, and whether we need to play a new game entirely.

Also, this was my way of saying I've been busy writing. I hope you'll join me wherever you can:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbaFpoGD602/

Also on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter.

Thanks for following my work. We got this. continue reading

The post On ELA, Math, and School, Because We Gotta Talk School appeared first on The Jose Vilson.