Jose Vilson's Blog, page 2

A Lesson About Identity and Culture in Bad Bunny’s New Album

Recently, rapper/singer Bad Bunny released his sixth solo album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, a homage to his homeland Puerto Rico. Upon first listen, it took me back to my elementary school years in a moment I’ll never forget. I went to my brother’s babysitter’s house where the babysitter and my mother were conversing over coffee. My mother (in Spanish) asked how my day was and I said, “Hey mom! You know what I learned today? A song!” She said, “OK, sing it!” And I sung “¡Que bonita bandera, que bonita bandera, que bonita bandera puertorriqueña!“

It caught my mother by surprise, but in the quizzical way. After all, she was Dominican and here comes her Dominican/Haitian son singing a Boricua anthem.

Thankfully, the moment came and went, and the Dominican/Puerto Rican rivalry feels childish in the midst of American fascism. But I never forgot that moment over the years. By the time I learned the anthem, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a well-established Puerto Rican neighborhood. My principal Mr. Barrientos and some of our school’s staff members including the arts teacher who taught me were Boricuas. While most of the teaching staff may have identified as white and/or Jewish, the surrounding neighborhood no longer was. The influx of Boricua immigrants through the 20th century made it safer for other marginalized groups, including Dominicans, to establish families here. Many of us pronounced The Lower East Side “Loisaida,” and we credit Nuyoricans for that, too.

Puerto Ricans didn’t insist that others drop their norms in service of theirs. That’s the American way. They simply ask us to understand their culture as vital to their existence akin to our own equation.

People often want to separate the processes of teaching and learning from the culture of teaching and learning. They think teaching and learning should be apolitical, acultural, and devoid of anything related to identity, especially if it’s an identity people in power don’t like. Yet, how do you separate culture from teaching and learning? The process of teaching and learning requires receiving signals from all over the world. We interpret signals through those values and communicate these signals to receivers whose lived experiences differs from the deliverer.

This becomes even more important when the lessons center narratives not borne from the story empires tell themselves.

As I listened to Ocasio’s album, I thought about the signals I might have missed if not for my formative cultural learning. Bad Bunny pulls in Nuyorican history and those in its orbit from Track 1, NUEVAYoL. The folks who taught me probably supported PR decolonization efforts, a major plank for the NY Young Lords given the subversive nature of “Que Bonita Bandera.“ It wasn’t just learning about Boricua culture, either. I often credit The Boys Club of New York (Milliken) for having us watch Eyes on the Prize. I wouldn’t have understood the role of the Civil Rights Movement in the world we aspire to without it. My sixth grade teacher took us to synagogue once, which also opened the door for me to visit a mosque in college. I set aside my ingrained Catholicism for a truly universal drive to the ways millions understood religion and spirituality.

But this, too, was culture. Teachers helped me appreciate the world through those cultural experiences, which connected me with so many others.

A plethora of well known frameworks embody how we think about teaching with culture in mind. From multicultural classroom to culturally responsive teaching and beyond, we have yet to see a full reckoning with the depth of these concepts across the profession. In fact, only about a quarter of teachers (to be generous) probably use them in their funds of knowledge. Many have said how difficult it is to create culturally responsive curriculum, even with readily available scorecards. Few have noted that every curriculum is culturally responsive, but it depends on which culture we’re talking about. Culturally responsive teaching, culturally sustaining pedagogy, or even Cultivating Genius frameworks point to a different way of doing things.

Instead of trying to funnel everyone towards a narrow, white-centric, conservative American culture, these frameworks aspire towards a culture that embraces difference towards a shared humanity.

Bad Bunny highlights the diversity of sounds generated from his motherland as well. His seamless juggling of Boricua genres like salsa, bomba, plena, and reggaeton creates the foundation for explorations of a wide array of themes. Bad Bunny’s chants for a liberated, decolonized Borikén take center stage as a call back to Un Verano Sin Ti. (It’s also a move away from his reflections of his stardom in Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana.) Many of us from Caribbean islands understand the multiple influences that generated our cultural identities.

On the other hand, aspirations towards monoethnic states create get us further away from the respect and dignity humans individually and collectively deserve.

In this way, the concept of teaching and learning through culture means everyone has the opportunity to do both teaching and learning. We learn to dance and, in time, we teach. We learn to eat and make the foods and that gets passed on, hopefully, too. Bad Bunny excels in giving a window into his island without giving everyone ownership of those materials. In other words, we get to bring our whole selves to the space he invites without us pretending that we’re suddenly Puerto Rican.

After all, many of us have our own rhythms to teach and learn with. And we should.

Jose, who probably listened to the latest Bad Bunny offering 20 times over …

The post A Lesson About Identity and Culture in Bad Bunny’s New Album appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

II Hands II Heaven, A Reprise [2024 Year-In-Review]

On August 6th, 2024, I had a solid draft of a 260-page dissertation in my hands. That whole week, I pored through so many of the words, I might have gone cross-eyed. Between the 100 or so survey responses and over 20 interviews, I knew I was onto something, but this draft felt like something wholly different. At noon, it was finally time to turn over this draft to my committee. I reviewed the e-mail with the attachment about five times.

But after all these years of putting my hands down in the work, I hit “Send” and put my hands up. As they say, I let go and let God.

The doctoral journey was a spiritual journey. All my friends would ask me how it’s going, and I’d nonchalantly flip: “I can read, I can write, and I can do math, so not bad.” The academic exercises didn’t feel difficult per se. I spent about two months listening to teachers and trying to make meaning of their experiences. What stood out the most from the interviews wasn’t what they said, at least on the surface. I understood how they interwove the pedagogical, the personal, and the political layers of their answers.

But this felt different. From what I surmised in the interviews, these educators with a wide range of years and experiences in the field had experienced something new in our hour-long sessions: uninterrupted listening. In many cases, they’d remark “Wow, that’s the first time someone asked me this.”

By the time I got to interview 25, I realized that my interview protocol was a series of questions I wished someone would have asked me. But I disassociated just long enough so their voices could take center stage. After dropping off my son, I’d walk into desolate rooms just before the sun fully rose, turned on the lights, coffee just warm enough to hold me over. Some opportunities fell through. Bills rose. Mental and physical challenges came, went, and returned. I haven’t been this humbled since I graduated from Syracuse University 20 years ago.

My wife and son supported me and pushed me to go write. Carry on, I did.

Because this jewel box was both some of my best work and a piece of the larger work I’ve set out to do with whatever time I have. These perspectives needed to get out into the world. My people had something to say about the teaching profession and the urgency couldn’t be clearer. I didn’t see myself as some wise master from afar, but a worker clearing the paths for others behind and next to me. I’d ask questions of my transcripts and the words talked back to me as if it was the participants themselves. I poked around numbers seeking both surprises and confirmations.

My first graduation from Teachers College, Columbia University happened in May of 2024 at United Palace about a mile away from where I first taught. By then, I was hoping to just have a good first draft. What I got was a deeper sense or spirituality.

All that deep listening, reading, and meaning-making was God talking to me. My intuition said “This is how it’s gonna go, but it’s gonna get done.” The process was as tedious as the drafting was, but I had a date and time: August 20th, 2024 at 1pm ET. Ten minutes before I was scheduled to defend, I wasn’t sure why the college felt so quiet. Soon, my people appeared and it felt just like it was supposed to. The two hour hearing ended with me whispering “Thank you” to the unknowable while other people mingled.

Then, the college got quiet again. God only knows why, though.

It’s worth saying a bunch of other stuff happened this year, too. EduColor held its fifth annual virtual summit featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones and some of the best educators I know from across the country. I keynoted and spoke on panels from the East to the West coast. A team of us co-planned and executed a creative and energetic two-week education activism and teacher learning institute at Teachers’ College, too. I signed my second book contract for this beautiful math book I can’t wait for the world to read. That Edutopia interview is still making its rounds across different districts. The White House invited dozens of prominent Afro-Latinx folks from across the country for a first-ever gathering of its kind. (I met Gina Torres; I’m never going to fail.) I rode a train right back so I could make my family breakfast the next morning.

Oh, and my son performed on multiple stages in the city. He rocked.

The New York Liberty won a chip (which means a lot to real New York basketball fans, truly). The city’s vibes were immaculate, as they say. But by the time former President Trump was named President-elect Trump again, my head didn’t stop shaking in disapproval for about a week. I saw how easy it was to splinter communities through well prepared narratives. The evidence kept pointing to the fact that this was a likely outcome, including the testimonies from so many teachers I heard. Our collective education wasn’t doing us any favors. The prescience of connecting the dots between several disinvestments in citizenship speaks to how easily this country has slipped into fascism and oligarchy.

But even then, about a week after the results, I saw people snap out of it and collect their people.

A small and powerful set of people are counting on us to be fearful. My doctoral process was teaching me a newfound courage, for the knowledge that I would unearth could help us imagine a world after the one we’re in. While people search for the meaning of life, I’ve found its meaning through this work for me and mine. In this next spiritual level, the darkness around us doesn’t dictate the world we imagine. Furthermore, I couldn’t be good at anything or for anyone if I didn’t love myself in the midst of this.

I’ve been seeking this clarity my whole life. For you and I. For us. Always.

Thank you, 2024. Let’s get this, 2025.

The post II Hands II Heaven, A Reprise [2024 Year-In-Review] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Reconsidering The Kai Cenat Union Square Incident of 2023

I’ve been trying to write this post for about a year, but the words have escaped me. Until now.

On August 4th, a Twitch streamer by the name of Kai Cenat invited his fans and friends to Union Square in New York City for a giveaway including Playstation 5s and PCs. With more than 11 million followers, Cenat is one of the most popular Internet figures in the world. For three hours, this poorly-planned giveaway went from a gathering of about two thousand mostly Black and Latinx fans of Cenat to a riot involving more a thousand police officers, tools from a nearby construction site, and a fire hydrant. News cameras from local and national stations got most of the angles for eyes across the country.

(Read the reliable recap from Wikipedia yourself.)

In the aftermath, the NYPD arrested and later released Cenat after being charged with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly. The mayor, police commissioner, and chief of police all had press conferences with a consistent message: these kids are out of control. We saw images of kids jumping on cars, climbing to the top of the subway gazebo, and running away from heavily armed men in riot gear. We saw a young and famous Black streamer in handcuffs, dreads hanging off the side of his face. Helicopters gave us aerial views of the gathering over those fateful three hours with mixed messages from reporters and commentators alike.

To Cenat’s credit, he paid close to 60-thousand dollars to the Union Square Partnership (USP) for the mess they made. To the district attorney’s credit, the charges were dropped. After that, it feels like we need a rethinking of the whole incident. Or, more broadly, our society needs to think about our relationship with youth. Because from an educator’s point of view, it looks like we hate kids. Let me explain.

The local media speculated that Cenat didn’t even have gift cards, but the USP contribution suggests otherwise. People described Cenat as an unsympathetic troublemaker when he graduated from one of NYC’s best high schools. Mayor Eric Adams even went so far as to say that students shouldn’t get their morals from social media. We saw clips of the skirmishes and arrests, but not of police officers picking up random kids and slamming them across cars and floors at will. We also didn’t hear students’ calm testimony that this riot was “no big deal” and this “happens everyday.”

Our kids who ride the subway, walk the bustling city streets, and have attended any parade are accustomed to large crowds. In fact, more than 70 thousand people pass through Union Square on foot on a daily basis. In fact, the next day, Union Square returned mostly back to normal. The farmer’s market, the local vendors, the chess players, and the passersby went back to business.

In researching this piece, I saw a spectrum of opinions about Kai Cenat, but where some might see a wasted individual, I see a potential leader. Cenat not only graduated from NYC Public Schools, he went on to college. He dropped out because he couldn’t keep up with his coursework and the demands of his newfound tech career. As a fellow Caribbean, I can imagine the values instilled in him about a hard work ethic and religious upbringing. In his apology, he comes across as contrite and grateful. I didn’t care as much about his choice of words as I care about his message. The more I watched, the more I realized that he was, at worse, naive about his audience. Looking through the composition of his fans, he may have thought the crowd abide by the fun, familiar, and intimate energy from his videos.

Because of his objectives for the event, he could have gone through the proper channels to ensure safety for the younger kids and their parents in attendance. He could have called it a meetup without the giveaway part, and then held an organized raffle. There were probably better spots to have such a meetup than one of our city’s epicenters, too. Events like this sometimes make people more popular and that part makes me skittish, too. But putting the full blame on Kai Cenat and the majority of attendees who weren’t trying to start a riot feels short-sighted.

They get signals all the time that society doesn’t care enough about them. Gun violence in schools has become normalized with no end in sight. The United States has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the world. Districts have stopped investing in local community centers where kids can gather. Their teachers are becoming less hopeful about K-12 education, too. Our student disciplinary codes and classrooms feel carceral. I’ve documented the parallels between school and prison for more than a decade, too. A couple of years prior to that incident, Black Lives Matter protests highlighted the plethora of children that look just like them whose lives were ended at the hands of people entrusted to protect them. These problems are not new.

Our society already oversurveills, overpolices, and under-resources them in policy and practice.

Readers recognize the parallels between the Union Square incident and another where adults gathered without police permits. On January 6, 2021, our young people watched as thousands destroyed offices across the Capitol building while police officers died and congresspeople stood powerless against the riotous crowds. Not only was the head of the “riot” not held accountable, he’s slated to become president again. (America. Learned. Nothing.) The mayor who moralized about the incident is now willingly obeying the rioter-in-chief in advance to avoid consequences for his legal troubles.

The Kai Cenat incident of 2023 was a book club by comparison.

There’s been a lot written about parasocial relationships and the nature of social media since the Union Square incident. Social media has transformed who we rely on for our information, who we take advice from, and who gets exalted. We still need more classes on digital citizenship for everyone. But even before social media, society needed a better relationship to its children.

The Kai Cenat incident offers insight about our children and we’re not listening. Let’s do better.

The post Reconsidering The Kai Cenat Union Square Incident of 2023 appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Write It Down Somewhere [Some Advice For New Teachers]

In a recent post, Nora H asked:

I was wondering simply what your biggest piece of advice would be for new/beginning educators?

Before I answer this question, it’s important to name that no one teacher has the same journey into this work. With the myriad identities, entryways, and circumstances, everyone has to adapt whatever advice is given to their own situation. However, over the course of my teaching, some patterns emerged in conversations with others:

The first year is relatively difficult for everyone.It’s difficult (though not impossible) to do it all by yourself.It’s probably better when new teachers have had experiences as the “adult” in the room before they’re the main one.The more veteran you get as a teacher, the more likely you are to critique who you were the first year.

That last one is appropriate. We often see prior versions of our teacher-selves and think of all the flaws in them. Even those of us who appreciated our first teacher-self understand the ways we could have been better.

In my book This Is Not A Test, I recount how one of the veteran teachers said I was doing a yeoman’s job. I came to learn that “yeoman’s job” meant “good in the midst of difficult circumstances.” I can’t tell if I made it look easy or if I had a valid connection with the students. From September until March of that school year, I did relatively well. Of course, I also revealed in the book how I cried to my befuddled administration. I was a blubbering mess, and didn’t think I would come back to teaching. Looking back, I gave so much to my teaching that I had no way of replenishing that well.

But the one thing I did well: I wrote it down.

On Writing It Down

As a new teacher, I had an advantage that some of my peers didn’t: I had already built a writing habit. I wrote poems as a burgeoning poet, and kept multiple journals for everything else. I also had an anonymous blog for years before starting this blog. In my graduate classes, I rarely worried about getting to a “word count” because I knew the goal would come. I worried more about what I wanted to say.

Most importantly, I kept the schedule.

It didn’t matter if I had a great day or a difficult week, I reflected on it and wrote something down. Sometimes, it was the same note (“Jose, you need to do better with timing.”). Other times, it was a quick observation (“Oh so seating charts don’t work with this group.”). Every so often, it was something random (“For next time, lock up your scissors before your day off.”). If the idea led to a blog post, I shared it with the world. Because I had already been accustomed to public vulnerability, it became easier to accept feedback, even from folks I didn’t want to hear from.

When you look up the term “being your own worst critic,” my picture comes up often.

The critiques sometimes bordered on self-flagellation, not to be confused with flatulation (yes, middle school teacher forever). I beat myself up for mistakes, even to this day. Some of my mistakes are so old, the students who the mistakes affected have their own children. For new teachers, every mistake feels like the end of the world. Maybe the angst lasts for a couple of days. Often, it lasts for a few weeks.

Even among those mistakes, having a reflective practice helps new teachers settle us recognize where our feelings sit.

The Reflective New Teacher

Akin to so many conversations happening about artificial intelligence and mechanized writing processes, if it’s not authentic to you, don’t do it. Also, in no way am I imploring people to start a blog, podcast, or newsletter divulging banalities of the day. (If that’s your thing, I won’t knock your hustle.) I strongly believe that reflection as part of your work is healthy even when it feels murky. We’re in a world that pushes us to act and produce. Then, when results don’t show up the way we want, we’re supposed to jump back into action and try again.

I’m a fan of urgency. I’m a bigger fan of thinking through scenarios before acting on something. But it’s hard to do without understanding what worked and what didn’t in a given class, lesson, or unit.

Becoming a better teacher, as with anything, isn’t just about how much time you’ve spent in the work. It’s also about developing the layers that constitute good teaching: a strong identity as the foundation, a cohesive and comprehensive approach to how you do your work, a proactive and reactive dance when plans meet the students. Akin to how athletes watch game tape or bloggers leave their work open for comments, teachers could benefit from having thoughtful support and coaching. But it starts with some form of metacognition.

Some Things To Consider

It doesn’t have to look one way. Here’s a list:

sticky notes on a lesson plan that went well (or didn’t)social notes (yes, microblogging on Bluesky or Threads (not X) if you have the appetite for it)using a good pencil/pen and notebook and finding a 30-minute window either right after your last class or on the way home (my favorite)finding some accountability partners (hopefully not a non-teacher friend) to talk through things

30% of my growth as a teacher was probably due to some metacognitive practice. I was fortunate to have the support of a few mentors provided by the NYC Teaching Fellows program, and some great folks within the school who supported my growth. I also shared a similar background with my students who I cared deeply about, even the ones that needed a little more support.

But a reflective process is akin to letting your food marinate in a rich sauce or cooling off a solid dessert.

Experience isn’t just about the time spent, but also the effort we put into the process. If it helps to settle on one question (“What was your big win this week?” “Which child(ren) pushed you to do better this week?” “What objective needed more time?”), then good. Whatever that looks like, get into a routine. It doesn’t have to be perfect every time, either. Even this blog has some stuff that made me cringe.

But that’s part of teaching. “The mess makes us best.” OK, but at least I wrote it down.

Jose, who’s curious about how many of you are reflective in your practice …

The post Write It Down Somewhere [Some Advice For New Teachers] appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

An Open Letter to the Listeners (The Heart pt. 5.5)

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that, honestly.”

As I sat to analyze all my mixed-methods data from my eventual dissertation, I kept thinking about the various ways teachers of color from across New York City indicated that no one listened to them. I believed it from the younger teachers. School systems like to elevate younger teachers until they burn them out. Once they want to make teaching into a career, the system and its actors start to turn on them. I also believed it from the veteran teachers. Our school systems are conservative in their approach to systemic change. Thus, as many reforms as we’ve seen to schools, they often feel like iterations of prior initiatives. Veteran teachers know this and either adjust or move on. Collectively, these were some of the most energetic and dedicated professionals I’ve ever met and known.

But I kept thinking about the idea of listening and what it means for the listener. In this case, me. And I have you to thank. Let me explain.

How did listening this often and this intentionally change my composition? I spent hours and days listening, re-transcribing, and making notes about them. I isolated my own experiences (to the best of my ability) to elevate theirs. Within them, they contained equal parts hope and exasperation with the current ways we teach children. It’s easy to say “Well, teacher, then teach it your way.” From what I hear, the teachers who can, do. It’s harder to see the levels of bureaucracy teachers need to fight to teach from that body of knowledge and help from there.

People love to pontificate about the state of public education, but the feedback loop often stops at the school building’s door.

But you may be wondering “What is it about listening that people don’t get?” Currently, people say they’re doing a lot of listening. Upon arriving to their posts, new CEOs go on a listening tour and ask carefully curated questions. Opinion columnists start their articles with something they overheard at some coffee shop or their workplace. People in power learn to say “I hear you” in response to righteously angry people, usually to those with way less power.

The trouble with “listening” in these examples is that, time and again, we see how “listening” doesn’t seem to change the listener in power in action or policy. Or, at least, doesn’t seem to affect the listener’s trajectory in any way.

I had to keep that in mind as I formulated questions for the dozens of teachers who took my survey, then opted into an interview. Some of the stories almost made me drop my dissertation altogether. Others had me up all night and into the next day trying to get their words reflected well in my work. (If you know me personally, yes, I actually emoted.) Sometimes, it felt like I was talking to the text and it would say “No, I said what I said. You put that down.” Their curses stayed. Their nuanced vernacular did, too. I set the gossip aside, but pulled out the larger lessons from the stories undergirding the chatter.

I could feel the listening change how I heard my erstwhile colleagues (colleagues in the broader sense) laying out their views of a system designed to never love them back.

At times, I even felt myself taking on their personas. I saw myself chatting with a student about their essay and helping them through corrections. I felt the pride in seeing students who once struggled with literacy cross the graduation stage. It took me a few days to shake off the second-hand hurt and embarrassment of an administrator giving me an ineffective rating for vengeful reasons. There’d be no one in the office I was working with, but I’d feel the isolation of not being around anyone who shared my racial experiences. The news would highlight another teacher who spoke out about their identity and culture and I could see my tongue shrinking lest I lose my livelihood.

I, the educator, knew of these experiences. But I, the researcher, needed to take it a step further to fully listen. Empathy has depths.

I also realized that I had already been doing this type of listening for more than a decade. It’s how this blog became visible. We build EduColor from listening well, too. It explains how, after every speech I’ve done, I end up staying for hours, if not days, just listening. “You made me think how …” “I’m gonna stay teaching one more year after what you …” “This is what I’ve been trying to tell people and …” Part of why I get to speak to power isn’t just my truth, but the truths of many of you. The best educators I know listen intently to their students, families, and communities and adjust their pedagogy, curriculum, and instruction accordingly.

The “body of knowledge” includes how we make meaning of all the signals we receive from the people we serve.

That’s why I had to thank you, the listener, for it all. You should know the written tribute, my dissertation, to those of you who participated in this work of love was extensive and breathtaking. You’d have loved the reactions and conversations from a plethora of scholars, including some who you look up to, reading your authentic voices translated for them. Thank you for waiting patiently, hoping I might drop a hint about what I was up to. But, because you’re part of my community, you knew I was up to something bigger than just me. I don’t wish to speak for people, but I can confidently say my opinions aren’t informed by just me. I’m also informed by so many of you. That nuance is a catalyst for me to speak up and speak loudly about things I might not otherwise have so much confidence in.

And really, I wish for us the things I wish for our children. That they too have someone willing to listen and act upon that listening. Let’s make a world where we can better questions than the ones we have now.

Jose, who would appreciate you sharing this with the listeners in your life …

The post An Open Letter to the Listeners (The Heart pt. 5.5) appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Building Community Amid Uncertain Doom

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had good opportunities to be “in community.” One of those opportunities happened at The Cutting Room, where School of Rock NYC had their midseason show. School of Rock is a nationwide program that teaches students music through modern compositions with attention to student agency. My son’s been attending a weekly tutoring and band session for the last year and a half. They perform at well-known spaces in the city for their midseason and end-of-season shows. He’s part of a Prince/MJ band and the students’ transformation into full-fledged rock stars is a sight to behold.

The families in the audience party along to their children’s melodies. For a minute, we didn’t worry about news of impending doom, just the kids and the SoR community.

Building community feels harder to accomplish these days. It’s more than just listening to one another. It’s the multiple forces vying for people’s ears and eyes and which messages land. The United States reached an apex during the 2020 uprisings because ideas of eliminating institutional harm towards a shared humanity replaced the status quo. Now, and in retaliation, we’re inundated with anti-heroes not only repeating nonsense about people they despite, but parading unapologetic dispositions in the worst ways.

The repetition is working well for too many of our neighbors. Educators at the school level have tried to sound the alarms, but those calls have fallen on ignorant ears.

We can discuss the role of social media, but the videos and memes fill holes in logics that society hasn’t filled. Our students watch videos that engage them in ways that the rest of us don’t. International reporters and testimonials explain ongoing inhumanity here and abroad to some. Evangelists also explain alpha and beta men and the connections between Christ and the incoming president. Conspiracy theories of varying degrees abound. Students turn to their phones because their in-person community isn’t pouring back into them. We watch adults struggle with facts and beliefs even more so. Some pundits have repeated lies that teachers specialize in gender affirming care, the latest attack on public education. Behind the scenes, some powerful people have sought to concretize this caste system. Few have sought to stop the calamity.

So many variables contribute to the isolation and polarization conversation. But it isn’t just people isolating and polarizing themselves. It’s people in power doing the isolating and polarizing.

But as an educator, I believe providing spaces for people to feel whole creates permission to feel like they belong. Right now, we’re getting signals that belonging to a larger, empathetic community doesn’t matter. People are writing inclusive histories further out of our textbooks. People are passing laws to further marginalize folks based on who they love, how they were born, and what part of their being they’d like to control. We’re already seeing large corporations, philanthropists, and politicians scale back some of the commitments they made only four years ago towards a shared humanity.

But I’m a believer that giving in to the whims of people trying to shove already marginalized people doesn’t help us get any closer to a loving community. This is a good time to look around to build and aspire to a community outside of our comforts. Forcing folks to silence crucial parts of themselves keeps us further away as well. There’s a difference between community and audience, too. An audience is one-directional and there’s room for that. But we need community to help more of us step up to the moment.

Luckily, I have a few communities I’m a part of that consistently step up and out (including one I helped to build ten years ago when I had none like it). For a couple hours on a Sunday, I took a breath and postponed my disbelief in America’s collective behavior. I witnessed kids as young as six years old play chords and sing hits from the 60s and 90s. I saw teens play heavy metal and change their whole personas as the strings shook the floors. My son talked/sung through Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” as the audience swayed back and forth to the synths on the keyboard. We looked around the bar and saw the diversity of New York City enjoy the rhythms that the future might bring. By the time Ale and co. played “Let’s Go Crazy” to conclude the show, I almost grabbed a guitar and tossed it myself.

But that reality came back after we exited the show. The rest of the world didn’t see that show, hear the kids perform, or dance to the drums with us. Nor should I expect them to. But I, and so many others, are working towards a world where our different gifts can come together in authentic unison. We get to be ourselves and together with others in our expressions.

As human beings, all of us crave that level of community, but we can’t get it if we don’t even recognize the same notes. Let’s get to work.

The post Building Community Amid Uncertain Doom appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Don’t Obey In Advance

Last week, I hopped off a bus and voted early. It was quick, convenient, and came with two stickers: one for me and one for my son. As I walked out, the volunteers (mostly elder Black women) thanked me for voting. I said, “Of course!” One of the volunteers said, “Wow, it feels like all day, I’m seeing Black men with the same reply after voting.” As an Afro-Latino, that made me smile a bit. For years, I’ve thought about how a civic duty for some was a moral obligation for others in this country. In the last week, the Harris campaign was cautiously optimistic that their 100-day journey would triumph while the other side doubled down on a dark, bigoted vision for America. As waves of fascism hit countries large and small across the world, the influx felt more pernicious here where the specter was ever present.

Many of us knew the work we needed to do regardless of the results.

At this point, the world knows the story. The re-ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency only confirmed the unapologetic white supremacy and patriarchy that looms over the nation. Pundits and politicians have used code words like “economic anxiety” and “wokeism” to explain Dems’ White House and Senate losses. However endearing, organizers rebuked the cavalcade of celebrities that came to represent the Harris campaign. (I thought Kamala Harris’ appearance on SNL was perhaps her most soulful moment of the campaign.)

Others like Rachel Maddow openly wonder why Trump didn’t seem to court votes like he wanted to win. But regardless of the reasons, it bears repeating that millions of people across the country, including in so-called blue states, voted for Trump’s return with indictments and all, this time with fewer guardrails against his agenda. 15 million people either stayed home during this election cycle or didn’t vote for Harris at all. Yes, the Palestinian genocide played a role in the discontent. So did courting the Cheneys who didn’t move many registered Republicans or independents, it seems.

But ultimately, the United States has a deep cultural problem, and one election won’t fix it. A country founded on enslavement, subjugation, and colonial terror can only run from its shadows but so long.

Zooming in a bit, many of our schools and classrooms have had to contend with influences that don’t show up on standardized tests, but still affect how children see the world. Politicians over-scrutinize and under-resource schools. We’re seeing cultural shifts, too. Our schools have seen how the manosphere influences our boys, how concepts like “trad wives” set women’s political and cultural rights back decades, and how phobias and aggressions further ostracize LGBTQIA+ folks. Our social studies books have histories just like this, but diluted and dispassionate in form and function.

This dynamic is happening in multiple languages across multiple districts and student racial demographics. Our teachers aren’t all prepared to teach children to develop an internal spam filter or to moderate their addictions. Local politicians have normalized gun violence in schools. Our kids have access to watching people like and unlike them die needlessly with little recourse, justice, or accountability. Mayors and governors ran from socioemotional learning and racial justice lessons shortly before election cycles.

Rather than demanding for better, many of our youth have decided to idolize a person who reflects that darkness back to them. That, too, is an identity.

But I’ve been heartened by some of the reaction post-Tuesday from educators and others, too. Unlike 2016 where people jumped into a deep depression, I’m seeing people more energized to build in community. That’s an important pivot. Some local wins in different states happened, not around party lines, but the kind of world we want to live in. I’m heartened by the examples I’ve seen from Black women who’ve insisted that other groups do better, and the Black men who were confident in letting a woman lead. It’s also exciting to engage conversations about machismo, xenophobia, and transphobia in a way that might build a real movement.

In other words, I’m not ready to give up. Hopefully, neither will you.

Whether you were shocked at recent electoral results or you knew this is who America has been all along, it means you are part of the coalition of folks who want to build a better world. And build I will with me and mine. Locally and internationally, I believe we have to walk together towards a shared humanity. A world where we do better together feels brighter than a siloed caste system, especially in the midst of unprecedented crises on our minds, hearts, and planet.

If you’re a believer, look around you and find your community. Go get your people. Grieve and mourn together. Then find a time to build towards that bigger vision. As for me, I’ll grieve and mourn for a bit, too. I’ll think to the elders in my neighborhood, the teachers who wiped away tears to face students the next day, and the people who tried to rally others, not just for one person, but away from unapologetic divisiveness.

Even when the last vote is counted, I know one thing: it doesn’t have to be this way. This is what it means to make politics our way of life. Steel your resolve with your people. Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.

Billionaires and media outlets have already acquiesced to the new presidency. We don’t have to. Whatever you do, do not obey in advance. We will win.

The post Don’t Obey In Advance appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Juan Soto and the Trouble with Progressive Education

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of keynoting the Progressive Education Network’s National Conference 2024 in Columbus, OH. The theme of the conference “The Space Between: How Progressive Education Fosters Curiosity, Creativity, Community and Connection” felt germane to the moment. As I formulated my remarks on Friday, I watched Game 4 of the New York Yankees versus the Cleveland Guardians. (No, I didn’t go in person even though it was two hours away.) Words failed me in preparation, so rather than force it, I let my mind take a step back a bit. The game barely started when “The Generational” Juan Soto smack a two-run homerun out the park to start the game.

As I watched Soto circling the bases, it made me think about the genius behind his at-bat. He has a unique stance (a “Soto Shuffle” that now has its own theme song), but it’s deeper than that. His at-bats seem less like structured and well-practiced swings and more like nimble, artful strokes in response to the environment and the situation. He might say, “I do what I need to do for my team in the moment.” Some interpret his chest thumping ebullience as cockiness. But, those of us who’ve watched players like him for a long time know his braggadocio aligns with Dominican culture.

Suddenly, I had something to say about progressive education and the way forward.

Over the last decade, baseball as a sport has had several conversations about cultures clashing and the American pastime ethos. Major League Baseball has seen international players for decades prior, but ideas of playing “the right way” have permeated over the last 15 years. Unwritten rules become common parlance for adhering to societal norms that no one really asked for, but must be maintained for some obscure reason. Fights break out when batters flip their bat high or pitchers show too much emotion on the mound. Things got so bad that MLB hired Ken Griffey Jr. to encourage the younger, more diverse generation of players to “just play.”

With Soto, as with the Guardians’ Jhonkensy Noel or any number of players, their showmanship isn’t just for fans. It’s a way to raise their energy for the moment and a tip of the cap to the culture where their cultures normalize and encourage those behaviors in the name of sport.

So it goes with progressive education. For what it’s worth, the term “progressive education” includes a plethora of frameworks. Dewey, Emilia, and Montessori are some of the names that come up, though other philosophers inform the concept. Regardless of the original thinkers’ intentions, these pedagogies are typically found in schools with more resources and autonomy. This doesn’t mean every school that espouses progressive education is a predominantly white school. Other thinkers including Paulo Freire, Deborah Meier, and Mildred Johnson pulled in progressive tenets with contextual adjustments and students of color in mind. Over the last century, a bunch of schools past and present provided progressive-type pedagogies to Black and Latinx students.

Currently, people have an easier time telling people what progressive education is not, but not what it is. To complicate this boundary setting, the perception of progressive education as belonging to the upper echelons of society has as much to do with who attends the school, too.

In too many of our schools, four deceits overcome the four C’s. We have children whose curiosity arouses suspicion of adults across the board. We see children’s work, but some of their creativity gets discarded offhand. Other adults see some students’ communities as deficit without any real inquiry about them as people. Some students seek connection and some adults see these connections as disruptions. In our progressive schools, many students have negative experiences, but based on many informal conversations I’ve seen with students and families, race plays a role in how schools mete out these experiences.

Yes, every school has to contend with students of color not feeling included, progressive or not. However, with its attention to student agency and constructivism, the lack of racial justice feels more poignant.

Near the end, I added a fifth C to the theme of the conference: culture. Putting it all together, attention to culture ensures that adults and students’ peers have more expansive and inclusive visions for genius. If the “progressive” in progressive education means to move forward (shout-out to Liza Talusan), then it means our success in these efforts leaves no one behind. Every child deserves voice, agency, and the opportunity to co-construct their education. It also means the rest of us have to believe students can do so.

Too many people label “progressive education” as loosey-goosey, but I prefer to think of the way it unearths academic gifts.

After finishing my talk, I got to see Soto’s genius on display in one of the greatest at-bats I’d seen. Based on the feedback I received, my treatise framed the rest of the conference well. But, as calm as I had been all day, my adrenaline shot back up thanks to this game. The duel between him and Hunter Gaddis was thrilling baseball when you add in the playoff implications and the vibrato from the sold-out stadium. The beauty of baseball now is in how these approaches to the game become expressions of their innermost super-selves.

But we miss the greatness when we don’t open up our racial and cultural views of what’s possible. That along ought to provoke more of us to make progress for all of our students.

The post Juan Soto and the Trouble with Progressive Education appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Building The Bridge Between Old and New Math

During my sixth year of teaching, I asked the class to divide a five-digit number by a two-digit number. For middle schoolers, this felt like a straightforward task. I walked around the classroom to see how everyone was approaching their work. Suddenly, I stopped at one of the students’ desks and said, “Are you playing Hang Man in my class?”. Of course he wasn’t, but I needed a way into his work. He explained how he learned to divide using a method they’re calling “repeated subtraction.” Rather than getting the exact number of times the divisor goes into the dividend, this method gives him multiple opportunities to find the number of divisor groupings that could fit into the dividend. But at first, I was confused why that worked. Actually, I think my face rebuked it.

I asked, “How did you do that?” and watched the student do it and explain it to me. Oh, and then I went home and tried it, too.

Before I found the quotient, I kept thinking about all this newer math my students did before they got to middle school. The lattice method of multiplication. Making tens. Area models. The growing list of pedagogical methods and approaches that differed from how my generation and previous generations learned math continues to press on. More of my people from different walks of life are asking me “What’s up with this new math?” But after I explain it to them, I still don’t feel satisfied with my answer.

Ultimately, it boils down to whether schools can do a good job of telling families why we’re doing what we’re doing. And we’re not. Let me explain.

Body of Knowledge Things

For the most part, teachers believe themselves to have a body of knowledge that they should be trusted with. As a former teacher, I took a lot of pride in my credentials. I not only had a computer science degree in undergrad with lots of math, but also a masters’ program that prepared me well. My day-to-day preparation consisted of thinking about how students individually and collectively would get my material. That’s not easy. The mental math teachers do to teach a topic well over a handful of days is worth honoring.

But there’s a difference between “is trusted” and “should be trusted.” Right now, teachers don’t feel trusted, even those with multiple credentials.

The lack of trust isn’t just at the interpersonal level. Teachers consistently encounter peers, leadership, and families who don’t fully trust teachers to do their work well. This sometimes forces teachers to double down on ideas of respect, even closing them off to other ideas and into their work. But also, because society has generally deprofessionalized work across the board, society also proliferates the idea that teachers don’t have a real body of knowledge.

In education, much of this sentiment comes from people who don’t have children in their care.

This feels even more poignant in math class where some – not all – teachers still feel a way about having anyone who’s not an educator critiquing their work. For generations, we’ve had ideas about foundational math that have been passed down time and again with little disruption. We know what the algorithms for long division, addition/multiplication of two+ digit numbers, and operations with fractions look like. Despite the overabundance of PD providers out there, many teachers generally stick with teaching math how they were taught. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s worth keeping in mind because …

Teachers and Families May Have Gone To Similar Schools of Thought

If we’re all familiar with the aforementioned algorithms, it stands to reason that we were almost all taught similarly. That’s wild to think about. When Sputnik and the 1957 National Defense Education Act ushered new attention on STEM, a “New Math” found its era. Yet, the “New Math” is the same math that generations of us remember. Fast forward to now and many of the memes we’ve seen about Common Core math only underscore the disconnect between all these generations and the current one.

So, if traditional methods stuck for teachers, imagine how people who aren’t getting PD about this stuff believe.

Sometimes, our collective memory does us a disservice. We might believe that, because the mathematical content we learned worked for us individually, it means that the rest of us also got it the same way. We may have seen our peers graduate with us, an indication that an authority believed we were equally competent at the same work. Some of us even went to college. Having a seat in college presumes that everyone at the college passed elementary school math, if not secondary math.

Many of the methods we believed to be effective for us needed a course correction. When people used algorithms to add three digit numbers by other three digit numbers, they may have “carried the one” without understanding that the one may have represented a 10 or 100. When people tried long division, they may have quit somewhere in between because the divisor’s multiples were too complicated.

More broadly, the math we thought we knew might have failed for all the maths we left behind. Our collective memory may fail us, too.

The New Math as a Reclamation

I’ve had people across different identity groups proclaiming that we should get back to basics. I empathize, but I always point us to the idea of the toolbox. For too long, the average person only had a handful of tools to solve math problems. We kept using a hammer every time we saw problems that required a hammer and ones that required a screwdriver or a wrench. As we get older, however, we notice that good mathematicians have a plethora of tools in their toolbox, many of which they don’t have to use, but they’re comfortable with.

The same people who say “But American students can’t compete internationally with math scores” also like their schools unequal, especially when it comes to math.

One way to build the bridge from the traditional math to the new math is to communicate why these new maths help. It’s not the solution, but families deserve to know why teachers do what they do with math. Often, during parent-teacher conferences, I sat there and taught parents a little math so they can take the math home. Other schools have found ways to give parents and families math workshops so they have access to this stuff as well.

Thinking back to my previous example, the repeated subtraction method of division is a more elegant way of doing long division. It requires similar attention to multiples and remainders, but less stress on getting the exact number of groupings towards a quotient. That doesn’t require an expert from on high to say as much.

Sometimes, we just need to do it ourselves, then show others. In community hopefully.

The post Building The Bridge Between Old and New Math appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Something Bigger Than Me (Recruiting Teachers with Students and Teachers)

Recently, I saw an interview with a celebrity that floored me.

In the interview, Wilmer Valderrama on CBS Mornings talks about his experiences with being a teen actor. He tells the story of Mr. Tucker, who encouraged him to pursue his acting career while Valderrama was filming That 70’s Show during his last years of high school. My first reaction was “How do they always find a way to get in touch with anyone?” My second thought was just how serendipitous it was to have a teacher during a critical year in his life who saw him as a fully brilliant human being.

In one of the poignant moments of the interview, Valderrama says, “You know, you come to this country with the thought that anything is possible. And then it is. And then it’s individuals like him that say you can do it, and then all of a sudden you start thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I can do it, you know?’ Maybe I can do something bigger than me.'”

Yes, I felt that, too.

It made me reflect on this recent Pew Research article highlighting teachers’ perspectives on the state of the profession. One of the core tensions with teaching is how the occupational and economic concerns of teaching stand in contrast to the ethical, moral, and spiritual undertaking of the work. On the one hand, teachers deserve to get paid much better than they do. That’s been true well before I started teaching. The inertia baffles me. On the other hand, teachers that I speak to still struggle with the lack of school supplies, mounds of paperwork, and what we’ll call “student discipline.”

When it comes to recruiting and retaining teachers, the current strategies attempt to use flash over substance. In my view, the best recruiters for teaching are the current classroom teachers. But, for all the great teachers we have in our profession, we also have to listen to communities across the country naming the way racism, ableism, sexism, and other identity-based discrimination are keeping students from seeing themselves in our public schools. Teaching isn’t just about what’s being taught, but who’s doing the teaching.

In a perfect world, teachers’ interests and students’ interests would form a close-to-perfect circle. But it’s not close, so here we are. Some sociological perspectives on the state of teaching ensue:

The Teacher Side

These days, people have a myriad of solutions for recruiting and retaining more teachers. Some have suggested that we should compartmentalize the job of teaching into different parts. But teaching is as much about the follow-through as it is about the initial interactions, hence the relationship building. Others have sought to amplify the need for racially diverse teachers, but this, too, rarely accounts for the pipeline for teaching. After all, someone’s gotta do the hiring. Then there are those who have created professional groups of teachers that subsidize teachers’ experiences through after-school activities and stipends. That helps, but the system seems slow to take up these solutions more sustainably.

But time and again, teachers keep giving America their lists of what keeps them working, and America says, “OK, thanks. Try again next year.”

Some have argued that teachers shouldn’t allow for their work to be exploited. However, the teachers I speak to wouldn’t dilute their labor to match the dollar amount they receive. In other words, it’s up to districts and schools to match the efforts teachers put into their work with the right salary. Of course, this tension leads to teachers leaving in droves. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers rarely blamed the students for their departure. Since the onset of this pandemic, student behavior has taken a more central role in how teachers see their work.

But students are also the gift. Let me explain.

The Student Side

In my research, I surveyed teachers of color in different contexts, content areas, and racial and cultural backgrounds. When it came to students, 96% of them said they wanted to teach students of racially diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, they were unapologetically satisfied with teaching mostly Black and Latinx students because this satisfied the mission-driven parts of their work. But all of the teachers in my research agreed that student relationships and culturally responsive curriculum mattered a lot to them.

But as I’ve said previously, teaching might look the same on paper, but it feels different. Some of that might come from how students match authority figures with what they see on their TVs and devices. Much of it, really, is about us.

While it may feel true that students have changed, it’s also true that we still need teachers who can nurture students’ academic and socioemotional development. Neither of these are “soft.” All of these skills require a sense of individual and collective responsibility. This specifically becomes more urgent in schools that are under-resourced and over-scrutinized. Where society generally lacks of political will and societal imagination, educators of color and conscience generally don’t.

Despite what’s happening in their devices, students of all ages are telling us they still need the best of us.

Recruiting To Retain and Sustain

People spend too much time these days focusing on the teachers who leave and not enough on the teachers who stay. This has been true for some time and continues to drive the narrative. Teaching deserves folks who not only stay and fight, but stay and thrive. The teaching profession deserves bolder vision setting that creates pathways for a sustainable profession first and foremost.

Knowing that the best of teachers won’t diminish their efforts despite the lack of economic returns is exploitation. But that same dynamic allows for otherwise dedicated folks to get squeezed out of the work they love. Too many higher-ups use “What about the children?” as a pejorative to make people accept less in their work.

Yet, when I see the interviews with folks like Valderrama, we know how powerful it is when we can attend to the aspirational parts of the work. In fact, the reason why we should pay educators more – particularly those at the elementary school level – is because paying them more means they can concentrate on the dozens of humans in their charge. When a teacher worries less about the professional and economic sides of the job, it frees them up to put more energy into the moral and creative parts of their work.

If systems don’t allow for teachers to see their own genius, how readily will they see that in others? The more we invest, the more we may even allow for those students to do something bigger than them. That thing could be teaching.

The post Something Bigger Than Me (Recruiting Teachers with Students and Teachers) appeared first on The Jose Vilson.