Jose Vilson's Blog, page 23
June 12, 2016
Drop The Hate (A Word On The Orlando Massacre) [#NotOneMore]
I’m not at a loss for words.
I’m at a loss for the right words.
I’m looking for words that might heal. I’m looking for more than a proclamation, more than #NotOneMore. I want to be told that our elected officials will do more than just pray. I want to let these perfect words embrace my mind and heart. I then want to express these words to the 145 students I’m seeing tomorrow, all of whom have seen massacres happen across the country with little to no action.
I want to embrace my son tightly because he’s too young to completely get my anguish.
In many ways, adults like me would be best to keep our mouth shut. We haven’t revolted enough to make the world a better place for our children. We adults hope the best for our youth to solve the world’s problems because we are absolutely inadequate individually and, perhaps, collectively.
Some might say we are fortunate to not live in a country where such murders are a daily occurrence, but even one dead is one too many. I will never be sensitized. I never feel fortunate until we eliminate such violence here and abroad.
In times like these, I listen to W. Leo Daniels’ words, courtesy of Fatboy Slim’s “Drop The Hate.” Observe:
Tonight, we not only speak, to the members of the Greater Jerusalem Baptist church
We not only speak, to Baptist people tonight
We not only speak to, the Methodist people tonight
Church of God and Christ
Catholic, and no particular denomination
No particular city
But tonight we speak to the whole nation
Tonight, our message
Drop the hate, forgive each other
Drop the hate …
I’m calling on heaven and me
To join hands tonight, oh Lord …
photo c/o Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel / AP
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June 8, 2016
Whatever Happens To Teachers Of Color Happens To All [The Progressive]
In my latest article at the Progressive, I write about my visit to the US Department of Education for their first-ever Teacher Diversity Summit:
William A. Smith calls this “racial fatigue”— the mental and physical weariness of having to navigate personal and professional spaces that often favor white people. The educational subset of racial fatigue often posits educators of color as both the problem and solution to improving failing (read: failed) schools. No wonder teachers of color are coming in at higher rates than ever before, but also leaving faster than their white counterparts. As working conditions in places like Detroit, Newark, and Los Angeles continue to depreciate, leaders continue to push educators to do more with less (and even work for nothing).
Since the advent of No Child Left Behind, we’ve seen countless instances of teacher bashing, but the coded language used against educators has particular educational ramifications. For example, the old southern strategy, a technique used by politicians to appeal to disaffected white people, has historical ties to school desegregation.
Yes, I went in. Please read and let me know what you think.
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June 4, 2016
What I Hope To Tell My Kids About Muhammad Ali [Be Great]
On any given day during the NBA series, my students shout out any number of stats and names, solidifying their argument for who reigns supreme as of that specific game. After Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Kevin Durant dropped 29 points in a summer game in 2011, turquoise-blue and hot orange became the wave, chipping at the LeBron James vs. Kobe Bryant duopoly that held the debates then. Nowadays, some kids flaunt goldenrod and blue, shooting threes in their gym periods from inappropriate distances, yelling “CURRY!” even as the basketball thuds against the backboard. A few of them still flex three fingers to their temples after making an ill-advised fade-away a la Carmelo Anthony, a hopeful sign that the Knicks franchise isn’t completely comatose. As the NBA finals wrap up and we get into the heart of the MLB season (note bene: most of my students are Dominican), there’ll be plenty of baseball talk too. The Red Sox still have a Dominican stronghold thanks to David Ortiz and Yankees fans still rep Derek Jeter two years after he officially announced his retirement.
So when I woke up this morning to the news of boxing legend Muhammad Ali’s passing, one of my first thoughts was “How am I going to explain him to my kids?”
Growing up, Mike Tyson was boxing. His matches seemed to only last a minute before he laid waste to his opponent. Tyson’s broad shoulders, menacing walk, and gap-toothed grin at a time when boxing still captivated most of my friends. Even with Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, Jose Canseco, and Jerry Rice captivating us in their respective sports, Mike Tyson was indomitable, and, with his ferocity, we thought he might never lose. After that fateful match against Buster Douglas, Tyson’s reputation as a warrior took a turn for the worse. As with every athlete, their greatest losses flip a switch for the rest of us, as if the very quality that made them great now becomes a character flaw.
Which is inherently our fault, right? We heap praise on people fully expecting them to never break away from our expectations of them. We don’t simply create pedestals to knock the greats off them. We fear our imperfections and simplify our heroes because their celebrity allows us to heave our visions upon them.
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June 1, 2016
Who Are The Rest of Y’all? (On Dr. Emdin’s For White Folks …)
First, it’s important to note that I’ve been following Dr. Christopher Emdin’s ascent into superstar academic. From the hip-hop pedagogy classes he organized at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the collaborations with Wu-Tang Clan elder statesman GZA to conferences in South America and rendezvous with Kendrick Lamar, the dapper dandy reppin’ the Bronx has made this “work” look easy. (Note: it’s not.) What’s most captured me is that, despite the plethora of praise he’s received from Harvard University and the American Education Research Association to the Department of Energy and the White House, he has found time to wage war with both ideas and the figures who espouse said ideas. He doesn’t simply resort to calling them haters, but uses the academic language he inherited on the way to his doctorate to address and redress.
Which is why Dr. Christopher Emdin’s For White Folk Who Teach In The Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too was so fascinating, not because he names names, but because he avoids names and focuses intently on ideas. For all of y’all: past, present, and future.
For those who’s been “doing the work” for some time, this book is a conglomerate of influences like Gloria Ladson-Billings (culturally responsive teaching), Lisa Delpit (analogizing the struggles of a people outside of his personal experiences to explicate his people more directly), Paulo Freire (bringing in students’ knowledge to make them the teachers and thus activating their knowledge), and, yes, John Dewey. But, as we know, John Dewey didn’t truly believe that progressive pedagogy rested in the hands of people of color, so the boulder that other academics like the aforementioned as well as Pedro Noguera, Sonia Nieto, Antonia Darder, and Angela Valenzuela keeps rolling with Emdin and the up-and-comers he stands to usher in. If you’re in this category, reading the book feels conversational, familiar, and will either affirm what you already believe and / or help you tweak that which you know. As a classroom teacher, I definitely nodded in affirmation and winced at my own empathetic memories.
For the rest of y’all? Well, that’s tricky. continue reading
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May 29, 2016
Education Policy’s Roost (On Social Justice Warriors)
Less than a year ago, I was in a heated conversation (we’ll call it that) where a few folks who disagreed on education policy brought their frustrations to full display. Unbeknownst to the folks who I agreed with, the conservative dissenters are encouraged to engage with, start sh*t, and frustrate folks like us. At one point, after one of the folks in “my” group decided she couldn’t take the direction of the conversation, a dissenter promptly called her a Nazi. Observers from afar thought that the argument between the two groups would have cut across color lines, but not necessarily. At the point where one dissenter called one of my people a Nazi, no one in the dissenter clique decided to call him in, even the people of color. In fact, they cheered the use of Nazi actively, flooding her mentions and getting favorites and retweets for engaging in kind.
It reminded me of two lessons: 1) not all my skinfolk are kinfolk and 2) sometimes, to many people, the side of the debate you’re on is stronger than the principle of social justice you supposedly espouse.
After I rebuked this dissenter for analogizing simple disagreement with outright fascism, I too found myself in a conundrum. For those who follow me on social media and beyond, they’ve seen my patience with people who loathe my point of view on schools and beyond. Through my questioning, I work through the initial red herrings and often come to the same conclusion: there’s a huge swath of folks who prefer we keep the same structures of inequity, even if they reluctantly have to include a “talented tenth” of people who are not white, Christian males.
They’re too attuned to the idea that they’d have to actually give something up in order for everyone to get a sustainable piece of the pie and must work completely against it. continue reading
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May 25, 2016
Gritting My Teeth Over Grit (Bootstrap Theories)
My worst enemy isn’t just the system, but what the system does to my students’ self-worth and confidence. The daily fight against belief. Don’t talk to me about grit; talk to me about systems of callousness and the incapacity for love and compassion. Talk to me about students knowing their environment is there to help them rather than them having to be skeptical the whole way through their learning.
Talk to me about the withered sparks and dulled stars dug deep into our celestial selves. Fight me when I’m not trying to extract that from 150 or so adolescents.
I prefer if people just said grit meant that yes, we value hard work and passion, and that’s as far as it goes.
Unfortunately, a handful of people are making tons of money on the idea that 10,000 of fixing your attitude about ideas students may or may not be interested in might close the achievement gap. It’s not that folks like Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and Malcolm Gladwell aren’t well-meaning folks. But, as we’ve seen with education professors such as Charlotte Danielson, we too easily trust intention without a thorough inspection of effect. continue reading
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May 22, 2016
This Post Is Dedicated To All The Teachers Who Said They Wouldn’t Amount to Nothing
Last week, I had the honor and privilege of attending a special presentation from the students of Satellite Academy Midtown High School, a transfer high school just south of Madison Square Garden. Two years ago, assistant principal Paul Melkonian told me he had a vision of getting his students overseas somewhere. (full disclosure: he’s my son’s godfather as per Catholic traditions) I wasn’t stunned, but I didn’t understand to what depths he’d take this project. With the unflinching approval of and collaboration with his principal, Melkonian started putting together his travel abroad project that would take his students to Costa Rica and, as of this year, South Africa.
Through different supports across the city, including the right people from in and out of the NYC Department of Education coming together, these students who the system seemingly discarded got a second chance to prove their doubters wrong. That’s why alternative high schools matter.
That’s also why, whenever I advocate for great schools, I believe we should start rebuilding from what the students who our system has failed. It’s the students we call “dropouts,” “failures,” and “rejects” that need to sit in panels, write white papers, and have photo opps with the cool kids in the glossy photos. We need to do right by all kids, but, when we only work through the average student, we don’t actually address the needs of all kids.
Sea change requires a shift in tectonic plates, right? continue reading
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May 18, 2016
We Must Not Be Defeated (Optimism In May)
62 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, we’re still having a passive-aggressive argument over whether every school-aged child deserves equitable funding for their school. Three-score and two years ago, the legendary Thurgood Marshall led one of the most influential civil rights cases in the nation in BvB, a case whose promise has yet to be delivered in full. Our country has neither the political nor moral will, and most of the arguments sound like “I know there’s a problem, but my kid.” We can’t blame “either side” because on this issue, Americans have reached across the aisle for centuries on engraving inequitable situations. These issues come up almost annually, and, with a renewed focus on racial and social justice, major educational figures from Secretary of Education John King on down have used moments like these to speak to the persistent inequities facing our schools.
In my classroom, I bear a different sort of responsibility to this legacy.
There’s the litigious elements of the work we do: education policy, implemented standards, school funding, and standardized testing, individualized education plans (IEPs), Title 1, and a host of other laws we’ve initialized acronymed. Yet, when our classroom doors shutter, there’s the daily interactions we as educators enact to make our students feel included and academically engaged. As often as I study up on the macro-education policy and the ways we need to deconstruct education reform, I’m equally, if not more so, responsible for the ostensible minutiae of what my students do.
I’m a teacher. Not just. We build students. continue reading
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May 15, 2016
I Have An English Doppelganger! (feat. Mark Martin) [Video]
Have you ever wondered whether you have a twin in another country doing the same work as you?
Well, at SXSWEdu, I got a chance to meet mine. His name is Mark Martin, and he’s a black male educator out of the UK with a strong social media presence, trying to unite educators of color across the pond. His name on Twitter is the Urban Teacher and usually sports a 5 o’clock shadow at conferences. In other words, he’s the truth!
Where the commonalities end, I’m afraid, is that he’s way more extroverted than I am and, ironically, he interviewed me and not the other way around. Here’s a video of the interview for your viewing pleasure:
Let me know what you think and give Mark a shout-out on Twitter!
(pictured in feature image (l-r): Mark Martin, Rafranz Davis, Nicol Howard, Jose Vilson)
continue reading
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May 11, 2016
Everything You Need To Know About Publishing My Book
In the summer of 2011, I stared at my blog and wondered if I could make a book of it. The wall I kept banging my head against was the idea that I’d get fired, piss every current and future employer with my critiques, and, offer no apology for the forthcoming expressions of passion for the work I do. By the time I set my heart to a manuscript, I partook in meetings that tested every limit of mine from a professional standpoint. As a teacher, I could close the doors shut (though I rarely did) and focus 150% of my attentions on my students and their needs (sometimes to the detriment of my own body). As a math coach, I had no choice but to listen to DOE rhetoric and the ways our system continued to perpetuate inequity through complex accountability schemes, the decimation of teacher morale, and the stunted voices of students and parents writ large.
The rest of the country was still catching up to the swindle, and I didn’t think the world would catch up fast enough. continue reading
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