Jose Vilson's Blog, page 39

What You Gonna Do When The Common Core Runs Wild On You?

“Are you ready for the Common Core?”

“Survey says teachers aren’t ready for the Common Core.”

“Districts haven’t been ready for the Common Core.”

Most of the discussion that I’ve seen around the Common Core lately is whether our country has sufficiently prepared the nation’s teachers for the Common Core State Standards. Even in places that profess to have dropped the Common Core (and replaced them with Common Core-like standards), the idea of “readiness” seems to create an urgency in the face of pushback and doubling down on the reforms of the last decade. Yet, it also reminds me how cartoonish folks look talking about education as a whole, as if the preparation of teachers for the CCSS is akin to preparing for national disasters for beach-based cities or … opponents to Hulk Hogan in the mid-80s and 90s.

Akin to Hulkamania, I often look at the Common Core paraphernalia and fanfare as a well-funded, bipartisan effort, bringing together strange bedfellows in legion for a crusade that might win. Painful as it is to watch, the script drawn up in backrooms to move the action forward give everyone an accepted understanding of what they’re signing up to. If you think I’m dancing in my analogy, imagine the stretch journalists and bloggers have had to make to speak about Common Core readiness, a phrase turned frequently since the beginning of Common Core lore.

With two years of CCSS tests under New York’s belt, for example, we still have gaps in what so-called experts believe the CCSS should look like in classrooms and how actual practitioners see the Common Core working in their classrooms. As test scores go up and the current scale scores remain stringent for levels 3 and 4, it seems hard to tell whether the Common Core itself has transformed what’s happening in the classroom or if the teachers have kept doing as they do the last time test scores went up. Did everyone understand the new curriculum they were given last year or are the old textbooks now adaptive to what teachers believe the standards are saying? Can the same texts be used or just moved to different grades?

Or, do we let the Common Core run wild on us, with no discernible characteristics of preparedness available to us other than test items that may or may not look suspiciously like other tests we’ve seen?

Even as people attempt to write what they mean by “ready,” those of us in the classroom look at the Common Core like a wrestler does jumping from the top rope: a costly move that, if successful, works to great effect for both the wrestler and the onlookers, but if unsuccessful, could do lots more harm than good, especially since it took so long to get up top. The emphasis, again, ought to be pedagogy because it means we can sift through (if not develop) tasks that, regardless of whether we like the Common Core, will teach students the skills and concepts to get them through any material.

Despite the plethora of now-labeled curricular materials and videos out there showing “Common Core,” the idea of readiness will continue to run wild until teachers work together to develop themselves, each other, and the district to come up with a realistic plan.

What are YOU gonna do, brother?

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On Writing Like A Monster

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of moderating a non-fiction panel for Las Comadres and Compadres organization featuring former Colorlines editor Daisy Hernandez and writer Alina Garcia-Lapuerta. The panel was uproarious and chock full of information for the burgeoning writers in the audience, some of whom already have their own works in the audience. Even though I was there mainly to let the other panelists shine, I also had the opportunity to reflect on my own successes and failures as a writer. With no agent, a super-tight budget for publicity, and a teacher’s / father’s schedule, I’ve still made plenty of headway with my writing.

I’ve had hundreds of rejections and made hundreds of mistakes, but, in the back of my mind, the word “radical” always grounded me. What does it mean to be a radical writer in a time of polished centrism? If radical means “far-reaching or thorough” (along with advocating for complete sociopolitical reform), then how does my writing propound that? In education, this is especially dangerous considering the levels of acceptability folks want you to reach before you’re welcomed into some circles whose borders you never actually see, just feel. If “radical” means getting to the root, not necessarily uprooting, where do we belong in that?

I’m writing this list not as a definition, but as a documentation of the ways and means for how I go about my business here, my book, or anywhere else I’ve written.

1. Look for what’s not being said.

The most difficult part of writing in any circle is to look for the things that aren’t “successful” in views and shares, but that are meaningful. For instance, in education, it’s super-easy to write a post about the plethora of venture philanthropists trying to privatize our schools. It’s equally easy to write about anti-testing too. Yet, I rarely find posts that incorporate both this element with what that looks like for the average classroom teacher (or student). The policy angle has been done over and again. Can we tell the stories without the shame that it’s not a carbon copy of someone else’s material?

2. Be unafraid to fail.

Many of my colleagues have this fear of failure, as if the blogs we write are the only shot we have of getting people to read us. That might be true sometimes, but usually, I’ve found that the more we write, the better we get, and the more our writing improves, the more people are willing to give your writing a second chance. We all have different levels of attention we given to different projects, but we can rest assured that, as long as you as the writer are earnest about your growth, your people will continue reading.

3. Develop new words.

Esmeralda Santiago, famous author of When I Was Puerto Rican, had echoed a sentiment Sonia Sanchez had mentioned to me more than a decade ago: we all work with the same set of words, but the way we approach them will make our stories different from all the others. The writer needs to develop the delicate balance between writing from a unique perspective and drawing in an audience who may or may not relate, connecting to something in their purview.

4. Challenge your own contradictions.

Often, radicalism looks less like Chomsky and more like Calvin and Hobbes, reflecting on your own practices and asking hard questions of yourself. For example, let’s acknowledge the complications of developing collegiality with one another and understanding that some of our colleagues clash with our deepest principles. Those sorts of conflicts make us more human and more approachable. This also gives us the pathway to lay bare our grievances about one another. These honest conversations rarely go anywhere when people play defense more often than acknowledge flaws.

When people ask me how they can do what I do, I often tell them “Don’t.” Yes, I have a book and all the praise that comes with it. But there is a certain danger in writing like this. Only in the last month or so did the NYC Department of Education unblock my website from district computers. Some folks still tread nervously around sponsoring what I say, even when they quietly agree with it. Don’t be me; be the best you.

You have to be willing to discard the hope that corporate sponsors and luminaries in your field will openly and vociferously endorse you because, as it turns out, you’re a radical writer. We’re trying to get to the root of things and work from there, not simply gathering words from others.

This is real writing right here.

photo c/o

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Derek Jeter

My first real introduction to baseball was my cousin Richie’s autographed Don Mattingly placard. He put it on his shelf after meeting him thanks to the Miliken Boys’ Club in 1991. I didn’t understand the sport, and didn’t care for it since I already had Patrick Ewing and the Madison Square Bullies playing at their peak. My interest in baseball grew because I too became a member of the Boys Club, observing as the uniformed kids clapped their dusty cleats while the rest of us played pool or watched a movie. I got to go to the Old Yankee Stadium for the first time in 1992 (My counselor would say, “You’re not getting a ball from these seats unless Jose Canseco smacks it harder than he’s ever done in his life!), but I didn’t really appreciate it until 1996.

Enter Derek Sanderson Jeter.

From the beginning, I found myself gravitating towards that team because they looked like they were having serious fun. In particular, Jeter looked like he could have been one of the kids who I saw play in East River Park, the ebullience and bounce every time a play went his way. Even the odd fro-coiffe Jeter sported on his head for most of his life made him seem more, not less, approachable. He had a billion interviews, none of them particularly interesting, and the commercials always came off effortlessly. He just had to smile and deliver the lines. His at-bat routine (slow walk, square feet in the batter’s box, right arm extension while re-shuffling his feet, squint at the pitcher, reserve swing his bat two times, then the ready nod) must have added a full 10 minutes to the game, but everyone watched at attention just the same.

He was the man.

Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa carried MLB from the depravity of the full-season lockout of 1994. The New York Yankees rebounded from having their owner suspended from baseball in the early 90’s while Buck Showalter and others in the Yankee brass played the waiting game with their farm system. Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius, John Wetteland, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, David Cone, Tino Martinez, and any number of players from the dynasty years may have had more critical numbers during the dynasty years (1996 – 2000).

None of this mattered. Derek Jeter was the everyday shortstop, and gave it everything he had on the field. And I kept watching.

As I’ve gotten older, though, there’s all this other stuff that comes to the fore, too. His 2001 locker-room interview after the Yankees lost to the Diamondbacks and, still drenched in sweat and adrenaline, exclaimed cynically that these weren’t the same dynasty Yankees, almost dismissing his own .148 batting average in the series. The seemingly infallible Jeter, the one who for years controlled every bit of his persona on and off the field, came unraveled in a moment of bitter honesty. His all-star roster of women he reportedly dated and the unconfirmed but slightly credible stories about his life off-camera brought him down a few notches to some, but he wasn’t any wilder than Reggie Jackson, Keith Hernandez, or Lawrence Taylor in their heyday. His shorter range on defense and pretty good statistics still didn’t do him favors when people argued that Alex Rodriguez or Nomar Garciaparra were the best shortstops during Jeter’s tenure, but he was still the 1996 AL Rookie of the Year and the 2000 All-Star Game and World Series MVP, remarkable considering he only had six years under his belt.

But the scrutiny unsettled many of us because without Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius after 2001, and with George Steinbrenner’s renewed emphasis on paying for players like Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Hideki Matsui, and a host of others, Derek Jeter couldn’t win as the leader and eventual captain. The acquisition of Alex Rodriguez might have jarred Derek Jeter some, too, because, at the time, A-Rod was considered the next true legend statistically, at least according to ESPN. When Alex, not Derek, had the best infield arm, the best offensive stats, the most MVPs, the largest contracts, the dumbest luck in supposedly clutch situation, and the most stories on the back page of the New York media, I had to wonder if having his best-friend-turned-enemy on his team got to him otherwise unquestioned leadership.

Obviously, winning things changes perspectives, too. In 2009, with A-Rod imploding with a steroid admission, baseball (and sports media) re-adjusted itself again to make Derek Jeter the face of baseball again. The contract negotiation of 2010, where only the Yankees insisted on kicking dirt on his legacy only made the Yankees look ridiculous since Jeter only wanted to be with the Yankees. With MLB hungry for a beacon of steroid-free superstars, Derek Jeter, the crown jewel of the most storied franchise in the league, fit perfectly.

He also happens to be my favorite player. Watching a few games every year (including Game 1 of the 2009 World Series) meant donning one of two Derek Jeter jerseys proudly down the school hallway and to the game. Seeing his face sparks memories of parades and met promises. Even when, for a second, I felt like Jeter should have retired in 2011, when it became super-obvious that he couldn’t reach for many fast grounders hit to left, when teams put their best second-basemen in line with his opposite field ambitions, when his screaming hits weren’t homers but doubles just inside the warning track where Jeffrey Maier couldn’t tip it, he was still my favorite. He allowed us to project our aspirations on him because, even when he failed miserably, he at least signaled to us that he was trying his best, and that there might be a next time.

Except there’s no next time. This is it, my favorite baseball player’s jersey hanging the way his bat does now. I could care less about the things he didn’t accomplish, nor do I care for hero-worship, but the most you can expect from anyone with that many fans is to give it all they got.

Thank you, #2. You’re the man.

“I’m not going to boast about being the shortstop on a team that has won three of the last four World Championships, but it does feel good. I’m not going to tell you that as a 26-year old multimillionaire who still has all of his hair all of his teeth, and can get dates, I have a perfect life, but it’s good. I’m not going to tell you that you should want to be like me, because everyone should want to be their own person, but I assure you that it’s fun to be me. What I do want to tell you is that I’m proud of where I am and how I got to this stage in my life, and I think there’s a way for everyone to benefit from all that I have experienced while making it my dream. I’m proud of the guidance my parents gave me in helping me determined the best ways to methodically move closer and close to my dream, and I’m proud of how I’ve worked to reach that dream and maintain it. For me, the dream of being a baseball player is a daily challenge – not only living that dream but ensuring it stays alive.”

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A Love Supreme

For the last week or so, I’ve had NFL Hall of Famer Cris Carter’s words ring in my head in his response to the current consternation about NFL running backs Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson. His quote “My mom did the best job she could do. My mom was wrong” juxtaposed with “You know what? Take em off the daggone field because, you know what, as a man, that’s the only thing we really respect. We don’t respect no women. We don’t respect no kids. The only thing Roger and them do, take them off the field cuz they respect that” made me think about schools and parenting.

In particular, it made me think of the unwritten rules about parent-teacher communication, and how often many of us would observe parents not just threaten to beat their kids, but also hear of students get a beating, prompted by that educators’ phone call. Some of us might have even hoped that the phone call would lead to such a beating.

Yet, as my friend Alexa (@alexachula) said this on Twitter:

“Listen, beating your kids doesn’t work. They’re still not doing HW, fighting, cussing, & talking back. I spend 6.5 hours w/your kid, I know.”

This is a critical aspect of the Adrian Peterson conversation for educators. In the past, I’ve been of the mindset that sparing the rod meant spoiling the child. When I think about the hundreds of students I’ve taught and met, my best students never got beaten. Love, structure, and discussions seemed to work best for them. It was my more rambunctious kids who were the most fragile and, often, the most beaten. They also felt the least loved. Corporal punishment is still legal in 23 states, despite the studies showing more progressive ways to instill discipline and positive school culture.

So, all that beating seems to accomplish is making kids less confident in their own person and more agitated at the sight of authority. That includes teachers.

Even our classroom management strategies might need an upgrade, for, if schools are supposed to function as safe havens, why do we continue to work against that so often? Why do we run mock prisons and threaten students ad nauseam about ending up in jail or flipping burgers for a living? How do we re-define the word discipline as restraint towards achieving a wholeness, not destroying as a means of stripping apart?

This cuts across so many lines and gets more complicated the deeper you look, but it’s unfair for us to not look, to not see the legacies we’ve inherited, and the impressions we leave on the children who will have to ask themselves the same questions, scars and all.

A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme …

photo c/o

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Week 2: The Best Laid Lesson Plans

Last week, I found myself as restless as the first day of school.

In fact, I got to school at 7:10am every day, when school usually starts at 8am. I racked my brain around what the next logical step is in my curriculum. Negative exponents are especially difficult if students don’t get a lot of practice with the concept, and if they can’t make a seamless connection between negative and positive integer exponents. I decided to breathe life into it by waiting and waiting and not settling for mediocre understanding, returning to the idea of folding for amount and folding for size. Tight with behavioral expectations, loose with the learning timeline. My classroom and quiz questions all sounded like this: “What is the reciprocal of 3^-4?” “What’s the difference between -2^3 and (-2)^3?” “Prove that x^0 = 1.”

Here I am, successfully proving that I can deliver middle-school-level math material with higher-order thinking. There they are, answering two-thirds of the questions correctly. Two thirds of my students passed my hardest quiz of the year thus far. I’m not happy, but I’m happier.

Usually, I wait a while before drawing bolder lines between what they can and can’t do in my class, but this week, I decided that the tough love was necessary early and often. As the pseudo-dean of the floor last year, I saw this set of students as seventh graders run roughshod over most teachers’ rules, ignoring stern warnings and detention sessions alike. I’m sticking to my “no yelling” policy, but the usually patient Mr. Vilson has a sudden sense of urgency. As I hold myself to a higher standard of teaching, I find myself expecting the same from the students in front of me. They’re responding by excelling in my quizzes. I’m onto something.

The expectations I have for them and the expectations I have for myself ought to match the expectations they have for me and for themselves. Duh.

For the first parent-teacher conference, I had plenty of parents come in, many of whom were told explicitly to come to my class by their sons and daughters. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but seeing 25 of 90 parents on Back To School Night is pretty good. I told them the same thing I’m telling you now. Students can check their grades whenever they wish. They need to work hard and there’s no such thing as a math person. Parents can ask me questions as they need to. My syllabus is available to them. When they’re concerned about their child’s behavior in my class, they respond not to me, but to their children. They thank me. Two of them remind me that I had their children nine years prior. I tell them that it’s an honor to serve them again.

It’s amazing that I’ve gotten this many chances to get it right and keep doing so. In my tenth year, Lord knows that even my best lesson plans have nothing on inquisitive and slightly sugar-influenced children. I’m not all that perfect, either.

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Join The EduColor Movement, Part 1 of Many

It’s been a few years since Arvind Grover, ed-tech specialist in NYC, and I looked around boutique education conferences and said, “Wow, these spaces need a lot more diversity.” When a few of us sat there and said we’d create a clearinghouse to rate the diversity of any conference we came across, I didn’t think we’d have much impact. How many people of color were willing to jump into spaces they didn’t feel invited to? How many people were ready to have that conversation about race in education reform at all? While supposed ed-reformers like former Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and principaneur Steve Perry ran around telling the world that teachers’ union stunk and that the current teaching corps, 85% of whom are white, have low expectations of the neediest students of color, no one in that stratosphere was willing to say, “There’s a progressive way to discuss race in education reform.”

Insert EduColor.

This collective of teachers, parents, students, and other education denizens from many different backgrounds has secretly taken the lead on a lot of great efforts in the last year or so, building up leaders in their edu-communities, promoting diversity in different spaces, and holding organizations and personalities to higher standards when talking about race.

Soon, we’ll grow this collective, but for now, the 40 or so people in this coalition, many of whom you recognize in this work, have one ask: sign this petition, please.

Readers of this blog know how I feel about the teachers who wore the NYPD t-shirts on the first day of school. (For added context, please read NYC Educator’s post on this as well.) Now, our EduColor team has asked everyone involved to not do what’s popular, but to do what’s right, even people who I have a good relationship with. Our calls for justice are an assertion that, yes, our voices belong here. At a time when a majority white teaching profession comes in conflict with a majority non-white student body, having thorough race discussions in our school buildings as part of our professional development coincides with the calls for the NYC Department of Education, the United Federation of Teachers, and the group of NYPD t-shirt wearing teachers to address this better than using policies and codes.

The transition from EduColor from humble clearinghouse to rumbling coalition isn’t lost on me as the founder. Now, we have an independent set of folks who think we can do better than the current crop of folks on the proverbial “both sides” trying to tap into discussions of race.

The petition is an important piece. Be a part of our community. We can do this.

Sign This Petition

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Week 1: I Belong Here (On Starting Exponents)

I’ve started my unit on exponents the same exact way for the last five years. I’d give my students the definition of exponent and base, and give them examples of how each of them work. From there, we’d see what happens as I made tables to show growth patterns. What happens as the exponent increases? What happens as the exponent decreases? What if the exponent is zero? Negative? What’s the difference between a negative base and a negative exponent?

This year, I changed my whole lesson planning by introducing them to the problem of folds.

In this problem, I take a sheet of paper and fold it in half. I then take the paper and fold it again in half, and do it again for emphasis. I then asked them, “What do you notice?” I let them tackle this for a longer while than I’m used to. The students came up with a bunch of different observations:

As the stage increased, the number of boxes doubles.
As the stage increased, the size of the boxes shrunk in half.
It looks like division / multiplication.

I didn’t really tell them which is right or wrong, but they put something into my lessons that I didn’t anticipate: I could use this problem for both positive and negative numbers, the positive numbers dealing with the amount of the boxes and the negative numbers dealing with the size of the boxes.

For the rest of the week, instead of giving them a mix of computation problems for their first activity, I decided to just put up the complex ones I would ask for homework and let them argue. Indeed, many of them did argue with each other. Maybe it got a little loud for my taste in one of the classes this week, but, for my kids to have the permission to argue with each other gave all of us a sense of how the school year might proceed.

This is all buoyed by my loose-tight structure in class. I’m demanding “good morning” from each of them, and asking them to jump into their work as soon as they walk in. I’m demanding that they listen to each other and questioning them on what the other is saying. I’m not collecting all their classwork and notes, but I’m asking them to participate more intentionally. With a vibrant, organized classroom around them, including a Martin Luther King Jr. poster behind them, I’m hoping they feel welcome.

With me going back into the classroom full-time, one might expect that I have a sour taste in my mouth. There’s evidence to the contrary. On Friday, I spent the last two periods grading my work and cleaning my classroom. One of my colleagues who needed the room during the period saw me going about my business and remarked, “You look like you belong here. You look happy.”

I said, “Hell yeah.”

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Listen To The Controversial Panel Featuring Dana Goldstein, Motoko Rich, and Me Right Here

Hey everyone,

Last night, I had the pleasure of being invited by Dana Goldstein, author of the must-read education history book of the year The Teacher Wars, and New York Times education writer Motoko Rich to speak at the New America NYC panel on Goldstein’s aforementioned book. We did a good job parsing some of the education issues of today. Glad the place was sold out, and there might be another one soon. In the meantime, listen to the convo here!

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My Contribution To #FergusonSyllabus [Edutopia]

Hey everyone,

I wrote up a resource on how to teach about and beyond the events of Ferguson, and included examples of how some teachers are already doing it. Please read and let me know what you think.

3. Bring it back to the individual.

We don’t often get the chance to reflect about our misgivings or perceptions of each other. Especially in diverse communities (and I do mean diverse and not just communities of color), we often dodge racial conversations because we pretend that avoiding the subject means peace. Instead, confronting our own prejudices head-on would make us better people and leaders. Understanding the lens through which we see the world and how others see the world will combine to grow a sense of empathy within our communities, so that when conversations like Ferguson do come up, everyone understands how to approach it.

Read, share, and let me know what you think. Thank you!

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Pedagogy First (A Note on Elizabeth Green’s Building A Better Teacher)

Every so often, I love reading other folks talk about standards without any current teachers present in their conversation. Even a cursory read of education history in this country shows how intellectual [white] men throw their moral and scholarly swag about what teachers should and shouldn’t be focused on. On the other hand, the teachers I eavesdrop on try to out-intellectual the folks imposing their “thought leadership” onto those of us in schools. Over and again, I see templates and talking points, and less about the day-to-day events and adjustments we as teachers have to make to make school work when other adults can’t.

Thankfully, Elizabeth Green’s book Building A Better Teacher does quite a bit of this.

As an urban middle school math teacher going into my 10th year, I valued getting a different perspective about teaching. Hearing things about Finland, Singapore, and Japan are nice, and all the cool kids who get to travel over there and tell us how their talking points matched with their experience over there is all well and good, but on more than one occasion found myself saying, “So what does that have to do with me?”

Green’s book, in sharp contrast, expounds on ideas I’ve only heard in passing, like the heavily-touted Japanese model of lesson study or Magdalene Lampert’s TKOT. I appreciated hearing the trials and failures of these pedagogical movements as well. It’s great to hear that teachers want to observe each other, come together, and make observations about how they can improve their pedagogy and assessments. It’s great to hear that people had the time and resources to work with each other and feel vested in this intellectually challenging work. It’s great to hear that, at some point, a group of folks actually wanted to disband the “ed-schools from afar” approach.

It also felt weird that, simultaneously, article after article came out disputing some of the claims in the book, which I found odd. For instance, Reiko Watanabe came out with an article explaining why Green’s excerpt from her book, which appeared in the New York Times, had gotten Japanese schools all wrong. According to him, juku school, and not “regular school,” were the reason that students learned. In American terms, he’s saying that companies like Kumon and Kaplan matter more than the schools the students attend by day. While that might have some credibility, especially when it comes to SAT prep and the like), I’m not convinced that rote memorization school and beating kids over the head with facts like a thousand hammers into a child’s skull is the best way to get kids to learn.

Then again, I’m not a standards-deliverer. I’m a teacher, a pedagogue. As a few of us have said time and again, I can take a set of great standards and deliver it in monotonous worksheets or I can take a set of inappropriate and unintelligible standards and still get kids engaged in lessons about it. Thus, pedagogy must come first.

Perhaps that’s the implication in her book, too. Yes, she pays lots of attention to what many dub as the best classroom management system out there (Doug Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion is the handbook), but she dedicates many pages critiquing its militaristic and often callous procedures. [Full disclosure: reading too much about the charter movement made me wince a bit, but that's neither here nor there.]

She noticeably doesn’t critique Lampert’s open, patient, and precise approach to teaching mathematics. And, instead of just listing the things Japanese teachers did, she breaks down the sort of dialogue that happens in the lesson study meetings. The structures obviously support the pedagogy, and the structures include the standards, but the pedagogy still wins.

That’s why, when watching men debate each other over their own agendas, I wonder if those men have actually put both feet into the classroom and debate over the 30+ kids in front of them, and, if not, why they don’t ask the folks who must. Like Green did here. L’chayim.

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