JOSE

These posts are focused more on world events from an educator’s perspective. Raw and unfiltered, these writings tackle the tougher subjects.

Honesty In The Time Of Professionalism

by Jose Vilson on May 20, 2013

Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan

In this economy, everyone’s scared to lose their jobs.

Leaders often say they want feedback and honesty, but only if it fits their beliefs about the reality they’ve interpreted. For instance, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently tweeted this:

I laughed and replied:

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he believes that the schools his administration created in Chicago mattered a lot for the most impoverished kids. Perhaps he thinks charter schools offer a way to circumvent obtrusive localities that want to stall innovation. Perhaps he thinks Race To The Top shakes districts into following an agenda. He could have the best intentions in mind, and could see himself as helping continue the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education. Perhaps he read my tweet, too, and decided to rethink how he approaches this thing he calls “listening to teachers.”

I doubt it. All of it.

Sadly, I have little (read: no) faith in our current administration’s policies, irrespective of how much they say they appreciate educators, and want for the children. The reform path offers little solutions that interest me and the thousands of American educators trying to make a difference in our children’s lives.  I have a few more anti-reform pro-child things to tell you, most of them documented here.

What often separates the message, however, is the source. By source, I mean, when people come out for or against a position, do they do it from a place of love and care or hate and derision? Do they say things because they have an honest belief in making things better or do they have an ulterior motive in their positions?

We have people like Michelle Rhee who takes shots at National Education Association, The American Federation of Teachers, and  Occupy The DOE and other education activists without actually talking about what her organization, StudentsLast, does against the public good. Dr. Steve Perry, another person who sees himself as the solution and not a part of it, thinks a huge lit review is the same as a dissertation for his doctorate. The mainstream media, book publishers, celebrities, and venture capitalists treat them as darlings, but people on the ground have grown more skeptical as the days go by.

Sometimes, though, I fear that people on “my” side of things have similar ambitions. Some questions to ask:

  • Do we emphasize the word “teacher” or “leader” in teacher-leader?
  • Do we talk down to teachers and tell them how they should approach their jobs when they haven’t done it themselves?
  • Do we believe the way to have a bigger voice is to get a doctorate?

In no way do I seek purity in ideology, but I do take issue when people see their positions solely as a means for self-advancement. The honesty I often seek comes from a source of love, a source of restoration, and getting to a place where all children have equitable conditions for academic (and personal) success. College and career readiness sounds hollow in light of creating conditions for better people.

The challenge for us is, really, how do we continue to do this without feeling like we could lose our jobs for this? Or vex our colleagues with this?

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Stand Up On The Train

by Jose Vilson on May 14, 2013

She’s got auburn hair, a blue cottony zip-up sweater, and navy blue uniform pants. She gets on the train searching left and right, for a face perhaps. She’s slightly jolted when the blonde woman in the velvet-black suit jacket and sharp black heels.

She’s standing there, exasperated, but looking straight ahead. At what, I’m not sure. No one else notices because everyone on this train looks outward, but in no particular direction. The looks of nothingness last as long as the train ride does. IPods and smartphones light hands and eyes up, headphones tangled around their heads, and passengers try to avoid each others’ shoulders.

The young woman continues to look straight ahead. This time, I do too. But this was different.

She was directly in front of me now, unable to hug the pole directly in front of her fully. She doesn’t have enough room in front of her.

Her stomach shook a bit even as the train stood still, and whether I realized it or not, my fatherly instincts kicked in.

Something told me “Stand up.” I did. I saw the young lady mouth “Thank you” as my earphones blared Kendrick Lamar.

She rubbed her belly, hoping to tuck it in before she went to school. Bellies don’t often cooperate with our intentions. She looked left and right, searching for something. What, I’m not sure.

As I stood, I had questions that weren’t any of my business. I just settled for standing with my coffee for two long stops. My burdens aren’t as heavy as my blessings.

I’m hoping she realizes that, too.

Jose, who’s not quite back yet …

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Please, Keep Writing and Teaching [Kick More Ass]

by Jose Vilson on April 30, 2013

Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you’re a blogger writing about education and a whole mess of other stuff that permeates the experiences you have as an educator looking inward and outward, trying to seek solutions to complex and amorphous situations.

Let’s say you decided to look at the landscape of writing about education through this lens. You see messages and e-mails asking you why you put your name out there, no pseudonym, in a land where central district offices want to block and fire teachers with dissenting opinions, follow and interrogate teachers who pose hard questions on Twitter, or only highlight the teachers who please corporate sponsors and / or proffer ed-tech solutions. While the rhetoric sounds supportive of the “best” teachers, the policies themselves call worsening working (and learning) conditions. Congress and the White House continue to bundle the social safety net of America and prepare it on a cutting board, directly affecting the works of educators for everyone except the most privileged.

Your last message asks you if the person should keep her blog around in an environment like this. Your answer is hell yes.

As writers in the education field, we have a right, a privilege, and for many of us, a responsibility to tell the truth about our professions. The “best” of us can do it through anecdote or diatribe, but these finely honed skills matter none if we don’t use them to affect and effect social change. Speaking up and out about our daily struggles, the way we approach our craft, and the passion with which we inspire may prompt the next educator to look at their classrooms a little differently the next morning.

As writers who sun-light as teachers, we have an extra responsibility to the students we serve, and to do so in a way that encourages others to see themselves as teachers, as not alone, as not naive for having stayed when the best rewards are called “small victories.” With kids stuck in little cubicles in front of computers getting programmed like The Matrix in pilot programs, high-stakes standardized assessments stripping time from children who need as much time as possible to learn, and “non-profit” lobbies pegging teachers, parents, and students against each other in the name of kids (who didn’t ask their help, mind you), teacher-writers have the insight necessary in a dialogue bereft of voices from the classroom.

Indeed, you might have grander inspirations. You might have a manuscript in need of someone to believe in its marketability. You might have a few unfinished lesson plans and web sites you signed up to finish. You might be traveling to a few places along the way, but hoping your family doesn’t resent you for finding your Personal Legend.

You have a job. You’re tired. The school year is almost over. You’re tired of the nonsense. Something’s gotta g ive. You don’t want to stop because you know someone’s reading semi-religiously. You have to stop because you’re going at a blinding speed. Your heart hurts. So does your back. Your teeth hurt not from smiling, but from gnawing and snickering.

You’ll never get your voice out like this. You take a step back, and stand there for a minute. Your kids matter. You need this step back so you can run forward. Don’t stop blogging. Just hope that the next time you do, it inspires someone to kick more ass.

Jose

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Born To Do This Shit [On Personal Legends and Teaching]

by Jose Vilson on April 25, 2013

The Alchemist

The Alchemist

“You have 135 minutes left on this test. Are there any questions?”

After a quick pause, I said, “You may begin.”

As the students got to work on this section of the test, I began to reflect on my life as a teacher, and came to realize that, yes, I was born to be in a classroom, teaching.

The set of students in front of me, a gathering of opted-out English Language Learners from different classes including mine, had different experiences coming into that exam, yet already had an engrained respect for me before I even said my first words of the day. They might have seen me pass by in the hallway, covering a class, or heard rumors about me from different kids. They knew I didn’t laugh, at least not in front of them. They knew I cracked some jokes, and rarely wrote up students, preferring to talk them out of their unwise decisions.

They heard I love teaching students, and they can see it in my eyes.

A few years ago, I didn’t know how my body language (or my actual language) manifested in them thinking I hated my job, or at least that I should hate it. They confided in me that teachers in these environments work less like gurus, more like prison guards. They tell me that they couldn’t work “with these stupid kids” who “never want to do anything,” so becoming a teacher would be too hard for them. They don’t like the lack of respect teachers get generally, and wonder why someone like me actually wanted to teach, and not do anything else.

America as a whole has similar beliefs.

Yet, after reading The Alchemist, I realized just how close I am to reaching this “Personal Legend.” The students I reach in the classroom – I’m happy I reach the majority of them – have an appreciation for math now, and I hope I had a positive effect on that sentiment. The ones I don’t aren’t the “bad” kids, or the “most troubled” kids. It’s the kids who simply aren’t ready for me, or maybe not anyone, right now. I’ve learned that great teachers have plenty of students who simply weren’t ready to learn from them. Maybe I’m not ready to teach them, either, and I still have lots to learn about teaching them.

Learning isn’t linear, and neither are our lives.

In some meetings, we get the privilege to debrief with our colleagues with varying degrees of frustration, of pain, or annoyance. At the kids. At their superiors. At the system as a whole. This source of frustration, although warranted, can also cloud us from our objective. As I’ve heard a few of my colleagues say time and again, we don’t teach our subjects; we teach our students these subjects.

In time, if we let that little bubble of frustration grow, we get blinded, strayed from what we originally came to do. We see teaching as just a job, and not as both profession and passion. We see children as cogs to fit into a framework and not as people we’re giving tools to build. Some people are OK with that, and they’ll have their vision for what teaching should be, too. I just can’t allow that.

Maybe the kids respect me because I walk in like I was born to do this shit, and I want to take them along with me.

Jose, who can’t / won’t / shouldn’t talk about the test until tomorrow afternoon …

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Resolve

April 23, 2013 Jose

This morning, after a few sips of my coffee and getting ready for class, a cold sweat developed in the palms of my hand. I rubbed my hands a few times before I put the marker to the whiteboard, hoping the few examples of problems I do today serve less as a lesson and more [...]

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When It Comes To Testing, Kids Get Labeled Failures First

April 22, 2013 Jose

In my new co-blog The Collaborateurs, I wrote a little bit about testing and race. Here’s a bit: What’s sometimes missing from this side of the argument is that the effects for students is much worse than for teachers. Obviously, the teaching profession has a long way to go before we have the right working [...]

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Freestyle Week: How Politeness Kills Even The Pretense of Justice

April 16, 2013 Jose

This week, I’m writing blog posts based on people’s submissions to my Facebook page right here. My first one is based on online friend Michael Doyle’s suggested title, “How politeness kills even the pretense of justice.” Let’s go … The Boston Marathon shouldn’t have ended that way. A moment of celebration turned into a maelstrom [...]

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An Open Letter From The Trenches [To Education Activists, Friends, and Haters]

April 8, 2013 Jose

To my fellow education activists: I’ve come across a few pieces that concern me and others in the last few months, and we got some shit to talk about. On normal days, I wake up at 5:30am hellbent on kicking butt at work, metaphorically of course. The stirring in my belly long after my butter [...]

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Chesar Chavez, Jesus Christ, and Commitment to Eradicating Poverty [To The Foolish]

March 31, 2013 Jose

Dear critics of Google’s choice for their Google Doodle of the Day: What part of “serving the poor” is not aligned with today, a celebration of Jesus’ renewal and purpose in life? In no way am I saying Cesar Chavez is Jesus, but are Chavez’s (and Dolores Huerta, by the way) works not aligned with [...]

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Chinua Achebe and Finding The Language For My Experience

March 25, 2013 Jose

When Chinua Achebe passed away, my thoughts immediately took me to the fifth grade book fair. There, I found the cover of a book I found interesting. Knowing nothing about the actual book, reading level, or histories behind it, I decided to buy it for what was probably five bucks from my school’s library. Shortly [...]

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