I couldn’t help it. I checked my work e-mail. A list of names with offers I’ll never accept with things I’d never buy from them. A few security checks from central offices. Oh, and an automated e-mail from our teacher rating system that calculated our rating for last year. I skipped the paragraphs and went directly to the table.

Effective. Effective. Effective. This is no brag. I’m on my own rubric. And a few years ago, the algorithms didn’t bestow their blessings so readily.

I eschewed common sense for the sixth year in a row to fix my classroom the week before we’re actively getting paid to work. It’s also the first year in those six that I’ve gotten to keep the same classroom. Every year, I’m entrusted with discarded the old, the misused, the dusty, and the murky from a given classroom and turn it into a learning space for middle schoolers. Every year with varying degrees of success, I accomplish this. Every year, it had been decided that I need to do so for the next class. Every classroom strengthens my spacial and ancestral knowledge in this work.

Oh, and every year, most of my colleagues are already 10 steps ahead of me on Day 1 even with all the pre-work I get done the week before.

That’s why it’s important for people to understand what I’m saying when I accept this as my new-ish mantra: come as you are. Whether you just narrowly escaped the hurricanes in the South, spent the summer accumulating knowledge from any number of professional development sessions, or worked on that new project that you can’t share until it’s Instagram ready, come as you are. Your room isn’t ready. Your furniture is moved about. Your floors may not look to your specifications. You’re nervous about changes in curriculum, in administration, in the children you’re expected to serve this year. You’re mad that August changed to September so quickly.

You’re not ready. You’ll never be ready. Come as you are.

All I’m interested in whether you’re willing and able to put in the work on behalf of and with students. In no way am I advocating for us not to get paid for the work we’ve put in as professionals. I am very much pushing us to consider our orientations, though. The ways we initiate students, the rules we have our students engage in, the pedagogy we assign to our classrooms, and the conversations we have about the students and their parents matter in the way of this work. The empathy is as critical as the data we use to determine the moves we make in our open theaters.

As with any learner, I much rather work with people who may not fall along the same sociopolitical spectrum but want to build students academically and relationally than someone who thinks they have it all figured out. After fourteen years in the classroom, eight different classrooms, and a dozen or so keys around my neck to prove it, I know to never take for granted the knowledge I’ve acquired from the hundreds of students I’ve taught. It takes humility to recognize our expertise in the work we do while telling ourselves “We wish to learn more.”

I want to learn more. NYC teachers, I hope you’ll want to learn more with me as well. That’s what we beg of our students. What better models than the people who set them up for their learning, anyways?

photo c/o