I arrive in my classroom every morning at around 7:20 am, 40 minutes before my students trickle in. The minute hand leans to the right while I drag my feet a few flights of stairs, coffee in hand, lesson plan in mind. A few rays of light creep into my room, usually hitting the likenesses of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. behind my desk. I glance at Detroit Red, then el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, then Dr. King Jr. I take a deep breath, then get my mind set on this lesson plan. I fill out this Word document with an objective, a Do Now / warm-up activity, the materials we’ll need for class, a lesson with an essential question, a box for modifications, an activity, a closing activity, and a homework assignment. I print it. I spend a few minutes wondering whether I told the right story about the math I’ll be teaching.

Students come in. Good morning. I never have an idea of what’ll come next.

The math part of this work is simple enough. Let’s take a ratio and find equivalent ratios in other forms like fractions and decimals and in multiple representations like tables and graphs. Let’s use multiplication and division to keep these ratios consistent and find the patterns between the numerators and denominators, the x’s and y’s, the quotients and constants of proportionality. Let’s determine that a proportional graph cuts through the origin – (0,0) if you must – and makes a straight line. Let’s put those points in a table, divide them, and see if a constant of proportionality comes out. Let’s make a rule, call it an equation, and find points that aren’t represented on the graph yet.

We can name those and build activities around those that elicit discussion among pairs and groups. It’s been almost 15 years of this. I came into the profession hoping to see more of “me” in those computer science classes and so much of it started from my misconceptions about the math I learned long before that. I wanted to step into this work to correct the course.

Yet, I’m also not teaching math in isolation. I’m teaching fully complicated human beings in a subject area that pretends neutrality and simplicity. The concepts of ratios and representation are not divorced from the strife and trauma so many of my students come in with. I expect them to acclimate to these academic standards while sympathizing with their hunger and growing pains. I hear their stories of overworked mothers, struggling fathers, children with responsibilities above their age range, and a collective collapse in self-esteem. I recognize the cut marks on arms, bags under eyes, and bouts of exhaustion. As if the plastic desktops and semi-silent rooms in my classroom were one of their few constants.

I feel the ways students prefer to be left to their own devices because they too often have adults hovering over their every move. They can’t always differentiate between those who care about them and those who can’t, and, when they do, they too get tired of adults. I know I do as an adult.

I spend hours grading papers, writing lessons, and thinking about how I’ll address this moment’s situations tomorrow. I’m warmly demanding they get this work in and end with an “I believe in you so let’s get this in.” I’m done arguing about pencils and seating, but I push them about work ethic and participation in their own learning. I remind them often how much potential they have and how they’re giving themselves more opportunities by getting their education in the moments we share.

I leave school with 30% of the energy I had coming in. I see former students, some with strollers with their youthful smiles still intact, some behind the counters of the stores they once frequented, some on the subway to the jobs that help them pay for the college courses they’re taking. I read former students’ social media, some with incisive commentary on the state of the world, others with dance memes and hood jokes.

I don’t track these effects on a spreadsheet or put them on a form, but I’m honored with the trust their parents had in me and I’m hoping they’re on their path to happiness, whatever that looks like.

At our best, teachers can create mountaintops over and again with peaks we’ll never foresee. I can give suggestions to my students. With enough pressure and bass in my voice, I can tell any number of students what to do at a time. Yet, I must prepare myself and them for an unjust world imbued with bigotry, economic stratification, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression that inevitably push my students to the outskirts. Their high schools are some of the most segregated in the country. The police meant to protect them are the sixth-largest paramilitary in the world. Their curriculum and the educators who write them refuse to reflect their identities in what they read, write, and ‘rithmetic. Their technology spies on them while they dance and rant in front of their cameras. Some of their parents who worked two to three jobs to make a better life for their families see few prospects for their children to do better than them. They’re in institutions and going to other institutions that don’t love them back.

I can tell them they can be whatever they want to be in life. I can’t control all the factors that have an effect on what they’re allowed to be.

So justice is constant work. I start my conversations with them by saying “Alright, I’m listening.” I remind them of what they should do in my classroom by saying “You can do it all on your own without me.” I refuse to have the last word in our discussions. I tell them that they’re in this to be better than me because I’m not here to know for them. I have guidelines in my classroom, not rules. I share when I’m tired, sick, exhausted, annoyed with adults (not this year, but y’all know). I thank them and ask for forgiveness when I can. My radicalness won’t show up in anyone’s manifesto, but, if I take the simplest actions to do my life’s work differently, how am I not grasping at the roots of teaching?

I know no peace in this work until all of my students have the same opportunities bestowed upon them that are owed to them. I don’t know if any of us are truly radical because we’re working within a system that filters for compliance and narrow forms of intellect at its core. I never issue forms of purity tests for people on the streets struggling to make ends meet, many of whom send their kids into my hands for growth. I want nothing more than to look into children’s faces and tell them that my classroom was an integral part of elevating the hopes and dreams of their ancestors.

All I want to do in and out of the classroom is to put my students on the path that would allow them to be better than us. I want to meet members of my teaching community, Inwood / Washington Heights community, and any number of groups to which I belong as human beings with a superhuman charge. I believe in my students enough to change my whole introverted disposition towards them.

May they, in turn, change theirs towards justice. At least I can hope for that.