Just before I got home, I turn on DMX’s “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” because it matches the BPM I need to make it through the length of JFK International Airport corridors. As I get off the umpteenth moving sidewalk, DMX rapped:

“I’ve been doing this for 19 years.
Cats wanna fight me? Fight these tears.
I put in work, and it’s all for the kids,
But these cats done forgot what work is.
They don’t know who we be,
Looking, but they don’t know who they see …”

Headline reads: “Typical NYC Guy Sheds Half a Tear Before Dealing with Queens Traffic.”

This idea we call “professionalism” has so many of us holding our tongues and acting out of character. For instance, we have misinterpretations of a framework meant ostensibly to wrest control from control as praxis. I have my critiques of the Danielson framework, but I’m not a fan of using dimensions of a rubric to play games with someone’s passions and duties. This and many more elements are the burdens I don’t wish upon future students and educators, but here we are. When higher-ups hold schools under hostage for the express purpose of keeping appearances and test scores up, we lose any number of social and cultural norms that makes schools palatable to our kids.

If we don’t give students opportunity to express themselves, why should we expect them to perform? The same goes for our educators and parents.

So when we find spaces to convene, like the National Council of Teachers of English Convention, we savor the moment to share experiences with colleagues who want to teach students, regardless of subject area. These institutional spaces might feel “too white.” Large education conferences are merely a reflection of the profession as a whole. But, unlike so many other conferences, the NCTE experience leans on rock-star educators and pop culture authors aligned to their work. Jason Reynolds and Elizabeth Acevedo flow naturally with the plethora of teachers who created classrooms collections based on their works. NCTE can invite Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Jose Older, and Marley Dias and still have folks who could equally take those keynote slots and have them in the exhibit fall or a workshop instead. Their benches are deep with talent in a way that other conferences aren’t.

Which made this year interesting because they also invited a science / hip-hop pedagogy guy and a current math classroom teacher to keynote as well.

Hundreds of white educators (and the rest of us, too) stood at attention when Christopher Emdin’s prompted us to not be “consumed by or concerned by” the gaze of another. Riveting. I, however, needed to sit with that sentiment. How much was that outside gaze – through formal and informal observation or workshop and speech – affecting what I know to be true of my own classroom?

At my best, I’m less concerned with assuring that the right words show up on my lesson plan and more concerned with the revelations of inquiry and the interplay of children’s minds with the math they’re learning. At my worst, I worry about survival and becoming another exemplar of study on the lack of racial diversity in the teaching profession. On a daily basis, the implicit and explicit job descriptions we abide by and the contracts we’ve signed mire the revolutionary / oppressor dichotomy in complications.

We are intensely problematic, whether we’ve been granted a stage in front of other learners or not.

A few hours later, it was my turn to wax poetic. I thanked Shekema Silveri and the whole NCTE crew for passing the mic to a math teacher. I included a fresh set of GIFs, a few touch points that would hopefully build bridges between the attendees and their respective departments, and a new framework for how we discuss math in society. [Yes, I’m probably writing a book on it.] More important than the content was my approach, unapologetically hood / Dominican / Haitian / Black with some infusion of the Geto Boys, Beyoncé, and Johnny Cash. The pedagogy felt natural.

After signing a bunch of copies of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative or so while taking selfies with colleagues, I felt affirmed in both the work I was doing with children and the work I am doing to inspire others to do the same. None of this comes without faults and responsibilities, but leading with these flaws allow us the mirrors and windows we so desperately need for all of our students.

And the rest of us learners, too.

A math teacher at an English conference shouldn’t be weird because we all teach children, not subjects or labels (gifted and talented, special ed, English language learners, etc.). Specificity is important and we need some collective principles about our understandings of the work. Our disciplines are but avenues for our approaches and relationships to the work. Of course, I also came into that conference as a best-selling author, a parent of a burgeoning reader, a loving partner of an administrator and English as a New Language expert, a parent who was once labeled an English as a Second Language student, a person who’s conversational in two languages (and any number of dialects within those languages), and one of the few published teacher-writers in the largest school district in the country.

None of these matter if I don’t share that power with folks who also do truly powerful work, especially those in the English teaching space.

A few hours later, I’m already thinking about my own students, the ones so easily discarded. Some are currently playing Fortnite, taking selfies on Snapchat and Instagram, or following whatever LeBron James / Kevin Durant / Steph Curry are doing. They may or may not be getting ready to do their school work tomorrow. They’re deciding whether they’ll make it to school on time or if they’ll be a few minutes late. An empathy of language would mean that, when students walk into my classroom, I’d leave myself open enough to their feelings and woes, I’d create space for students to express their understanding of the material in front of them, and I’d let my full self emanate from the walls. I like to read my students before they read my objective and Do Now.

I shouldn’t have to fight to be that. The ways that our students read each other and how we perform are the collective implicit literacy, and this educational literacy would be universal.

Let us put in work for and with all of my kids.