On a Thursday night, I had a nightmare.
I barely have dreams, mostly illusions. This is probably a function of my estranged relationship with deep sleep. But Thursday night already felt different. On Friday, April 13th, I woke up in a warm sweat sometime around 5:10am, 20 minutes before my alarm clock usually goes off. The week needed to be over and the energies around me didn’t feel right. My suspicions aligned with my intuition a few hours later when I opened my e-mail shortly before lunch to find that I lost my arbitration case against DOE, a rebuke against their formula that got me a “Developing” for reasons other than my actual job performance. My track record couldn’t save me. My titles couldn’t save me. Neither my connections nor my investments in the work couldn’t save me. I carried the resentment and pain after a year-long battle into the American Education Research Association conference in midtown NYC where I got to see, among others, my OG Bob Moses of the Algebra Project after thirteen years of looking up to his work.
The conference’s theme was “The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Public Education,” conceived by the planning team of Drs. Deborah Ball, Carla O’Connor, Suzanne Wilson, and Felice Levine. For me, it also recalled Meek Mill’s “Of Dreams and Nightmares.” As with most education conferences my people attend, the ways we inspire people to action are also the ways we deconstruct and critique the system that’s oppressed so many people like us.
The easy thing to tell you is that AERA felt like success to me. This current classroom teacher got to be the only teacher panelist among a roster of notable scholars on a Saturday morning. 15 minutes later, the same classroom teacher brought a squad of current (and recently former) classroom teachers to talk about resistance and service to the students. The same classroom teacher did a keynote / presidential session to a packed room to discuss teacher evaluations and the future of education. Throughout the conference, the same current classroom teacher recognized scholars he considers comrades in arms to this work and some who’ve made his work more difficult. I get to offer a voice not just for teachers, but any number of subgroups of which I’m part: teachers of color, black teachers, Latinx teachers, activist teachers, math teachers, male teachers, teachers tired of not being represented in their own profession so they go somewhere else to get the respect they deserve.
It was happening to me, to us, an enormous privilege even with all the layers of power laid out in front of me. If being at AERA was an evaluation of my work, then the “Teacher Improvement Plan” assigned to me frustrated me even more so. When I first started teaching, I used to pray for times like this, to write like this, so I had to grind like that to shine like this. Now I live it.
The reality of working with our futures drives my angst home even more. The students tell me I’m their favorite teacher, but there are days where my own consciousness can’t see it. Others tell me there need to be more teachers like me, but the system says otherwise. The Danielson framework and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards suggest I was a great teacher at some point in this work, but forces around me suggest my pedagogy is too “loosey goosey,” so projects and creative works went out the door in the service of keeping me in the classroom.
The research couldn’t save me because there’s other research to ostensibly the research we trust. Even as the system keeps making me a valid case study.
In less than two weeks, my students will take an exam on everything the math department and I covered throughout the 2017-18 school year. I’ll get some sleep knowing their scores don’t determine their worth as human beings, no matter how many times they’re called “1’s and 2’s.” I’ll lose that sleep knowing their eventual high schools will judge their future students, superintendents and administrators will insist on the legitimacy of these tests as a marker for teacher quality, and teachers will gnash their teeth as to how these perceptions will ultimately affect their relationships with students. I’ll fluctuate between grief, disappointment, and hurt.
None of this shows up on a rubric.
In my pre-coffee lethargy, I will have visions where the best of our research, practice, and policy will converge on ideas that illuminate the best in all of our young ones. I will speak to hopes and victories large and small, where schools foster those dreams and mitigate the nightmares. I must work with the people right in front of me, the ones we call students, who’ve all come from dreams and nightmares in their past, present, and time immemorial.
As long as I can wake up, I’ll be waking that dream ’til my feet match my vision. As should we.