There were about six minutes of silence in my house while I stared at my computer screen. This time, my advisors were on the other side of the Zoom call, discussing whether my presentation was sufficient for me to start my doctoral research.

Prior to August 24th, I spent hours poring over every sentence of my 130-page proposal, getting my social theories in order, deepening my literature review, and making sure my methods aligned with my purpose for even trying to get my doctorate in sociology of education in the first place. The explicit goal is to examine the characteristics of teacher professionalism as it relates to race and social context in the nation’s largest public school system. The implicit goal – and my raison d’être – is to create a new portal from which I could change worlds. But, for six minutes, I had to believe that all the work I put up to that point would carry me past this goalpost because it was out of my hands.

My first advisor pulled me back from the Zoom breakout room with a grin and said, “Congratulations, Future Dr. Vilson, you’re a doctoral candidate!” I felt seen.

The born-and-raised New Yorker in me wouldn’t let my advisors see much of my emotion. When I got off the call, however, I let out a few screams and a few leaps, too. Then, I sat there for a few minutes, wondering what this all meant for the work I wanted to do and the person I wanted to be. Before then, I had spent hours in classrooms across the city, visiting teachers who were friends from different parts of my life and one who was a former student. My family and I went to The White House and DC’s Blackseum in March, but I brought them with me in spirit to places where I couldn’t tell whether they actually liked teachers or not.

Ancestors saw me, and I saw them, too.

I traveled across the country again hoping to have critical conversations with people I considered colleagues about math and the world around us. Hopefully, I inspired a few thousand young people to think about teaching in the future with racial justice in mind. Maybe, I inspired some student-teachers to think about teaching for the long term. I co-planned another successful EduColor Summit with a community of mutual cares, and even won an award for building community. I made amends with my high school alma mater (more soon), and recalled so many memories as I strolled through my undergraduate university. My own summer education and public policy class had four guests, including a previous US Secretary of Education, a former National Teacher of the Year, and two other educators who developed lenses for my students, too.

By the time Beyoncé released Renaissance, I felt like I was having one of my own. I saw myself and my work clearly. But to what end?

The answer came shortly after I defended my proposal. After all those school visits and large educator gatherings, there’s one thing that kept bothering me about everything I was seeing. On paper, the job of teaching is exactly the same as it was before the pandemic. Teachers would cycle through instruction, pedagogy, and assessment with a curriculum in hand perhaps. Some would argue that teachers didn’t have to do anything outside of their contract. We could sprinkle in a few other tasks: homeroom/advisory duties, extracurricular activities, and a few more responsibilities for teacher leaders, and teachers with special education/multilingual licenses.

But, akin to filling up a water balloon in a cardboard box, the social parts of doing this job applied much more pressure to the dimensions of teaching. Policymakers are trying to get their spheres of influence back to a normal that was still so demanding on the soul. People use the term “student behavior” as a negative, but students were merely mirrors of the conditions they’ve been pushed to learn in, and none of us fully escaped the trauma, either. A significant part of our world has given up on social norms of empathy, love, and authentic peace in favor of profit, xenophobia, and unfathomable inhumanity. Even in NYC, the capital of “we welcome everyone,” where crime numbers had reportedly come down across the board, its leaders sought to place blame on asylum seekers, the people experiencing homelessness, and the folks most in need of societal help.

On “the other.” As institutions that are fully open to all of society’s aspirations and ills, our schools deserve not just the financial resources to meet the needs, but also the moral and humane resources of hope and belief to meet the moment. We need the world to see us.

As we started another school year and my son entered middle school for the first time, the needs felt that much more urgent. In October and November, in the midst of all *this* (-waves hands frantically-), I helped lead a procession of National Board certified teachers at the federal level to advocate for the teaching profession on the national level. This felt a win we pulled out of a growing sense of loss. But the hope that has carried me for those six minutes of silence also carried me through these larger fights on the local and federal level.

It’s the same hope that carries me now.

Hope isn’t just useful for when things are going well. If anything, hope is even more useful when we’re all out of it. The educator knows that it might be the only thing that keeps us going when the conditions around us get darker. We allow ourselves a moment to think of what should happen if we fail, if our common cause cracks at our foundations. What should happen if everything we had dreamed up together suddenly get stolen from under us? Wisdom tells us to act like we’ve been there before. Hope is both the idea that we would dream together, but that the work we do will create enough aligned ripples with others to help us think anew.

I mean that about the teaching profession. I mean that about the world after this one. The one my son will grow into, the one my nephew who was born in March will inherit, too, the one that all the children in my sphere of influence deserve. Even the ones I don’t know yet, but are interconnected with us.

For six minutes, I questioned whether I was too optimistic, too sure, or too informed about everything I read. Was it relevant to even discuss professionalism at a time when people are leaving? How does humanity inform a cold concept that’s a function of capitalism? Why do I care about a title people have been using about me even before I started this program?

Because we got work to do. I don’t need this title to prove anyone wrong. I need this for the people who want to see us win. With this, I’ll get to see us, and teach others how to see us better, too.

Thank you, 2023. 2024, I’ll see you soon.

Jose

p.s. – Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the last few weeks. I know I’ve been on a writing tear. If you’d like to support the work, please consider subscribing for as little as $5 a month. It helps.