Preach it!

Somebody left a stack of change in the homework turn-in bin. Either the kids are tipping me now, or they’re conducting drug deals on a very small scale.

The nice thing about high school students is that they haven't
arrived at this point yet. Though today I had two conversations--
one after intercepting a note between two of my sweetest students
that went, "you don't need to ask her if you look like a hoe
because you are beautiful and confident and smart and nothing
anybody says should make you doubt that and hoe is a
disempowering word to use," and the other was a response to
"I can use that word [the n word] because I'm black" which went, "not
in this class you can't"-- in which I definitely made my preferences
clear to students.

We studied apartheid, and every single one of my classes had a long conversation at the get-go about names and labels, because “African-American” doesn’t work if we’re not talking about Americans. So we moved through “black” and “white,” “Caucasian” and “South African,” and “people of color” as a catchall… every student had a reason they liked or disliked a different term, so the conversations were lively.

What fascinated me was how some students, when talking about black people during apartheid, said “we,” while others said “them.” I guess it’s a good way to tell whether race or nationality is more salient to them. One entire class identified so completely that they all said “we.” As a particularly articulate student rose to read his essay on apartheid, exhorting us to forget race and focus on the inside of people, the class began interjecting a chorus of respectful “preach it!”s after each sentence. He rose into a delicious crescendo of brotherhood and good feeling that left the whole class struck silent after he’d finished. “It shouldn’t be about skin color. We all come from the same place, we all have the same blood under our skin. We shouldn’t care about anything but who a person is.” Preach it!

In a HBTSPD meeting today, we covered the same reflection that I’d done yesterday in a meeting with my TFAMTLD. So I figured I could be a little flip with my answers:

Do you develop daily lessons that are directly linked to the standards for your course?

No. No, I meticulously plan lessons linked to standards for other courses.

Do your lesson plans include questions and tasks that require students to use higher-order thinking skills?

Yes. Students must build a life-size statue of Ghengis Khan out of toothpicks for their end-of-term project.

How often do you use your voice to maintain authority AND convey caring for students?

Mostly I just wag my tail.

Then I crumpled up the reflection and wrote this blog post. It's becoming catharsis at the end of my day, when I'm trapped in meetings that are sucking the marrow from my mind.

I don’t think the authorities appreciate my sense of humor. But I don’t know why; if my kids answered questions like that, I’d give them extra credit for spicing up my grading. I wonder why my kids don’t present that kind of chutzpah—my high school papers were full of it, and they certainly have no issues presenting every other kind. Sigh. Teenage rebellion just isn’t what it used to be.