“Teaching the skill of having conversations about identity is different than teaching the skill of how to apply a math formula to the real world. You can’t apply formulas to an identity. We, as educators, have to be comfortable with fumbling through conversations and not having all the answers and having to model what it’s like when you say the wrong thing or learn something.”
“Every once in a while, I wander and look in other people’s classes: I’d like to see what people are doing in other disciplines. How do they handle their lessons? How are they arranging their desks and table? I just ask.”
“There’s no way that we can guarantee that a discussion is equitable. What we can work toward is finding as many ways to get student voices into it as possible.”
What if audiobooks could lead students to more creative reading and better listening?
“We think about “oh, the purpose of this class is to be English class,” but there needs to be a clear purpose for each specific gathering. You get to choose what that template looks like. The structures that go with it should fuel that purpose.”
“There’s a creative force within schools, but to move forward, we need a community-centered approach that draws everyone in to make change. In order for that to happen, something has to drastically disrupt the current system. Possibility and liberation has to become the imperative over maintaining systems.”
“Teaching is demanding! These folks have to be attending to children’s mental health even as they are trying to teach them educational materials. To maintain community well-being, we need to look “upstream” at who’s running the ship, and in the classroom, that is the teacher. Everything’s affected if they’re doing well, or doing poorly. So you, as a teacher, are the upstream influence. Your wellbeing matters — of course your knowledge and skills do too, but to maximize them, we have to be sure you feel good as a human being.”
This week’s Beyond the Syllabus pinpoints three bright fires worth approaching more closely. Book Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Even before the Atlanta shootings rocked the United States with another round of debates over gun violence and what is or is not a racially-motivated violence, Hong’s collection of essays was a…
We spoke with David McCullough, founder of the American Exchange Project, about building connections across barriers.
We spoke with Rebecca Marcus, English Teacher and Founder of Paper Paragon, whose “favorite moments aren’t even when someone says something really brilliant; it’s when you can look at a student or read their writing and see them finally making the connection, that first step that you’ve been working on for months.”