Identity: Why I Do Sontag
identity (n.) (from Google)
1. the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
2. a close similarity or affinity.
3. (mathematics) a transformation that leaves an object or a set unchanged.
-----------------------------
On my first day at my current school, I was labeled a Progressive educator ("Progressive" with a capital "p", were the exact words) by my head of school.
I've never quite known what this means. I'm sure he meant well. Immediately, I felt somewhat vindicated: the person who had hired me that summer really read my resume and my cover letter, and really knew what I was about. They took seriously my stances on all the latest buzzwords, like authentic assessment and multiple pathways and competency-based education and restorative justice. They knew that I was serious about student-centered approaches to education, and a vision of a classroom as a community; they knew that I took my career (and identity) as an Essential School teacher seriously.
But, at the same time, I felt outed, exposed. I felt like someone had let out a spread of obscenities, all used to describe me, and sent them adrift across a room full of educators with a traditional bent on how education was meant to be. I got a few looks when I stood up and introduced myself with a shy wave and a quick tip of my head. I quickly sat back down.
I was once told not to wear a tie in the summer because it too closely resembled a noose. A few months later, I stopped wearing neckties in favor of bowties.
Two years later, I feel like I'm living in the high schools of the 1980s, the ones Ted Sizer spent years studying and writing about in books like Horace's Compromise. Classes are large. Desks are in rows and columns. Everywhere are the signs of punitive grading measures and old ideas about classroom order: half-credit for assignments a day late, if they're accepted at all; points off for talking out of turn; references to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman as a model for so-called "tough-but-fairness." There is a militarism to the environment, a lack of warmth in the delivery.
Within these walls is a tension, though. My school is full of people who want to do things differently. On occasion I get visits from colleagues who ask me what my opinion is on things ranging from problem solving collaboratively to alternative assessment, from ideas about using true inquiry in classes (as opposed to guided inquiry, which everyone seems to think is real inquiry) to the insight required to keep a student-centered class (which is sometimes likened to complete chaos) together and on-task.
I do not how to resolve this tension. I'm not even sure it's my responsibility to relieve it. I just know that I find myself adrift in a sea of educational thought that lost relevance thirty years ago and continues to drift away.
...and a rock feels no pain...
...and an island never cries...
------------------------------------------
During one of the problem solving sessions in Chelsea, one of the students says the word "grump" in a conversation about why he willingly assumes this identity.
Another student says, pointedly, "did you just say Trump?"
"Hell no."
The conversation ceases. They don't talk for another thirty minutes.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be them at this time in our country's history. Some of the students I've taught in Massachusetts are desperately afraid of being deported from the one country where they thought they had a chance. Young Latinx students, some of whom speak little English and poor Spanish on account of a lack of schooling (these students are classified as SLIFEs, or Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education), who have come to this country (or whose families have come to this country) and worked as hard as they can for what education they can get in a state almost mandating that the curriculum be delivered in English if they demonstrate any ounce of English proficiency, and if they don't make it, if they can't do it, they're even more afraid to be forced away from their families and from the life they've built here than they already are. An education is their only shot.
And if they are here legally, how do they feel about being in a country where people of their common ancestry and culture are demonized as they are? Demonized as job stealers, yet seen as too lazy to work the jobs that our society rewards and crawl out of poverty the American way, drags on a welfare system that is already full of people dragging that system (other poor people). Unwilling to be subverted and exploited by richer white people, but seeing no other way to move forward and be, well, American, to the extent that they can be (because they'll always be somewhat less than American, until they eschew their heritage and stop being a hyphenized-American). Hearing constantly that America is a land of opportunity, yet finding it in only one place, a place that must reek as much of whiteness as it does of the requirement of obedience that is preached every day to all kids everywhere.
Am I right? Is my guess accurate? I can only gather from what my students tell me about their lives during these short times I get with them. Strewn in between the math and the teaching and the work and the tests and being a relentless taskmaster are just a few precious conversations I get to have with these kids about their real lives, their lives outside of those walls, walls that we put up to legitimize what we think a formal education should be.
A real education is listening, reflecting, understanding, and making sense of the world with a view of others in mind. No building required. No input required, save for a check of your own understanding. Only quiet, open ears, humility, empathy, and kindness. The rest will follow.
We ourselves have an education to gain from kids like these, kids fighting their way through an education on our terms. I don't get the chance to do it often, so when kids choose to tell me about their lives and what they are like, I listen, and I listen hard. I must. It is the most important job I do.
--------------------------------------
Around this time of year, some people ask me what moves me to give up my break around the third week of April to go to teach in places like Lawrence or Chelsea. People look at my jackets when I wear them out and ask, "like Lawrence, Mass?" When I confirm their suspicion, they offer their sympathies or they talk about how they have friends who are teachers in Massachusetts or how their kids attend school in places like Groton-Dunstable or Brookline or Littleton.
I must admit to laughing when someone asked me this same question, and mentioned that their nieces and nephews go to school in Andover at Phillips Academy.
I have wondered myself what it is that motivates me to go every year, but now I can't see myself not doing it.
I have fought with issues related to my identity all my life to no avail. I haven't stayed in one place for very long, so I never felt like I had a geographical identity (I am definitely, definitely, definitely not living in a place where I feel a part, by the by, but that's another conversation). I definitely don't think I fit into the typical gender binary (I'm a man, but I don't identify with 99.9% of what being a man is, typically, so where in the world do I fall?), and I haven't the slightest clue about my own sexual orientation. Some of my own heritage is unknown, so I'm not sure what to call my own there, either. I haven't seen my mother since I was 13 years old. I know I suffer from depression (and have for a long, long time) and I've contemplated suicide, but I haven't the slightest clue how to talk to others about these difficult aspects of my life. Among all the ways people can identify themselves, I'm at a loss. I simply don't know. I may never know.
But I do identify with teaching, with the work I do every day when classes gather to learn and work together. I identify with the pursuit of learning something new, of setting a goal to become more aware of the world, through whatever lens is necessary. I identify with that, surely. It's not that I think I'm good at what I do; it's simply that that is what I do. Some days, I crush it. Some days, I am terrible at it. There is a whole lot of in between. I've learned so much from my students, mountains above what I've supposedly taught them.
Before I am anything else, I am an educator. Maybe even a Progressive one. This is what I do, and I can never see myself doing anything else. This is why, I think, every time I've looked to stray away from the craft, away from the classroom, I feel a little out of place or unnatural, like a brown belt on black slacks. This is what I do.
When I do these acceleration academies, there is an urgency, an energy to the work. It is at once the same as what I do every day in my current school, but it is also so drastically different. So much is on the line, and the kids I teach need the help most of all. It is rewarding and exhausting. It's a feeling of all-hands-on-deck, eyes-on-the-prize, all-or-nothing. There's enthusiasm, followed by a willingness to make it. From everyone. It's different.
I do this because I can't not do it. It calls to me, and I have had the privilege to do it three times, and I'm grateful. I do it because it is a chance to do the best teaching I've ever done in my life.
I do it because it's a chance to do some real hard listening to students and people whose voices deserve to be heard.
I do it because I must do it.
1. the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.
2. a close similarity or affinity.
3. (mathematics) a transformation that leaves an object or a set unchanged.
-----------------------------
On my first day at my current school, I was labeled a Progressive educator ("Progressive" with a capital "p", were the exact words) by my head of school.
I've never quite known what this means. I'm sure he meant well. Immediately, I felt somewhat vindicated: the person who had hired me that summer really read my resume and my cover letter, and really knew what I was about. They took seriously my stances on all the latest buzzwords, like authentic assessment and multiple pathways and competency-based education and restorative justice. They knew that I was serious about student-centered approaches to education, and a vision of a classroom as a community; they knew that I took my career (and identity) as an Essential School teacher seriously.
But, at the same time, I felt outed, exposed. I felt like someone had let out a spread of obscenities, all used to describe me, and sent them adrift across a room full of educators with a traditional bent on how education was meant to be. I got a few looks when I stood up and introduced myself with a shy wave and a quick tip of my head. I quickly sat back down.
I was once told not to wear a tie in the summer because it too closely resembled a noose. A few months later, I stopped wearing neckties in favor of bowties.
Two years later, I feel like I'm living in the high schools of the 1980s, the ones Ted Sizer spent years studying and writing about in books like Horace's Compromise. Classes are large. Desks are in rows and columns. Everywhere are the signs of punitive grading measures and old ideas about classroom order: half-credit for assignments a day late, if they're accepted at all; points off for talking out of turn; references to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman as a model for so-called "tough-but-fairness." There is a militarism to the environment, a lack of warmth in the delivery.
Within these walls is a tension, though. My school is full of people who want to do things differently. On occasion I get visits from colleagues who ask me what my opinion is on things ranging from problem solving collaboratively to alternative assessment, from ideas about using true inquiry in classes (as opposed to guided inquiry, which everyone seems to think is real inquiry) to the insight required to keep a student-centered class (which is sometimes likened to complete chaos) together and on-task.
I do not how to resolve this tension. I'm not even sure it's my responsibility to relieve it. I just know that I find myself adrift in a sea of educational thought that lost relevance thirty years ago and continues to drift away.
...and a rock feels no pain...
...and an island never cries...
------------------------------------------
During one of the problem solving sessions in Chelsea, one of the students says the word "grump" in a conversation about why he willingly assumes this identity.
Another student says, pointedly, "did you just say Trump?"
"Hell no."
The conversation ceases. They don't talk for another thirty minutes.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be them at this time in our country's history. Some of the students I've taught in Massachusetts are desperately afraid of being deported from the one country where they thought they had a chance. Young Latinx students, some of whom speak little English and poor Spanish on account of a lack of schooling (these students are classified as SLIFEs, or Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education), who have come to this country (or whose families have come to this country) and worked as hard as they can for what education they can get in a state almost mandating that the curriculum be delivered in English if they demonstrate any ounce of English proficiency, and if they don't make it, if they can't do it, they're even more afraid to be forced away from their families and from the life they've built here than they already are. An education is their only shot.
And if they are here legally, how do they feel about being in a country where people of their common ancestry and culture are demonized as they are? Demonized as job stealers, yet seen as too lazy to work the jobs that our society rewards and crawl out of poverty the American way, drags on a welfare system that is already full of people dragging that system (other poor people). Unwilling to be subverted and exploited by richer white people, but seeing no other way to move forward and be, well, American, to the extent that they can be (because they'll always be somewhat less than American, until they eschew their heritage and stop being a hyphenized-American). Hearing constantly that America is a land of opportunity, yet finding it in only one place, a place that must reek as much of whiteness as it does of the requirement of obedience that is preached every day to all kids everywhere.
Am I right? Is my guess accurate? I can only gather from what my students tell me about their lives during these short times I get with them. Strewn in between the math and the teaching and the work and the tests and being a relentless taskmaster are just a few precious conversations I get to have with these kids about their real lives, their lives outside of those walls, walls that we put up to legitimize what we think a formal education should be.
A real education is listening, reflecting, understanding, and making sense of the world with a view of others in mind. No building required. No input required, save for a check of your own understanding. Only quiet, open ears, humility, empathy, and kindness. The rest will follow.
We ourselves have an education to gain from kids like these, kids fighting their way through an education on our terms. I don't get the chance to do it often, so when kids choose to tell me about their lives and what they are like, I listen, and I listen hard. I must. It is the most important job I do.
--------------------------------------
Around this time of year, some people ask me what moves me to give up my break around the third week of April to go to teach in places like Lawrence or Chelsea. People look at my jackets when I wear them out and ask, "like Lawrence, Mass?" When I confirm their suspicion, they offer their sympathies or they talk about how they have friends who are teachers in Massachusetts or how their kids attend school in places like Groton-Dunstable or Brookline or Littleton.
I must admit to laughing when someone asked me this same question, and mentioned that their nieces and nephews go to school in Andover at Phillips Academy.
I have wondered myself what it is that motivates me to go every year, but now I can't see myself not doing it.
I have fought with issues related to my identity all my life to no avail. I haven't stayed in one place for very long, so I never felt like I had a geographical identity (I am definitely, definitely, definitely not living in a place where I feel a part, by the by, but that's another conversation). I definitely don't think I fit into the typical gender binary (I'm a man, but I don't identify with 99.9% of what being a man is, typically, so where in the world do I fall?), and I haven't the slightest clue about my own sexual orientation. Some of my own heritage is unknown, so I'm not sure what to call my own there, either. I haven't seen my mother since I was 13 years old. I know I suffer from depression (and have for a long, long time) and I've contemplated suicide, but I haven't the slightest clue how to talk to others about these difficult aspects of my life. Among all the ways people can identify themselves, I'm at a loss. I simply don't know. I may never know.
But I do identify with teaching, with the work I do every day when classes gather to learn and work together. I identify with the pursuit of learning something new, of setting a goal to become more aware of the world, through whatever lens is necessary. I identify with that, surely. It's not that I think I'm good at what I do; it's simply that that is what I do. Some days, I crush it. Some days, I am terrible at it. There is a whole lot of in between. I've learned so much from my students, mountains above what I've supposedly taught them.
Before I am anything else, I am an educator. Maybe even a Progressive one. This is what I do, and I can never see myself doing anything else. This is why, I think, every time I've looked to stray away from the craft, away from the classroom, I feel a little out of place or unnatural, like a brown belt on black slacks. This is what I do.
When I do these acceleration academies, there is an urgency, an energy to the work. It is at once the same as what I do every day in my current school, but it is also so drastically different. So much is on the line, and the kids I teach need the help most of all. It is rewarding and exhausting. It's a feeling of all-hands-on-deck, eyes-on-the-prize, all-or-nothing. There's enthusiasm, followed by a willingness to make it. From everyone. It's different.
I do this because I can't not do it. It calls to me, and I have had the privilege to do it three times, and I'm grateful. I do it because it is a chance to do the best teaching I've ever done in my life.
I do it because it's a chance to do some real hard listening to students and people whose voices deserve to be heard.
I do it because I must do it.
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