#eedutalk

[tacroyy]

okay. i'm going back to teaching tomorrow. i think i'm going to try to keep track of how things go so that i can carry less of it around with me. i'll use the tag #eedutalk and put things under a read more.

it has been a Very Good summer, perhaps even a Great one, and thus i have some resolutions for the upcoming school year. the vast majority of these, frankly, i am doing already, but i think it's a good idea to verbalize them.

always prioritize children over adults (parents/guardians, other teachers, administrators).

work to the fucking contract. do not overwork yourself.

if you don't finish something or are behind on grading because you have chosen to work a ~mere~ forty hours a week, do not hate yourself for that. your society has chosen to underfund education and not give you enough planning time. it is not ethical to do work that you are not being paid for, especially considering the amount of free work you have already done. you do not give your students homework. do not give yourself homework either.

use your notebook for 1) dates, meetings, notes, etc and 2) leaving things behind so that you don't take them home with you.

prioritize the educational experiences of students of color & disabled students.

remember that for many kids, structure is freedom from anxiety and uncertainty. it is good to enforce structure in a developmentally appropriate, compassionate, equitable way. it is bad to enforce structure purely for structure's sake. the structure must be flexible enough to allow for the needs of the individual student.

do not allow the attitudes of other adults to sway the expression of your pedagogical ethics.

when you are in pain, express it, feel it, and live in it rather than denying its existence.

take your thirty-minute lunch break every single day and eat lunch during that time. do not work on your lunch break.

if you are sick, stay home.

get reimbursed for shit!!! submit your fucking expenses and meetings on the fifteenth of every month!!!

continue to be an example for your students and peers in these ways: be queer. be disabled. be weird. discuss, teach about, and interrogate white supremacy, racism, and imperialism. answer all questions. apologize to children. let kids go to the bathroom. talk about and explain the mistakes you have made. show kids how to google things properly. never talk down to anyone. if you must enforce school rules that you disagree with, explain why. be patient. be interesting. be calm. don't yell in anger. explain the things adults don't want to talk about. use the real terms for things. be flexible. be active. be gentle. see lashing out for what it is. respect kids. listen and watch for signs. ask follow-up questions when you are suspicious.

remind yourself of the truth every day: children are people.

[tacroyy]

first week of school. also want to add that ill try to do content warnings better for these! haven’t done a good job of that at all. mentions of racial and ableist slurs, discussion of stressed kids, food insecurity, institutional neglect and harm, general discussion of trauma

ok, thursday and friday weren’t bad other than me being beyond exhausted. i truly couldn’t have functioned without my adhd meds. the seventh graders are fucking amazing and we had The Best discussion, totally out of the blue, about prejudicial language, specifically the n-word and the r-word (both are problems at our school 🙃). i basically don’t have classroom management over them rn (or at least am not bothering to Exert It) bc their other teachers are Overreacting and being Too Intense bc it’s the start of the year so since they already know me it’s all steam blowing off in my class but honestly that’s fine. they don’t have to be non-feral until next week bc i just want them to Relax right now. the sixth graders just got lockers and are Going Through It emotionally so there’s a lot of “breathe, try again” and “nobody is doing tardies right now” bc some of them literally haven’t developed their fine motor skills enough yet and our locks and lockers are, no lie!!!!!, forty years old and Cranky. so that’s a lot of unregulated stress to channel off. i think i say this twice a week but i Do Not Understand how ANYONE teaches elementary school. makes No sense to me. beginning of sixth grade is often too young for me, really; so many of them haven’t developed that, like, independent rationality yet, and it’s A Lot when there are So Many of them.

the ideal way to end this first week would have been to have like a half day for prep so we could meet w teachers, contact parents/guardians, do sped referrals, seating chart upheavals, etc. there’s a lot of “ah, okay, here’s what This batch needs” even 3 or 4 days in, and it would just be so lovely and useful and productive and overall good for everyone to have that. for example i overheard a convo that made it clear that a family hadn’t signed their kid up for free lunch this year and so the kid didn’t get lunch so i had to run around and tell the right people (teachers don’t have access to that info) and make sure they got fed and all but it took my whole prep, and im obviously delighted to do that, but then i didn’t have any prep time and did my last three classes on the fly. not that this kind of thing doesn’t happen most days. it’s just that more prep time is imo the number one thing we need as a profession. i cant begin to express how much it would help everyone.

plus there are, as always, the kids that i just want to have a four hour productive meeting about every single day, where we hash out an Actual Plan. with a social worker, a reading specialist, a developmental psychologist, a pediatrician, a therapist, a sped expert, a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a case manager, a para AND an ea and a secretary for notes. instead it’s me and the counselor who has a 250 kid caseload for ten minutes in the hall.

ive had a dream for a while, since grad school actually, of studying the affect of referred trauma on kids’ peers and school faculty and staff, especially peers and faculty and staff who also have trauma. the amount of shit that slides off of me now because you Have to grow the most perfectly balanced shield of “i will Act on this and Not ignore it” and “i must Remain Calm” and “I’ve just heard the Worst Thing Ever and have to teach for another four hours”. what does it do to you long term? what about the ones who get inured? and the ones who don’t? how can we actually help people handle this well? i know there’s So much stuff out there about secondary/vicarious trauma, and trauma informed education, and i want to be able to know if it’s at all useful or if it’s too tainted to use, like i now expect from basically all educational academia. to be clear i have already done a lot of work in this area but not for a while, and i wanted to reframe the fundamentals.

so glad we have a three day weekend now.

[tacroyy]

teacher strike sign ideas (yes this is a lot of text, what do you want, we have a lot to say, also no i wouldn't actually make most of these bc i know how strike signs and picketing works but they really demonstrate how i feel rn):

• you: “But at MY workplace we have to deal with [insert terrible thing here]”

teachers: Yeah, we know. Your kids tell us all about it. That's part of why your kids have so much anxiety and stress. You should probably be on strike, too.

• I taught over 180 eleven and twelve year olds three different subjects in a 55-96 degree ant-infested classroom with fifty minutes to prepare without quitting and all I got was this dang strike

• do you know where your kids are for the first thirty minutes of middle school each day? because PPS doesn't!

• I would RATHER be teaching eleven-year-olds about medieval history than holding this sign and if you don't think that deserves a raise I don't know what to tell you

• it worries me that demanding a 60-90 degree temperature range and mold/ant/mouse/rat infestation/dropping remediation in classrooms is unreasonable to Portland Public Schools and I hope it worries you too

• I just think it would be cool if we could get paid for doing our jobs

• I just think it would be cool if we had time to do our jobs

[tacroyy]

shoutout to me for finding out progress reports are due at midnight tonight and going 🤷🏻 sounds like a problem for tomorrow me, if you were wondering how your resident teacher is doing

[tacroyy]

back to school day 1

a suspicious lack of bullshittery from the district and admin. there was a painful metaphor about rope and we do have a convention center training tomorrow. but otherwise things were a bit too normal. i think we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

i did somehow forget to set the alarm (or it didn't go off? i am not clear) and literally walked in fifteen minutes late with starbucks, so par for the course on me as a person

also my largest class is only 31 kids! (which goes to show how low the expectations are because that's Not Great but wow is it better than 37, which was my high last year)

[tacroyy]

legally i don’t think teachers should have to interact w parents n guardians. like our job is children. we r good at children. that’s why we do this job. so why throw us to the parent wolves. brought to you from back to school night. alive and in fact it was fine but holy shit im so tired

[tacroyy]

work stuff. brief discussion of masking

i have a relatively small humanities class and yet i still can't get to everyone i'd want to in a period. i give a ton of both choice and structure but there is still so much drama about grades. and theyre also very loud, and heres whats really frustrating: two of them loud are for sociocultural reasons. but also they are much louder than i am used to and much louder than a lot of other kids are used to. so. we are working on it. ~cultural compromise~

i also feel very overstimulated. got to school a bit early and cleaned. sound hurts right now. a coworker is sick and had to be reminded to mask and refused to go home and i had to tell her to not follow me. during my prep a kid hadn't finished a thing so i let them stay to finish and they didn't talk or anything but it was still... presence. then i ate lunch with a colleague which was a mistake bc it wasn't 30 minutes off, and then we had a staff meeting. i just need to be put into a vat of darkness and silence for like an hour and that'll cure me. even the keyboard is giving me shudders. but its also helping a lot to get this out.

i overdid two things and theyre both things im having a hard time feeling bad about doing: first is doing more with our self-contained special education class, which i have zero professional responsibility towards but also im like the only gen ed teacher who even attempts to reach out. but its a lot of coordination and frankly also a lot of distance; our rooms are on opposite sides of the building. second is that i came up with a cool interactive idea for a history thing but its a lot of work.

just tired. i want to lay down in a book or just talk to people about, like, how soft plants are. theyre so soft. well, a lot of them. you know the fuzz on some plants. not the thick fuzz. the gentle fuzz. thats good stuff.

[tacroyy]

school stuff. electronic surveillance, anti-queer stuff, ableist language references (r-word)

but really, the best thing that happened today was that i gave the sixth graders my you are being spied on electronically talk, bc they just got their computers. i tell them all about the spyware teachers use and how it works (and show them, which is really fun, and they have SO many questions), and, most importantly—and this is the reason i do this—that their parents and guardians can also use this spyware on their school computers, and unlike teachers can do it at any time, not just at school. i explicitly tell them that i am telling them about what their parents/guardians can do because i don't want them to get hurt if they are searching up stuff like "how do you know if you're trans/gay/queer" etc. and then i say that, regardless of what their parents or guardians might say or think, that there is nothing wrong with being gay, queer, trans—i'd already gone over what all the terms meant, bc we have a part in the syllabus about not being shitty to ppl bc of their identities*—and that we have books in the library and in the classroom (and i show them where the books are and also pass them around) about being queer and queer people.

i fight with myself a lot about this. i've done it every year i've taught, though. i don't, of course, think it's wrong to do any of this. i think it's kind of like when you're really sick and you know you have to stay home but you don't want to but you do it anyway, of course; you were never going to not do it, but you have doubts mainly because of how important it is. i know that i really have to do this, but i could face pretty serious consequences for doing it. i work at an incredibly liberal and open district with a frankly amazing pro-queer teacher/staff/student policy, but if parents get mad about something, regardless of whether or not it's school/district policy, it can get messy. i have been told not to do things that i have a right, per my union contract, to do, but doing it anyway puts one's job at risk. so you have to be careful. it always makes me nervous but every single time i do this, the kids get it. they say they get it. a lot of them have talked about it with me further.

*there's this article i found in grad school and havent read since so idk whether or not to still vouch for it but this paragraph was really important to me, formatively, as a teacher. i have to say that ending it with the phrase "teachable moment," which is the number one worst term on the entire planet, makes me want to die for sure, but hey.

article: Brian M. Payne (2010) Your Art Is Gay and Retarded: Eliminating Discriminating Speech against Homosexual and Intellectually Disabled Students in the Secondary Arts Eduation Classroom, Art Education, 63:5, 52-55

I posted the following disclaimer under the “Class Expectations”

on the front page of my Art I syllabus I gave my students the

first day of class:

I expect each student to be able to work in an environment

that is void of any slurs or derogatory comments that

demean another student. This includes comments pertaining

to their style of dress, race, gender, or sexual orientation.

There is absolutely no tolerance on this issue. (Payne, 2009)

After reading aloud this section of the syllabus I could tell that

my words may not have been absorbed by the group of 14- to

18-year-olds that sat in front of me. I followed by stating, “This

includes words such as ‘gay’ and ‘retarded.’” The students, most

of whom I assumed perked their heads up either because they

were guilty of such rhetoric, or simply not accustomed to

hearing a teacher use these words in the same sentence, were

now paying attention. Instead of simply making a disclaimer and

moving on to the next section of the syllabus, I used this

opportunity to create a teachable moment out of the situation.

[tacroyy]

shoutout to the kid whose tshirt made me have to explain “⬆️the man ⬇️the legend” to a large number of adults today (their shirt said “⬆️two seats⬇️” and NOBODY GOT IT. I had to be like “you know, like, ‘sit on my face’ or ‘sit on my dick?’” and they were like “how do you have this arcane knowledge” and i was like “how can you consider this arcane knowledge” but then Much Was Revealed when i had to tell them what facesitting was 💀)

[tacroyy]

official first day of school

~the state of public education in the us is shiiiiiiiiiiiiit~

boy, im really trying not to use identifying details here, but i am having a hard time not to describing in excruciating play by play the ABSOLUTE bullshit the district handed down this week. to simplify, we have to teach a class that we shouldn’t be teaching (bc we are not licensed in the area) and that we aren’t being paid for, AND—none of that is new news, but THIS is—we are (the district is) lying to the state about it—they edited our official reporting system to delete the class, but we are still being asked to send kids to other locations/teachers when they’re supposed to be in our custody. so we don’t have ACCURATE CHAIN OF CUSTODY. what the FUCK. now don’t worry, the appropriate agencies/authorities Have Been Contacted, grievances have been Extremely filed, etc., but like. what an utterly wild and irresponsible and unsafe and insulting and demeaning thing to try to do and expect to get away with it.

so that was hanging over the first day of school. i ended up with 32 kids in my core class (pending new students, of which there are generally an average of three for year, and also—i am not bragging, i am just saying this bc it constantly happens—i am a great teacher, or at least kids who dont like school really tend to like me, so i often get kids transferred into my class) and it wouldn't be too bad except there are a number of them who need like, every bit of attention i have 95% of the time or shit will go down. so day one there was some shit, which is fine, its not their fault (its the fucking system), it just really sucks ass to have such a difficult educational environment so fast. my two smaller classes (20 and 24) are delights! my three larger classes (28 and 32) are More Difficult. (you would think we could even that out, wouldnt you. dont get me started.) it's entirely the size, it really is. its not kids fault bc, developmentally, their brains are SO activated by the shit their peers are doing and so NOT activated by the shit their teachers/adults are doing. so basically you have the peanuts teacher except its the NEUROLOGICAL, DEVELOPMENTAL TRUTH. which is why we need small class sizes, interest-based and project-based learning and training on this, prep and meeting time, and... i mean, i can't start listing what we need because i would never stop.

good things that happened: a kid came in just to make sure id kept his amongus artwork up (i obviously had), they continued to be amazingly helpful to each other ("heres a pencil!" "theres a seat over there!" "how the fuck do you not know where the lunchroom is! no i was kidding its fine let me show you"), a ten and a half year old defined and explained gdp perfectly to the utter bamboozlement of everyone else at his table group, i was asked who i mained in mario kart (botw link) and then i also added that my wife mains tanooki mario and they were Actually Impressed and had No Arguments about it (i cannot express to you how hard it is to Actually Impress a middle schooler into having No Arguments), a kid who i had to Talk To In The Hallway managed to get the closest guess on a difficult thing and Bounced Back, we are already getting into linguistic colonialism, and i got to see SO many kids from last year that i missed SO much and teach so many of them too!!! also i think i maybe know what im doing in most of my classes tomorrow. miracle.

[tacroyy]

first day w/ kids

im so tired. i was only around them for like 90 minutes bc i dont teach much 6th grade but whew. it’s great bc some of them are SO helpful and kind to each other and it’s just DEEPLY wonderful, and also they’re hilarious, we did “if you could have any job” and selections included: “medical engineer” (“i want to be a doctor AND an engineer”), “i never want to work ever,” and “assassin.” just delightful. however i am feeling the lack of prep time so bad. i wish i had a more concrete plan for tomorrow but. well! ran out of time. so making myself move on and relax.

[tacroyy]

back to school day 2

kids start tuesday and have i been in my classroom yet? yes. for ten seconds. i dont think i have chairs right now actually. idk. thats what tomorrow is for. also there is no paper OR working copiers in the building and there won't be for like ten days. less upsetting than puzzling. like what is the plan here. do you want us to teach or no. signs point to no (esp considering the building is also still such an active construction zone that apparently in the live photo of it i sent to my dad he could hear me say "oh my god" in the background)

extremely large amounts of curricular + district bullshit today, but... well, i was about to say "my largest class is still only thirty one students" but i just checked the system and yep. one juuuust got added. ... and i texted a friend about it and she said that that kid got given to me specifically and another one is coming as well and I GET IT, i am definitely the best for them both, i love them and they are national heroes who nobody else understands, but in that case pls... trade... i do not have enough desks.............. yep refreshed and am at thirty three. ok. thats a talk with admin for tomorrow me, for now i am taking an edible and forgetting my work password, peace

[tacroyy]

fun things from today

>many kids angry about democratic republic of Congo and republic of Congo. “WHY are the names like that.” in the atlas the drc is listed as congo and roc is listed as congo republic. gnashing of teeth. patiently showed them Congo basin, river, etc, discussed who has claims on names, eventually ended with kinshasa and brazzaville on google maps—closest capital cities in the world (rome and Vatican City don’t count imo 🙄) and there was much rejoicing and zooming in and waking around the cities virtually. problem not exactly solved but felt around enough to show it wasn’t a problem

>talked to a kid briefly in the hallway and got the compliment of my LIFE when I walked away and their friend was like “wait was that a teacher??”

>subbed for a math class and the kids were all mad about their computer program being inconsistent w rounding and i honestly agreed and emailed the teacher being like wtf shouldn’t it be consistent rather than sometimes u round up sometimes u round down!! and then she responded well it depends on the problem like this one is about hay so they’d round up bc you need a whole bale and not part of one, and this simulation IS testing them on common sense shit like that. which totally makes sense actually. so glad there was logic in the end. they will be initially mad but eventually reflective tomorrow