Think Feelingly

               A standard 11^th grade writing task is to write a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King’s writing craft is so slyly attuned to his balking white audience, even as his cramped 7,000 words were drafted on bits of newspaper and writing pads in the confines of his cell, that his letter is repeatedly anthologized and studied as a masterwork of persuasion. But it is certainly more, too, because its pleading message to complacent white citizens, in its grief, anger, and biting urgency, now carries the weight of half a century with too little changed: police still brutalizing Black bodies, social and economic realities tenaciously holding, and, when any who object to such realities do anything, almost anything at all, besides calmy and solitarily litigate or write an ignorable op-ed, still the angry protestations and accusations of division.

              A rhetorical analysis—showing what a writer, speaker, or artist does to achieve a textual purpose—can be a formulaic exercise, and that’s how we generally teach it: a version of a five-paragraph essay with its three-pronged thesis suffocating every chance at intuitive and intellectual connection, often turning to a recipe of the Aristotelean appeals of pathos, logos, and ethos to do the work.
              The task is about understanding how we reach each other, and all too often—given a sharpening of tribalized community and cyber-noise—our desperate need to do so. This is where I go. I have become deliberate in my teaching of sincerity.
              But our students have been so well trained.
              Here is a typical response focusing on King’s most heart-rending paragraphs—a litany of horrors that suddenly erupt after seven paragraphs of deferential reasoning:

• King also appealed to emotion by using personal examples and creating empathy. While explaining the problem with asking black people to wait a little bit longer before taking action against segregation, King says, “When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eye” (King 2). Caring deeply about children is a universal experience, as is the belief that children are innocent and pure and shouldn’t have to suffer. By talking about the impacts of segregation on his children, the audience is able to relate and imagine being in the same scenario with their own children, and they become more empathetic than if he had only talked about himself. By using relatable examples and emotion-provoking language, King caused them to empathize more with him and the anti-segregation movement and better understand the urgency and importance.

              Clinical, earning an A, and a so-what.
              But I had a good week this week, because in addition to essays that include the one above, another of my students took me at my word. Here is a portion of her essay in response to the same passage:

• He is not so elegant with this letter through the whole thing. He is vulgar. He creates this tension between him, his situation, the mess of which racism was, and the arrogance of the clergy. His impatience is loud. He makes this evident without even having to use descriptive words. When he is addressing the clergy telling him his manner was “untimely,” this heated paragraph had the strongest run-on sentences. It feels as though one cannot stop halfway through, they must finish and be forced to read his words. It is almost tiring. Word after word, bullet after bullet, emotion just bursting in these sentences. One that is the most passionate is when he was talking about how they have never felt the way his people do. “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will…when you have seen hate filled policemen curse kick brutalize…when you see the vast majority of your 20 million brothers…in an airtight cage of poverty” (pg. 2), and the sentence goes on. The way in which he writes this is so passionate. He creates this swirl of tension. With these long trains of words, he is firing at the clergy. The way he does not stop speaking and is almost telling them to wait until he does, it hurts.

The author is not a top writer and she was shocked when I liked her essay at all.
              Wow, I didn’t put much time into writing that paragraph; it was just stream-of-consciousness, she said. I told her that this allowed her to unleash: She intuitively tried to capture the feeling she had, of King’s utter rage and sorrow as he’s trying to move white men to feel what they’ve never had to feel, and she captured it like a poet, turning to metaphors and sonic devices because she needed to tap the heart as well as the mind to get at it.
              How do I convince others what their emotionality is to their thinking and engagement in all things?
              When we were reading Dr. King’s letter, I took the time to go to the era and the place, to discuss the Children’s Crusade there, and of Bull Connor’s response, and to show them pictures I took while I visited Birmingham; I sang “Birmingham Sunday” about the four girls killed in a bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church on Easter Sunday, which I heard first through Joan Baez, and showed them my interview of a man in the park by the church, whose anger was still palpable. Absolute silence followed my singing. I said, I’m taking you through all of this because reading King’s letter is not just an intellectual exercise. And a plea to see and respond to another’s human dignity is not a game. I’m going through the history, I’m laying my vulnerability before you, because I want you reading and feeling his words with your hearts, all through your skin; if you’ve got analytical writing under control, I want you also to try reflecting King’s pain in your own description and discussion. 

               You will do fine just doing the tasks of a rhetorical analysis; but you will see how much more is available to you, in dialogue, in connection, in meaning, in activism, if, as a writer, as an audience, as a citizen and neighbor, you invest feeling with curiosity and fact and can think feelingly. 

Hardened Schools, Hardened Hopes

               A few days ago, vice presidential candidate JD Vance upset many parents by conceding school shootings to be a “fact of life,” and suggesting there’s nothing to do about guns, and that we must instead bolster the security in what are otherwise the tempting, soft targets of our schools.

              Last Spring, after another shooting outside Garfield High, Seattle Schools began to discuss the return of uniformed resource officers, who’d been unwelcome since the de-policing energy following George Floyd’s death in 2020.

              As officials were debating, students in my Roosevelt English class wanted to talk about how they felt about police in the schools—addressing race, profiling, school-to-prison pipelines, but focusing especially on how much such a person could help in the face of an armed threat. Finally, students turned to me for my thoughts.

              And to my dear students, I said: I am sorry. I don’t have a solution. I have grief.

              We now have cameras at every corner in every hallway. All doors are locked and we video-buzz the main office to let us in. Classrooms have interior locks and black-out shades and we practice huddling together quietly on the floor away from windows and doors. Fire doors close off hallways soon after most students go home. Field trips require huge teams to approve all the security measures we must prove are in place. We’re looking to build a perimeter fence.

              Schools are supposed to be places where we grow and inspire our children, teach them to be citizens and neighbors. Schools have been the gathering hubs for surrounding community that’s usually named after the very schools that have always been their beating heart.

              I want school to be a place that speaks to our curiosities rather than our fears.

              Why must our best solution to school shootings be locking up our children?

Ends and Beginnings

               Much of teaching last year was dispiriting, as it had been the two previous years following the return from Covid. A year ago, I met with a financial advisor, who showed me that my half-pension, half-401K plan is pretty much garbage even if I put a bunch more years into teaching—and only a little more broken were I to leave the profession far sooner than that—in three years, say, after I’d served over 30 years. Tin handcuffs! I found this incredibly liberating. And so, all year, unlike most of my coworkers, and especially the department heads to whom I’d passed the sputtering torch, when confronted by nonsense at work, nothing keeping me, I was able to live up to my professional goal for the year and Let Shit Go.
              Despite this attitude and relentless encounters with the absurd, the end of the school year was triumphant: I felt connected to students and our work together in ways I hadn’t since before the pandemic.
              I attribute this both to Letting Go and choosing a moment to ratchet all the way back up.
              Leading up to the two-week visit from the South Africans in late March was full of stress and panic and agonizing interactions with a dozen people from the district and our principal and nurse whose goal, it seemed, was to discourage us from ever, including on a weekend day trip, meeting our students outside the walls of my classroom. Here was Shit I could not Let Go because 16 visitors and many here were deeply and joyously part of this, and so, I experienced the kind of torment I can’t even describe because it’s so boring and bureaucratic. One morning, I was exasperated to the point of career danger, and I announced to my program team that I could no longer serve as its teacher leader in the next year.
              But for now, towards those two weeks and through them, I stayed dialed all the way up.
              When the South Africans came, we were there to meet them at the airport; they shadowed students in classes and paneled discussions in others; homestays and neighborhood social pods were active and successful; we had a weekend retreat in a forest; we volunteered at a garden run by the Black Farmers Collective; we toured the Wing Luke Museum and the Chinatown International District; we jointly led games and discussion in an elementary school; we attended the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Garden on an anniversary of forced internment, and we heard from a Suquamish storyteller on the reservation. Students and visitors spent as much time with each other as their sleeping schedules would allow, and I was learning and loving my own guest, Mimi (an experience I detail here). It was a rich two weeks that blotted out everything else; and when we came to the tearful, weeping end, I was on a high, knowing I had put my all into what would probably be the last, big thing I led as a teacher. My last big thing.
              Having done that, I really could let go. Mimi raised the stakes of my teaching, and I came out of the experience relaxed and sincere. The program students and I had arrived at a mutual trust and affection and the thoughtfulness of a community that had experienced risk, growth, and grief together.
              Meanwhile, I finally arrived at some mutuality in my other classes, too, in part because I stopped fighting for attention and attendance and just leaned towards those ready to engage together.
              About a decade ago, my father-in-law said he believed schools should just teach to those wanting to be taught, which is what I found myself doing at the end of the year. At the time, I had said to him, Yes, while that would save schools so much time and money, many kids come to schools with attention and skills fragmented by life circumstances entirely outside their control that nevertheless put those students at high risk of difficulty at school. Those students need the interventions and care of educators even more than those prepared and ready to focus. I still believe this.
              But by the end of the year, and with so little help from my school forthcoming, I put myself first: I taught to those ready to engage, without policing or case managing. And I enjoyed it. Students in it with me enjoyed it. And those other students? Didn’t notice I’d let their shit go.
              On the day of the final exam for the program class, I told them how much their there-ness meant to me. And at the end of the period, I received hug after hug from students, and some tears.
              We had one more moment together—what we call the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, in which we introduce the incoming group and celebrate the outgoing. As a master of ceremonies at our community evenings, I keep the timetable tight and limit my own talk to introductions; but this was my last moment as the head of the program, and I decided to spend some attention on myself.
              I was secretly anticipating my retirement from the school after 29 years of service in the school that graduated me and all three of my daughters, and was fearing the hollow, life-defeating anticlimax of the school’s failure to recognize who and what I’ve been in those three decades—something I’d seen too often from hallowed old vets who’d been given a little speech and faded away or worse, ended their careers in angry sick leave and received no speech at all.
              At the Ends and Beginnings ceremony, I honored myself. I spoke to what was meaningful to me about the program, how it fostered the kind of community big and loving enough that students within it were willing to risk vulnerability and ignorance, and therefore depth of commitment, compassion, and learning. And I said that as much as the program means to students, it means even more to its teachers, who put their all into creating a meaningful experience just so we have one place where we know it’s  possible: What we do with you all represents what learning can be, what school can be. As an idea, and as a reality, it has saved some of us teachers. It’s the torch we light for ourselves. I told the community what I put in, what I took out. You can watch my speech here.
              And when I was done, I had the reception I knew would sustain me even were I to experience a couple more years of teaching frustrated by distracted students and obstructive administration and a hollow institutional goodbye at the end of them. Students, parents, alumni, and community members stood in line to hug me and give their recognitions.
              My sincerity and heart have been the best of my teaching. I hope to give them unobstructed entry this next year and what, after that, may be my final year teaching.

End of 2023-24 school year letters to students, administration

June 24, 2024

Dear BLT, RHS Admin, PTSA, absolutely anyone who might be able to do something about out-of-control smartphones in our building,

               I was cheered last week to learn that Hamilton and now Eaglestaff middle schools have decided to purchase Yondr pouches to secure student smartphones for the school day. I have been longing for exactly that at Roosevelt, or at least for an admin-supported policy that will not leave individual teachers to battle alone against students who can hardly help themselves. I am writing to plead for help with the phones.
              I started the 2023-2024 school year with a strict phone policy that demanded learners store their devices in designated pockets at the front of the room. I purchased multiple chargers to power 16 phones there. For a month and a half, the difference in the room was a revelation: to have students’ heads up and listening and interacting with each other, like an actual classroom—and not what it had been the year before (and what it came to be again), when I would have to fight to get heads up, fight for collective focus, fight for students to hear each other and tune in to class discussion, or to try instead to teach to rows of stooped bodies signaling boredom and disdain.
              Five minutes at the beginning of every period were spent chasing phones into the pockets at the front of the room. I thought if I invested the time and energy at the beginning of the year, students would fall in line, and most did, but multiple students, in every period, in every grade, continued to need chasing and arguing. The urge to get on their phones was simply too overpowering. Because our attention, time, and strength as teachers is strained so many ways, despite how much was gained by my daily efforts to keep phones away, I finally got tired and gave in.
              I know there are teachers who’ve figured out how to keep devices away. I also know many more teachers—nationally, too, a cacophony of frustration—are as desperate as I for a more systemic response.
              The case against phones in schools is being made around the country, and I’m sure you know it: social media are algorithmically induced to get eyes on screens, to provoke a slurry of anxiety and fear and desire that sell products, to amplify bias and abbreviate beliefs; and smartphones expose students to bullying and comparison and social pressure, at great time and experience cost. Meanwhile, notifications are designed to return nearby phones to hands and studies repeatedly demonstrate they succeed, even as they ding ding ding ding ding a student’s focus into pieces.
              From my teacher’s point of view, phones turn students into classroom zombies: Teenagers can’t multitask nearly as well as they think they can.
              Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation argues that two mammoth changes needed in schools are affordable and within reach: one is about more unregulated play; the other is for schools to lock up phones, all day, including during lunch. At the price of a third of a textbook per kid, $30 (and Hamilton’s PTSA said they received a hefty bulk discount lowering the price more), we can get our kids back.
              Get us those magnetic pouches, or advocate for a muscular, administratively supported school-wide no-phones policy. I’d prefer the pouches, to avoid the hourly battles over phones; to keep kids from grabbing their devices and wandering the halls to check them; to prevent all those meet-me-in-the-bathroom gatherings that have been happening this year; to get them to interact with each other in healthier ways in their down time. But I’d settle for an actual school-wide policy supported by administration.
              I’ve been teaching for a month and a half shy of 29 years. Teaching has never felt this stupid. I repeat the image from above: Vying hour after hour with the dispiriting arrays of silent bodies hunched over devices. I implore you—help us. Don’t leave teachers alone with this soul-crushing, career-dimming battle over phones.

David Grosskopf

June 20, 2024
Dear Margins and Centers students,
 
              I’ve been receiving a few emails from students because there was a scored reflection on the day of the final, and the missing points will help them get to an A- or A.
              15 students showed up to my 2^nd period Final. 11 came to the 4^th. In both classes, we finished the documentary about the battle over Arizona’s Ethnic Studies programs, did a little writing, had lively discussion about learning and schooling, and shared in a gratifying note and moment of closure.
              One of the things we discussed after we finished the documentary is a moment the politician John Huppenthal reflected on his visit to Mr. Acosta’s classroom: “My visit there wasn’t a typical day: it was more a discussion that took place. I wasn’t seeing anything that represented a typical day whatsoever.” At another moment, he condemned the Raza classes for reading “the Marxist” Paulo Freire, just as we have done. But because he didn’t actually read the Freire, Huppenthal didn’t understand that “a discussion” is a purposeful and, yes, typical element in the Raza classes: Critical thought and active engagement with the living world that recognizes our human dignity—it happens through dialogue, not through repetition of memorized facts and proficiencies; and the intellectual community that engages in such dialogue together not only challenges, refines, and energizes our ideas, but draws from our strength together, because 1) the best learning happens when we’re not defensive or exhausted but feel safe enough to be challenged and supported enough to get things wrong, and because 2) we build collective power and joy as a community in conversation.
              Another thing we discussed during our final was a national survey that suggests 70% of teens are bored in school most or all of the time. In second period, a couple students signed out and came back when the conversation was over. Another couple students texted and chatted and pointed to their phones, until I thanked them for the illustration and then asked our class if their actions were cause or effect of their boredom. Students in the room said “Effect.” Watching all year, I think that’s a snake eating its tail.
              So, how do these things fit together—skipping the final but seeking the points, Huppenthal not understanding Freire, the bored teens in all of our nations’ schools? All year, too many students have too often checked out of the essential element of our class—who we are and what we build in community and conversation. Marginalized issues and marginalized voices and marginalized people: silencing and mistreatment call for witness and justice. Sometimes you are the center of groups, sometimes the margins, and very often you are both—and either way, it’s community and conversation that leads to empowered and compassionate understanding and action.
              Our final didn’t have points—not many of them, anyway. But it featured the best and most important thing that we do—discussion—and used as its vehicle the documentary Precious Knowledge, a mirror to what, why, and how we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing. But if you could have joined us for the ending and chose not to because you could afford the points, or if you spent the time on a device then clocked in for the points on the little journal reflection, your grade might not have been hurt. But you failed the final exam.
              As the year has gone on, our conversations in class have become better—more thoughtful, more lively, more useful. I love learning from you and cherish the kind of energy, risk, and growth that’s possible in a group, which is what makes a classroom rare and special, and a reason I love being a teacher.
              If I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and you peaced-out without a word, I hope you have a restful summer.

David Grosskopf

When a Way of Life is Dismembered, Re-Member

              Last week I participated in a National Endowment of the Humanities Landmarks workshop on the Grand Coulee Dam (“The Intersection of Modernity and Indigenous Cultures”).

              I was drawn to the workshop after trying for several years to convey to students why coastal and plateau Salish peoples are so affected by the health of regional salmon. Dams in particular are featured in shared texts by Elizabeth Woody and Lawney Reyes (Seven Hands, Seven Hearts and Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice), as Woody describes Dulles Dam drowning the region’s most productive, sacred fishery, Celilo Falls, and Reyes describes effects on his family when the Grand Coulee Dam turned Kettle Falls into Lake Roosevelt. I tried to capture the cataclysmic difference between the bustling fishing sites and the calm, warm waters that replaced them, and year after year I failed to do so.

              Last week, I spent time with thirty other teachers in Spokane, Kettle Falls, and Grand Coulee with academics and speakers from Washington and Arizona universities and the Nez Perce Tribe, the Spokane Tribe, and Bands of the Colville Nation. I was especially affected around the central theme of harnessing nature for power, but also around foods, and the stories that connect us.

              In the last few years, I’ve tried to teach more local and Native American history and culture; people from Yakama Nation talked to my classes the importance of food:

              I planned with Yakama Peacekeepers a weekend retreat that would include a day devoted to foods and stories about them. The plan was this: In the morning, some students would go to the fields to join in harvesting root vegetables and greens, others would help dress a deer that hunters were to have taken for the occasion, and the rest would work together in the kitchen to prepare foods meaningful to their own families and traditions. The intention was to eat together and tell stories about our foods. Then Covid happened and the weekend retreat did not.

              Then last year, we brought a class to the Toppenish longhouse, where prayers of gratitude and blessings of welcome and descriptions of provenance encompassed indigenous foods before we ate them. On the bus drive across the plateau, our guide and teacher Polly pointed to a place seemingly nowhere that led to the same yellowed hills we were seeing everywhere, and she told us, Just past there, in this season (Spring), the ladies go to gather camas roots—private property but also a “usual and accustomed gathering” place to which treaty and the Boldt decision allowed them access.

              There was something here, something important, and we visitors all felt it; but I still didn’t have enough understanding to convey myself what was important about food to local native peoples.

              This last Tuesday, Laurie Arnold of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a professor at Gonzaga, helped me to not only feel the importance of food but also how it is connected to every element of daily living, coexisting within rhythms and seasons of these lands and waters, binding food preparations to community, memory, humility, expansive care.

              Dr. Arnold began by telling us she travels yearly to Kettle Falls, where a salmon ceremony still takes place. When she grew up, this occurred at St. Paul’s, one of the remaining sites from the missionary era, but it now takes place by the water: they sing, they offer prayers, and they bang stones together to recreate what salmon used to hear when they swam over the singing rocks of Kettle Falls on the roaring Columbia River. Salmon are not a resource, another speaker, Allen Pinkham, told us earlier: they are a life source. The fact that people still go to the shores of the becalmed Lake Roosevelt for a salmon ceremony when salmon no longer run is a statement of grief, and a connection to the past, and also a statement of hope and continued care. Whether the salmon can make it there or not, we want to honor the salmon, Arnold said—the first kin to say I am here for you and will sustain you. It is our responsibility to give thanks and protect our cousins the salmon.

              A similar intentionality of movement, harvesting, and preservation occurs along the plateau’s seasonal round, and this affects everything: not only diet, but social and spiritual life as well. During camas-gathering season, the root chief convenes the root ceremony, and then women dig roots and put them in baskets around their bellies, chit-chatting with each other all through. The roots are cleaned, peeled, and readied for preservation. They dig a big pit, ten by ten feet perhaps, and the roots bake there, underground for days, which is a big community event, too: a great time for connection. People work all year, and they socialize all year too.

              This management and cultivation of the land is highly organized and represents deep, ancestral knowledge. Look at these structures built with tule reeds, Dr. Arnold says, showing us slides of shelters and fish traps with shared geometry. The tule reeds are hollow, so when it’s hot and dry, the reeds are open and air gets through and hot air breathes out; when it rains, the damp expands the reeds and keeps out the wet. This is very old technology. These are a people who understood where they lived and how they lived there. The homelands foster people and care for them, Dr. Arnold said, and in turn, Plateau peoples find their identities and spiritual practices from their homelands, which it is their responsibility to protect.

              So what happens when the seasonal round is broken? What happens when someone takes away your food—how do you get it now? A store? Food is not just about food, but about community, about co-existence, about deep practice.

              In the plateau, settlement didn’t really happen until the 1850s, which is called BC time—before missionaries. Once they came, change happened fast, in the span of a generation and a half. Lives were changed entirely. The dam represents an entire transfer of wealth. The Grand Coulee Dam destroyed so much plant life on the plateau. Crossing Lake Roosevelt is far more difficult than crossing the Columbia River as it was before. Just trying to get at the foods there is now trespassing. Colville peoples and the graves of their ancestors were plucked out of their homelands. And the seasonal round was stopped—the loss of access to ancestral foods is a nutritional, cultural, and spiritual disruption. An economic and power boom occurred locally and across the West, but the Plateau peoples bore the cost in ways that can’t be assessed or compensated.

              However, Dr. Arnold also emphasized growing localized success in co-management, and larger co-management—with healthy ecosystems benefiting all—within reach. The Upper Columbia United Tribes and Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission have been in collaboration to get more indigenous voices involved for cultural and ecological consultation to serve people better. And people are moving closer to recovering practices that remain meaningful.

              So when we are talking about the importance of food, it involves connection to community, to past and future, to interrelationships with land and the animal peoples, to stewardship of and gratitude to all of these things. I can go to a store and pick something up for dinner; but so many processes go into the event of every can and vegetable stalk and box of pasta and ding dong, that such connection is wholly abstracted. Yet there are ways I can learn the blessings.

 * * * * *

              The other thread I want to pull from last week is about story. Randy Lewis, Wenatchi band of Colville, went out of his way to tell us he wasn’t a storyteller, and that, at 80 years old and recovering from stroke, his brain is a snow globe. That’s what he said: But everything he said suddenly came together like a laser gathering light.

              He started by telling us that he learned to fish at Celilo Falls when he was five. White people would watch all the dip netting on platforms from the road above the Falls and try to buy the fresh-caught salmon. Lewis’s mother, Mary Marchand, was among those dip-netting, and Tommy Thompson, the salmon chief and headman of Wyam, told the men not to hassle her for it—she’s feeding many kids—and when you see her, you better give her a smile. At five years old, Randy learned from women how to dry the fish in the sun, and he took fish that were to be thrown back and dried them, and sold them as salmon to white onlookers, earning adult wages at $13 a day. This is how Randy Lewis would tell a story, with sparkle and mischief. Then, after giving us this image of lived experience at Celilo Falls, he changed the mood without changing his tone:

              He was told he had to be there at Celilo Falls the day the Dulles Dam would wall up the river; it would be an important event, their Ceremony of Tears (the three days mourning event that occurred 17 years before, in 1940, with the drowning of Kettle Falls). And, he said, when the song over the rocks was silenced, the women keened and the men turned away.

              When I was a child, Lewis told us, there were four dams. Now there are fourteen. Everything’s been dammed. A lot of the land used to be green, and we owe it to the salmon, who fertilize the earth. We would never have been able to dream of a day when the salmon would be extinct. That we have salmon at all now is due to the tribes’ efforts.

              Storytellers, Lewis told us, animate what was and the way things are. Western society indoctrinates people not to believe or see the spirit world that we nevertheless sometimes catch out of the corner of our eye, but native kids continue to see this world throughout their lives. Storytellers made the spirit world easier to see. Aunts and uncles and cousins would kneel down on a quilt and just let it all go. All animals—the first peoples—have a spark from the creator, and they all have medicine and knowledge. The elders would sit there and start humming, and then the words would come out. My aunt said we learn our industriousness from the beaver; and all of a sudden, we realized we were hearing a song, and my aunt looked just like a beaver, singing. My grandmother, who could kill you in more ways than you could die, brought us outside and had me gather the sticky mud. Then she started telling stories about the creator bringing first peoples to life, while she, at the same time, was sculpting little characters from the mud. We existed out of time, hearing stories this way. Storytelling is rich like that.

              But it’s more than this. There’s much in the seasonal round, in the wheel of life, the circle of life—whatever you want to call it—that has been broken in this last century and a half. We were an ancient people and we never had to leave. And now the ways of life are, piece by piece, broken off that wheel. But then we come together, and we share our stories of what life was like and how we lived: we patch our souls back together as we speak and as we listen, and we find our connections again. The stories are important because when a way of life is dismembered, you can re-member it.

              Here’s what you can do, Lewis told us: Learn a place. Learn the place where you live. Go backwards. Who lived there before you? Find their stories. Add your own story to it: How did you come to this place? That is how you work on making the world and spirit inside you whole.

              That line—when a way of life is dismembered, you should re-member it—was a thunderclap for me. All week, learning about ceremonies, gatherings, descriptions of how different peoples lived from and learned from fish, plants, and animals, other people, the thread was in stories that recall, that acknowledge, that offer wisdom about ecological and communal practice. These stories are, currently, dismantling dams on the Klamath River, and soon enough, the Snake River too; but they also connect people to themselves and to the world around us. Much is broken. How much of this we can heal soon is doubtful. But we can work on healing, and we can kindle our spirits.

              Many kids these days are afraid of a looming climate apocalypse, and this feeds a despair I try to address as a teacher and adult in their world. They would do well to listen to the stories of indigenous peoples around the world, who have already endured a catastrophic apocalypse: as they’ve come together to recover practices and revive languages and to tell stories, they’ve adapted, found joy and connection, and they’ve endured.

              Randy Lewis said as a child he was about to kill a spider when his mother told him stop: we learn how to weave from that spider. That’s us, she said: that web she’s made, and all the strands in it. A spider uses that web to survive. We didn’t put the strands there and we don’t have a right to remove them. If a strand is broken, we have to work to replace all those strands so the world is healthy again.

LSG

               A few weeks ago, I walked out on one of my classes.
              My strength as a teacher has never been policing my students. I don’t expend much energy directing traffic to the bathroom, monitoring furtive behaviors, punishing disruptions beyond verbal redirection. I’m slow to anger. I find goofy antics funny. But my greatest strengths have allowed me to get away with this: I meet students in shared humanity, as partners in understanding and repair of the world. I love digging into the complexities and challenges of literature, art, democracy, or politics, and have been, as a result, able to immerse students in discussion and questions that have tended to engage them. I don’t have lunch detentions, but the critical mass has been with me. Had been.
              After a few weeks of lessons and work time, research presentations or essays were due in my college-in-the-high-school course. Several essays had come in fourth period, but none of the presentations were ready. A student came to my desk before the bell and told me I’d misled them all about our online submission due date, which occurred that morning before school, and not midnight, as he presumed. I asked when my assignments have ever been due at midnight—all year, every assignment has been due right before school. Well, it was confusing, he said.
              When class started, I asked who was ready to present, and indeed, no one was. The student raised his hand and said, I think what this means is that we should have an extension because...
              Stop! I looked at him intently: Before you go on speaking, be very careful about what you’re about to say.
              But he wrinkled his eyes and continued: I was just going to say, you have to understand that you’re not the only one giving us work.
              I looked at him. I shook my head. And I left.
              I took an exasperated circuit around the building, hot with students’ languor and their easy faith in me, and, in relation to this project, ruminating too over a seeming lack of curiosity and civic interest.
              I returned after a slow walk to a few kids waiting at the door. Inside, the air was buzzing.
              When the tumult died down, I turned to the student asking for a class extension and said, Do you want to try that again? And he said, What. What did I say? I turned to everyone else and told the class, You all need to do some talking together, and I left again, this time, in clear didactic purpose.
              When I returned, I asked what they discussed. A few students said they had plenty of time for research and preparing the slide decks and that I must be annoyed how they’d used their time. A student who’d only just arrived suggested it wasn’t what the student said but the tone in which he’d said it. The loudest voice said, Why can’t you just tell us what we did wrong?
              So I told them. I want you to be excited to share what you learned, I said. I want to see some urgency, and some nerves. I want you to be upset that you weren’t ready for each other. I want to see you looking forward to what your classmates have been passionate about. I want to see your curiosity, your light, your accountability for yourselves and engagement as a community that’s had eight months of intellectual growth as a group. I want to see you take sincere responsibility for your learning. And yes, I want you to own what’s yours. You weren't ready: What did you do and what didn't you do when you realized you wouldn't be ready? I left you to talk, because I want you, you together, to unpack and address what’s wrong here—you, as learners and as a community with a stake in what happens in the room.

 * * * * *

              I know students have been hobbled by Seattle’s more than a year in remote education. I suspect that recovery has been slowed by our district’s compassionate response to the unique challenges this pandemic has posed for our students, as well as the justice-minded recognitions that finally reached the white mainstream when our nation mobilized—in their masks—around the 2020 murder of George Floyd. These more equitable grading practices, restorative justice approaches, and recognitions of historical trauma have not typically been joined to the infrastructure needed—training, people-power, and above all, time—to support this community-, dignity-based response; and the result is instead a relaxing of standards and consequences: in our school as elsewhere, it’s the privileged kids that exploit these while others further fall.
              I wonder if the dual response that swept the nation since the pandemic—the justice-minded recognitions in blue states, and, in red states, rage against covid protocols and the “awokening” of America—have resulted in two distinct disasters playing out: a permissive relaxing of consequences in blue states, exacerbating chronic absenteeism and poor executive functioning and behavior, and in red states, censorship of literature, history, and dialogue, threatening the health, safety, and collectivity of more than one generation.
              But I also believe that our students have endured a cataclysm at least equal to that of the pandemic—their phones. The surgeon general has written about it. Teachers and districts around the country have contended openly with it. My own district is suing social media companies about it. And the National Center for Education Statistics reports that 77% of schools prohibit phone use for non-academic purpose—and even in those schools, teachers are in a constant battle of wills. My high school is not one of those with a school-wide prohibition. Our principal says she is protecting teachers from possible lawsuits in the event that a confiscated phone is lost or stolen.
              Nevertheless, at the beginning of the school year, every day, I spent five minutes at the start of each class, making sure students had placed phones in their assigned pockets at the front of the room, hunting the missing phones, demanding trades of power banks for handsets, standing and waiting with my hand out with the same two or three kids every period. Even though invested time did not, as I’d hoped, speed up this start-of-class routine—am I not annoying or scary enough?—I was pleased by what came of the five minutes badgering: Students were collectively looking up and focused on what I was saying, participating in discussion with one another, engaging in the content and skills of the class. It was the sun clearing the utter despair of a room where too many were huddled over phones or laptops and turned away from each other and from me.
              The day a student refused wasn’t the day I lost the fight. She said she had a doctor’s note. The note said she had ADHD and that her phone helped her concentrate. It’s a whole thing, she said. Ask my mom about it. She’ll explain. Eagerly, I contacted her mother, certain no parent and no doctor would approve such logic. But the parent backed her daughter, referred to the doctor’s note, argued ADHD conferred special multi-tasking abilities, and was, finally, deaf to my panicked dread that one kid intently scrolling would break my whole policy.
              The day I lost the fight came soon, though, and here’s why. In the course of our exchange, the parent carbon-copied our principal; after touchy exchanges about race and racism to which the principal was silent, when that particular tension was resolved, she suddenly spoke up to celebrate us: Good job, team! But here’s how I took it: She saw my desperation to maintain the phone prohibition and she heard the mom assert it didn’t apply to her daughter—and my principal did not intervene to back me.
              I stopped fighting the kid. I could have kept fighting, I know—but I felt helpless and alone, professionally exhausted. And within a week, the other phones came out.
              For so small a slight as a principal trusting me to manage my business, I gave in? Yes. I was run-down already, already believed myself undermined—by the number of unsupported and mismanaged students with special needs as a percentage of my 162 students; by the number of exceptions we were expected to offer every assignment (encouraged modification, example: thesis, notes, outline, workshopped sample, draft and 3-8 page essay replaced by three unpolished sentences) and exceptions to every classroom rule (demanded modification, example: consequences for repeatedly throwing food across the room at a student’s head replaced with reminders about no-food-in-class). I felt undermined already by inefficient and often absurd demands on time outside the classroom and, even more, by systems and bosses deaf to practical instructional needs to meet such challenges. I felt demoralized by the meetings styled as professional development to address these challenges and provide “tools” to meet them, because the tools they provide us are always actually a variation of “do more”: more communication; more conferencing with kids, parents, and intervention teams; more individually tailored instruction and assessment; more research into existing counseling, assessment, and disciplinary data. I’ve come out of these meetings recalling Animal Farm’s Boxer saying, “I will work harder.”
              All of this is existentially and professional perilous; and for this reason, the actual motto I’ve adopted for the year is “Let Shit Go.”

Healing

Healing

TLDR from ChatGPT: The author reflects on their solo backpacking trip, seeking healing and headspace after a busy period hosting visitors from Cape Town. They recall interactions with Mimi, a forceful figure who embodies healing traditions passed down from her ancestors. Through Mimi's stories and teachings, the author learns about gratitude, commitment, and the transformative power of deep engagement with life. Mimi's approach to teaching and mentoring prompts introspection about the author's own role as a teacher and their future path. The trip serves as a journey of self-discovery, despite being cut short by rain, leaving the author feeling rejuvenated and inspired.

April 7, 2024

              I’m writing on a hiking journal I made for myself, sitting on a bear canister and looking out over a low-lying fog hanging over the treed hill on the other side of the Hoh River. I’ve been hearing this rhythmic guttural sound that has the arpeggiating crescendo of bird call but is chillingly resonant. Do bears make that sound? Elk?

              It was my desire to do a solo backpacking trip, despite the forecasted but fortunately so far sporadic rain I’ve encountered here, despite learning 30 years and 30 miles from here—when I fled a trip alone despite the beauty of Third Beach—that maybe I don’t fill my time as satisfyingly as I foresee. Hiking alone, yes. But backpacking? Check with me tomorrow.

              I want to do two things on this trip: recover from an extraordinarily breathless couple of weeks preparing, coordinating, and leading a fully hosted visit of sixteen students and teachers from Cape Town, and, to find headspace to write about some of the big things I experienced, hosting Mimi, in particular.

              I have been chaperoning trips to Cape Town since 2017, and from the start, I was awed by Mimi’s force of will. She is wise and loud, with as sudden a solemnity as with quick laughter, directing a crowd like a fifth limb, and, with a rebuke, wielding shame like a thunderbolt to the soul.

April 8, 2024

              Just slept eleven hours, from 7:20 p.m. until 6:20. It was mostly dry last night, with a light rain now.

              In 2019, our three high schools went for our closing retreat to a place new to us on the Melkbosstrand. The large, forbidding steel door between wings inspired rumors. Both Mimi and Polly—a sensitive and culturally unapologetic urban from Yakama Nation who came as chaperone and driver with my group—sensed something wrong when we arrived in this place. The two quietly went out in the dunes to introduce themselves to the ancestors and learn what to do for welcome, Polly told me later. She didn’t say what they did, but the place was put to ease.

              Since our visit, Polly had told me that Mimi’d put herself on the path to becoming a healer, and a Facebook post in isiXhosa—with many congratulations—confirmed. It’s a very big deal, Polly said. But it was not until hosting Mimi last week that I glimpsed what that meant.

              What does it mean? Finding cures—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. Finding solutions to complex problems and ways forward from unhappiness. She finds these things through her ancestors, who also were sangoma in their time. They speak to her through dreams, and more intrusively, knocking about in her head when Mimi’s just trying to go about her day. Mimi says that people who have accepted and started on the path of the sangoma and then tried to leave it cannot stop the ancestors from trumpeting in their heads: they’ve ended up on the streets, broken and raving. And so this is piece of what Polly meant by a big deal decision—there’s no going back to a life inhabited by the narrow world of job and husband, family, friends, and holidays. The ancestors are insistent, and the mind and body are ever available in waking and in sleep, until Mimi joins them in death.

April 9, 2024

              Wet morning, wet night; wet evening, wet day. Everything I own is damp and marked by the forest rot on my wet fingers. It’s six in the morning and the river at least is louder than the rain against my brave tent. But I am reluctant to get up and put on the raincoat heavy with wet. I will hike the twelve miles back to the car today. I can’t stay when every pair of good socks burble in the sodden, impermeable shoes.

              Yesterday had much joy. The morning had writing and hope and a dry place under trees, and light rainfall through magical moss-strewn rocks and shining ferns and sturdy old spruce and cedar and hemlock, everything welcoming and soft and glowing. And then I found this spot, under the protective arms of a centuries-old Douglas fir, and a dry perch for the tent. Having made camp, I cheerfully left for a mountain lake another five miles up, observing the river turn more ice green and violent the steeper I climbed, encountering singing creeks over mossy stones in a blessing of green, and a bridge high over a turbulent channel cut through stone over a hundred feet below. But I told myself that I would turn back at four and did so, disappointing the lake by less than a mile. The rain had become harder and now I noticed; the way back to my site was long and wet, and my dry little spot when I returned to it was wet too. I stayed in my boggy socks and shoes to filter water and cook a welcome dinner and then be free of them; but I couldn’t ignite the waterproof matches. And so I went to bed.

April 10, 2024

              I am writing now from a dry coffee shop blocks from my home. Did I fulfill my two objectives, to recover and find headspace to turn over events of the past couple weeks?

              Mimi turned my thinking inside itself only a couple days after her arrival, during the open mic at the weekend retreat at Camp Killoqua. The oldest boy poured his heart out there, first in an existential poem he read in turns with his American host brother, and then, more sharply, in a poem about his father, solemnly and sonorously intoned by a classmate while the poet openly keened and wept in his seat.

              After the event was over, Mimi went and stood over him, and commenced to scold him a while and left.

              She returned to where the teachers were sitting and explained. He was sad about his missing father. I told him, Your mother does everything for you. Everything. Why are you crying for that loser?

              What a jolt—for all of us, and especially for Seattleites steeped in the pedagogy and activism of compassion.

              The next night, back at my house, Mimi told Stephanie and me some of her own story:

              Mimi grew up with both a mother and a father in the home, but having both parents was no great thing, she said. Her two older brothers would hand their paychecks to their father and then he would disappear for the weekend, leaving them with no money for their own needs and their mother to scrounge for their meals.

              When Mimi came of age and became a teacher, her father demanded her paycheck too. Mimi said, You don’t get one blue cent. You can have my pay stub to see how much money I’m getting, to see that my money is going to the proper taxes, but you get none.

              And she went to the store with her mother and they filled two carts with food.

              Later, her younger sister got a job and followed Mimi in refusing their father. He did not like that.

              Then Mimi came to her point, returning to what she’d said to the boy at open mic:

              So this student. I told him not to think about that loser but the mother who does everything for him, who feeds him, supplies him, supports his every opportunity, including a flight all the way to America, because she wants him to thrive. The father, what does he do? He does nothing. The mother, what does she do? Everything. But he puts his heart on the father, so the heart breaks.

              The student was mortified and regretted not appreciating his mother. She scolded him for this, too:

              No. She does all this not so that you feel badly, but so you go out and make a better life for yourself. What parents need most is for you to go and have a secure life, and that’s what they do it all for. So that’s what you need to do. Don’t feel bad for your mother, and don’t spend a second on your father. Put your gratitude in making a good life for yourself, and be strong in your mother’s love.

              As Mimi was telling us this, our daughter Maisie was up in her room. Mimi suddenly turned her attention to her: Maisie chooses to come home in her spare time. You did your job, then. She could be elsewhere, but she’s happy to rest here. She knows this home is love, so you two are done. You did your job as parents and now you’re done.

              For me, this was the beginning of a thought about a deep commitment and its relationship to gratitude. There is an aimless and lost purposefulness in myself, and to many who share my cultural heritage of self and bottom line—a scarcity of appreciation for all that elders and most of all family have done to stand us up and so a lack of urgency to live up to our own riches.

              Mimi continued to demonstrate such largeness of purpose as she described how she framed her approach to teaching art and to preparing the travelers for this visit:

              She tells her art students that no matter how poor you are, you can show the world your creativity. But you have to commit. You have to put everything you have into your work; and when you do, no one will be able to compete, no matter what money they have and you don’t.

              And she told her travelers, Think how much money has been spent to send you all the way to Seattle, and how many people raised it because they were excited to bring you here. You have to live up to this, she told them. Forty people didn’t get to go. You have to live up to them, too. So many people made this possible for you. So when you get there, and it’s time to perform, you have to sing. Sing like no one has ever sung this before. And then, Mimi described, she’d speak to students individually: You. You have to be this person.

              The student with the poems, Mimi charged him to forget his father and live up to his mother, and the next day, she said, his deep weight had been lifted. He had a miraculous realization.

              This is why I love Hands for a Bridge, Mimi said to Stephanie and me that night. That student, he was like a duck who goes in water and he comes out wet. The others, they’re still ducks who go in water but they come out, they’re still dry. But now his friend, he reads these poems and he gets a little wet too. This is the goal for every child, that they go on this trip and they come back really changed; they come back wet.

April 11, 2024

              At my high school, for the years since the Covid shutdown, our administration has embraced our district’s goals of inclusive grading, restorative justice, and particular thought and care for Students Furthest from Educational Justice—referred to as SFFEJ—by asking patience, grace, and frequent communication. But all this has somehow translated into a noticeable segregation in our building: Black students in halls, lunchroom, and library, and everyone else in classrooms. I know that’s an oversimplification. Still. When teachers last year demanded more support in getting students to our rooms, we were a) individually presented the same “wonder” [eduspeak turns innocent verbs into tools]—I wonder why your students don’t feel more welcome and invited in your space?—and b) collectively told by our principal that we were no longer going to rely on punishing students who have been historically traumatized. Good theories. But in practice, we’re a white staff knowingly allowing Black students to fail.

              Midway through the visit, the South Africans joined History classes in the library for a few periods. By the end of the day, Mimi witnessed the same group of jawing bodies return again and again to a corner of stuffed chairs in the corner.

              Mimi and her colleague went to these kids she didn’t know and started dressing them down. The librarian called a few other Black boys over to stand under their piercing heat:

               What are you doing? You are at the best school in the city and what are you doing? What is your mother doing right now? Oh, she’s working at the hospital. Is she a doctor? Is she a nurse? No? Then she’s a cleaner. And how much money are you carrying with you today? Who gave you this money? Show me your phones. What about these expensive phones? Who bought these for you? Your mother. Your mother gave you all this. Why? Because she wants you to be happy. She wants you to have what you need so you have the advantages other students have so you can succeed. And what have you done with all that? All she wants is for you to work hard. Is it so hard? You’re black, but you’re not dumb. But you choose to be cool and you don’t go to your classes. I see you coming to the library all day. Why aren’t you going to your classes? If you don’t understand the work, tell me, who you have asked for help? Who. Nobody? Look. Look at the pictures of our students. These are squatters’ houses, made out of zinc. These are not wealthy children. But they have flown all the way around the world to make their lives better. They are poor but they are working hard. You should know better. Your mother sends you to the best school in the city and makes sure you have what you need here so you can come and make something of yourself. How do you think your running away from classes all day makes her feel? Go to your classes. Learn your lessons. It’s not hard.

              What a dousing. I hope these are some ducks to come away wet.

* * * * *

              When Mimi describes her initiation into the sangoma, she strokes the string of turquoise and white beads that hang from her neck. She dreamed exactly these strands. The furred ends are from the goat sacrificed at the beginning of the journey, something that also signals her rank to others on the journey. Dreams are essential to the process and to the communication with ancestors. Everything she needs to fulfill this journey will come to her in her dreams, and it is up to the ancestors to put her on the path to encounter their manifestations in waking life. It is the reason her teacher says initiates must not sleep with their partners until their journey is complete: Another body in the bed interferes with dreaming. When Mimi goes to her teacher on the Eastern Cape, initiates sleep in the middle of the compound, her teacher on one side, and his wife, even now, well away in a room on the other. It is because Mimi stays with her husband at night that her initiation is now in its third year rather than third month.

              Nevertheless, her dreams have brought everything she has needed, and dreams put her on this path: Mimi originally rejected the whole process despite her inheritance, telling others that, no, she would not be a healer until both of her dead parents showed up in her dreams and demanded it. Then she did dream of her father. And she dreamed of her sangoma great-grandmother who was the one who revealed this particular healer and where to find him.

              Mimi dreamed of this man, this sangoma teacher, and she found him. She dreamed of the red cow that will be sacrificed to bring her the final connections and has learned where this cow can be found. She has dreamed of needed herbs and medicines. She has dreamed of the beads she wears now but also the beads she will need in the end. Those beads are the last thing Mimi needs to find.

              It sounds exhausting. When she’s on the Eastern cape every Wednesday and Friday night and Sunday, she hauls around hillsides gathering weeds and at night will be woken any time when the healer, who seems never to sleep at all, wakes the initiates to tell them ancestors need to talk to them. In everyday life, ancestors are always piping up: This one is lying. This one is a bitch. And Mimi will say, No! Why are you telling me this right now? And through all this, Mimi is still teaching full-time. Sometimes, ancestors will call her and she’ll go groggy and fall asleep in front of students. But they’re Xhosa too and know what it’s about. They tell each other: Don’t worry. That’s just Missus talking to people we can’t see.

              I witnessed it myself. On our final Saturday, we took our students to Bainbridge Island, first visiting the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Garden and then to the Suquamish Museum and Chief Sealth’s grave. We visited the garden on March 30^th—the 42^nd anniversary of Bainbridge forced voyage to internment at Manzanar and Minidoka. We missed the speeches but not the extraordinary sense of community and power, laying the many cranes we were given against the winding memorial wall. But Mimi was halting. On the way to the Suquamish Museum, she told me the ancestors were angry with her: She hadn’t introduced herself and hadn’t praised the ancestors there. On Suquamish lands, where ancestors openly live among the people, Mimi kept to herself, communing.

              In some sense, Mimi was already a healer before she found her first beads. But I know from disruptions to my own sense of right and purpose and from the loose joy I feel today that Mimi is sanctified.

* * * * *

              This visit from the South Africans was very meaningful to me, as meaningful as any trip I’ve taken with students to Cape Town. Perhaps more.

              These last few years of teaching have been demoralizing and hollow. I know many workers have more distant relationships to their jobs since Covid. I know that teachers around the country have faced the new stresses of our jobs and come up short. And it’s true for me, too: For the first time in my career, my work has become a job I go to, and I have studied how to leave it.

              This visit, I knew, was likely to be my last big thing. And I spared myself nothing. Preparing for hosting and coordinating all the field trips and other necessaries—the exponentially expanding red tape and encounters with fussy, admonishing, soul-defeating bureaucrats—propelled me to announce this would be my last year as a teacher in the program. When our visitors arrived, I was coordinating assemblies and class visits and speakers and open mics and trips to other schools and the retreat and field trips and potlucks and the hosting families and student-groups in clubs and setting up the informal gatherings. I was the go-to for all emergencies and disruptions to communication. I was the primary group teacher, the leading emissary outside our school. And I was conducting my own classes, still collecting essays. I gave up all my time before and after school and lunch to the visiting teachers. My own hosting responsibilities meant comforts at home and meals to take out. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, weighing details, settling emergencies. One evening I set an alarm for ten minutes and woke up at the end of it bewildered. I lost eight pounds. All my moments were occupied. I put everything of myself into this visit.

              But by the end, I was joyful, deeply fulfilled in my work as a teacher for the first time in years, years.

              Mimi pushed an urgency into it all, into how I teach, how I live: Will I live up to others, will I demand others live up to all they’ve been given and all they face? Am I still the teacher I need to be and also the teacher my students need me to be? Will I move to something else, and is this something I can cultivate as richly, commit to as fully?

              I went to up the Hoh River Trail alone, to explore some of these questions, to think of what I’ve learned from Mimi, to comprehend the largeness of life she invokes, as a teacher and as a healer, to commune with my own whispers—in the bending trees and regenerative loam of their leaves and needles, their hanging moss and intermingling roots. Going there and sitting down to write gave me a start.

              I left because the rain overpowered me.

              And I came away wet.

Professional Development to Start the School Year

                This summer, I went hiking, running, walking, bicycling, met with friends, spent time with family, and discovered joy was still possible. After the indignities of post-Covid teaching, I was delighted to realize it. This is not depression; this is not a midlife crisis: this has become a demoralizing job that has been taking a dump on my state-of-being.

              I’m back at school and have just completed three days of professional development. The gist of all back-to-school teacher training and this year too is ice-breaker, ice-breaker, work harder, care more. This year, same urgency: Ice breaker, ice-breaker; if you really cared about SFFEJ—that is, students furthest from educational justice—you would do more and work harder.
              The theme for this year is “Authentic Inclusion.” Inclusion refers to the integration of general population students with those formerly set apart in dedicated Special Education or multilingual classrooms. When I saw “Authentic Inclusion” as the year’s theme, I sparked with the phrase, because, for the first time, I’m going to be co-teaching a couple of ninth grade English classes with a Special Education instructor and an especially high concentration of Special Education students, in what our building is calling an inclusion block.
              Here’s how the school has supported authentic inclusion so far: I’ve never co-taught an inclusion block before; neither has my Special Education partner, who was given the assignment yesterday. Neither has the Social Studies teacher, who also has never taught Social Studies before. So, we’re new to the model, but we will have no training and no guidance and no word from administration. We will have no common planning period during the day and no dedicated collaboration time, and neither will there be any expectation that we should, in fact, meet to collaborate. Meanwhile, both 5th and 6th periods of the ninth grade block have the chockfull 32 students, of which a quarter have substantial behavioral and learning needs. This is just to say the inclusion block is no less packed than my other classes (which add up to 160 students). My co-teacher will also be co-teaching a tenth grade class, but the students on her additional case load are eleventh and twelfth graders. She coaches too, and will need to be at games on Friday afternoons.
              For these reasons, I was feeling nervous about the school year and prickly about the year’s theme before I arrived at the professional development days this week.
              Session one: MTSS. Multi-tiered Systems of Support. This included all the ways that we should be intervening when students are not successfully engaging—building routines, welcoming culture, then conferencing, communicating with families and school support teams, and warehousing each step as “data.” All this is fine. And here’s the data that show how we’ve been failing SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice. The session devolved into pleas from teachers who last year tried asking for help from school support teams—administrators—but received no response nor follow-up communication.
              Session two: CSIP. Continuous School Improvement Plan. Roosevelt’s plan for improvement is to improve attainment and belonging among SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice—especially in 9th and 10th grade. Seattle’s superintendent has added language called guardrails, which are marked by the phrase, “The superintendent will not allow,” as in guardrail number 5, “The superintendent will not allow any district department, school building, or classrooms to provide unwelcoming environments.” One teacher responded, then several more, about “inclusion,” and specifically the way our school has been ramping up inclusion blocks without forethought or training: If we really want to support our improvement goals of SFFEJ in 9th and 10th grade, then show care for these new blocks. Give their teachers training and time to meet.
              Session three: RP. Restorative practices. Restorative practices seem to mean building healthy communities and trust, and that, when harm falls within a community, starting with such trust to address the harms together. I believe in this. We were shown a chart with four quadrants falling along a Y axis of action and an X axis of empathy: Bottom left, low action, low empathy: Neglectful. Bottom right, low action, high empathy: Permissive. Top left, high action, low empathy: Punitive. Top right, high action, high empathy, the sweetest of sweet spots: Restorative. With restorative practices, we should care and we should push—what had previously been called warm-demander.
 
Punitive             Restorative
 
Neglectful          Permissive
 
              A teacher asked, Are you saying we should do this in the classroom, and in the building as a whole? The administrator said she had to think about that one. But for us teachers, much of what has changed in both the culture of students and administrations’ demands to it are plain: They have not been “restorative”; they’ve been permissive at best. And teachers think and feel this administrative permissiveness—occurring in action and explicit policy—has made our jobs more difficult, often oppressively so, and has degraded habits of communal behavior.
              Last year, a group of students gathered in the lunchroom for hours at a time, and we pleaded with administration to help us get them to come to our classes. All-staff emails piled on; and in a faculty meeting last December about teachers’ responsibilities to MTSS—multi-tiered systems of support—a teacher was cry-shouting from the back of the room, saying, What will you do? We’re just letting these students fail. The word from our principal was that these are students who’ve been traumatized by school, and that we must turn to restorative justice over models of disciplinary punishment or alienate them further. This is excellent, heartful mission thinking—except that restorative justice and effective dialogue didn’t seem to be happening either, and those students continued wandering the halls and staying for hours in the lunchroom all year. High empathy, low action. It’s little surprise that Black students’ surveyed sense of belonging fell once again.
              And the district policies are likewise permissive: Students, by policy, can retake any test or redo any essay for full credit; and if they cheat, likewise, see retakes and re-dos. There are no longer zeroes. Participation and absences in class are not permitted to affect class grades. All of these are rooted in an idea of “grading for equity,” where mastery of skills is the focus and anything that translates as behavior is bias-skewed. The theory is okay, but it means that community engagement and readiness aren’t skills or institutionally demanded of our graduates. Teachers suspect that the people who will most use the equitable grading practices of retakes and rewrites will be white, privileged students who further learn that they can bumble forth and other people will adjust to their ease in service to a customer-is-always-right bottom line—in this case, the grade.
              Administrators talk about restorative justice. But they’re talking about it as though their own permissiveness is simply equitable and just policy, even as they call for us to dialogue towards accountability. Teachers have been harmed by the lack of support coupled with the you’re-not-doing-enough message, as a result of which, teacher’s climate survey was so low in the Fall and worse in the Spring. We need to address the harms within the teaching community, too.
              Here’s how I think this professional development should have started three days ago: With an apology.
              We have so much we need to do to serve our students, and it’s especially important that we address and counteract systemic inequities within and outside of our schools. And you don’t have all the support you all know you need to do this work near effectively. Your class sizes are too big. You have too many demands on your very limited time, which we administrators tend to treat as a vast and generous resource. But we come together as a teaching community before school starts because we know this work is important, and together, we’re going to do what we can.