#24: Part 2: Standard English Grammar is a Tool for White Supremacy

I have been thinking about the upcoming school year and wondering (ruminating) what it will be like to return to the classroom with full classes of students on August 11, 2021. Summer has come and gone, and our school district has decided on a literal “return to normal” with our day-to-day school schedules. With every written statement and publicized claim and proclamation of self-awareness and the desire to “do better,” schools and their leaders were and are powerfully vulnerable to the status quo and to the temptation of melting back into the familiar categories and patterns. So they did.

I’m going to try my best to try to not make this a whole piece complaining about why last year sucked. I don’t think I can count on one hand people I personally know who had a great 2020. Instead, I want to convey how and why I constantly felt like I was grasping for the edge of something that wasn’t there as I was being sucked into a whirlpool because of the tension that exists in our profession. We have forces beyond our control that pull us underwater as we have gasped for air. Educators, for the most part, have managed to survive (again, for the most part) by embodying that endearing saying about ducks that appear calm and smooth sailing above water but are pedaling like mad to maintain that composure.

The tension that I mention is the pull of different actors in the system motivated by seemingly different forces. These forces are the narratives that are attached to policies that rarely serve either actor well and also further exacerbate some of the inequalities that school purportedly aims to fix. These conditions are not the fault of most people alive today. We are rarely at fault for the systems that we have been handed, yet we are responsible to change them if they no longer fit.

I spent a lot of last year thinking that the entire system needed to be torn down and rebuilt, but that was the motto of 2020 for every public industry (yeah, you incredulous people may say “what about firefighters?!” but them, too). If there was ever a year to do it, it should have been 2020, but it did not happen for a number of reasons that are rooted in this tension.

“WHAT TENSION ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

1. Schools are not the market.

Some tension is a symptom of the way market forces influence schools’ culture and priorities that have historically stated that they care about children while simultaneously handcuffed to the policies that are interested in making better cogs in the capitalist machine.

The pandemic disrupted schools. Last year, educators tackled the Sisyphean task of transitioning to remote, distance, online, or whatever you want to call it teaching overnight (actually, over a weekend for most of us), disrupting the way that we had previously practiced education. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, using “disrupt” often has a loaded, sometimes positive connotation. It implies the process of reinventing an industry, service, or paradigm that is reimagined or destroyed and rebuilt in favor of the consumer and convenience while it also emphasizes the “genius” of the producer (I write genius in the quotes because our society mistakenly assigns genius to people who make a lot of money. That’s not genius. That’s exploitation.) Anyone who has financially benefited from the pandemic’s creation of our co-dependence on tech tools to stay connected may argue that the move to distance learning will “better help prepare students for the future.” These people do not know about (or are willfully ignorant to) the executive functioning of children or others not like them, and have a myopic view of schools’ role in educating children. This form of “disruption” has not reinvented the industry in a way that makes it better for students or teachers, it has reinvented the operations of teaching and learning in a way that makes more money for tech and also creates and exacerbates social divides. School is not solely a training ground or assembly line to make more cogs in the system. Schools are places that communities are built around and cannot and should not have to fluctuate to market pressures. Technology literacy will not prepare students if they lack the ability to manage tools and devices that teachers with advanced degrees had difficulty navigating. And whatever tech-expert teen you have sitting in your mind right now as a counterargument for mine, they are most likely the exception and not the rule. Children need interaction and engagement to develop their ability to learn with different forms of media and in different ways. Online learning does not afford that.

Schools, especially during the pandemic, proved that they are the last viable social safety nets for many families in the communities across the country. Beyond just feeding children, teachers and educators are advocates for children and their needs. When students can’t see the board, educators recommend the student to be seen by the nurse. When students are hungry, educators feed students with food purchased out of pocket or even offer up their own lunch for the day. When students need safety and care at home because they don’t feel safe, educators advocate for the resources and services to ensure student safety because we know that safety is imperative for proper cognitive functioning. When parents cannot pay rent or afford groceries or may anticipate homelessness with a pending divorce, they turn to schools for resources, help, and next steps. Many times, parents know that schools provide safety when they fear they cannot.

Schools as a sole mechanism for students to be assessed and tested on standardized curriculum needs to be countered more aggressively with gratitude for the resources and support that schools provide when the government that necessitates and centers curriculum and assessment cannot do so.

2. Data, knowledge, and emotion

To build on the ubiquity of technology, it has infiltrated our collective lexicon. Technology metaphors abound in the way that we discuss our thinking like we are computers. We’re not. And that is not how knowledge works or should. Ever.

Some think that school is a place for knowledge to be downloaded where students are empty vessels to be filled by teachers. These gatekeeping notions of school place knowledge and fact in tension with learning and prevent good teaching and learning from happening. Some may argue for the sake of testing and assessment that teachers should “stick to the facts” and be Spock while delivering a lesson. That’s not human. It is inspiring and challenging to see and hear and experience learning about something from someone who cares about it rather than whether or not they are teaching it neutrally. Emotion must play a role in the learning experience because it informs our reactions and also connects us as humans. It asks us to implore, to probe, to push ourselves and each other outside of our comfort zones to understand the curriculum, but also learn to understand each other.

I am not arguing that everyone speaks about their feelings all the time; I want acknowledgment of the fundamental role that feelings have in developing knowledge and understanding data. Our emotions are a tool that can be used to cultivate a critical lens to view the information that we are presented with and the information that we teach. Instead of moving away from emotion, we need to embrace it. The skill of knowing what to say or how to react when presented with or acting from emotion can better any communicative act. Data is often viewed as a neutral, objective form of information, without consideration of emotions’ role in developing the questions to acquire the data. People studying subjects that they care about, and that care is rooted in emotion; therefore, data is subjective and should not be held on the objective pedestal that it is. Instead, it should be used in complement with critical questions created in response to understanding emotions.

A stronger focus on emotions can help teachers and educators meet the moment of the socio-emotional needs. We experience life emotionally and need to be equipped with an emotional safety net in order to advance these emotions to actions or solutions. This is not coddling, but support.


3. Mind and body and the way it exists in the spaces of school

Teaching online was so difficult because I was not used to sitting or standing in one position for so many hours while speaking. I took for granted the ability to gesture with my hands and also move around the room. Moving and thinking and the way that movement can help our brains process and be generative. Having to regularly practice stillness is mentally exhausting; ask anyone who has sat at a desk longer than sixty minutes. As we move forward, we need to remember the importance of moving and understand that some of the cognitive cloudiness that students face throughout the day is not because they do not have ideas or do not understand, it is because they have exhausted their minds by maintaining stillness that countered their desire to move.

This should also be a reminder of the way that this functions around socioeconomic divides amongst our children. Wealthy children are able to do well because they have the affordances in their home to recharge for prolonged moments of productivity: a bedroom to themselves, a desk to designate their personal space for work, a hallway to walk down to clear their mind when they have been sitting, a yard to sit in when the weather is nice. These “breaks” can be generative and make work feel less intellectually taxing than students who live in multi-family apartments that are crowded, cramped, and noisy. This is not to say that we should not assign students homework, but that we should create spaces in the physical classroom and in our organization of class time for students to learn how spaces can afford thinking, learning, and production. Go for a walk-and-chat, allow students to walk around the classroom without having to ask permission, have students stand up after prolonged (20 minutes) moments of sitting, allow students to speak freely without assessment to understand how their gesturing can influence or deepen their thinking (I talk with my hands and swear that it makes me a better communicator). As we take care of edifying students’ minds, we also must account for the body’s role in influencing the processing of information and production of ideas. *
*As I wrote this piece, I sat in three different spaces around my parents’ home until I found one that worked best for me: on the floor with two pillows stacked on my lap as I sat cross-legged and reclined against the couch. 

4. Professional Collaboration and Collision

There is so much discussion at my school around collaboration that sometimes it means the sharing of ideas, but often it is mistaken as doing everything the same way amongst teachers who are very different.

We should be encouraging students to be themselves, yet sometimes we do not allow teachers the opportunity to be themselves and practice professional discretion with decisions made in the classroom. This also makes me question the type of worker that is seen as valuable and what that means for students as they watch. If we have standardized ways of teaching, is that sending the message that there are standardized ways of being? We know this to be somewhat true, but we also inherently know that this is arbitrary and can become another form of gatekeeping. When we mistake collaboration for conformity, this creates collision and compromised mediocrity instead of greatness. Sure, we should share our ideas with the minds of other people and loop back with them to see where they could be exacted or improved, but not as a form of compromise--that does not create the BEST work, it creates the most agreeable (and sometimes, not agreeable at all, but mandated).

There is no time to squander in service of the wrong ideas while waiting for the right ones or to sacrifice or divert our values. I hold all of this tension in my mind and heart as I move into the 2021-2022 school year.