Through The Wire [This Is Still Not A Test]
No one asked me to write This Is Not A Test, but I still felt it necessary.
About two years ago, I was in the middle of one of the weirdest weeks of my life, capped off with my father passing away and me finding out 30 minutes before class started. My shoulders buckled, my face felt pulled an inch closer to the earth, and my feet felt light. I knew there was nothing I could do about it since his body was over a thousand miles away in Florida.
When I informed Liliana Segura, my editor, that my father passed, she asked if I needed time. I said, “Nah, gimme more.”
For about a year or two prior to my father passing, I struggled with this idea of a published book. How many people back then got their Internet-based thoughts turned into an IRL cover-bound thingie? In education, the chances were slimmer. I found myself staring at the Education section of Barnes & Noble, doing my research on what publishers call the market. I didn’t know that publishers paid for book placement, and whether the covers faced the customers or the spine did. All I knew was that there were no books that truly spoke to me from a K-12 educator as a K-12 educator.
With all due respect to folks to folks I call colleagues or even friends, all I saw were education professors, politicians, billionaires, journalists, and plenty of former educators who had friends in mainstream media spaces. What was a current classroom teacher to do? I tried the education publisher route, only to be rebuffed for being instructional enough. I tried the agent route, only to be rejected dozens of times, many of them citing that they didn’t know how to sell my story. I tried Through The Wire [This Is Still Not A Test] | The Jose Vilson: