I PUT IN WORK AND IT’S ALL FOR THE KIDS [AN NCTE REFLECTION]
Just before I got home, I turn on DMX’s “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” because it matches the BPM I need to make it through the length of JFK International Airport corridors. As I get off the umpteenth moving sidewalk, DMX rapped:
“I’ve been doing this for 19 years.
Cats wanna fight me? Fight these tears.
I put in work, and it’s all for the kids,
But these cats done forgot what work is.
They don’t know who we be,
Looking, but they don’t know who they see …”
Cats wanna fight me? Fight these tears.
I put in work, and it’s all for the kids,
But these cats done forgot what work is.
They don’t know who we be,
Looking, but they don’t know who they see …”
Headline reads: “Typical NYC Guy Sheds Half a Tear Before Dealing with Queens Traffic.”
This idea we call “professionalism” has so many of us holding our tongues and acting out of character. For instance, we have misinterpretations of a framework meant ostensibly to wrest control from control as praxis. I have my critiques of the Danielson framework, but I’m not a fan of using dimensions of a rubric to play games with someone’s passions and duties. This and many more elements are the burdens I don’t wish upon future students and educators, but here we are. When higher-ups hold schools under hostage for the express purpose of keeping appearances and test scores up, we lose any number of social and cultural norms that makes schools palatable to our kids.
If we don’t give students opportunity to express themselves, why should we expect them to perform? The same goes for our educators and parents.
So when we find spaces to convene, like the National Council of Teachers of English Convention, we savor the moment to share experiences with colleagues who want to teach students, regardless of subject area. These institutional spaces might feel “too white.” Large education conferences are merely a reflection of the profession as a whole. But, unlike so many other conferences, the NCTE experience leans on rock-star educators and pop culture authors aligned to their work. Jason Reynolds and Elizabeth Acevedo flow naturally with the plethora of teachers who created classrooms collections based on their works. NCTE can invite Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Jose Older, and Marley Dias and still have folks who could equally take those keynote slots and have them in the exhibit fall or a workshop instead. Their benches are deep with talent in a way that other conferences aren’t.
Which made this year interesting because they also invited a science / hip-hop pedagogy guy and a current math classroom teacher to keynote as well.
Hundreds of white educators (and the rest of us, too) stood at attention when Christopher Emdin’s Continue reading: I Put In Work And It's All For The Kids [An NCTE Reflection] | The Jose Vilson