COME AS YOU ARE (PART 1)
I couldn’t help it. I checked my work e-mail. A list of names with offers I’ll never accept with things I’d never buy from them. A few security checks from central offices. Oh, and an automated e-mail from our teacher rating system that calculated our rating for last year. I skipped the paragraphs and went directly to the table.
Effective. Effective. Effective. This is no brag. I’m on my own rubric. And a few years ago, the algorithms didn’t bestow their blessings so readily.
I eschewed common sense for the sixth year in a row to fix my classroom the week before we’re actively getting paid to work. It’s also the first year in those six that I’ve gotten to keep the same classroom. Every year, I’m entrusted with discarded the old, the misused, the dusty, and the murky from a given classroom and turn it into a learning space for middle schoolers. Every year with varying degrees of success, I accomplish this. Every year, it had been decided that I need to do so for the next class. Every classroom strengthens my spacial and ancestral knowledge in this work.
Oh, and every year, most of my colleagues are already 10 steps ahead of me on Day 1 even with all the pre-work I get done the week before.
That’s why it’s important for people to understand what I’m saying when I accept this as my new-ish CONTINUE READING: Come As You Are (Part 1) | The Jose Vilson
