Hope and the Teacher | The Jose Vilson

Hope and the Teacher | The Jose Vilson:

Hope and the Teacher

My colleague asked me point-blank: “You’re saying you don’t think you’re having an effect on kids?”

I guess I should have been more poignant. I’m also not one for small talk, an affliction I acquired from years of nervous ticks when I spoke in normal situations. I also suffered from an extreme case of “I respect this person’s current work on these issues to not be honest.”

The thing about teaching, writing, and advocating at the same time is that I’m simultaneously aware of the energy it takes to teach my 150 students at 45 minutes a class for an entire day and the legions of self-interested actors who, at any given moment, would turn these very children against me. That’s our current educational discourse, an overlay of the socioeconomic and political realities of a nation at risk of every and anything at all times. Everything is right or wrong and the only way to fix it is to double down or completely change course. Every person is either good or evil. We must choose a side, one for each eye, if we’re granted that at all.

In my positionality, I am hopeful things will change. I am doubtful anything will.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, he says that writers, specifically those who write with history in mind, who only work with a hopeful lens haven’t done much homework, or are willfully ignorant of Hope and the Teacher | The Jose Vilson: