Teacher face.

In my experience:

Our schools operate within systems of intentional scarcity and upheaval, students teachers and admin running around with crisis brain, reinventing new systems to meet new directives while the constant and predictable needs created by poverty go unmet, cortisone flooding our senses, existential threat creeping–and then the copy machine jams. Normal, functioning adults don’t lose it when the copy machine jams.  But our school system saps resilience, because it is grounded in scarcity and upheaval.

I believe we can build revolutionary classrooms, and by that I mean classrooms where we encourage and cultivate in children the kind of imagination it takes to envision and design new systems, but I also mean spaces of joy, abundance, community, liberation through criticism, through logic invention art and the airing of righteous rage. Classrooms don’t have to feel like this every second of their days. Think about how uneven your own schooling was, and you turned out brilliant, sitting here all whole and thinking and alive. But however it was, you probably deserved more of the good stuff.

I think we can build these spaces within the system that we have, by learning to consciously tune out the noise during our on hours, by being activists during our off-hours, and by making for our kids some of these things:

List-in-Progress

• Safe space for intimate and substantive parental involvement
• Learning from, being shaped by, being accountable to the community
• Student-centered constructivist pedagogy
• Building knowledge of community organizing and social movement theory
• Practice in activism and advocacy
• Critical theory about race, class, gender, nationality, and post-colonialism geared for a middle school audience
• A classroom art gallery
• A library that looks like a book store display section and makes you want to stay all day
• Reinvention of classroom design, with lots more bean bag action
• Intensive community building, and the experience of unconditional love in a peer group
• A garden and knowledge of food production
• Hours of free-play time
• A soundtrack
• Media literacy and media production experience
• Conflict mediation training that critically examines the roots of systemic violence
• Math problem-solving and quantitative and logical analysis skills
• A queer-positive, body-positive environment
• Lots of peer discussion
• Reading whole novels together, by whatever means necessary
• Fun every day

 Please help me give my students these things. Thank you, and good night.

Let’s build more things.