Learn, Teach, Lead.

This year we dove into an experiment with Restorative Practice. Now class meetings are one component of SFA’s English Language Arts package, but the format and the questions teachers are supposed to read from are flat, unimaginative, and depressingly naive. My students would roll their eyes at them. I’ve seen Restorative Circles done poorly and I’ve heard of them being done very well. We fell somewhere in the middle.

Most regular public schools rely on Behaviorism as the backbone of their beliefs about education. Detentions, suspensions, and of course grades and GPA’s are all drawn from old ideas about how to best “motivate” people.

But behaviorism is ultimately counter-productive (and yet the trust and relationships built are done despite that regime), and so the idea of adding a restorative circle routine to our classroom was one small attempt to “make this classroom and school a more comfortable place for everyone”.

In this year-long exercise, I wanted to avoid the sometimes shallow nature of poorly-run Circles, and so over the summer I found a decent online playbook to draw from: a free booklet from The Center For Restorative Process. This, along with a few conversations with fellow educators who’ve done this kind of work, helped me to determine what might be effective in my classroom.

The final results, according to the students, were mixed: about half were positive, the other half neutral, with a very few falling into the “this was a waste of time” category. Sometimes it can be tough to gauge who is taking the reflection seriously; who is parroting what they think the teacher wants them to write, who is being honest, and who is thinking about what they want to say to their friend in the hallway, or what’s for lunch today?

We started each circle with a simple check-in to get the mood of the kids, and toward the beginning of the year the questions that each student was required to answer were more on the “getting to know you” side of things. Some kids warmed to this format, but some others I know felt uncomfortable—either because they didn’t want to speak in front of their peers, or they thought, “this isn’t what school is for”. These were valid enough points, and I was also trying to hustle the formal conversations toward more substantive topics.

When we dived into the “problem solving” portion of these meetings, most students became more engaged and their talk felt more authentic; they listened to each other more intensely, and we actually added a sliver of democracy to the otherwise authoritarian structure in place in most schools across the country. One of the tools that we introduced (again thanks to the training manual from The Center For Restorative Process) was the simple idea of consensus—that is, someone creates a proposal for an agreement, and then we vote: thumbs up, down, or sideways. So either, Yes, I like this, this should become an agreement; Eh, this is OK with me and should become an agreement; and No, I don’t think this is a good idea and I’m not allowing it to move forward. 

The first proposal was one that I suggested myself, in anticipation of having to be out a few days of the year. When I was student teaching, my mentor taught me to essentially clear the decks when a substitute stood in for me, not knowing how involved or competent that adult would be. I followed the advice, but this past year I also tried an agreement: I would promise to try and assign simple and relevant writing when I wouldn’t be there, and the students would ensure that the classroom would be left in a neat condition. 

This seemed to work to an extent—I’d usually return to a classroom that was in the same shape I’d left it in, even if few students completed the assignment I’d left for the substitute. And more importantly, the one time that I found things in disarray, the Circle gave me a format and a formula to address this concern. Rather than berating and threatening, I could point back to our Class Agreement (conspicuously displayed on the classroom wall) and explain how the mess affected myself, the custodial staff, and indeed the students themselves. This lead to a discussion of shared responsibility and unforeseen consequences. I always told the kids that I would take this process as seriously as they would. I could still threaten to fall back on punitive measures. 

Punishment without conversation and reflection can oftentimes be counterproductive, though conversation without honesty and genuine ownership can also be a waste of time and a way for both students and teachers to dodge any real thinking and internal work. This is what makes some teachers angry about Restorative Practices: kids (and adults) can be disingenuous and trust cannot be developed. Furthermore, this kind of approach takes time. This is in short supply in our hectic public school schedule.

[And of course this returns to another point that I’ve made previously: we need more competent and caring adults in the building. Without one or two adults whose sole job it is to coordinate and facilitate these kinds of restorative efforts, our small experiment in the classroom doesn’t mean a whole lot to the fabric of the school. This shouldn’t keep us from continuing the process, though.]

After a year of using this playbook, I understand now that the most important part of our “Circles” is that we’re practicing shaping decisions together. Of course, I don’t do this at the beginning of the school year, when I’m busy setting up my own classroom management and establishing routines and order. I still think that routines and order make students more comfortable, as if they can trust the competency of their teacher. And you can’t “do” Restorative Practice without trust. Of course, this is exactly what the best examples of the process are trying to accomplish. And in so doing, hopefully our behavioristic school system can grow into something a bit more human.  

The Success For All framework both enables and encourages lazy teaching. This is a quiet threat to education—specifically in poor and racially segregated districts across the country.

As a teacher, the consequences of giving into this laziness are disturbing, mostly because the content that’s handed to us in plastic bins (one per “cycle”) contains severe myopia, an inability to see the world as it really is.

In the reading about AIDS in an infectious disease magazine, there is no mention of gender or sexuality. There is no mention of the hysteria and stigma surrounding the “gay plague” of the 80’s and 90’s. 

In the reading that extolls the ingenuity inherent in the creation of Dubai, there is no mention of the migrant workers—lured away from India or Pakistan, their passports confiscated—who’ve built the city, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

These are just two examples of why teachers need the discretion to choose their own content. 

While it can be comforting for teachers to not have to think about what they will teach, it can at the same time be frustrating, and also serves to devalue the content and curriculum itself, while also playing into the hands of those who would seek to profit from the creation of canned content like textbook companies, educational services providers like SFA, and those who’ve labeled themselves “education reformers”.

At the end of my second year teaching with SFA, I see more and more decisions taken away from teachers. And I have to admit that I also have felt the call to give into this point of view. Somewhere in a dark recess of my mind, I’m grateful to be rid of the burden of choice. After all, I’ve spent many a late night (or early morning) roaming the internet, combing bookshelves, texting peers in order to find that perfect short story, article, or political cartoon. This is not a healthy habit. 

For one, there is no perfect resource. And secondly, a teacher gains this kind of content knowledge over time: where to get great resources, whom to speak to when you want a good lead on poems. The thing about SFA is that they take away this evolving portion of the profession. There is no deepening of a teacher’s content knowledge, only tweaking of data entry and classroom management. There is no growing understanding of who you are as a writer and how you can best teach others to write well, because writing extends no further than the state’s standardized test. If you can hit all the pieces from SFA’s rubric with relatively few errors, then you’re gold. 

I believe that those in power in districts like ours don’t trust teachers to raise test scores. And I get this, on some level. Our funding and local control depend on those scores. Yet I don’t think that it’s helpful to one, pretend that giving students a quality education is the same thing as raising test scores, and two, that teachers can’t do both without a scripted curriculum, if given the time and latitude. 

Yet I as a teacher have felt comforted at times that I can arrive at school without needing to come up with my own specific plans. And this is the allure of something like SFA: by taking away choice and agency, they also take away a certain amount of teacher anxiety. I catch myself thinking this way sometimes, and it disturbs me.

It is frustrating that my supervisors refuse to allow us to mold our own content to the SFA framework. They say that this would take us too much time, and that we should spend that time on data entry. It is frustrating that they imply that it is specifically because we enter quantitative data that students “improve” and that it is this “improvement” of student test scores that shows which teachers are “good” and which are “bad”. This is nothing new. People like Diane Ravitch have been writing about it for years, but it is disturbing to watch it unfold in front of you. 

We oftentimes don’t stop to question this lunacy, because we’ve latched onto the buzzwords: “data entry”, “moving students”, “measurable”. So-called education reformers love these terms, because again, it allows us to be lazy about our thinking. Why is there so much emphasis on data entry? What the heck do we mean when we say, “moving students”? If something is easily measurable, does that automatically make it worth our attention?

Those questions are considered out of bounds. The educators who care about this have to remind ourselves that we shouldn’t give a damn about that, and go ahead and tell everyone who will listen that this is ludicrous, and no way to help mold citizens. 

Not all teachers will be willing to do this. We have families to attend to, grades to enter, parent phone calls to make, referrals to write, and journals to read. But again, this plays into the hands of the education reformers: “Don’t worry about it,” they say, “we will take care of the content, and even the format and the exact words, if you like. You worry about teaching.” The trouble is that our definitions of teaching split here, because I refuse to be nothing other than a technician, and those of us who care need to remind ourselves of this continually. 

Our profession, our students, and our democracy depend on it. 

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

                                 –The Shining, by Stephen King

From the beginning of this school year, I have been continually disturbed by the language that we specifically as English teachers use to describe students, vis-a-vis test scores. We speak of them as commodities, as “bubble kids” (who’re just on the cusp of reaching another score category), and as pieces that we need  to “move” from one bracket to another.

When one of our well-meaning instructional coaches spoke in a recent meeting about, “stay[ing] focused this year and really attack[ing] this, we can really help our students improve. We can really move a lot of our students,” I cringed and re-crossed my arms. She was speaking of course about our school’s dismal English test scores from last spring’s round of PSSA’s.

It’s not the language itself that’s the problem, but the assumptions hiding underneath that are deadening: we exist as teachers to improve students’ test-score numbers; a kid is useful only if they’re Proficient or Advanced; anything that cannot be easily quantitatively measured is not worth spending time on. Things like insight and community aren’t worth anything, except as a means to improving scores, or as another commodity that can be traded–as a point, as a grade, as a diploma.

There’s never discussion of the larger societal issue at the heart of our test-score debacle, which is racially and economically segregated schools. To be fair, our District is one of several who are currently awaiting our day in court with the state to fight for more equitable school funding. But we’re teachers, and our first responsibility is to the students who’re directly in front of us.

So instead, what is our answer? More practice testing–nine 90-minute periods just in English this year by my count, including SFA tests–and more diagnostic tests (four of the eight) designed specifically to mirror our state’s standardized tests. This doesn’t count the days when students who were either absent or couldn’t finish in 90 minutes are pulled from class to finish their test. We need that data, after all.

I feel called to resist this. Why? Because, again, our first responsibility is to our students. And while some might argue that I’m being selfish and standing up only for my own expediency and standing in the way of my students’ progress, I don’t believe that I’m being selfish by protesting a dehumanizing system of test-and-punish. And yet, I am part of this system. I administer the tests, sometimes without much protest. I do curtail my lesson plans to hew to the PSSA’s. I feel I need to, not only to protect my job and those of my colleagues, but also because the kids themselves feel they need to do well on the PSSA’s. So who am I to say that they don’t matter?

We force each other into these situations, and this needn’t be the case for the teaching of writing, specifically, in K-12 education.

There’s nothing wrong with the state’s mandate that students should be able to write effectively in three basic genres: narrative, informational, and argumentative. There’s nothing wrong with demanding that students are able to support a point or an idea with evidence from a provided text. The problem arises when–among other things–the state creates prompts that are boring, bereft of audience, purpose, and context. Any specific prompt is contrived and artificial by necessity, but then the goal of writing effectively is lost. It isn’t about changing the question, it’s about changing the way that good writing is taught and measured.

And back to the larger question: how can we as teachers not become monsters? How can we not allow ourselves to be entirely swallowed by this singular obsession with improving test scores, even as it dehumanizes both teachers and the students? Truthfully, I’m biding my time, taking notes, tallying days lost, starting conversations about testing with kids in class, and waiting for those days in the testing “window” in the spring. I’m curious to see if our test scores do in fact improve this year. I don’t think they will, but I will withhold judgement for now.

Then again, any improving scores are beside the point: if we brutalize each other and the kids, and “move” our students from Basic to Proficient, we’re still monsters. Even if the scores improve, we always have to ask if it was worth it.

 

Bandying about catchphrases is one of the favorite past-times of educators. Drop a term or a name, and everyone is suppose to understand your meaning. The trouble is that this doesn’t give anyone an accurate idea of what is happening inside your classroom.

One of the most popular terms for an English teacher was popularized by one teacher, Nancie Atwell, who founded her own demonstration school in Maine, the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Her term: Reading and Writing Workshop.

If I mean anything by this term, I mean this: the student’s interests in reading and writing should be placed in the middle of the class as the “curriculum”; students need to write for real-life audiences and purposes; students need a teacher who is also a writer himself to teach and mentor them.

Atwell–the honoree of the first Global Teacher Prize from the Varkey Foundation–perhaps never envisioned moving her concept of reading and writing workshop into an urban school. That is, into a racially and economically isolated school that is overwhelmingly black, with all the socially engineered disadvantages that come with this situation. Nevertheless, I’ve always found her classic In The Middle to be one of my best resources when teaching writing.

This past year our middle school ELA curriculum was split into two classes: “Reading” class (Success For All) and “English” class, which was to focus on writing. The problem was, there was no writing curriculum, no plan, for this class. Enter opportunity.

I therefore began the school year with a question: What would happen when I gave students the choice of what to read and how fast, and the choice of what to write?

My students were regular-track kids in our segregated district, and their school habits ranged from a very few who inhaled books and wrote their own stories or journaled to a few who roamed the halls, never brought a pencil nor book to class and bent my patience on a regular basis, with the overwhelming majority in between.

What follows is my appraisal of “what happened when”:

 

The positives:

— A few kids finished stories they were proud of (comics, fantasy) or letters (letters to parents, letters to younger students) and shared them with friends. I would catch them reading these instead of the required texts during class.

— With some books, kids passed them around, exhorting each other to “Read this, it’s nice!” Sometimes these books disappeared for weeks as they were passed without my knowledge from one student to another until they’d been consumed by an entire clique of friends.

–I finally hit on something when we created “Recipe” wall lists for certain genres of writing by inspecting exemplars as a class. When kids were missing an “ingredient” from the genre, I simply pointed them back to our list: “Well, what ingredients are you missing for a film review?”

— I personally learned more about new methods and modes of writing than I ever imagined existed. A few kids in each class both read and wrote stories or fan fiction using apps on their phones. Some would ask permission to use their phones first, some would just do it and I’d “catch” them while making my rounds of desks.

 

The negatives:

— Plenty of kids (the majority it seemed as the year wore on) either started something and dropped it to goof off, or went from one beginning to another without ever finishing or re-writing anything.

— Far too many books were lost because kids were careless in returning them.

— I couldn’t always keep kids quiet during independent reading, so the kids who were really trying to read got pissed off and quit reading in class.

— I didn’t have enough writing examples of different genres and kids hardly ever referred to them, though they were available at the back of the room.

— Too many kids said they were “conferencing” with each other, while in fact they were just gossiping, despite the fact that I taught conferencing and developed a standard reference form in the fall.

— We didn’t share much as an entire class, and therefore the good writing that one student had completed died a lonely death on the page, without receiving its due time in the spotlight as a learning opportunity for other kids.

 

New challenges for the fall:

In the second year of the Success For All curriculum (per the administration’s request), the English department has developed a writing “curriculum” that will supplement the reading-heavy SFA schedule.

Two challenges that this poses to my plans: one, this curriculum follows the state-assessed genres of writing without much deviance, and two, our new schedule only allows for seven or eight “writing days” per Quarter. I and several other teachers raised the obvious objection that a kid won’t remember what they’ve been writing from two weeks ago, to no avail.

No one publicly raised an objection to the edict from the district curriculum coordinator that our goal should be to help kids score better on the State-mandated tests in the spring.

So if I want to follow the prescripts of Atwell’s “Reading-Writing Workshop”–with plenty of time set aside for independent reading and writing, with tons of teacher and peer conferring, with almost unlimited choice of writing genre, and writing for an audience and a purpose beyond the teacher and the test, then I’ll have to be more careful about how I do that.

I don’t want to go it alone too much.

That’s not only unhealthy for a new(er) teacher’s job, but I also have to work with the people with whom I’ve developed this curriculum. Despite the misgivings I have about the institution of schooling as usual, I have to admit that I’ve chosen to be a part of that institution.

 

What I resolve to do…

— Use every available moment on the shoulders of SFA class time to have students work on their chosen writing project.

— Continue to create “Genre Recipes” from real-life exemplars to show them how an adult writer approaches a new genre (I have never said to myself, “I’ve never written that before, let me go find a graphic organizer that fits”).

— “Explode” the three assessed genres (narrative, expository, argumentative), stretching them to their limits, rather than mirroring the State’s bleak and unrealistic assignments.

— Incorporate independent reading into weekly class time.

— Continue building our classroom library (especially as we’ll be losing our full-time librarian position this fall).

— Find some way to allow students to share their work with their class and beyond.

The Success For All Foundation is excellent at turning genuine learning opportunities into moments of dull conformity.

One day this past spring my 5th period class was threatening to break free of that mold.

Whenever I can go quiet, take a seat on top of a desk in the room, and simply point and speak students’ names while they carry the conversation, I know that true understanding can’t be far off.

The text that day was Novio Boy, a play by Gary Soto published in 1997 that centers on the first teenage date of a boy who’s romantically interested in an older girl. The play is somewhat predictable, but also funny, thoughtful, and rich with potential for understanding into what it means to be a young person who’s dating for the first time.

Students were absorbed in the discussion, asking questions of each other, referring to the text to defend their points of view, and bringing up examples from different mediums, including other books and their own experiences. In short, they were searching for insight.

But I was about to play my part and throw water on this spark.

The problem was that the questions that were mandated by The Success For All Foundation for this play simply sucked, and I had to turn students’ attention toward them.

The questions were too focused on the minutiae of stage direction and tone that they missed an opportunity to discuss young people’s relationships with adults, with their peers, or with their love interests. I ended up cutting off the discussion because we needed to move onto the “Lightning Round” (read: sharing their answers to the prescribed questions). In attempting solely to hammer home a format for answering questions on a standardized test, we missed a chance at gaining something more enduring.

Everyone involved in public schooling has their own ideas of what a complete education should look like, even if they’ve never taken a single moment to think about it.

People who don’t know any better (and some who do or should) bark about transferrable skills or training workers to beat the Chinese. SFA has made a fortune off those impulses, preferring to sacrifice insight in the pursuit of compliance and temporary skill proficiency.

Some days, I have preferred to go in the opposite direction: sacrificing the skills in order to focus on insight. I never completely skipped over the reading and the questions that The Foundation mandated, we just wouldn’t spend too much time belaboring the point when it came to discussing our answers. Instead we’d move onto a short documentary, a news clip, or an imagined roleplay.

To be clear: the reading helped to inform our understanding of whatever else I made time for–we didn’t abandon it, but the skill was no longer our Holy Grail.

The Success For All curriculum that I use is continually guilty of this myopia.

We read about the transmission methods of HIV in a magazine about infectious diseases without once mentioning the stigma surrounding gay people living with the virus.

We learned all about the great technological achievements of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai without looking at an image of a worker from India who couldn’t leave because his passport had been confiscated by the very company that lured him to the UAE in the first place.

In short, we ignored opportunities for understanding for the sake of standardized proficiency.

Within the first eight hours of my new teaching position, I thought of leaving the profession. And not of leaving in the next five years, but of leaving tomorrow. I cursed under my breath, sent angry text messages to my wife, and went hunting immediate job openings in other districts, in full-time tutoring, and in educational publishing—anything so that I could get away from here.

The reason for all of this hand-wringing and soul-searching was that I had been told to help implement a regimented and standardized test-prep curriculum, euphemistically named Success For All.

Luckily, after all of that I also called a trusted colleague or two to commiserate and ask for advice. This helped, if only because it allowed me to place my panic within the proper context. If I needed the job and wanted to stay in the profession, then I could find ways to exercise my autonomy. If I wanted to learn and grow, I had to stay. I walked into school the next day somewhat calmed, and ready to try my best to engage the thing that had briefly driven me toward madness.

When I accepted a full-time job teaching middle school Language Arts (at the same district where I’d served as a long-term substitute at the high school last year), I had been told by the head of Human Resources that I would help to implement a new reading program.

“OK,” I said, “that’s not a problem,” not realizing that the program was in fact The Foundation, and that The Foundation’s model would tether me to a day-by-day, minute-by-minute, word-by-word script. In hindsight, I should have asked more questions.

The Success For All Foundation was begun in 1986 by—among others—Dr. Robert Slavin, an educational researcher at Johns Hopkins University. The Foundation’s stated goal is to raise the reading and math scores of the nation’s poorest students. By the time I was hired to teach middle school, my district had already implemented SFA in all of its elementary schools. This model in fact permeated all subjects, but especially targeted language arts and math.

[The manner in which the district imposed SFA on its schools, administrations, teachers, and students deserves its own review, which at the moment I lack the time to undertake myself.]

Two months into the Success For All model, and I’m still feeling overwhelmed by the amount of fluff (the points systems, the team scoresheets, the different codified edu-babble terms) that I have to sort through in order to get to the core of what the program is designed to do, and that’s improving students’ reading and writing skills. In particular, improving them apropos of excelling on mandated state standardized tests. And there’s the kicker: this is test prep, and there’s no way to deny that.

Now some might furrow their brows and ask blankly, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” And the answer is, nothing, so long as this is your end-goal for kids. But this isn’t my goal for my students, nor for my own child. I want to be a teacher who helps create citizens, not workers. For me, education should be about personal and social liberation, not only personal utility.

There are things that I like about this program, including its reliance on teamwork, and the open study and discussion of basic reading strategies. As one retiring teacher admonished her colleagues on the last day of the 2015/16 school year, I’m striving to take what’s good about the program, and leave the rest alone.

But that doesn’t stop me from critiquing, and from still believing that this program has grave weaknesses. Ultimately though, staying put is more about trying to take back some of my autonomy. As I try and show my students, in the act of studying and writing you have the readymade tools not only to change your own viewpoint, but also by extension to change your environment.

I think more police officers should be wearing body cameras. I also believe that the documentary camera should have a place in the continuing education of teachers.

After the events surrounding the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile the country re-hashed the narrative of cop as villain. After the events surrounding the deaths of police officers in Dallas last weekend, the country re-hashed the narrative of cop as hero.

Both of these narratives are devoid of context and nuance, and both keep us from true understanding.

However, the video that helped to document the death of Mr. Castile showed us the scenario in real-time. Beyond helping with any legal proceedings against the officer, could this video be used for future trainings? Yes, I believe it could be. Specifically, exactly how not to react in this type of situation.

I’ve watched since becoming a teacher as both law enforcement officers and educators are called out as either heroes and villains, and I find both stories unsatisfactory.

As Redditt Hudson has written for Vox, the answer lies somewhere in between: for example, he speaks about how–in his view–a police force is made up of some entrenched disgruntled officers and some ramrod-straight moral officers, surrounded by a vast majority who can be swayed in different directions.

Hudson also thinks that cops benefit from cameras because it makes them think more carefully about their jobs. That camera makes them hold each other accountable; that camera hopefully helps them become better officers. I think the same can be true for teachers.

I can only imagine that it’s scary being a cop: being alone and not knowing how to react in a given situation; the same can be true of teaching, though with less potentially lethal consequences.

I’d probably be fine working with a camera inside my classroom, but only if the goal would be to help me become a better teacher. If it were only used to catch a student with their phone out (or me, for that matter), or to punish me for not punishing that student, then I’d want no part in it. I’d want the same to be true for police officers.

I’d like to review that tape in order to learn from it. Every pre-service teacher has to film and review their own teaching at least once, sometimes alone and sometimes with their peers or more experienced mentors. But this practice almost always falls away after the first year. I’d like it to continue.

How could we make both professions–law enforcement and education–more like the medical field, where we do “peer reviews”, asking each other what went well in this scenario, and what could have been done better? If the camera was used for that purpose—just as I believe it should be used by police officers—then I’d be all about it, to borrow a phrase from my students. The awkwardness of feeling like I was being “watched” would fade over time; it would become a non-issue.

This means changing the structure of a teacher’s day and our working conditions. You can’t just add this extra time-burden without limiting another facet of our days. So maybe it’s the same with cops? Should police training (and continuing education) be more about reviewing video of de-escalations and successful relationship-building, and less about weapons?

 

[NOTE: the following blog entry may only be funny either to those between the ages of 15 and 18, or to those who work with said age group.]

Sometimes class goes like this:

6^th Period, last class of the day; both the students and I are dragging a bit, and we’re reviewing the previous night’s reading from Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart via students’ selected quotes and an informal, teacher-lead recitation.

One student has written the following quote on the board: “Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop.”

Mr. Forsyth: throwing in the emphasis as much as possible “So Okonkwo is this man’s man–he’s a farmer—and the yam is a man’s crop!”

Students snicker here and there in the room. Several grin at Mr. Forsyth, others roll their eyes.

Mr. Forsyth: honestly curious. What’s so funny? He’s a man—he believes—and the yam is a man’s crop.

More of the same from students.

Mr. Forsyth: Okay, each class today has laughed at that when I say it—and I realize I’m being a bit silly with it—but can someone let me in on the joke?

General silence for a moment. One brave student speaks up.

Brave Student: Mr. Forsyth, yam means ‘vagina’.

Students snicker again, watching for my reaction.

Mr. Forsyth: ‘Vagina?’

Brave Student: It’s like, ‘I’m going to go find me some yams tonight.’

General laughter at this students’ words, the recognition, and my fake-flustered look.

Lots of folks from outside of my school—as well as some students within the school itself—criticize the speech of my students. “Are you teaching them English?” they’ll ask, and I’ll have to launch into my explanation of code-switching, and how society decides whose speech is denigrated and whose is standardized. It’s about power and context-specific savvy, not about correctness.

Much of the vocabulary and grammatical structure of my students’ Black Speech (AAVE, Ebonics, whatever you want to call it) is wonderfully subversive. It’s designed to be a language of the hallways that (mostly) white teachers can’t catch. It has its roots in survival and subterfuge.

But sometimes the confusion can just be flat-out hilarious.

This quasi-performance has become a common trope of mine: act like the dorky clueless white dude, try to invite (in an admittedly small way) my students’ language into the classroom as a tool and as worthy of study, and laugh a little bit too when I put my foot in my mouth.

Because we all need a little chuckle now and then in the classroom, and because building relationships through curriculum is some of our most important educational work.