Mining For Hidden Gems

This was a good year for reading. There was the pandemic of course and the heightened awareness that we don’t really know a whole lot about each other and about our country’s history, which prompted even more reading. Then about a month ago I tore my Achilles tendon which resulted in surgery and forced confinement on a couch. I’ve read 96 books so far (my goal is 100 before the year),  from a 622 page tome on the Great Migration to 32 page picture books. I’ve travelled back to Venezuela,  Iran and Texas -  places intimately connected to who I am. I read to understand and be understood. I also read to escape the news, even if for just a few hours. Here is a list of my top ten: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson - Over the past twenty years, I’ve read as many books as I could about the Black experience in America. As an immigrant, I realized a long time ago that I know very little about this part of America and even less about how it has impacted the rest of American history. If I ...

  Before there was art criticism, there was art. Before there was literary analysis, there was literature. Before there were rules, there was the game. Standards come into being long after there is a large body of accumulated knowledge and experience about a field. And they are always subjective! They are as limited as the vision, expertise and knowledge of those who write them. They are as universally applicable as the degree of participation of those who are subjected to them. So basically, standards, benchmarks, and milestones are all man-made. They change and evolve as our collective knowledge about a field grows and deepens. Standards are also written by people and as such reflect the values and biases of those people. Sometimes standards are guided by political ideologies rather than scientific research.  The more I teach, the more I question the unquestioned use of standards. To insist that every learner master the same concepts at the same time and to the same degree i...

Photo by  Marc-Olivier Jodoin  on  Unsplash When I was a child, my dentist would give me a tablet to chew on that would turn the plaque a bright purple color. These “disclosing tablets” were helpful in showing kids how to brush their teeth better. The pills tasted horrible, the sight of purple teeth was ugly and the truth about how badly or infrequently I was brushing my teeth was embarrassing. The pandemic has been a disclosing tablet, revealing all the areas that we have left neglected. This realization is not pleasant, the truths we are discovering are ugly and admitting our ignorance and neglect is embarrassing. But much in the same way, this experience can be used to make changes, changes that can go beyond the current moment and help restructure our communities for the better. When our one week Spring Break turned into two and then gradually led to online learning, many of the imperfections and inequities in teaching, learning and the role schools play were exposed....

Photo by Steven Wright on Unsplash To be a more reflective, responsive teacher is to cultivate curiosity by questioning everything we do, know, read, think or hear. By questioning I don’t mean second guess, interrogate, doubt or indict. Curiosity is simply asking questions to understand better. Here are are some of my curiosities for today: What do we mean when we say:  Meeting the needs of ALL of our students - How do we know what their needs are?  Preparing students for success - What do we mean by ‘success’? Empowering students or adults - What are we empowering them to do? What is our definition of ‘power’? Authentic learning - Authentic for whom?  Problem Based Learning - Whose problems are we solving? Who decided that was a problem? What do we mean when we say ‘problem’? What these questions have in common is the assumption that we all have the same definition of need, success, power, authenticity and problem. But a bigger assumption is the one about our true natu...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2009 TED talk titled The Danger of a Single Story explains what happens when what we know of a place or a people (or even a historical event) is shaped by one perspective. What we have is an incomplete story and often an inaccurate one. If we believe that first story on face value and are not diligent in our own truth-seeking, it will settle in our brain and consciousness and claim prime real estate - squatters' rights. Any other story will have to now compete with it. Any new information is filtered through that initial imprinting. And it may take decades to supplant that initial story or add to it. Here is my personal experience with swallowing  incomplete truths: I was fifteen years old when I came to the United States from Iran. My knowledge of Black people and their culture was limited to what I had seen on dubbed TV shows and athletes at Olympic games, i.e very incomplete, twisted and inaccurate. I had very little knowledge of the Civil Right...

I have learned so much about teaching and learning by observing nature (Read Goose Liver Pedagogy , Butterfly Facts for a Teacher and Untitled  for other musings on nature and teaching) Last year I hired someone to trim my trees. I was so desperate to get the job done that I just went with the random person who had left their card on my door and wasn't asking for a lot of money.  When I came home I was shocked to see how they had pretty much hacked all of my trees down without any attention to aesthetics or shape. I was sure I had lost all of my crepe myrtles. But a couple of weeks later I began to see signs of branches and leaves coming back! The trees bloomed all summer and I was relieved that I hadn't lost them. When winter came, the crepe myrtles naturally lost their leaves and became bare again. But as Spring approached, I began to worry that most of them would not bud or bloom again. There was no sign of new growth. In mid-March, I went on a closer inspection and notice...

As teachers we want to believe we love all of our students equally and treat each and every one of them the same. We know that equality and equity are not quite the same things. This graphic has been helpful to me and my students in understanding that each of us may need different resources to gain equal access to learning. If equality is the end, equity is the means to get to that end. What we hope to achieve is a society where each and every member has an equal voice, their needs are considered with equal urgency and concern, their lives are valued equally and they have the same rights and privileges for participation. Equity is how we get there. Equity is recognizing that we do not live in a world that has always believed in equality, that some of us are not starting at the same place as others because of hundreds of years of inequality. Equity means that we recognize the beautiful diversity of our communities and appreciate the various ways we learn and express ourselves, even w...

I ran into a former student at the office supply store the other day. She greeted me with her sweet smile and let me know that she remembers her fourth grade year and me fondly. She also let me know that she is graduating as a dental hygienist soon and will be looking for a job in her field. I was not surprised. I remember her as a serious student, diligent, hard working and conscientious  - all the qualities that I knew would allow her to succeed in school and in life. On top of that she was kind, well-mannered and always wore a smile on her face. "Jesse" was my student ten years ago while we still offered transitional bilingual services to our students that came from Spanish speaking homes. The goal of a transitional program was to strengthen a student's English proficiency enough so that they could transition to a monolingual classroom. It was a remedial model that looked at students' multiple languages as a handicap and not an asset. That year "Jesse" ...

I've been reading and thinking a lot about reflection this year and wondering how to create an environment that fosters the kind of thinking that leads to learning from experiences. On Tuesday, when my students came back from two weeks on Winter break and we sat on the carpet to catch up and reconnect, I asked them to take a minute and think about what they had learned? I admit I was trying to avoid the situation where some of my students had a lot to say about where they went and what they got and others felt left out. I wasn't sure how it would go. I was prepared for a lot of silence and repeated answers. But I was pleasantly surprised.  Here are some of their responses: "I learned that you have to be really patient when you go on a long road trip." "I learned that dogs need a lot of care and attention, otherwise you have to give them away." "I learned what it means when people say Christmas is about family. I knew it was true but this year I real...