I'm Not the Teacher I Used to Be...and I wouldn't want to be

A lot of the news the last year has covered awful, misogynistic, racist stories/posts/Tweets that have been uncovered from celebrities' pasts, as well as some in real time.
Most recently, James Gunn was fired as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for offensive tweets from roughly a decade ago.
The tweets/jokes are awful. No debate.
People should be held accountable for what they say and do, online and face to face. No debate.
I don't know if Disney was correct in firing a man based on alt-right accusations that use decade old information as evidence. I don't know where the line is. Many claim Gunn is not the man he was then.
I don't want to debate this issue, BUT it has made me think about the response. About how Gunn states, and his friends and colleagues support, that he is a different man, changed, kind.

The last few months and years, I have thought a lot about how I am not the teacher I used to be.
I used to mimic the sarcastic, frankly mean, male teachers I had.
I used to be a teacher who claimed her students needed to be prepared for the "real world."
I used to believe that I helped my students best by giving them the cultural capital of the canon to be competitive in a world stacked against them.
I used to see parent relationships as inherently antagonistic.

But I'm not this person anymore.

Some of these changes happened slowly, a single idea or project or trying something new.
Some were more wholesale changes, overhauling my whole classroom.

Some of these things came from listening to smart people on Twitter.
Some from seeing something I wanted to try.
Some from staying in conversations about education, and keeping up.

But today, as I talked with a colleague, I realized that not only are a lot of our staff NOT having these conversations, but they aren't even aware of what the conversations ARE.

This summer, a lot of people have talked about the issues, the trouble, the damage, that is done when teachers, particularly Anglo teachers, replicate the teaching that taught them, the systems that they did well with, the assignments and readings that they were given.

I would not want to be judged as the teacher I was ten years ago. I would not go back to teaching that way. This year, in many ways I'm overhauling my classes. But I'm also using this as a guideline:

The world, the news, the seemingly daily tragedies can seem overwhelming, and I'm an adult. Our students are so much more susceptible to these things. There is not a lot I can do about that, although I recognize the need to focus on social justice, and not stand by and do nothing. But this year, I'm going to focus on my classroom. The changes I can make in the lives of the 150 students that will inhabit my room this year. On how to best serve THEM.

So, in that light, and building on my previous posts about tips for the start of the year, and things to make your classroom better (it's not Teacher Instagram), here is a list of small moves that can have great changes, that I'm trying this year.

I am not teaching the canon. I am decolonizing my bookshelf. My students, both my English 9 and AP Language students, will choose their books, their short stories. All of them.

• If you always teach To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Odyssey, and the poems in the 9th grade textbook, and if you teach versions of the same lessons, every year, you are doing a disservice to your students.
• You're not choosing texts based on your students' interests.
• You're not choosing texts that represent your students.
• If you're using lesson plans off the internet, from other teachers, you're doing a disservice to your students. This doesn't mean you can't try out a cool idea you saw online. It means students and learning isn't cookie cutter, and if you're applying that theory, you're not teaching. You're presenting.
• Student choice will increase engagement.
• I got enough donations to have current, representative, relevant YA novels as the majority in my classroom. I will supplement their choices for lit circles with things like The Jungle (because my AP students do love it, go figure), Farewell to Manzanar, In the Time of Butterflies. The literature circle approach means the 15 books that I couldn't teach because there was no class set, means I suddenly have a lot more options.
• I will choose a mentor text that we'll use as a model, and for mini-lessons. Students will then apply those lessons, those skills, to their choice books. This will focus on transferring skills. Even with my choice of mentor texts though, I'm not relying on the canon. Newer, more relevant texts my not have all the literary elements I want, but movie stills and scenes are great for showing students this, so it'll get taught.

Actual conversation I've had with a colleague-
Them: I don't like X as a teacher, but I can deal with them
Me: They're racist and misogynist
Them: Well, yes, but...
Me: No buts. I won't stay quiet on that anymore. I'm calling them out.

• Especially when I taught in NC, I learned to bite my tongue a lot. The guidance counselor using the n-word. Misogyny from the principal. "Obama is a Muslim, who is destroying the country." These people weren't changing these views, I needed my job, and more times than not, I rolled my eyes, and stayed silent. Because my white privilege made it possible for me to. There was no consequence or trauma if I didn't.
• I can't do that anymore. I just can't. I can't because it's wrong. I can't because I need to use my privilege. I can't because so many of my students have to, are not in a position to.
• I am working on actively, and explicitly, calling out bigotry and oppression. Dismantling it in my classroom in every way I can.

Tech is fun. It is cool. Using to use it responsibly is a great skill. It's not a replacement for dedicated teachers, content knowledge, or accessibility.

• I was an early adopter of tech in the classroom, Google Docs, email. I use it to make all my resources available all the time, to everyone- other teachers, students, parents. I love it. Whether it's making our class pacing calendar a live Google Doc, or Google Voice to text parents, or taking and sharing photos of board notes, I love it all. My students and parents do too, they always know what's going on in my class. Absent students use the resources to get caught up.
• BUT even if you are aware, don't penalize students, survey them, in many ways tech is not accessible. Students don't have computers, printers, wifi. So you have to think on how and why you use it.
• Also, I have noticed in the last couple of years, in an effort to provide notes, info, resources, that it resulted in my students copying the information rather than using it as a model. So this year, I'm going to pull back on a lot of this, and see what happens.

It's easy to coast. To get tired. To teach one lesson, then phone it in or go through the motions for the next three classes as they do that lesson. This gets easier the longer you teach. Everyone has days like this. 8 hours on every day is tiring, and sometimes some things give. It's human nature. BUT I can design my class so that this IS just a once in a while, exhausted, sick, occurrence, and NOT a feature of the system.

• This means engaging with my students in their reading.
• This means conferencing with them, their experiences, their questions, their responses, about a text or writing.
• This means modeling in my Daybook, the work I'm asking them to do.
• This means changing things as I need to, in response to individual students and groups and classes. 
• Make a list of things you do in your classroom- notes, routines, homeworks, assignments, all of it. Then ask yourself, what is the pedagogical reason for doing X? If you can't answer that in a meaningful way, then you're probably replicating things that you were taught, how you were taught, or education methods that are not accurate. When we're tired, or drained, we default to what we know. But here's the thing- what we "know," what we learned, is probably not accurate anymore. There's a better way. Research has proven differently. The conversations have shifted.
• Learning styles don't exist.
• The gains of a "growth mindset" are infintessimal.
• Homework and summer reading assignments punish students with family responsibilities and from certain socio-economic classes.
• Popcorn reading or round-robin reading shames students and doesn't model or teach.
• Punishing students for late work or not taking late work does not teach students the content they're in your class to learn.
• Punishing students for things out of their control (tardies, absences, not having materials) sets up an antagonistic relationship.
• Make your language and classroom explicitly anti-racist and not ableist.

As a list, it's not a lot. Yet these changes will radically change my classroom culture, and MORE IMPORTANTLY it will change the experience of my students.
It will change their learning.
It will change how they FEEL about their learning.
It will change our relationship.

These aren't things I pulled out of a hat, they're based on research based books, conversations online, evidence that the things I was doing were wrong, not working, just awful.
I don't expect all this to coalesce on the first day. Like routines, we'll build up to some of these things. BUT, I do think it's important that I start the year knowing this is the rough road map for where I want to be. I think it's important that all of my decisions this year are made through this lens.