Starting Your Anti-Racist Pedagogy

I've spoken before about coming to my anti-racist pedagogy way too late into my 20 year career. I've gone back and forth about whether writing up how I got here was worth it. I don't want to center myself. But if I could write something that maybe takes work off of Black educators, maybe that's helpful. I didn't want to write a "give me a cookie, look at me" post, but I did want to provide a practical explanation for just how easy it can be to start making these shifts in your classroom.

So this is my attempt to do those things.

In 2016 I wrote a Tweet, then a Google Doc, then a wiki, now a blog, about "How to Grad School While Poor." It was meant to be a crowd sourced resource. For the most part it has been helpful to folks. But I got called out almost immediately for identifying as "white trash" in the description paragraph for what the document was and how I hoped it would help. I was initially resistant to the Women of Color who emailed me to correct me, and then I was defensive. And then I sat with it. This was the start.

Like many now, I started with a reading list:

• Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American (2017)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) and Between the World and Me (2015)
• Matthew Demond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016)
• Matt Wray's Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006)
• Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (2010)
• Robin Diangelo's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018)

I also used social media, following people, organizations, voices, I would not normally encounter but needed to hear. The most impactful was #DisruptTexts

I always work with things as soon as I know better, so my high school students started hearing about these topics explicitly, and we read these texts in class. I bought, and got donated, YA and other books where my students could see themselves in. These titles are easy to find by Googling, and buying a few at a time, setting lit circles for them is easy. I also found that it's not hard to share wishlists and get people to donate a copy here or there.

I did find at this start that I hit two cognitive speed bumps which I won't snitch tag but will talk about. A very popular group that advocates for representative books and reading when called out/in about a problematic stance did the opposite of what I had come to expect, and instead of admitting wrong and doing better, claimed they hadn't done anything wrong, blocked, and ignored further comments. The other was an author of what I thought was a good book for educators, getting them to see their Black students in the classroom. But the book uses "tribe" and the author will not mea culpa and move on, do better. I was confused that folks dedicated to social justice and representation would do this. I recognize now that it's all complicated. I choose not to follow and support these folks, but understand why some still support their voices. I write this out only to say that there is no perfect here, and intent matters, and does not negate impact. I've seen a lot of trash edu celebrities lash out and check out when asked about problematic crap (and it's almost always framed as a way for them to learn and do better). There is nothing wrong with saying I messed up, I see that, I'll do better.

I teach at an HBCU and knew I wanted to keep that in mind as I designed by British Literature I survey and Shakespeare class. I chose texts that I felt talked about race, we talked about how race was seen, especially in the survey we talked about the artificial constructs that racists made and used, and I made sure that we read Scholars of Color.

This past spring I taught a Gender and Lit course. It was not my field, I do folklore, popular culture, medieval and early modern, but I was excited about the course at the same time that I knew it was out of my field and I'd have to do my homework. I knew I wanted to teach Black authors, that I wanted to theme it around whose story gets told, and who determines that, and voice, and agency. So on day one I spent class telling the students how I designed the class, why, what themes I wanted to focus on, and why, and explained it was not my expertise and I was going to screw up at some point, and I'd figure it out, and we'd go forward. I was also explicit with them that I was using anti-racist pedagogy to guide my work, and #DisruptTexts. The class really worked. But it would not have worked without me doing the work.

Like wise, this fall, I am teaching World Literature I, a Young Adult Literature, and Intro to English Studies classes. When I designed them I first wanted to apply the lessons I had learned. I wanted to decenter whiteness and tell a more accurate, representative narrative. I also wanted, especially in the YA and Intro classes, to give the students a clear overview of the ideas, the scholars, the conversations in the field, many of which are centered on race. 

For me, designing these courses came down to some simply steps to implement in your classes:

• What primary texts did you choose?
• My guide here is always “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. (Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop 1990).”
• One of the reasons why it is so important for my students to see themselves in what we read is because do many of them never have. A common argument against representative teaching and reading is that it's an agenda to never teach white authors. And it's not. This is why I prefer representative over diversity because too often diversity is seen as a box to check- I assigned Maxine Hong Kingston's The Warrior Woman, I'm done. Representative texts on the other hand seek to teach literature that reflects the world. To me that means an accurate representation but it also means in its correct historical context, accurately, not the whitewashed version taught in K-12.
• What secondary texts and scholars are you reading?
• I've started to post a picture of the scholars I teach when I post the link to their articles and books and blogs on my class notes. I want students to SEE the scholars we study. 
• I also have made a concerted effort to make sure that the scholars we read are BIPOC and queer, and speak specifically to issues within their academic work.
• What topics and ideas and history are you teaching? 
• I always teach my literature in its historical context. Literature, as with popular culture, is always a representation of its historical and cultural moment. Therefore it is impossible to teach these texts accurately without teaching the context. One of the issues with continuing to teach some of these texts, of teaching the traditional canon, is that only the literature is taught, it is totally divorced from the context. 
• What conversations do you make room for?
• This may be the scariest for educators. Your students may say things that are hard for you to hear. They may say things that you have a negative reaction to. You have to be prepared to give the students these spaces, this time, you have to let them have these conversations. This means letting go of control of your classroom. It also means that you need to build in supports and structures for your students to step away, skip class, walk out, and take breaks as they work through these issues and deal with these truths.

In my experience, these changes, these moves, are easy to start doing. But these are not one and done things. You have to continuously read, listen, learn, and improve how you are serving your students, the content you are teaching. The changes with my high school students were a great start, but I didn't fill my class bookshelves with representative texts and call it done. It was a start, that led me to opening my class to center students and the conversations they wanted and needed to have. Then I used this to explicitly talk about race, and history, and specific issues. Without all of this work, every day, showing up, changing, messing up, I would not have been able to tailor my classes at the college level. Without experimenting with what this looked like in higher ed, I would not have been able to create and teach my Gender and Lit class, and without that I would not be able to teach my classes this fall.

Every semester I am making changes based on listening to new conversations, reading new books, and trying new things. To me this is what the work requires, changing and learning all the time. My classes are not perfect. They are not model examples. But they don't have to be. They DO have to be better than they were the day, week, semester before.

If teachers are willing to do the work I do think these things are easy to start with. It's hard to keep up, it's hard to keep going, but it's great work, it's necessary work. And it is ongoing. 

This spring I'm teaching Shakespeare, and rather than teach something similar to what I taught this past fall I've decided to teach it as Shakespeare: Race and Adaptation. I am going to teach King Lear with James Earl Jones. We're going to look at Djimon Hounsou as Caliban in The Tempest. We're going to look at Vanessa I. Corredera's "Get Out and the Remediation of Othello's Sunken Place: Beholding White Supremacy's Coagula." We're going to look at Star Crossed. We're going to read Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson. We're going to read Amiri Baraka's conversations about Shakespare. We're going to use the Globe's anti-racist Shakespeare, we're going to look at the work adaptation does, what the revisions and reimagings do. 

I have a running document of "future class ideas" that when a great article or blog from a Scholar of Color comes across my feed I just paste it on that document, so this fall when I plan out my Shakespeare class I have all these resources in one place so I can plan. I think this class will be great, I think it will reflect the most current conversations in the field, and that the students can engage with. 

Designing Different Ways to Contribute and Engage in Online Classes

As classes move online this past summer for the pandemic, more schools moved summer school online this summer, and others are making a variety of decisions for fall (resilient, hyflex, online, f2f but ready to pivot) a lot of teachers and professors are talking more and more about what worked and didn't for them and their students and things to address for the fall.

Most teachers/professors will tell you that it is key that students engage and contribute to courses with any type of online component regardless of the LMS (Google Classroom or Pages, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.). I like to use engage and contribute rather than participate because I think they are more active verbs that also convey that my classes are just as much the students' as mine. Also, participation too often is a box to check and then move on and that's not what I want classes to be.

Each of these LMS have some version of a discussion board which many use to address engagement or contributing to various degrees of success. Too often discussion boards are not done well, like participation they are boxes to check- post once, respond twice type things that I don't think add much to the course.

So, I've been thinking of different ways my students could engage and contribute with the course's content. I had a couple of goals with this. I wanted things that would be easy for students to use. I wanted things that would work with a variety of LMS.

So, here are my thoughts:

• A Google Sheet where all students have edit access. Post a prompt, graph, question in a center square. Students post answers in pattern around. You could have them color code according to sides or topic, have some fun with it. It seems a cool way to talk and teach some ways to map data and information.
• Lino-It is online corkboards that you can put sticky notes, images, videos on. You can create one per module and just have students add cool things they find that connects to that content

• Once a week synchronous class. Maybe this is f2f if your institution allows, run like a seminar- this is what we did this week what did you think? Or maybe you do it on Hangouts or Zoom or in Blackboard Collaborate.
• Google Doc: you can copy and paste an article or story, any text. Students can use the insert comment feature to then annotate and comment on the text.
• Google Slide: Put a video, image, question, in the center, and students add squares with their comments or thoughts or responses.
• Google Doc: t-chart that students can edit. 
• Put a line or quote, cite, response
• Write a 1 sentence statement about a piece, then support with textual evidence
• Provide sentence starters for them to use as models 
• Polls 
• Discussion Boards
• You can have students record video or audio responses. 
• You can focus on making concise arguments, so the DBs become writing practice: write a 1 sentence thesis, make a text to text, text to world, text to self connection, support explanation: X shows Y....
• Let students sign up to be student moderators and pick the topic, "I want to talk about..." 
• Ask Essential Questions

My fall classes, both online and face to face are going to all have online components. I've designed them so there are 4 modules. Each module starts with a mini-lesson, resources, then has a "read this" section, then a "do this" assessment. Right now I plan on having a "ask questions about anything" discussion board. Then for each module, one of the above forms of contributing for the response to the reading, and probably a more traditional discussion board for the assessment, so they can post drafts, and ask specific questions. I'm leaning more towards the resiliency model, where I design 1 class, with all this built in, and if some classes are face to face in the fall, we use the synchronous time to discuss the reading (but students can still post to the online in addition to or instead of) and the same for the assessments, we'll use those days as workshop days OR they can post online AND post online.

My classes don't have an attendance policy so no one will be punished if they choose one option or another, or if their choice differs from one week to another. They can adapt and change their minds and make the best decision for themselves at that moment.

I have a statement that tells them we'll be flexible about all of this, and change as we need to.

COVID-19 Caveat

This caveat is here as a promise from me to you.

During these extraordinary times we’re all doing our best. You’re doing your best to juggle a myriad of responsibilities and keep attending classes, and I’m doing my best to teach you. In many ways this is uncharted territory.

This course is based on the assumption that you have the time to dedicate to this course, have the mental and physical energy to do the work, and have reliable, daily access to the tools (computer, Internet) you need to be successful.

However, you, your mental and physical health is more important to me than this class. You do not have to apologize to me for trying to juggle everything we are during a pandemic. You do not have to apologize for prioritizing your own or family members’ health.

I will work with you to do what is best for you and support you to the best of my ability.

I ask that you stay in touch with me and keep me informed so I can do this.

And we’ll both do the best we can.

From all the models and ideas I've seen planning now for everything to be available online (content, assignments, grades, etc.) is the best idea. IF you're face to face it's easy to do a flipped classroom, "read this" for us to discuss in class, "come with this" for us to workshop IF you and the students feel this is best while also allowing for flexibility. I also think this seems the best because it's front loaded work but it's not twice the work, and I think this front loaded work will pay off this fall. Another benefit is that I think this shows students what we're valuing and how we're centering their needs.

My first instinct is to flee

We lived in roughly 13 different homes during my school years. There was also a period of several months where we had no home and relied on people's spare rooms, couches, and floors. There was the house in Maryland, the one in Connecticut, then the duplex, the illegal apartment cramming in Section 8 housing in Gaithersburg, then the shared house in North Carolina, then the off-season rental house, then the cockroach infested apartment, then the boyfriend's house, another house, then the upper offices in Corolla, then the condo in Manteo, then the house.

I know there were times where we moved every 3-6 months- into an off-season rental, out for the season, into another off-season rental. Maybe the same school, but new bus, new folks, new place. No roots. No foundation.

Frequently these moves were not planned, and were more along the lines of "throw everything you own into a black garbage bag we're leaving." I distinctly remember her using both the racist term "Gypsy" for our lives  and the REALLY racist term "Puerto Rican luggage" for the black trash bags. When the movie Mermaids (1990) came out, it was like someone was watching us. Mom usually moved us because she suddenly hated her job, people did not appreciate her, or we were in some sort of vague trouble. She didn't quite pull out a map, close her eyes, and randomly choose where we would go next but it sure felt like that.

I remember vaguely being aware that this wasn't the norm for most people but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it so I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It ended up serving me well when I worked in technical theatre. It was the norm for a job to last just a few weeks or month before you moved on. I got a job a week after graduation and stayed in Greenville, NC to work a job. A few months later I took a train to Omaha, NE with just a duffle to go on the road with a theatre company for a month. Less than a month after I got home I moved down to Atlanta with the same duffle bag and stayed on someone's couch working until I could find my own place. When I moved to Brooklyn on the hope of a job I didn't even tell anyone I was leaving. A friend called a few months later saying they hadn't seen me and I was like, Oh yeah, I moved.

By New York I got a box sent to me of stuff. It was three years before a friend drove the really pathetic contents of my storage unit up. I remember it was right after 9/11 and he got stopped for driving a moving van into the city.

Theatre was wonderful and miserable. You worked 7 days a week, there were no weekends, no holidays. You'd work a 20 hour day, get all the way up to your apartment in the Bronx and get called to come back in. People were mean, abusive, and awful. There was too much drinking, too much substance abuse, too much physical and sexual abuse. But you were sold a bill of goods that the work was worth it, and you got to the point where you knew you were supposed to be grateful for the job, so you just took it.

It was actually pretty good indoctrination for education.

I think that was one of the allures of going into teaching. Theatre always claimed you were a family but they were, for the most part, short lived families, only existing the length of your summer or 6 or 9 month contract. Teaching seemed like a chance to be a part of a community, to give back, to contribute, to fit, to have a place. I'd never had these things but they seemed like something to want.

The problem is the evocation of "family" and "community" are often the mechanism to get you to do unpaid labor, tolerate intolerable conditions, not strike, put up with abuse. You should not care about pay or working conditions or health, these are selfish things. Instead you should be focused ont he children, doing what is best for students. Completely disregarding that better quality of life and work for teachers means better quality of life and teaching for students.

Teaching is exhausting on a good day, more so on most days when you realize that people like to pay lip service to equity, caring, support, and representation but aren't interested in the actual work to accomplish these things. Just look at the edu celebrities with exorbitant speaker fees that are the headliners at professional development sessions in districts across the country. They speak for 6 hours, the publish books, the sell handouts, and teachers sit through the bullshit their first day of the new semester, roll their eyes, and know it's crap.

Doesn't keep it from being a multi-million dollar industry.

With almost 20 years of teaching, here's what I've learned. You're never going to get the teacher who thinks they're a savior, that their children are trash, lazy, stupid, unmotivated, to change. They are righteous in their beliefs. They will push back against any suggestions or reforms to change the canon or curriculum in any way to better serve their students.

Sometimes you can trick these teachers. If you're willing to do the work, make the presentations, the assessments, design the lessons, you might, *might* get them to adopt them if only because they're too lazy to do the work themselves.

But you're never going to get the racists or the misogynists to stop being racists or misogynists. You're just not. Because they do not see themselves as these things. They are traditional, they have a culture and a history. They celebrate these parts of themselves, they embrace them, they are proud of these things, and they will not acknowledge, ever, the active harm they do to the students in their classrooms every day.

The fix is in.

You might be able to nudge some folks. 

You might be able to get someone to see that it's more important that students learn to communicate ideas than memorize arbitrary colonial language rules.

You might be able to convince someone that students should be able to see themselves in the texts they read. That literature should reflect the diversity and variety of our world.

You might be able to convince folks that allowing students choice in what they study and how the demonstrate knowledge is a more accurate representation and better.

But in my almost 20 years of teaching, I can tell you I worked with hundreds of teacher. I never once, across three school systems, in different states, ever met another nudge.

That's some hard math.

And the majority of those other teachers would have told you we're a family. That they cared about their students. That they taught the canon and racists texts, and rapist authors because somehow all of this prepared them for the "real" world.

The last couple of weeks especially I've been thinking about the active harm these people do in a classroom.

I remember after a spate of school shootings high school students not feeling comfortable in one teacher's classroom because this teacher bragged about their open carry license, and students KNEW this teacher hated them, and were convinced if teachers were allowed to carry in the classroom some of them would die.

I've heard students internalize the misogyny of professors who told them what they wrote wasn't really professional, or right, or good, and they needed to find a different, better way to write. Less like them (ethnic, women, accented). More like them (white, Anglo, male).

I know students who reach senior year and have never once had a class read an author where the characters looked like them or reflected their experiences.

I think moments like we're living through- rebellion, pandemic, economic hardships don't change anything. I think they shine a light on the things that are already broken. So the teachers and professors who already think teaching representative texts is "dictating" or "censoring" their individual wants distort freedom of speech. Teachers and professors who claim all opinions, perspectives, writings matter, and should be given voice, would argue against you if you pointed out their legitimizing hate.

I think higher ed is behind K-12 in these things. In the past few years more and more elementary, middle, and high schools are moving towards representative texts, realizing they can use anything to teach skills and they might as well teach texts that are more accessible to their students.

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop first made her oft-quoted and applied speech in 1990. Thirty years ago. Yet we're just now starting to see widespread implementation and application of what she meant.

“Books,” she wrote, “are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.”
“These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.”
But if the light is right, the window becomes a mirror.
“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”

There are still a lot of places that use "diversity" instead of "representation" and consider it a box to be checked rather than a pedagogy to use and evolve. Places where there is one Black author on the syllabus and when a class get cancelled they are the first text cut. There are still places that pat themselves on the back because they teach Things Fall Apart, ignoring the harm done by still teaching To Kill a Mockingbird.

I know a lot of people, especially teachers and those who work in education, especially the last few weeks are wondering if lasting change is possible. Too often have we collectively as teachers been told that something would be a fix, the answer, the solution, and too often has it turned out to be a con job, a checking of boxes, a performative action, a sticker, or t-shirt, with absolutely no work behind it. It's easy to add a Black or Indigenous author to your required reading list. It's easy to say you're a trauma informed instructor. You can sit through a required PD on poverty on the first day of the year. You can say you're not using deficit language to describe your students.

It's harder to have hard conversations with yourself about your bias and privilege. It's harder to accept that you've done active harm to students for years by replicating systems. It's hard to admit that you pushed racist agendas and participated in carceral institutions. That you contributed to the school to prison pipeline. It's hard to not slide back and slip into performative allyship because it's easier, because you're tired, because you need a break. It's hard to do the extra work to Google the shit, to read the hard truths, to reexamine everything you were taught. It's hard to listen to what you have done and participated in, what you have enabled.

And we should all fucking shut up about it. Because it is our privilege to choose, to check out, to not know. Our Black colleagues and students don't get to. They don't get to flee.

Working at a school or an institution where the work seems insurmountable, the faculty recalcitrant if not outwardly racist and misogynist, is hard. Speaking up is hard. Having to throw out syllabi and rethink your readings and scholars is hard. Standing up to administration and people above you and telling them they're wrong is hard.

And again, we should all fucking shut up about it.

I think a lot of these things are harder in higher ed. I think while colleges and universities had brief moments of "wokeness" in the 90s, with the establishment of women and gender, African, and Chican@ studies, an easy box to check- LOOK we have a department! We can't be racist. We have one Black/Indigenous/Chinese/Japanese/Phillipino professor, they head our diversity committee, we CAN'T be racist. We don't see color. All students are treated equally. Of course what these initiatives did not do, could not do, were given no power to do, was to change/alter/tear down/blow up the foundations and structures that created the inequities. So they were doomed to fail, to be cut as soon as the majority of white people stopped feeling like they needed to check that box.

I also think that a lot of these things are harder in higher ed where often the argument against making moves and changing things is "I have academic freedom you can't tell me what to do." But the thing is, academic freedom and tenure is supposed to protect and encourage the free flow of ideas. It's not supposed to hold up and reinforce racist, bigoted, misogynistic, outdated, harmful ideas, texts, statements.

Literally the least we can do for our students is teach texts that accurately reflect the world, our history, and allow for a variety of answers and responses to these things, as there are a variety of types of students in our classes.

Literally the least we can do for our students is provide a safe, non-bigoted space for them to learn.

Literally the least we can do for our students is not actively harm them while they are with us.

In so many cases we're not even hitting the bare minimum mark.

I think a lot about Mom, and how her instinct when things got bad, when she couldn't deal, was just to flee, run, start over. It never worked. Not once. Not once did giving up her dependable, solid, benefited job help us. Never once did using what little savings we had to move make our lives better. Because there are just certain things you cannot get away from.



I have stayed in jobs that are toxic, awful, unhealthy. I have put up with abusive emails, shitty behavior, and threats. Like most teachers I put up with it because I think there's a greater service that we do.


In the rare cases where I've left jobs it's always been towards something else- I left teaching in Brooklyn to care for my mom, I left teaching in NC to pursue my PhD, I left teaching in Albuquerque for a full time job at the university level. It's easy when things get hard(er) to question what we're doing. To wonder if any of it is worth it. To think the grass maybe isn't greener somewhere else but it wouldn't be THIS.

The simple fact is while running away is an attractive option (how many of us ran away as children, mini-protests for what we saw as horrific conditions like naps or eating vegetables). Running away, the idea of starting anew, imaging a brand new world is a compelling idea. It's persuasive. Especially when work, this kind of work, and the toll it takes is cumulative. Energy in year 2 is easy. Energy to keep showing up let along speaking up is really hard in year 10 or 1 or 20.

But the thing is, the need for this work does not disappear if you go one town over, or move upstate or across the country. You may very well be able to avoid seeing the need for this work if you move to a charter school, or a mostly white, affluent private school. But the institutional and structural inequities that make this work necessary don't go away just because you've made it harder for you to see it, to hear it, to bear witness.

I absolutely think that people will make these moves comes August. They will continue to teach their classes, their content, in the same way they always have. They will teach with not one consideration for the changes in the outside world. You'll hear more of "X is not political, don't try and make it so." Education programs will continue to teach crap policies and pedagogies and churn out white savior educators. I think individual educators, principals, districts, professors, and colleges and universities will actually do LESS not more in the coming school year because they haven't been doing the work all this time and that looks bad, especially depending on the school you're in. I think they'll do less because starting out you have to admit what you don't know, and where you fucked up before you can even think about starting. You have to read. You have to ask hard questions. Then you have to listen.

I admit I'm as guilty as anyone else of thinking I can't do this, I can't do this here, it's too much work, these people will never X, Y, Z. It can feel lonely, and isolating, and insurmountable to do this work every day, to show up 100% in your classroom and for your students. I fail at this regularly. My first instinct is to flee. I often daydream about throwing Nehi in the truck and starting over, just leaving. But it doesn't work. It never works. Because you can't outrun these problems, these systems. One place may be better at hiding it than another, but scrape the layers a bit and they're still there.

So don't flee.

Don't buy into the propaganda of family or community either.

Be reflective. Build time in to reconsider things. This fall will be hard for lots of folks for lots of reasons. Maybe it's not the time to teach the violent, explicit text if you're not going to be face to face to support your students. Maybe it's the perfect time to dump the rapists, the misogynists, the abusers, from your syllabus. Maybe it's the perfect time to do the math on your syllabus and see how many BIPOC, LGBTQ+, authors and scholars you have.

Build in breaks. As I keep seeing on social media- you're/we're not used to this work. It will tire you out. It's a marathon not a spring. Give yourself time and breaks to keep going. Just know too that being able to do that is a privilege many don't have.

Build in work. Realize this is not one and done work. Form a book club. Set your own reading lists. Follow people on Twitter. Make this work part of your every day.

It's gonna suck. People will not like you. You will be avoided, if not outright dragged in meetings and email. People will actively want you to shut up. They will actively roll their eyes when you go to speak at meetings. The sooner you admit this will suck the easier these things will be. You will still cry at your desk. That's fine, just shut the door.

I don't say don't flee, don't run, because I have any great hope that we'll wake up tomorrow and the world will have been kum ba yah-ed into equity and justice. Bless y'all who do, but it ain't me. I look at the news and totally expect people to choose the performative, not actionable, check the box, superficial options because they will feel comfortable and easy and "normal." But I also know that small moves in a classroom can have lasting effects. Small moves for teachers and small moves for students can do amazing things.

So while I don't have a lot of hope about world peace, I am excited and hopeful for what my classes will look like this fall, this spring, this year. And I'll keep working on my small moves.