Equitable Teaching Reflection: How do we operate as part of a multi-layered, overlapping professional communities? (EQ4)

This essential question is the one I mulled over the least during my blogs because it fell at a time when I was most overwhelmed. To read the original blog post with how I was thinking about it in that very stressful space, you can look here. I find the timing of this essential question to be somewhat ironic, as that burnout I was feeling is part of the question at hand. It is important to think about how we operate in our professional communities in order to sustain our relationship with teaching and maintain our own desire to continue to learn and grow, both as professionals and as people. Continuing to reflect on my practice and be willing to grow is something I've been working on a lot in the past year as a whole, actually, as I've become more aware of resources to support an anti-racist journey in the midst of the outcry and continued Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd. While social media is often exhausting and somewhat toxic, the movement and my experiences in this program have taught me that, when I want it to be one, it can also be an amazing resource for learning and growing as a community. The summer brought me links and graphics shared by my friends to learn how to get involved in anti-racism and grow towards an anti-racist mindset, but this semester brought me specific resources on how to do so with specific respect to teaching. And it didn't only bring me anti-racist resources for teaching, but also just resources for teaching. I've seen open-source lesson plans and projects, funny jokes and warm-ups to share with the class, questions that the community is asking, and lots of ways to talk about how our jobs are going and what we can learn from each other, all via Twitter and blogging!

I have loved seeing Dan Meyer's posts on Twitter specifically (Meyer, n.d.). His Twitter bio lists him as Desmos' Chief Academic, and he is often sharing data about students' answers to Desmos activities using #WrongAndBrilliant. Alongside a picture of the question, Mr. Meyer shares the incorrect answers that students are choosing, and the community is invited to engage and discuss what is valuable about those incorrect answers and how we can interact with that thinking when moving forward with students. This has been sort of a checkpoint for addressing 'misconception' versus 'conception' and how we can see mathematical smartness, competence, and productive mathematical thinking all in answers that are incorrect. An example is linked here where students have different conceptions about how scale factors and similar figures work (Meyer, 2020). Teachers get to talk about what their next moves will be in responses, noting that they are not just "reteaching" or "reviewing" but instead starting in a new way to help the students see the different perspectives on the situation.

Beyond all of the lovely benefits I have seen from interacting with and operating within professional communities, I have also been forced to reckon with the number of communities I am in and how it is affecting my body and my mind. As I said at the beginning, I originally addressed this question at a time when I was really struggling academically and personally. My workload had gotten very overwhelming. Even today, I am still operating at a very high stress point as the semester comes to a close, and I imagine this will continue for a while as we all adjust to a new way of teaching and learning through screens and the internet. All of this meant a reflection on how communities work and how much stress my body can handle from those communities. In Classroom Ecology, we read an excerpt from an interview of Sonia Nieto where she said "A teacher who came to one of our meetings told the story of how she overheard a couple of the student teachers complaining about how hard they were working and how they didn’t have a life anymore. She was a cooperating teacher and had been working in the system for 28 years. She was a hardened veteran, passionately committed to her work but very angry — in fact, I found out later that one of her students had just been murdered and she was in mourning. But when she heard the student teachers complain about “not having a life” anymore, she leaned over and said, “You know something, this is a life. You come in, you grow, you learn, it’s never the same, it’s always different. You heal, you help, you love. What’s wrong with that? Is that a life or is that a life?”" (Heller, 2020). This quote was met with a lot of pushback from members of the class, and I agreed with the pushback. We talk a lot about valuing our students' humanity in the classroom. Caring for them. Critical care. But sometimes I think we neglect to acknowledge our own humanity. Education can be a righteous choice. Educators are trying to make a difference in the world, in their students lives, in the outcomes of the future. Teaching is political. Knowing that teaching is political, we have to realize that teaching is also just a job. Dedicating your life to it is wonderfully kind, perhaps. But that choice requires so much privilege. Teachers are underpaid for the work that they do. Boundaries have to be set in order to continue to do anything besides teaching. Because realistically a teacher's salary only pays for the time spent in the classroom each week, so the more work done outside of those hours, the more labor is being put in without compensation. Doing what's best for our students, caring for our students, valuing our students' humanity can all still be done while valuing ourselves and our boundaries. Maybe we won't always be able to do the best we could for our students, but we will be doing the best with what we have been given and the ability that we have amongst the world in which we live. At the end of the day, setting those boundaries is also a good role model for the students, showing them that they are more than just their jobs and they too are allowed to function outside of production for a biased system.