I say: humbug.

I say: let’s take that hard-won competence, do a sort of inner inventory of the strengths we developed in our classrooms and schools, and let’s unleash those strengths. Let’s advocate for and demand better policies for our students and our schools.

Here’s a bit of my villain origin story and all of my philosophy about advocating for public education in public.

Years ago, when I was a wee baby teacher (early career teachers, don’t ever let a veteran teacher call you that), I mostly minded my business inside of my classroom and didn’t concern myself with whatever nonsense was happening “downtown”, as we called the central school district offices.

I paid so little attention to school funding at the state level that the way I’d find out something went wrong with it is that I’d show up to work in the fall and on the first day our principal would announce that we weren’t offering this class or that class because we lost funding for a math teacher. Decisions were made so far over my head that I felt powerless to effect them one way or the other.

Years went on, and occasionally I would get asked to chime in on a panel. One time I won an award and there was a fluffy interview for a two paragraph interview for it and I talked the poor man’s ear off for three hours. “The thing about segregation in American schools is….”.

I’d started to notice a few things: a lot of news coverage for public education policy included interviews for everyone under the sun but teachers. The other thing I noticed was that the more I had contact with folks outside of my classroom, the more I seemed to frustrate everyone. They wanted me to say things I wasn’t going to say, and I wanted to talk about things they didn’t want to ask me about.

Yea, these many years later, I often find myself in a position to write or speak in public about public education. Here’s my life philosophy on being an outspoken teacher.

• Savior teacher narratives are gross and I don’t participate in that nonsense. Look, teacher pals. When someone comes at you and wants to cast you in any version of Saint Magistra, Patron Saint of Underprivileged Children, shut that down. It can feel flattering and maybe ego soothing - perhaps you, too, listened to Gangsta’s Paradise while watching Michelle Pfeiffer be Strict but Loving in the Hood. But you’d be embarrassed for a kid to hear you talking about teaching them as some kind of act of martyrdom, and imagine how hurtful it’d be for parents to hear you talking about your kids like that? Especially if they’ve, let’s be honest, been patient with you as a teacher once or twice. Also, casting you in a stereotype of Savior Teacher is way for society at large to not listen to you and to underpay you. You don’t have to pay saints a living wage. You don’t have to listen to a stereotype when you’ve already seen the inspirational movie. With no false modesty - I’m quite good at teaching. That doesn’t make me a saint or a martyr; that makes me a competent professional. And the kids I teach do face a lot of social and economic challenges. That doesn’t make them fodder for after school specials - that makes them typical American teenagers in 2026.

• If everyone else at an event is asked about policy and I’m only asked about cutesy-pie classroom things, I’m not coughing up Kids Say the Darndest Things. People who expect that from me are sometimes startled. Because here’s the thing: kids do say the darndest things. Kids are sweet and funny and also evil and funny, but they are pretty consistently funny. I don’t just know a couple of cutesy pie stories about kids, I’m sitting on mountains of anecdotes. But, I’m a fed up teacher and I feel that everyone needs to earn them. The kids don’t need me to share a story about how Johnny said a goofy thing, the kids need me to explain that if people keep undercutting school funding, his math class isn’t going to have air conditioning for another year and that’s not funny. So if everyone else at the proverbial table is being asked about policy, then I’m going to explain how said policy translates to the experience of kids in a classroom whether I’m asked or not. And only then does anyone get a funny as a little treat.

• No name-calling. I have a temper and I get frustrated like anyone else, but I’d never want a current or former student to be embarrassed by watching me lose my cool in public. If I can’t make my point and defend it without getting ugly or personal, then it’s not a good point. How many years have I told kids this during class discussions? A lot of times!

• Don’t throw your school or your community or your colleagues under the bus. Advocating for better transportation systems so that your students aren’t waiting for school buses for more than an hour after school? Good. Blaming underpaid bus drivers who are just trying to drive their routes: bad.

Here’s what I mean by weaponizing competence -

You know what I’m good at? You know what all of my teaching pals are good at? Explaining things. This profession emphasizes group effort and discourages attention seeking. That’s good. Nobody should go into teaching middle school for the glory! But while humility and the ability to work in a team are good, being so self-effacing or having so much self-deprecation that we feel unqualified to opine in public about our own profession is a real problem. And, y’all - it’s gendered. It’s absolutely gendered.

So, that’s what I’m weaponizing. I’m good at explaining things, so I’m explaining things as best as I can - explaining American Lit and composition in my classroom, explaining why I’m voting the way that I am to my community, and how public policies are really hurting school to any decision maker that will listen. I’m not claiming to be the world’s expert in anything, I’m just saying that I know about literacy and kids, because I do. And so do countless other teachers in this town!

Weaponized incompetence is having a cultural moment, and I say that my teacher friends - and parent friends - should go in the opposite direction. We’re competent at a lot of things. A lot of you (not me) are good at organizing and logistics and research. Use it. Let’s have confidence in our voices and our abilities to know what good policies look like.

So teacher pals - what are you most competent in? Use it. Let’s be our own biggest advocates. Let’s be the loudest voices in Texas for what will help our students learn. If they don’t ask us what we think, let’s tell them anyway. If they try to pat us on the head, let’s shut that down and use our teacher voices.

Disclaimer - I am not any kind of expert. I’m just sharing my own experience pestering about various topics over the course of many years.

The internet has given us all this false perception that advocating for something is like a high school debate match. Whoever gets the biggest zinger wins. “So-and-so demolished this other person”, both sides will sa…

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So take what I’m saying with a grain of salt - I am speaking from my own experience, but I can’t speak from a parents’ perspective because I am not a parent.

Also - there are going to be good changes this year. There are! Some things will be better, even if your kid complains about them. Other things will not.

Understand that you are powerful. You have more power and influence than any district employee at your kids’ school. Team up together with more parents, and you are that much more powerful.

author’s note: My apostrophes are going to be all over the place because sometimes I am picture y’all with one kid and sometimes with multiple kids. Since I am the boss of this blog I’m just switching it up as the spirit moves.

1. It is not disloyal to criticize or complain publicly. It is not disloyal to advocate for your kid. It’s your kid! No amount of belief in the public school system or affection for your kids’ teachers and school should ever make you feel like you can’t advocate for your kid.

   IF YOU LIKE YOUR KIDS’ SCHOOL, communicate with them first and also.

   Look, in these delicate times, it’s going to be really helpful to get some kind of relationship with the principal. The principal cannot, ever, publicly say that they are not going to follow district policy. But some of them are trying their darndest to navigate around district directives to protect their programs, serve the kids best, and keep their staff from quitting. If you like the principal and have confidence in them, ask “would it be helpful if I advocated for this publicly”. If you get a nod or a neutral, go for it. If you get a no, please consider that you might make it harder for them to navigate around bad policies. Understand that for a lot of things, they can’t tell you a straight “yes”.

   An example -

   In other words - let’s say that your kid comes home and says that they are sweltering because there’s no A/C in their math class. I promise you that not only is every teacher in the school wishing that the parents would call downtown and complain, they are sitting in the teachers’ lounge wondering why the parents don’t. Ditto the buses coming late.

Another example - public comment at a BOM meeting: good! Email to district leadership: good! Public post about how X school hasn’t had Y thing repaired: Fine! Posting an email from a teacher and lambasting them: nooooooooooooo. Please don’t do that.

1. PLEASE DON’T MISDIRECT ANGER

   Y’all. Teachers and principals are the face of a lot of these new policies, but they have no control over them. Phones? dress code? curriculum? lessons? Those are district things. Take it up with district people. Yelling at the bottom rung enforcer who may not agree with the policy in the first place is just letting off steam.

   sidebar - personally, I strongly agree with not having phones in classrooms. Not saying I’m for or against any of those. Just saying that they are not up to the campus.

   In other words, use some nuance. If your kids’ bus consistently picks them up late, don’t take it out on the poor bus driver. That is a really hard job! But don’t feel like you can’t complain about the bus situation because you don’t want them to think you’re being critical of them. You are totally capable of both saying that you appreciate your kids’ bus driver (if you do) and also that the transportation department doesn’t need to be making the kids in your neighborhood wait an hour after school, or whatever the case may be. (Don’t come for me, transportation people - I love you and I was just using a random example).

2. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PRAISE GOES A LONG WAY. EVEN PASSIVE AGGRESSIVELY

   Do you love the project based learning style of lessons your kid used to get and now isn’t? You know how to say that without sounding negative?

   “My spouse and I were so pleased last year that our child had so many hands-on learning experiences and can’t wait to see that this year. It’s very important to us that our child (whatever is important to you and your child)”.

   Private praise - an email, a text message, especially cc’ing someone’s boss, goes a long way. For two reasons: it documents and quantifies what the community wants. Teachers are being told over and over again that any disagreement they have with curriculum or lessons or policies is because they are selfish and not child centered. They are told that all of these changes are for kids, and anyone who disagrees is not for kids. Let me tell you from personal experience that it feels awful for someone to say it to you one time, and it doesn’t feel better every successive time they say it. It feels even worse when the person who says it is incompetent and gets paid many times worse than you do. Having a parent say the exact same thing gets a really different reaction. I don’t mean that parents need to be saying what teachers want. Say what is important to you as a parent! I’m just saying that in my experience, often those two thing are a strongly overlapping Venn diagram, because teachers and parents are in the most direct contact with actual kids.

   Private praise is also especially welcomed this year because frankly, your kids’ teachers and principals are hanging on by their fingernails. Hearing someone, anyone, say anything nice - “hey, Ms. So and So, my kid multiplied something at home last night when we were cooking, so looks like they’re learning!” means the world.

3. EXPRESS, DON’T REPRESS

   If your concern has nothing to do with the takeover, if your concern is plain vanilla issue with a teacher or a principal or whatever - don’t sit on it. Pick up the phone and call right away. Or drop by, or send an email.

   I don’t mean storm the castle - coming in hot isn’t going to help anyone. But the longer that you wait to clarify what is going on, the more you’re having a one-sided conversation in your head that is making you angrier. Either the teacher/principal/school is in the wrong and you need them to course correct, or there’s a miscommunication and it needs to be cleared up. But if it is causing your kid unhappiness, then you need to help them either navigate that themselves (if it’s age appropriate) or navigate it yourself. Don’t simmer, and don’t wait til the situation goes south.

   Multiple things can be true at the same time - kids tell monumental whoppers to their parents to get themselves out of trouble at home and also sometimes a teacher is human just like a kid is human and you’re human. The reality that kids tell whoppers sometimes isn’t a value judgment on your kid, it just means that nobody likes to tell their mom that they were a little lazy with school work.

   When your kid is telling you one thing and the teacher is telling you another and their stories don’t match, use some common sense and judgment. Is it more likely that the middle aged lady is bald faced lying about a fourth grade science assignment being due on a certain day? Or is it more likely that a fourth grader doesn’t want to admit that they had weeks to work on something and just put it off? Likewise, you know your own kids’ personalities and you know what sounds completely out of character for them. I once left a class in the library and marched into a long-term sub’s room and had it out with that individual because of something a kid told me. The teacher was incensed that I believed the kid at face value, but I had known that kid for three years. If she said it, I didn’t have a single reason to disbelieve her. What I’m trying to say is that if it’s academic, give the teacher the benefit of the doubt. Your kid’s poor math teacher just wants them to learn math, and sometimes kids fight them every step of the way.

   But the other true thing is that kids need to be listened to. If your kid is telling you that Ms. Checka was mean/unfair/punched someone in the face, then it frankly doesn’t matter how nice Ms. Checka seems on the internet. Go check it out. Benefit of the doubt to the teacher over a homework assignment doesn’t mean not taking your kids’ side or ignoring their concerns. In fact, thinking in terms of “sides” isn’t helpful.

   I can tell you personally that the kids who call me Tia Ale/Auntie Checka/neighborlady/Tita - I love teachers and schools but if my angel babies are messed with you will be hearing from me. I have a lot of professional solidarity but I once took a day off work and went up to a school in another school district because a cleaning lady I know described a situation to me that sounded like red flag city. I didn’t raise my voice but they learned that day.

All of this talk about fall school district convocations has me thinking. Y’all - it’s fine to be a bubbly teacher who is into all the fun spirit things. It’s also fine to be a cranky teacher who would rather poke their eye out than go to an adult pep rally. Neither one of them correlates to or says anything about enjoying teaching.

I’m going to get a little personal here -

I grew up in Texas. I went to a large public high school with a big football program and I have done more than my fair share of pep rallies. My best friend growing up was a varsity cheerleader.

I don’t like pep rallies. I don’t remember feeling any kind of way about them in high school - I liked playing in the band, but I didn’t have strong feelings either way about sports. But now? I don’t like them. Too loud, too raucous, too much chanting. I also just don’t like forced jollity of any kind. I don’t like spirit days, dress up days, inspirational speeches, or seasonal dish towels.

I’m just not a festive person. in college, I had a sign on my dry erase board that said, “I hate you. Go Away”. Everyone thought it was a joke and would guffaw at it before coming in. My dorm room was often the center of pizza and activity.

Multiple times over my career, I have been called into an office and basically told to fix my face, because I look so visibly unhappy at inspirational speeches and so forth.

Early on, a dear colleague puzzled over it.

“You’re just so fun and enthusiastic about everything!” she said, “I just don’t get it”

And I am! I am a fun person. I’m just not a festive person. I am a cranky person.

My teacher friends still poke fun of me over a decade later for the existential crisis it gave me one year when, at convocation, they gave us a rock with an emotion on it and then made us do a conga line. I TEACH middle school, I grouched when we got back. I’m not IN middle school! I don’t like inspirational speeches. Last speech I truly enjoyed at Convocation was when Melody Johnson invited Pedro Noguera to give us a scholarly speech on ELL students. I’m a professional. I am motivated by scholarship.

A revealing anecdote:

Once upon a time, when I decided to become a teacher, I started a teaching job midyear. That means I didn’t actually get to do the training for my alternative certification program until that summer, after I’d already taught for a semester. If I had done it the other way around, I don’t think I would have ever become a teacher. I remember one particular day of training - after a truly appalling speech by an invited guest speaker (an anecdote for another day, but if I’d heard this speech today I would have called TEA )- clips from various inspirational heroic teacher movies- the days’ activities culminated in a heartfelt talk by two former teachers. They stood in front of a table draped with cloth. The dramatic climax of their talk featured one lady making a dramatic gesture towards the table and declaring, “Remember why we’re here - it’s FOR THE CHILDREN,” while the other teacher swept the cloth from the table, revealing a lot of framed photos of their kids.

Listen. I laughed.

It was so kitsch, and ran so contrary to the, again, appalling speeches beforehand, I thought it was ironic? or something? and then I looked to the right and to the left of me and saw people wiping away tears. They were genuinely moved.

I got pulled aside for A Talk, in which it was suggested that my negative attitude meant that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher.

That was nineteen years ago.

I only know of one, maybe two, other people from that cohort who are still teaching. Because the thing that I knew that summer was that I wasn’t just cut out to be a teacher - I loved teaching. Loved it. Bone deep. Best job in the world.

I love being in a room with a bunch of teenagers and a cup of coffee and a really good book. I love sitting in a quiet room with kids as they clickety clack on their keyboards with their terrible chicken peck typing, seeing the thoughts and feelings of my elusive introverted kids materialize on a screen. I love a rowdy room of kids laughing and arguing over projects. I love the tension and creative energy of a class discussion that all of a sudden gets real. I love - as all teachers do - I love the electrifying moment when that light bulb goes off. I swear, sometimes you almost hear an audible click. I love - truly- commiserating with a parent as we brainstorm together how to shepherd their kid through rocky teen years. I love, I love, I love, running into old students and seeing them out in the world and figuring it all out. I just love it. When you get to teach a subject you love, there’s just not a bigger thrill than getting to be the one to share it with someone else. It’s like giving someone their first taste of chocolate.

And you know what? sometimes kids hate it. Can’t stand it. What is chocolate to me is broccoli to them. My over the top production value for Edgar Allan Poe Day or Poetry Cafe? There are kids who would rather poke their eyes out. They are me, not wanting to do the conga line.

I learned in the last year, going outside of my comfort zone and teaching engineering that at my big old age I still also love learning. It was fun learning about robotics. It was fun learning about electricity. I learned it, I taught it, and my rusty brain kind of woke up.

And y’all. The flip side is, there are festive teachers out there. They LOVE spirit days. Love ‘em. Put those days on their calendars, plan cute outfits with their besties. Their classroom decor is a work of art and their door decorations could hang in the Louvre. They don’t make word walls, they make word ecosystems. Conga line? Conga love! Last time I reminisced about that nightmare convocation with the rock with the emotion on it? The teacher friend I was talking to said, “awww, I loved that one. I still have mine”.

Their cup is filled with an enthusiastic inspirational speakers who see and appreciate the work we do.

So, I’ve got two points to make:

1. a. If. you are someone who is festive and loves all the spirit stuff - that is not toxic positivity. You’re allowed to enjoy things and be enthusiastic. People like me should not rain on your parade. Live it up! Be fun! Sparkle your sparkliest!!

   b. If, like me, you are just not a festive person, that’s fine. You don’t have to be. You don’t have to perform enthusiasm to please others. It doesn’t mean that you’re negative or not cut out for teaching. You shouldn’t be pressured into either forced jollity or made to feel that because you don’t love shouting and carrying on you don’t like teaching.

   c. Neither one means that you like or don’t like teaching. Neither one means that your classroom is enjoyable or not for students. But having a smidgen of self awareness - that kids have preferences just like adults - could make your classroom inclusive.

   d. All of the above goes ten thousand times more if you are not neurotypical. Listen, I’m sorry that being a teacher means that you’re sometimes forced into loud, shouty spaces if that’s the case.

2. I’M NOT CYNICAL

   Here’s the self reflection that took me almost nineteen years to sift through and arrive at:

That one semester before the summer training for my alternative certification program? Was as a self contained bilingual ed teacher in a title 1 elementary school in Arlington. I was exposed to so many inequities both inside of the school house and in the lives of my students.

When I saw those clips of inspirational teacher movies and saw the big “for the children” photo reveal, it rang false to me. It felt performative and hypocritical. How could we be “for the children” if we weren’t even naming or discussing the very real structural problems I had gotten a tiny glimpse of? Why were the inspirational teacher movies all centered on a savior narrative rather than the work? I didn’t have the words for all of this back then. I just had this feeling sitting in that auditorium that my life’s work wasn’t going to be about feeling like a savior or an inspirational teacher in a movie. It was going to be about doing what I was paid to do - being good at teaching kids how to read and write, and encouraging them to think.

I know that many people felt the same way, including the peers who were moved to tears by the “for the children” moment. We just had different ways of seeing and approaching the job.

I think when people scold teacher for being “negative”, that’s what they are really worried about. They mistake a face unmoved by a motivational speaker to be someone who has grown cynical and uncaring about teaching and about kids.

Sometimes that’s the case. Look, we all know teachers and administrators who just shouldn’t be in the job anymore because they have burned out, for so, so, many reasons.

I guess what I would like to remind everyone is that forcing people to perform either way - forced jollity, or denying whimsy - is a surefire way of burning people out, of letting yourself burn out. THAT is when you become cynical, and truly can’t find the joy in the work.

PS - Don’t get me started on how this profession demands that you like adult pep rallies and also COMIC SANS. Can’t make me like pep rallies, can’t make me like comic sans.

PPS - I know I know I know about the dyslexia-friendly qualities of comic sans. I don’t care! There are other fonts that are just as dyslexia friendly (and even more dyslexia friendly) that are not an aesthetic assault to my eyes.

Texas Monthly - State Takeovers are Spreading

If you live in Texas, let me say this as bluntly as possible:

If we have the same governor in Texas in the fall, hostile state takeovers are coming for more and more school districts across the state. Chances are, it’ll hit your kid’s school.

If that is something you don’t want, vote for a different governor. Vote for Gina Hinojosa. She is the parent of a middle schooler and education policy is why she got into politics. Her stated, explicit platform is replacing Mike Morath on her first day in office.

That’s not fear mongering. It’s policy, but unfortunately nobody pays attention to education policy until it hits their door step and all of a sudden their kid’s school doesn’t have a math teacher for them because they all quit, or the school closed because of lack of funding.

Also, let me get personal - I’ve met her three times and spoken with her on the phone twice. To put it mildly, I was extremely frustrated and we clashed. Why? because I’m frustrated and angry that nobody seems to listen to teachers or people who work in schools. I’ve never in my whole life been a rah-rah for political candidates. I don’t do fan clubs - I vote, or I don’t vote. When it comes to education, you could be Shakespeare reincarnated and I’m not giving you the benefit of the doubt or my vote unless and until I feel like you can be trusted with schools. If I share that I’m supporting someone, it’s because I really evaluated and thought about it.

With Gina Hinojosa, I came away from our interactions thinking that this is both someone who can handle public criticism and someone who understands education policy in Texas. She gets it. She has skin in the game - she’s a public school parent, and her kid’s school in Austin are facing the same things we’re facing here.

The current governor of Texas is no friend to public school. At best, schools are an election year afterthought. At worst, he treats the schools like a political chess piece, as he did when he refused funding for schools when rural Republicans in his own party wouldn’t vote for his voucher bill. That political moment is long gone - that moment was years ago, and in the interim those rural Republicans were primaries out and the governor got his voucher bill in the next legislative session. But the damage he inflicted by starving the states’ schools of funding are being felt now, years later, before the damage from his voucher bill has even been felt yet. We feel and see that damage in the widespread school closures and consolidations across the state.

Texas schools need help. Some school districts need outside intervention from the state. But the governor and his guy, Mike Morath, are simply not the ones to do it. They inflict more damage than they fix, and they introduce yet more problems. The takeover model as it currently stands leaves a wake of ill feeling, dysfunction, community frustration and controversy, and thousands of teachers experienced teachers leaving.

A governor like Gina Hinojosa who prioritizes schools and has a personal state could do the following, and I can’t believe it’s something I have to beg for in a Facebook post:

Put someone in charge of the Texas Education Agency who has experience in education.

Someone who has taught, ever. Someone who has run a school, ever. Someone who has run a school district, ever.

That person, in turn, can - as they do interventions - put superintendents in charge who have at least one complete year of experience.

Preferably someone who does not bring controversy, mass exodus of parents, students, and teachers leaving.

So much can be done to improve schools in Texas. So much needs to be done to stop the current path that we’re on. B

But we desperately, desperately, need a different governor. Please vote for Gina Hinojosa. Please vote for someone who will keep Mike Morath and Mike Miles out of their seats of power over schools.

https://ginafortexas.com/priorities/

“….Oh. Hi. I’m Ale, the new English teacher.”

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That interaction - my “welcome” as a new faculty member at a school new to me - set the tone for my experience working at that school. That’s how I was greeted before anyone asked my name or offered up their own name.

Mind you, that interaction was before the first day back - I was just up there making copies. The actual first day back, my entire department went to lunch together without me. I did go on to (eventually) make friends there, but it was a rough year. A friend later told me that their campus culture was that everyone was nice once a new person had proven themselves.

I chewed on that a lot, because it was the first time in my adult life I’d been mean girled at work. Sure, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m generally a pleasant person and I didn’t quite know how to deal with instant hostility.

It all worked out in the end - like I said, I did end up making friends there.

But, y’all. Don’t make new people earn your kindness or your welcome. Just be welcoming. If the new person turns out to be a jerk, well, then deal with that as it comes up.

One thousand teachers just left FWISD, which means one thousand new people are coming in. That’s just teachers! There will also be new employees of all kinds in the building.

Some of the new folks aren’t just new to the campus, they’re new to teaching. Others aren’t new to teaching, but they’re new to Fort Worth. They may not have any idea about any of the takeover drama.

I’m not saying you have to be besties with everyone - but be welcoming. Introduce yourself rather than making a new person awkwardly hang out on the sidelines. Keep introducing yourself with your name every time they run into you for the first few weeks, because they are overwhelmed with all of the new names.

Introduce them to other people. Tell them where the good coffee is. Ask them something about themselves before launching into school lore.

Is it a brand new teacher, new to the profession? Make sure they know what they’re doing on the first day. Ask them if they need anything. Give them the head’s up about which admin is most likely to help in an emergency. Whatever you do, don’t beat them over the head with what your old work bestie, the teacher they replaced, used to do.

And for pity’s sake, don’t you dare leave the new people all alone when it comes time for lunch.

Y’all - there’s no formal mentorship in the district for new teachers. Remember how much you cried in your car and in the faculty bathroom your first year? Check in periodically with the new people. If they’re new to teaching, one of the many things they may not realize is how much veteran teachers are helping and supporting each other all the time. New teachers often feel self-conscious about asking for help, because they think everyone else is just toughing it out.

Finally - new people have a lot to offer. Veteran teachers coming from other schools or school districts are going to come in with a different set of tools in the toolbox. Pick their brains! Be open to new ideas! Inexperienced teachers may be coming in with experience from different industries - again, be open to new perspectives! And younger teachers, bless them a thousand times, often have enthusiasm that can be infectious. Don’t kill it with cynicism.

Important context: My longest years of experience are with middle schoolers. If your kid is much older or much younger, then take everything with a grain of salt.

SLEEP HYGIENE:

When kids are in school, it’s really important that they sleep at night and stay awake during the day. In order for them to sleep at night, they need to go to bed at a reasonable hour and not have access to screens.

Y’all, it’s not a matter of trust or self discipline - multi-billion dollar corporations have spent massive amounts of money of making phones as addictive as possible. Adults have a hard time putting the screen away to sleep (ask me how I know). Teens barely stand a chance, and yelling and nagging at them is going to have a limited success. A twelve year old? Don’t set them up for failure. Help them learn to regulate screen time at night by keeping their phone for them in a different place than where they sleep. Ditto the laptop.

Know that if they have a device in their rooms, they are definitely on that device at night.

How this looks at school: Friends. I didn’t go to my students’ houses and do inspections or surveys of bed times or nighttime screen access, but I could tell you with a very high degree of accuracy who had access to their phones at night.

So many issues with middle schoolers that present as academic or behavioral had so much more to do with kids being sleep-deprived and hungry than with then having a natural interest or ability with fractions. And kids will happily tell their classmates and teachers that they stay up til dawn!

Kids, like anyone, can get bored and occasionally zone out in a lesson on a sunny day in the afternoon. That’s just human nature. But a young teenager who arrives to school after going to sleep at four in the morning is already starting the day groggy, irritable, and unable to focus. Sleep deprived kids are short tempered and have trouble concentrating even in their morning classes. By the afternoon, they’re dying.

I’m convinced that it’s one of the reasons teachers and parents talk past each other sometimes. The teacher is describing behaviors from the kid that the parent doesn’t see at home. Well, if the kid is up all night and sleeping during every class, then the hours that they are most awake and alert are in the evening, when the parent sees them.

PLEASE START THE SCHOOL SLEEP SCHEDULE A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE FIRST DAY.

For real, y’all - please make it a little easier on your kid. It’s already a huge shift in routine and emotions and all of the things for your kid to go back to school. If it’s the first time they’ve been up before noon since school let out, it’s going to make the first morning of the first day that much harder to adjust to. I’m not saying you should make them wake up at the crack of dawn a week before! By all means, kids should enjoy their last days of summer. But, ease into that crack of dawn schedule over a couple of days.

FOOD.

Welp. This section is aspirational, because there’s a limited amount you, the parent, can do about what your kids eat at school. It would hurt your feelings too much to tell you how many kids I’ve seen over the years bartering away the nutritious meals you sent them to school with. And there’s a limited amount the school can do, other than provide the time and space for them to eat. I actually have a separate rant about how I don’t think teachers should give kids stashes of junk food, because it creates further disincentive for kids to eat fruits at lunch.

But! what both parties can and should do is talk to the kids about nutrition. I’ve had a medium amount of success with this over the years.

Here’s the thing: this varies depending on the city you live in, but in Fort Worth, middle school gets out at 4:30. Let me tell you that hungry, sleep-deprived middle schoolers who have consumed no nutrients during the day make three year olds who haven’t napped seem like pleasant angels. They’re cranky, they’re a little mean, and boy, do they not want to hear about algebra.

I can’t count the number of the number of hallway behavior conversations I’ve had with kids over the years during a class at the end of the day. Rather than starting by asking the kid if they’ve completely lost their mind, I’ll start by asking them what they’ve eaten that day. At least eight times out of ten, the answer is Hot Cheetos and Red Bull, and the mystery is solved. So, I address the behavior, but a huge contributing factor is that the kid is just tired and cranky and taking it out on the rest of us.

“For the love of all that is holy, people. Eat a banana. Eat literally any nutrient at lunch so that you’re not a rage monster by eighth period.”

Kids do seem to receive this somewhat, because they can see as well as anyone that their afternoon classes do tend to get more unhinged as the day goes on. All kids in FWISD get free breakfast and lunch, and even though it’s not Michelin starred, there’s always fruit of some kind. There’s just no getting around the fact that growing bodies need fuel for learning.

SIDEBAR: If your kid chronically has behavior or academic problems in one specific class, find out when that class is. Sure, maybe they are truly not getting the subject, or they really are having a personality conflict with the teacher. But if they’re having a huge amount of trouble with a class the first thing in the morning? Could be that they are secretly up all night on social media. If they’re getting lots of reports about being disruptive in the class right after lunch? Do some investigating and figure out if they’re heading to math class right after consuming four Red Bulls and a bag of Taquis every day because they bartered away their packed lunch (true story). And if they’ve never in their lives struggled in an English class but are struggling mightily THIS year, check their schedule. Is it the last class of the day? Maybe just ask if it can be switched to a different class period.

Being hungry and sleepy may not be the only factor with a behavioral or academic issue, but it can often be a hidden exacerbating factor.

That’s all! Enjoy these last days of summer!

I like computers generally, and I love my own laptop particularly. I cover it with stickers and I have been known to refer to it as “my precious”. I vividly remember how exciting it was in elementary school to go once a week to the computer lab and write on the brand spanking new Apple II GS’s. Yeah, I’m that old.

I also remember struggling as a teacher to have enough working desktops in my own classroom to have even three kids able to type up a paper for a project at the same time, and I remember the tension in my middle school when all of us tried book time in the computer lab for our students. Boy, trying to teach a coding class with dilapidated old desktops that fifteen minutes to boot up in a forty minute class was rough.

Therefore, it feels strange to say that the problem I’m addressing in this post isn’t access to computers but the real pedagogical struggle of trying to compete with kids’ screen addictions, trying to carve space for real lessons while school districts push more and more unvetted ed tech into limited class time, and the depressing truth that school issued laptops are used as plagiarism generators just as often (more often!) as they are used as learning tools.

The following classroom policies aren’t the platonic ideal of how to use laptops or other devices in a classroom, they’re just my classroom policies. Read them, adapt what is useful to you, ignore what isn’t.

IMPORTANT CONTEXT: I taught English to secondary students.

1. THE COMPUTER IS A LEARNING TOOL.

   Establish that expectation day one. School issued computers are for completing school assignments. The school district didn’t issue them for students’ entertainment. It’s important to say this explicitly at the beginning of the school year and repeat as needed. Otherwise, students believe that when they aren’t allowed to use the computer as entertainment or down-time, they are being punished or deprived.

Read more

Y’all. My other post to returning FWISD teachers was about encouragement and teamwork and working in community. That was the nice one. This one is the kick-in-the-pants pep talk, and it’s also directed towards principals and everyone else working in school buildings.

LEARN TO PUSH BACK

Here’s a harsh truth that has been true as long as I worked for this school district:

In FWISD, you get punished for being disobedient, but you don’t get rewarded for being obedient. You only get rewarded for being effective.

In other words - if you comply with every single blessed policy du jour - curriculum, seating, PD, all of it - if you comply with everything to the letter and get bad standardized test scores, you are still going to be blamed. Nobody is going to say, “you did everything we asked you to do, good job, we see that we need to adjust what we tell you to do”. At least, they won’t say it publicly. Instead, they will acknowledge that you did exactly what they told you to do, and you will be blamed because you didn’t do a good enough job implementing it.

The reverse of this is also true: if you don’t do the things but your students do well on standardized test, you will be praised. Ask me how I know!

So your internal rubric for implementing things needs to readjust a bit.

We all want to feel like we are doing a good job at work. But readjust “good job” to mean “doing things that help my students learn” and not “blindly doing the thing I was told to do even when I see it’s not helping kids”.

I don’t mean that as a license to go by vibes or being a contrarian who refuses to be on board with the mission of the school.

I mean, if you pictured yourself explaining to a room full of parents or community members why you did an activity in class, could you justify that it was the best way for kids to learn in that moment? Or would you find yourself explaining that you actively implemented a policy that you knew wasn’t good for kids, but you did it because you don’t want to get fired, or you don’t want to be in trouble.

I’m saying: exercise professional judgment.

This is even more important for principals. There will be no reward for being the principal who was the most obedient. There will only be the principals whose state ratings went up and those whose ratings went down. You, as the leader of the school, know perfectly well which teachers’ pedagogy can be trusted and supported, and which teachers need more structure. You, as the leader of the school, know perfectly well that implementing some policies with a heavy hand might win you temporary compliance and lose you all of your TIA certified staff the second they can leave.

DOCUMENT and USE PROFESSIONAL JUDGEMENT

Y’all - pushing back doesn’t mean confrontation or hostility. In fact, a lot of the institutional dysfunction at FWISD is the inability to receive reasonable questions and push back as anything other than a challenge to authority. If you have ever been scolded or watched someone get scolded at a meeting for asking a question - recognize that the problem there isn’t that someone is asking a question, but that everyone in the meeting knows immediately that questions aren’t welcomed and will lead to retaliation. That is not the sign of a healthy organization. We have all seen that internally, and now the public is getting a taste at it during public comment at board meetings and community listening sessions.

Pushing back doesn’t mean name-calling or making a thing a dramatic hill to die on or torching your relationship with your principal or executive director. It means, first of all - writing things down. If you have a hallway or office conversation with someone, send a follow up email recapping what was discussed. Every time. “Hey, I’m so glad we were able to meet. As I understand it, you would like me to…….”.

Get clarification. Is something being suggested to you? Or is this an official directive that you’re being asked to do? If you don’t agree with it, ask someone to clarify the reasoning. But ask in writing.

Here’s the thing: a whole lot of gaslighting just happened in the spring. The takeover people came in super hot with policies, a wave of people quit, community members wanted to know why a bunch of unreasonable policies ran good people off, and now the district is saying that those policies were optional, and that a whole bunch of things didn’t happen. Because nothing was in writing!

Putting things in writing makes people clarify policies, which is as it should be.

There’s also a spate of new, scary sounding state laws that make everyone nervous. So some policies are an overreach to try and steer clear of those laws, but without first checking to see what the law really says. Asking for clarification forces a principal (or the district) to slow down and really see if what they're wanting to implement is even necessary in the first place.

Look what happened with the book bannings a few years ago - many, many, books were pulled from shelves when they were never challenged in the first place. That’s what happens when decisions are made in fear rather than thinking about what’s best for kids and learning.

Right now, before school starts - think about what your own personal professional boundaries will be. Think about it before the first faculty meeting. What is so important to you that you’re willing to take a little heat to defend it? What is a stupid but harmless change that you’re willing to go along with to make life easier? And what, frankly, is a long-overdue change that is good and worthy of being implemented? Don’t reject everything from the takeover people just because they’re the takeover people.

DON’T COVER UP, DON’T ENABLE

Listen, there’s all kinds of stuff that happens in a school that is dirty laundry chisme that should never be aired in public. Interpersonal tensions between staff - that’s for the group chat. Never, ever, ever complain in a public forum about parents. Never, ever, EVER, talk trash about your students in a mean or identifiable way in public.

But district stuff? There’s all kinds of stuff that teachers are trained not to complain about in public, because it “looks bad”. But sometimes things look bad because they ARE bad. I can tell you right now that the A/C in your classroom is never getting fixed if you try to just tell the front office and get a work order put in. Every single day there’s no heat or no air in your classroom and your students are miserable? Who are you protecting?

I can think of so many problems over the years that either I “solved” or my colleagues and I “solved” by just working harder and for more hours and finding creative workarounds. I was (and still am, honestly) proud of how scrappy public school teachers are. We fix things so that our students don’t suffer the consequences of institutional problems. But now I look back and even though I’m proud of my various creative/workaholic solutions, I also wonder how many problems I enabled the school district or school into not fixing.

So.

Go to board meeting and do public comment. They should hear from teachers and people who work in schools. Again - doesn’t have to be angry or confrontational or full of flattery, for that matter. But communicating a basic framework of “THIS thing is good, please keep that and THAT thing is unhelpful and counterproductive to the goal of helping kids learn” is pretty powerful.

TIA TEACHERS

I’m just going to whisper something to y’all, specifically. I don’t like merit-based pay as policy. I didn’t like it when the state legislature was voting on it. I think FWISD has done a terrible job of implementing it, and I think it’s a fundamentally unfair system. There are plenty of outstanding teachers who don’t qualify for it and we all know it.

BUT

Whether or not I like the system, it’s the one we got. And the fact is, TIA created a class of teachers for whom T-TESS is essentially meaningless for five years.

The second that I qualified for TIA, well, that was the day that my T-TESS stopped having any kind of consequence. I could be rated poorly, I could be rated highly, the state of Texas still had to give me my bonus. The T-TESS wasn’t functionally doing anything to my pay. At that point, I was only ever complying with anything out of courtesy.

Again, I personally don’t think that anyone really thought through the unintended consequences of creating a class of teachers whose yearly evals basically don’t mean anything. But, they did!

So keep that in mind. If you have really good numbers and you already have TIA, then stick to your guns. The numbers show that what you’re doing in your classroom is effective at helping kids to learn. Keep doing it!!!! ESPECIALLY if your numbers are higher than the campus average or the district average or the state average.

I don’t know all the ins and outs of contracts or getting written up - that’s a separate thing. But if you’re a math teacher, and the thing you’re getting rated poorly for or in trouble about is a math lesson that you KNOW is effective and works - keep teaching math in the way you know works. Don’t stop doing effective lessons in an attempt to get a better yearly evaluation, when the yearly evaluation functionally has no impact.

One day, all of this will be aligned - professional development will train you to teach curriculum effectively, the curriculum that you’re being trained on will be tight, and your evaluation will reflect whether or not you’re an effective teacher. Earned autonomy will be logical and tied to results. That day is not today. All of that is currently: sometimes, in some grade levels, in some departments, by some evaluators.

But if you’re a TIA teacher - recognize that not only do you have expertise, but you also have power. You are not easy to replace, and nobody wants you to leave. Rather than simmer in quiet stress and misery - push back a little sometimes. Or just quietly keep doing your thing.

You know, in the second year of Covid I got a new inclusion teacher. New to me, new to teaching, like a shiny penny. The very first day in my classroom she saw something I had written on the board, went over and corrected it. She explained why the way I had written something was wrong, gave an interesting fact.

(when to use "vs./v.")

Based off of that, I knew we were going to get along right away, and boy, was I right.

She went on to be one of the best inclusion teachers I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

I'm getting sidetracked. The point is, at the time she told me she was very into mythology and I was very not. But, you know, new colleague, new teacher, trying to be polite. She kept telling me that I should really take a look again at The Odyssey. (me, in my heart: but why, tho)

One day she hands me her own copy of a book and recommends it: Circe, by Madeline Miller. Let me tell, y'all - that book is a BANGER. I mean, that is a BOOK.

I hadn't enjoyed a book so much in years. I read, the book kind of circulated around school so we talked about it at lunch for a while. I hadn't really read the Odyssey since high school, so I guess I'd mostly been going off of reflected allusions in other texts. The stories are embedded into a million other stories in western lit. Plus: the Brad Pitt version of Troy and the Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou for modern adaptations in different flavors. (Well, Troy for the Iliad and O, Brother for The Odyssey).

THEN, since I'm an English teacher, the kids must suffer. If I like a book and got into the thing, well, now we're all getting into the thing. It's the law.

Sure enough, there was an old, out of adoption textbook with excerpts from the Odyssey from the book room. For the next few years, I didn't just teach it, I taught the heck out of it.

Like so many things, everything is ten times more entertaining through the eyes of middle schoolers. They had no patience whatsoever for deadbeat dad Odysseus ("so, this whole time his kid is just waiting for him???"). They were scandalized by his goings on with Circe the witch ("You have a WIFE AND SON, sir"). Almost universally, they perceived Polyphemus the Cyclops as a tragic victim who acted in self-defense and was wrongfully maimed.

"Y'all, to be clear, you're siding with the monster who killed and ATE people?"

"Miss he was just in his cave minding his business and they came in and stole his CHEESE and took his goats. If someone comes in and steals my cheese then they get what's coming to them".

I got so obsessed with idea of Penelope that I went down a rabbit hole of feminist textile art which led me to study textile art traditions around the world and is the reason why I spent three years teaching kids to crochet. If you have ever clocked that I wear a fair amount of Mexican indigenous embroidery? and it's all over my house? Yeah.

I thought so often of my dear friend and college roommate Anne Wadlow Drogula, who spent all of freshman year translating scandalous ancient poetry in latin in our doom room while watching Titanic. (Look, Anne, I still remember "odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris. nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior" but I can only do the first part by memory now). She loved the ancients and all of these years later I felt like I finally *got* it.

All of that to say - I am hearing good reviews of that Odyssey adaptation but I'm nervous to see it!

I also just really want to encourage everyone to open their hearts and minds a little bit to the idea of interpretation. Usually in my world, I encounter this when people get uptight about wanting things to look "authentic". But of course people don't really mean that. Authentic Shakespeare is drag. Romeo's a dude, Juliet is a dude dressed up as a lady, Mr. Capulet is a dude, Mrs. Capulet is a dude, dudes, dudes, dudes. Everyone on stage is a dude. A lot of the dudes are in dresses. That is what Elizabethan theatre looked like, plus a ton of dirty jokes.

Likewise, "authentic" adaptations of the Odyssey would be a blind dude singing a verrrrrrry long song. There would be a lot of goats, I imagine. The language would sound modern to audiences at the time because to them, it _was_ modern. It's why Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey is so popular and so good. She recaptures the spirit of the thing.

Mind you, I am a lady who writes with a fountain pen and still stubbornly clings to a fair amount of King James Bible verses. I like it when things sound archaic. I like the cadence of it and I like the poetry of it.

But it's a really different thing when you are reading something written in your own language that has aged over centuries versus reading something that was originally written in a different language. That's translation, and a translation sort of freezes in amber the time period of the language it's translated into. So, the King James Bible sounds like Shakespeare times because it was translated in Shakespeare times and that's what Early Modern English sounds like. But it doesn't sound like ancient Aramaic. There's nothing inherently 1600s English about ancient Aramaic or Ancient Greek. We're just conditioned to think so because we heard the Ten Commandments as "Thou shalt".

So, stop being a stick in the mud about an ancient story like The Odyssey. Let the story breathe, like Emily Wilson did in her interpretation.

And, bless us everyone, let's all let go of the idea that classics in the canon are still around because they are somehow morally good for us or that it's morally correct to read them.

Y'all. If a story lasts for thousands of years, it's because that story was *entertaining* and there's a pretty high likelihood that the story involved murder, cheating, maybe some doomed love, a monster, and an intense betrayal between two loyal friends.

That's why, in addition to reading The Odyssey with middle schoolers, I also played a fair amount of Reba McIntyre and Jolene for them on the class playlist. I like a story, I like a story song, I grew up on Mexican soap operas, HOLA magazine, and French novels.

And friends, when you claim that you want “realism” but the thing that throws you out of a story isn’t the presence of a gigantic one-eyed monster or a deity who controls winds, but a legendarily good looking Black lady, I don’t think that your real issue is a desire for realism. May I gently suggest that people look at ancient map? look at where Carthage, and Egypt, and Sheba, and Nubia, and Timbuktu were, and maybe reconcile the fact that your mental picture of what a port city in the ancient world looked like has a lot more to do with pop culture than it does with history.

Teacher pals, this one is for you. This is part pep talk, and part kick in the pants.

PEP TALK:

First, you’re a champion for working for FWISD during takeover times. On behalf of the whole community - thank you. Are you a new teacher? double thank you! We need you and your talents and we appreciate your willingness to take on this challenge.

Are you a veteran teacher? double extra thank you. DID YOU TEACH DURING COVID? Then may your pillow always be cool and your stop lights always be green. That means that you’ve been through it and you’re a toughie. You taught through the book bannings and the anti-CRT times and through a roller coaster of superintendents and chaos. Fort Worth owes you one, honestly. You’ve survived trial by fire and I salute you.

Second - the work that you do is important. The work that you do is important. The work that you do is important. I want you to remember that this year, when that kid in your second period class licks his belonging to keep his classmate from using his pencil. I want you to remember that when faculty meetings make you feel inadequate and overwhelmed. I want you to remember that when some yahoo online makes a crack about summers off. The work that you do is important and meaningful.

Third - the takeover won’t be forever. It’s a season, and eventually that season will be over.

TEACHING IS A TEAM SPORT

Reframe how you think about your work community this year. You don’t work for FWISD or the superintendent or the board of managers. Not really. You work for your school. And within that school, you work with your team. Could be a grade level team, could be your department, could be your lunch pals. I don’t know who it is, but that is who you work for and with. The pal that you can text to put your sub plans out on your desk because you woke up sick, or the one who will cover a class so you can pee? That is your team. You are not alone.

The parents are also your team. Somewhere in your roster is a home adult that always responds to your emails and helps you help their kid. You may already know them or you may discover them this year when you send your first communication with parents. They’re out there! In takeover times, parents and teachers have to stick together.

Since teaching is a team sport, act like it. Don’t try and tough guy it out as an island. Be generous in offering help, be generous in receiving help. I mean it! Don’t be stingy in offering help and don’t be proud about receiving it. If you’re a new teacher, know that everyone else around you is getting help all the time and nobody is going to think less of you if you ask. Teachers who have been around a little minute? It’s not that they are self-sufficient, it’s that they already have a network of people to email and ask for resources or advice. If you have a lesson that isn’t working or a kid that you’re having conflict with or a parent that is intimidating - ask for help! Be open to suggestions. Likewise, you as a new teacher have a lot to offer.

Veteran teachers - ask for help, y’all. Make some boundaries and stick to them. Do not get sucked in to thinking that you can be everything for everyone. You can’t. Do not get sucked in to thinking that you are responsible for the fate of the world. You’re not.

ENCOURAGE EACH OTHER. ENCOURAGE YOURSELF.

Assignment for all of you: be generous and intentional with your encouragement. If you see a friend/colleague/parent/kid/admin doing something good, name it and say it. Even better, write it down in an email. The burnout is real, y’all. Be kind and encouraging to each other. Not just your work besties, but especially your work besties. If your inclusion teacher is helpful - SAY IT. If your campus monitor is making the hallways calmer - SAY THAT. Your classroom clean? Tell your custodian. And your fellow teacher pals - make a point of recognizing someone’s good work at least once a week. If nobody is doing that, do it for yourself. Did you do a good job remembering to take attendance on time? Gold star for you!

This may be too cheesy for you but it worked for me - two years ago I remembered that I was an adult with free will and a credit card, and I exercised that free will to buy myself those reward chart posters my elementary school teachers used when I was a kid. I also bought a pack of shiny star stickers. The kids thought it was going to be corny when they saw me putting up the poster until they realized that the reward chart was for ME, and then they were immediately jealous and wanted to participate, too. So, I had two different challenges for myself and for the kids. One was for exercise. I gave myself one star for every time that I did an exercise.

We also did a duolingo challenge for a month. Wasn’t for a grade, wasn’t part of class, had no academic underpinning. It was just fun. And dangit, it’s satisfying to put a shiny sticker on the chart for myself.

What I’m getting at is that in these takeover times, encouragement and recognition is thin on the ground. Decide now, before school starts, that you’re in it together with your teacher pals and parents and kids, and encourage each other. Encourage yourself.

(Sidebar - to any parent reading, if you think your kid’s teacher is doing a good job and you have five minutes, you have no idea how much a little text or email means. It’s huge. A one sentence “Hey, little Johnny came home and talked about fractions today and I think he’s really getting it” goes such a long way.)

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF

This one is important every year, but in takeover times, it’s ten times more important. Physically, emotionally, all of it. Exercise, eat actual food with nutrients, get a good night’s rest. You can get to work early to work on stuff or you can stay late to work on stuff or you can grade on the weekends or you can make some copies at lunch while eating on the fly. But you can’t be there before school, and after school, and on the weekend, and work through lunch. It’s not sustainable. You’ll crash the second you’re not at work and having nothing left for family and friends. That’s not being committed or hardworking, that’s martyrdom and it’s not helping you or the kids and it’s not making you a better teacher. It’s just burning you out and making you irritable and ruining your health.

Stop waiting for the school district or your supervisors to tell you that you are doing enough, because they never will. You have to decide now, before school starts and the guilt sets in, how much you can do outside of your contract hours. And then stick to it!

Pals. This section is probably the most important one. The school year is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself. Have coffee with that friend that you’re always meaning to see. Have a conversation with your spouse that isn’t about work. Hang out with friends and don’t talk about school. Have twenty minutes in the school day in which you don’t see kids.

JOY IS A PEDAGOGY

You didn’t go in to this job to be stressed out or miserable. You know what’s important this school year? Joy. Joy for you, joy for your kids. Pals, poetry isn’t important because it’s a vehicle for literacy TEKS, it’s important for because it’s good for the soul. The subject that you teach is interesting, and you like it! Kids are funny and chaotic and one of the many perks of working with them is that you will never be bored. This isn’t a school year where you can put joy in any capacity as a goal on your T-Tess, but maybe that’s why it’s that much more important to prioritize joyfulness in your classroom in whatever ways you can create it. One of my favorite things to do is pick some kid and make a point of making them happy at least one time a week. You’ve got a mini K-pop stan? put some kind of BTS easter egg for them to stumble across in an assignment or a bulletin board. You’ve got a mini budding scientist nerd that honest to goodness loves the periodic table? Aim a lesson towards that kid once in a while, rather than trying to entice the haters to like something that they don’t. You can’t always do that, but you can sometimes. Indulge yourself with your own cringy inside jokes or puns or sparkle pen or whatever. Not everything that is important is measurable in a data point.

DON’T ABSORB GUILT, SHAME, OR PANIC FROM THE DISTRICT

Y’all. The entire teaching industry runs on guilt. Teaching is very easy to do poorly and extremely difficult to do well. We want to do right by our students, but we work in dysfunctional systems. That’s true in public schools all over the United States, but it’s doubly true in Texas and trebly true in Fort Worth. The result is that a lot of us try to patch together the gaps in the systems so that our students have their needs met.

The result is that a lot of teachers feel inadequate pretty much all of the time - if we just worked harder, if we just were better, then our students would succeed more. If things are bad it’s because we’re not good enough and not doing a good enough job.

The harsh reality is that sometimes this is true. Every teacher reading this knows exactly who in their building is phoning it in and has been for years. That person doesn’t feel a smidge of guilt or shame about it, and I’m not talking to them. They’ve been blissfully lazy for a long time and that is their boss’s problem.

No, pal, I’m talking to you. The takeover is taking that culture - fixing systemic problems by making teachers feel that they just aren’t good enough - and amplifying it times one thousand.

So here’s your reminder before the school year starts: it’s not you, it’s them. So don’t absorb that guilt and shame.

Whenever someone is coming at you with a directive that is poorly thought out and panicked, it’s because someone waaaaaaaay above your pay grade didn’t plan ahead or execute something when they should have. Your principal yelling at everyone the day after principal’s meeting? yeah.

I hereby give you permission to not internalize that blame on yourself. You’re doing the best that you can, and that’s all you can do. As long as you are doing right by your kids, then you are doing your job.

The Bambrick coaching and the takeover directives - some of them are good and useful and a lot of it is not. But these aren’t the “right” way of teaching. It’s just one way of teaching, among many.

The second that someone gives you that line about being selfish because you’re only there for the benefit of adults instead of the best interest of kids, I give you full permission to not listen to a single other thing that person says. That person is a dumbass. If that person doesn’t work directly with kids every day, or hasn’t worked directly with kids since before Covid, then I want you to pretend that you’re on The Office and whenever they say dumbass things like that you can just stare real hard at the camera.

KIDS

Look. Those kids are going to wear you out and get on your nerves. They are going to roast you and gaslight you and steal your good pen. They are not going to listen to a single word of instruction that you give them when it comes to your lesson but they will develop Superman super hearing if you whisper to a kid three hallways down that you have candy.

And you know what? They’re good kids. And you love them. And you (and they) are going to make this school year the best it can be. And at the end of the year, by golly they are going to know more than they did on the first day, and that will be due to your hard work. And long, long, after you’re a distant memory for them, they’re going to be out there in the world somewhere, and they’re going to use something you taught them and it’s going to make their lives better. And one of these days, some kid that went through your room this year is going to be a better parent because you taught them to be more patient. One of them is going to make great art in the world, or be a statesman, or cure cancer, or write something brilliant, run a business, or be a wonderful cook. And some small part of how they operate in the world will come out of the year y’all spend together in your classroom. Some small part of whether those pain-in-the-butt gaslighters who can never manage to have a pencil when they need it and always, always need to go to bathroom right when you’re trying to teach something important - some small part of whether they grow up to make the world a better place in their sphere of influence or whether they grow up to burn the place down will be because of the work you do this school year. THAT, teacher friends, is why the work you do is important, T-TESS be damned.

The box, friends! My mom definitely wants to do the puzzle more than she wants to get a puzzle. It’s why the most coveted piece of any puzzle is the last one, to get the satisfaction of pressing it into place and completing it.

This seems pretty obvious. If your kid tells you they like LEGO, then hopefully you are getting them blocks and not handing them completed sculptures.

The danger is that if the puzzle is too hard - too many pieces, not enough contrast - then it stops being fun and starts feeling tedious and soul-crushing. If it’s too easy, well, that’s no fun, either.

The scholar Lev Vygotsky gives us a framework for this. It’s called the Zone of Proximal Development, and it describes that sweet spot where the puzzle is just right. Accessible, but challenging.

In adult world we often forget this obvious truth when it comes to kids- it’s fun to do challenging things. We rob kids of the satisfaction of figuring something out and getting that click of understanding when the last puzzle piece fits just so. Sometimes we fear putting kids in the deep end of something so much that we leave them in the splash pad for too long.

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First -

Hi. I’m Ale Checka, and this is my new substack. I’m a little bit at a loss at how to describe myself, because for the first time in eighteen years, I can’t just say “teacher”. I taught for a billion years, and now I’m teaching a little and doing other things.

One of them is speaking and writing more about education and education policy.

This space will be a place to reflect on what I’ve seen and observed in my career as a classroom teacher, but also to think about how policy and trends shape classrooms.

The subtitle to this post - “join me on this learning journey” is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I have long said that the quality that you need to survive teaching middle school is delusionally high self-esteem. As in, you offer forth the shiniest pearls of your wisdom to a room full of thirteen year olds and they react as though you handed them a lead balloon.

Full body flopping, rolling eyes, deep, gusty sighs. But in my heart, I decide that what they meant was, “Oh, wow, Ms. Checka! I’m so excited to read this novel with you and go on this learning journey!”. And it makes me happy, and we read the thing/do the activity. And sometimes they really did mean that, secretly.

So: hello, world. I don’t know what your facial expression is when you read this, but in my heart, it’s “wow, so excited to join you on this learning journey!”.