Someone sent me the Darius Cooks video.

It took me a while to actually watch it.

My social media days are few and far between these days, especially outside of networking, connecting with folks, or doing something related to business. So by the time I finally sat down and watched it, plenty of people had already had plenty to say.

But when I watched it, I wondered.

Not because I don’t believe what he experienced.

I am more than aware of what is happening in education. I know that students are struggling to read. I know students are struggling to write at length. There are young people entering high school who have difficulty interpreting literature, communicating their thinking, or sustaining themselves through a complex text.

I know.

I have committed more than 20 years of my life to teaching. I have multiple degrees, years of professional development, classroom experience, leadership experience, curriculum experience, and coaching experience—all of the things we use to establish that someone might actually know a little something about teaching and learning.

So I did not watch the video and think, This isn’t happening.

Instead, I wondered:

How did we get them here?

Because there is something we keep leaving out of these conversations about literacy.

There is a high-quality instruction crisis.

And I don’t think we want to talk enough about that.

I Know Because I Was One of Those Teachers

About 20 years ago, programs like Teach For America and other alternative certification pathways were filled to the brim with young people and career changers interested in entering education.

I know because I was one.

When I graduated from Howard University as an English major, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do next. Graduate school? Maybe. Writing? Hopefully.

Then I was introduced to the idea that I could move to New York City, earn a salary with benefits, teach, get paid holidays and summer breaks that I imagined I would spend enjoying the city and indulging in my own enrichment, AND earn a subsidized master’s degree.

Say less.

It sounded great.

So there I was: a college graduate, an English major, smart, well intentioned—and completely unprepared to do the job I had been hired to do.

My first teaching position was in special education.

Before September, my preparation had essentially consisted of co-teaching a summer-school course and taking a couple of loosely taught graduate classes about lesson planning and discipline.

Then September came.

I walked into a classroom filled with students who could not read and write on grade level.

And I did not know what to do.

I mean that literally.

I knew how to read. I knew how to write. I knew literature. I could discuss Toni Morrison and Shakespeare and analyze symbolism and write a college paper.

But I did not know how to teach a struggling adolescent reader how to read.

Those are not the same thing.

And nobody had really taught me the difference.

My poorly structured lessons quickly devolved into classroom mismanagement. Students ran into the hallway. Things were thrown across the classroom. There was name-calling, threats, profanity, and students hurting one another.

The expectation, however, never changed. I was still supposed to get these children on grade level while managing them well enough that my administrative team did not have to be bothered.

I did not have the support, training, or experience I needed.

But I absolutely had the responsibility.

For a long time, I thought that meant I simply was not a good teacher.

It took me years to understand that I had been underprepared and under-resourced for the work I was being asked to do.

And there is a difference.

Luckily, somewhere along the way, I got a mentor who supported me. I also had an instinct that kept telling me there had to be a better way to do this.

So I learned.

I took classes at Teachers College, Columbia University. I took district trainings. I studied. I watched other teachers. I tried things, reflected, adjusted, and kept learning.

Eventually, I learned how to teach children to read and write. Somewhere along the way I learned enough middle-school science and history to teach that too.

Most importantly, I didn’t quit.

Despite that disastrous first year, I realized something:

I actually wanted to teach.

I loved teaching. I loved young people. I loved watching a student finally understand something they had convinced themselves they could not do.

So I stayed.

A lot of people did not.

And that matters.

Research on teacher preparation and retention backs up part of what many of us saw with our own eyes. Teachers entering classrooms without comprehensive preparation leave at substantially higher rates than fully prepared teachers, and research has found particularly high turnover among alternatively certified teachers working in schools serving large populations of students of color. Lack of administrative support is also one of the strongest predictors of teachers leaving.

Now, I want to be clear about something.

I am not saying everybody who entered through alternative certification was a bad teacher.

That would mean I was saying that about myself.

Some of us became phenomenal teachers.

But look at what it took: mentorship, training, coursework, reflection, practice, failure, more training, and years of experience.

That is precisely my point.

Teaching is something you have to learn how to do.

Too often we behaved as though being smart, energetic, young, idealistic, or holding a bachelor’s degree was enough qualification to learn on somebody else’s children.

Especially Black children. Poor children. Children with disabilities. Children attending schools where vacancies were hardest to fill.

And this was happening over and over again.

Teachers came in, struggled, burned out, and left. Then another inexperienced teacher replaced them.

Now stop for a minute and think about this from the student’s perspective.

What happens when a child experiences that revolving door for years?

Maybe the fifth-grade teacher is new. The sixth-grade teacher leaves in December. The seventh-grade teacher is teaching outside their content area. The eighth-grade teacher is technically certified but still learning how to teach reading.

Then we meet that student at 17 years old and say:

My God. They can’t read.

Okay.

But what happened before they got to us?

That is the part I want to know.

Everybody Was a Student, So Everybody Thinks They Know How to Teach

This connects to something else that has bothered me for years.

Education has been devalued as a profession.

Because everybody was once a student, everybody seems to think they are an expert on teaching and learning.

Read the comments underneath almost any post about education and you will find plenty of advice about what teachers need to do, what schools should be doing, and what worked “back when I was in school.”

But we don’t apply that logic to other professions.

Imagine walking into your doctor’s office and saying:

“Well, I have had a body my whole life, so let me tell you what you need to be doing.”

You wouldn’t.

You understand that doctor spent years studying.

I remember being at Howard watching classmates enter as biology or pre-med majors and slowly change majors because the science coursework became increasingly demanding. Then there was still medical school. Residency. Exams. Specialization.

It’s tough.

And we expect it to be tough.

We actually find some comfort in knowing the person cutting us open had to demonstrate that they knew what they were doing first.

But teaching?

Somehow we remain comfortable with the idea that people can figure it out on the job, even when the job involves 25 or 30 children with different academic needs, disabilities, language backgrounds, behavioral needs, and life experiences.

Teaching requires an understanding of child development, cognition, content, assessment, literacy, language acquisition, disability, behavior, culture, and pedagogy—and how all of those things interact inside the body of an actual child.

That is intellectual work.

It requires study, practice, apprenticeship, feedback, and continuous professional learning.

Yet somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that teaching was something almost anybody could do.

I don’t believe that happened accidentally.

There Was a Time When Becoming a Teacher Meant Something Different

One of the reasons this conversation bothers me so much is because the history is deeper than people realize.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of Cultivating Genius, writes about the intellectual traditions of Black communities and draws her framework from 19th-century Black literary societies.

These communities were studying literature, history, politics, identity, and the world around them.

Literacy wasn’t simply about decoding words or answering comprehension questions.

It was connected to identity, intellect, criticality, liberation, and becoming.

That legacy matters to me personally too.

My own grandmother aspired to attend Cheyney more than 75 years ago.

Teaching was something to aspire to.

For Black communities, teachers were intellectuals. They were leaders. They were some of the most educated people in the community.

So when we talk about the state of teaching today, I cannot separate that conversation from what happened to Black educators after Brown v. Board of Education.

And here is where people may disagree with me.

That’s fine.

I know we have been taught to celebrate Brown as this wonderful landmark moment in American history.

I don’t celebrate it quite so simply.

Because I want to know what happened next.

What Happened to the Teachers?

One of my favorite episodes of Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment.”

If you have never listened to it, listen to it.

Because it asks a question that gets left out of the neat little Brown v. Board story many of us learned in school:

What happened to all of the Black teachers?

We talk about Black children integrating schools. We put up the pictures of Ruby Bridges. We celebrate children walking into white schools.

And yes, legalized segregation needed to end.

Absolutely.

But there is another part of this story.

Black schools were not struggling because Black people did not know how to educate Black children.

They were deliberately under-resourced.

Those are not the same thing.

Black schools received inferior buildings, old textbooks, less funding, fewer materials, and fewer opportunities.

The inequality was created.

Then somehow the people working inside those unequal conditions became associated with the deficiency.

After Brown, Black educators paid an enormous price.

Research estimates that more than 38,000 Black teachers in Southern and border states lost their jobs between 1954 and 1974 through school closures, firing, non-rehiring, new certification requirements, and other practices accompanying desegregation. Black administrators were frequently demoted as well.

Thirty-eight thousand.

Sit with that number.

Scholars including Howard University’s Leslie Fenwick have been pushing us to understand what that actually meant.

We didn’t simply integrate children.

We decimated a Black educator pipeline.

And many of those teachers were highly educated, highly trained, and deeply connected to the communities they served.

They knew the children’s families. They understood the community. They held children to high expectations while also understanding the world those children were navigating.

Then Black children were told:

Now you can attend this other school.

But many of the adults who had been educating them could not come with them.

Think about that.

We made the CHILD carry integration.

We put Black children into environments where some of the adults educating them did not believe they were equal in the first place.

And then we called that progress.

I do want to be precise here because the history deserves precision.

The Supreme Court’s constitutional ruling in Brown held that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause.

The Court also relied on arguments about the psychological harm segregation inflicted on Black children, and those arguments became part of a larger narrative about the supposed inadequacy of Black educational environments.

That is the piece that bothers me.

Because the problem was never that Black children were being loved and taught by Black educators.

The problem was that the government intentionally refused to give their schools equitable resources.

Those are very different problems.

Instead of simply fixing the resources and dismantling legal segregation while protecting the expertise of Black educators, thousands of those educators disappeared from the profession.

So yes.

When we talk about the deterioration of educational systems, I think that history matters.

A lot.

And Now, Seventy Years Later, We’re Looking at the Kids

Which brings me right back to that video.

We look at a high-school student who struggles to interpret a text, develop an argument, write at length, or sustain attention through reading.

Then everybody collectively gasps.

These kids can’t read.

Okay.

Who taught them?

And I don’t mean that as an attack on individual teachers.

I mean: what did their educational experience actually look like?

Were their teachers prepared and supported? Did those teachers stay long enough to develop expertise? Were literacy specialists available when students began falling behind? Did interventions happen early enough and with enough intensity to make a difference?

How many vacancies, substitutes, curriculum changes, or out-of-field teachers did students experience along the way?

Those things matter.

And right now, districts around the country are still trying all kinds of things to put adults in classrooms because they cannot attract and retain enough fully prepared teachers.

So when we talk about a literacy crisis, I need that conversation to be bigger.

Yes, phones matter. COVID matters. Attendance matters. Parents matter. Curriculum matters. Student motivation matters. The decline in independent reading matters.

All of it matters.

But I am not going to sit quietly while the entire conversation becomes:

What is wrong with these children?

No.

Turn the lens.

And once we turn the lens toward instruction, there is another question we have to be willing to ask:

Whose interpretation of what is happening in that classroom gets treated as truth?

When Representation Becomes a Pedestal

There is another layer to this conversation that I have been sitting with, and I know it may make some people uncomfortable.

We need Black male educators.

Let me start there.

Black men remain few and far between in American classrooms, and their presence can matter tremendously for students. I have worked beside phenomenal Black male teachers—men who were thoughtful, reflective, intellectually curious, deeply committed to children, and serious about the craft of teaching.

But scarcity can do something strange.

Sometimes when there are so few Black men in a profession, simply being there can make someone a commodity.

And representation can quietly become a pedestal.

I have watched Black male educators enter schools and immediately receive a level of visibility and authority that Black women educators may spend years earning. They become the person asked to mentor the boys, handle discipline, speak at assemblies, join leadership teams, represent the school, and explain what Black children need, sometimes before anyone has stopped to ask whether this particular man is actually an excellent teacher.

That matters because representation and expertise are not the same thing.

When we confuse them, we can unintentionally create educators who are insulated from the kind of listening, reflection, coaching, and correction that good teaching requires.

This is part of what I have been thinking about as I watch the conversation around this video unfold.

Here we have a Black male teacher sounding an alarm about the reading and writing abilities of his students, and the internet responds. People are devastated. They are shocked. They share the video. They praise him for telling the truth.

His emotion becomes evidence.

But then a woman educator who previously taught some of these same students enters the conversation and says: Hold on.

She describes students who have demonstrated much more than what is being represented publicly. She brings examples. She knows their work.

And suddenly the story becomes more complicated.

That complication interests me because what if the question is not simply whether these students can read?

What if we also have to ask what happened instructionally in that classroom?

What was the task? What scaffolds were provided? What did the teacher know about these students before making a public judgment about their ability? What had they demonstrated previously?

Was this inability, unfamiliarity, disengagement, a poorly designed task, or one moment in a much larger academic story?

Those are questions educators are supposed to ask.

Good teaching requires curiosity about what students know before concluding what they cannot do.

And this is where I think gender matters too.

Black women have carried an enormous share of the work of teaching Black children for generations. They have been classroom teachers, literacy teachers, special educators, instructional coaches, department chairs, principals, aunties, advocates, curriculum writers, and community educators.

Too often, that work is simply expected.

Meanwhile, a Black man says something about education publicly and people stop to listen.

There is a cultural hunger for the Black male intellectual voice that can grant Black men a level of authority Black women are often required to repeatedly prove they deserve.

And I have seen what can happen when that authority goes unchecked.

I have watched Black men in educational spaces lean into deficit narratives about Black children, embrace the role of disciplinarian without interrogating why that role was assigned to them, or dismiss the knowledge of Black women who have been doing the work longer. I have also seen confidence get confused with expertise and educators become so accustomed to being celebrated for simply being present that they stop listening.

That is dangerous in any profession.

It is especially dangerous in education.

Teaching requires humility.

It requires enough humility to consider that maybe I misunderstood the student, maybe the lesson did not work, or maybe my assessment did not actually measure what I thought it measured. Another teacher may know something about that child that I do not.

And sometimes I may simply need to learn.

That willingness is not weakness.

It is the work.

Representation alone will never save us.

I do want more Black men teaching our children.

Absolutely.

But I don’t want Black men in classrooms simply because they are Black men.

I want Black men who study teaching, who listen, who respect Black women, and who understand that culturally responsive teaching is more than being culturally familiar with your students.

I want educators who refuse the savior role, who do not mistake proximity to children for understanding them, and who see themselves not as commodities but as members of a profession that requires continuous learning.

Because our children do not need symbols.

They need excellent teachers.

And sometimes our excitement about representation makes us reluctant to say that out loud.

Our Kids Have Been Carrying the Onus for Far Too Long

That’s really what I keep coming back to.

Our students have been carrying the onus for far too long.

Adults created the systems, set the policies, determined who was qualified to teach, decided how schools would be funded, and determined which interventions would be available when students struggled.

Then somehow we arrive at senior year, look at a child and say:

Why can’t you write an essay?

I have another question.

What happened during the previous twelve years?

Because a literacy crisis does not begin in twelfth grade.

A child does not suddenly become a struggling reader at seventeen.

There is a trail.

There are assessments, report cards, incomplete assignments, interventions, referrals, conversations, and moments when somebody knew that something was not working.

And then somehow the child continued moving through the system.

Until eventually the system hands that child to somebody else and says:

Look what they can’t do.

No.

Look at what we did not do.

That doesn’t mean children have no responsibility.

It doesn’t mean families have no responsibility.

It doesn’t mean teachers have no responsibility.

It means children cannot be the only ones under examination.

And frankly, they should not be the first.

So Yes, Let’s Talk About the Literacy Crisis

Let’s talk about why students cannot sustain themselves through a text, write several pages, construct complete ideas, build vocabulary, or analyze literature.

But let’s also talk about whether the people teaching them received the level of preparation necessary to do that work well.

Let’s talk about whether excellent teachers can afford to remain in classrooms.

Let’s talk about why teachers with decades of expertise are treated as interchangeable with somebody who completed a few weeks of training.

Let’s talk about what happened to generations of highly educated Black teachers and what we lost when Black children were separated from so much Black educational expertise in the name of integration.

Let’s talk about why schools serving children with the greatest needs continue to experience some of the greatest instability.

And then maybe we can ask a better question:

When will we stop lowering the bar for children and start raising the bar for the systems responsible for educating them?

Because I believe in high expectations.

I believe children should read deeply, write well, wrestle with complicated ideas, defend an argument, interpret literature, question a text, and communicate what they think.

I have spent more than 20 years helping students do exactly that.

And that is precisely why I refuse to believe the answer is simply:

These kids can’t read.

There is a whole story before that sentence.

And maybe it is finally time we told it.

She was a veteran teacher, and I was intimidated.

Her students were focused and actively engaged in the learning. But what struck me most was the quiet. You could hear a pin drop. The silence was palpable.

I watched as she slowly moved through a reading passage with her students. And when I say slowly, I mean she started with the directions. She made sure students were following along. She checked for understanding. She didn’t seem particularly concerned with getting to the next thing.

She was concerned with making sure her students were actually learning the thing in front of them.

I remember being deeply impacted by veteran teachers like her. They taught with an intentionality I didn’t yet have. There was a confidence in slowing down because they understood something that would take me years to understand myself fully:

There is always more learning to uncover when we are willing to dig deeper.

Many years later, I became that veteran teacher.

And somewhere along the way, I developed a phrase that my students, especially my fast finishers, heard often:

“We are never done.”

Finished early?

Not in my classroom.

What else can you notice? What could you improve? Can you explain your thinking? Is there another way to solve it? What happens if you try it again?

We are never done.

We say we value perseverance. But do we practice it?

We tell people that patience is a virtue.

We tell children to persevere.

We celebrate hard work. We talk about grit. Entrepreneurs are told to “go for no.” Writers are told that writing is rewriting. We tell people that success doesn’t happen overnight.

And yet, increasingly, we have constructed a world that suggests exactly the opposite.

We have been living in a popcorn society for decades.

Put it in. Push the button. Wait a few minutes.

Done.

The internet accelerated our access to information. Smartphones put that access in our hands at every moment of the day. We became accustomed to immediate responses, instant communication, same-day delivery, short-form content, and answers available with a search.

Now we have AI.

I can type a prompt and have paragraphs appear before I’ve finished drinking my coffee.

There are incredible possibilities in that.

There is also danger.

Because the faster our tools become, the easier it is to start believing that everything should be fast.

But everything shouldn’t be.

Some things require time.

Some things require reflection.

Some things require sitting with the discomfort of not knowing.

Some things require doing it wrong before we understand how to do it right.

Some things require revision.

Processing is part of the work.

Sometimes, the silence is the learning

I see this constantly with my students.

When I don’t give my ESL students enough time to process a question, their responses tend to be more scattered or superficial. And usually the same students answer—the confident ones, the students with stronger language skills, the ones whose hands shoot into the air first.

But when I wait, the room changes.

More students participate.

Their responses become deeper.

Students who once hesitated begin raising their hands.

Over time, their confidence grows.

The difference wasn’t that they suddenly became smarter.

They were given enough time to show us what they knew.

That distinction matters.

Because when we reward speed, we can easily mistake quickness for intelligence.

And when we build classrooms, workplaces, organizations, and even entire cultures around immediacy, we have to ask:

Whose brilliance are we missing because we didn’t wait long enough to hear it?

Urgency is not neutral

This is where my thinking about processing moves beyond teaching practice.

I believe urgency can become an equity issue.

I’ve worked in schools where maintaining the pace of the lesson was essential. Timers were built into our slides. Teachers in adjacent classrooms teaching the same grade level were expected to teach the same lessons, use the same materials, administer the same assessments, and maintain roughly the same instructional pace.

There were benefits to that level of collaboration and alignment.

But human beings aren’t synchronized clocks.

So I learned to dance.

I looked for places inside the structure where students could process, revisit, revise, and reflect. Sometimes we moved quickly. Sometimes we needed to circle back. Sometimes I needed to find another way into the learning.

It was a strategic dance, and eventually I mastered the steps.

My years as a special educator made the stakes of that dance even clearer to me.

I have taught classrooms where every student was demonstrating success at their own level. That wasn’t because every student processed information in the same way or at the same speed.

They didn’t.

It happened because I refused to write students off.

I met them where they were and kept looking for another way forward.

That is why I’ve started thinking about a statement that may sound provocative:

Urgency is the opposite of equity.

Maybe more precisely, when urgency becomes a culture rather than a circumstance, it becomes the enemy of equity.

Of course, real emergencies exist. Sometimes we genuinely need to move quickly.

But we’ve also created organizations where almost everything is urgent.

Answer now.

Produce now.

Decide now.

Respond now.

Move on.

And those environments inevitably privilege certain people: people who are already comfortable with the dominant culture, people with strong written or verbal communication skills, people who process information quickly, and people who already understand how the system works.

Meanwhile, we risk losing people whose contributions could be irreplaceable.

People with disabilities.

English learners.

People from marginalized communities.

People without the same access or resources.

People who think differently.

People whose creativity doesn’t travel in a straight line.

Equity requires something urgency often refuses to give us:

time.

Time for reflection.

Time for collective thinking.

Time to revisit an idea.

Time to listen to someone else and change our minds.

Time to revise.

Equity is often circular rather than linear. We may have to return to something we thought we’d finished. Knowledge may need to come from multiple people instead of one designated expert.

That can look inefficient in a culture obsessed with productivity.

I think it can actually produce better work.

Revision taught me that

When I was studying for my MFA in writing, I attended a workshop where we spent the final days actively engaged in revision.

And I mean actively.

We tore apart pages of our stories.

We taped pieces to walls.

We spread pages across the floor.

We moved sections around and experimented with different versions of our stories until something began to feel right.

Revision became physical.

Messy.

Nonlinear.

We weren’t correcting a few commas and calling it done. We were reconsidering what the work could become.

That’s what I try to teach my students about writing now.

Students often think a draft is enough. They treat revision as the thing you do at the end if the teacher makes you.

I don’t.

I build revision throughout the writing process. And I believe educators should model it themselves. Let students hear us change our minds. Let them watch us cross something out. Let them hear us say, “Actually, I don’t think that works. Let me try it another way.”

Because perhaps one of the most important things we can teach young people is this:

Your first attempt does not determine your capacity.

I see it when tutoring, too.

A student gives me the wrong answer.

“Try again.”

At first, there can be resistance.

They want me to tell them the answer. They don’t want to sit in the discomfort of being wrong.

But I wait.

Try again.

Over time, something changes.

Trust develops.

They begin to understand that being wrong isn’t the end of the learning. It’s part of it.

Eventually, they lean in.

AI makes this conversation even more important

I use AI regularly, and I think it can be an incredible thought partner.

But thought partner is the important part.

When I have fleshed out what I want, understand my purpose, and know the right questions to ask, AI can help me move faster and explore possibilities I might not have considered.

When I expect it to do all of the thinking for me, the process becomes much more flawed.

We’ve been here before, although on a much smaller scale.

When Microsoft Word and spell-check became commonplace, spell-check didn’t suddenly make everyone a great writer. It couldn’t always account for slang, vernacular, context, voice, or nuance.

We still had to know something.

AI is exponentially more powerful, but the principle remains.

I constantly correct AI.

I rewrite prompts.

I clarify what I mean.

I check for alignment.

I revise what it gives me.

And sometimes I realize that I have spent so much time trying to engineer the perfect prompt that doing the thing manually would have been easier.

Ironically, giving ourselves time to process, correct, and revise can actually save time.

But I have another concern about AI that goes beyond efficiency.

I worry about our intellectual stamina.

What happens when we become increasingly uncomfortable with the experience of not knowing yet?

There is a particular kind of discomfort that accompanies real learning and creativity.

I don’t know.

This isn’t working.

Let me think.

Maybe I was wrong.

Let me try something else.

Wait.

What if...?

That space can be uncomfortable.

It can also be where the breakthrough happens.

If we outsource every uncomfortable moment of thinking because a machine can immediately produce an answer, we may become faster producers while becoming less capable thinkers.

The goal shouldn’t be to reject AI.

The goal should be to learn how to use it while protecting our ability to think, question, struggle, discern, and create.

Maybe technology should handle more of what doesn’t deserve our time so humans can spend more time on what does.

What becomes possible when we have another chance?

I think often about what could happen if we stopped asking:

“How quickly can we get this done?”

and started asking:

“What does this need in order to become what it could be?”

I think we’d unlock more creativity.

More possibility.

More inclusion.

More ideas from people we might otherwise overlook.

More entrepreneurs willing to hear no and try again.

More students willing to attempt something difficult.

More people willing to take intellectual risks because they know a mistake isn’t permanent.

More writers willing to tear apart the first version and build something better.

Maybe we’d even rediscover the value of hard work—not as endless productivity or exhaustion, but as the willingness to stay with something long enough to see what it can become.

Life might become more robust.

More interesting.

More human.

Because perhaps the real danger of our popcorn society isn’t simply that we’re becoming impatient.

It’s that we’re eliminating the space where becoming happens.

The pause.

The struggle.

The wrong answer.

The first draft.

The reconsideration.

The second attempt.

The moment when we say:

I don’t know yet. Give me some time to think.

We need those moments.

Our students need them.

Our organizations need them.

Our communities need them.

And perhaps the faster the world becomes, the more deliberately we will have to protect them.

Because we are never done.

When my daughter is playing with other children, I look and listen. I watch their body language. I evaluate the tone of their voices, the balance of power, and whether she seems comfortable. It sounds a little crazy when I write it out, but it is true.

Part of this comes from the abusive relationship I left when her father and I separated. Healing from domestic violence has meant learning how to feel safe again while also trying to protect my children from harm.

Another part comes from thinking back on my own childhood and wanting to rewrite the story.

I was adultified from a young age. I cooked dinner for a family of five and took on responsibilities that should never have belonged to a child. By middle school, I knew how to go to Western Union and put money on the light bill. I could handle a bank transaction, knew my mother’s ATM PIN, and could write a resignation letter in perfect cursive before I reached eighth grade. I managed daycare pick ups and drop offs when I was still a child myself.

One of my favorite things to tell my children is, “You have the rest of your life to be an adult. Slow down.”

I wanted their childhoods to feel different from mine. I wanted them to have room to play, make mistakes, and grow without carrying responsibilities that did not belong to them.

But as I watch my 21-year-old son, Quadir, struggle to find his footing as he enters adulthood, and as I watch Kali navigate the complicated relationships between the children she meets during our travels abroad, I have started to wonder whether my instinct to protect them is always helping.

I am learning to let go.

Letting go is nuanced.

For a long time, letting go of control meant sitting with the reality that I could not fix every problem or solve every challenge. Now, it also means recognizing that I have to allow my children to flail a little.

I have to give them space to struggle, especially because I can trust that the skills I have taught them and the resources I continue to provide can serve as a net beneath them.

And even if they fall, that is okay too.

I will still be there.

It seems like a small thing, but even today, when Quadir called and asked me to pay for an Uber because he did not want to wait an hour for the bus, I struggled with saying no.

I asked him whether he was safe. He said that he was.

I told him that he would need to wait for the bus and practice being patient.

But even after I said no, I could feel the discomfort physically in my body.

The urge to rescue him.
The urge to step in.
The urge to save and solve.

It is not simply a thought. It is a physical response. That is how deeply the instinct lives inside me.

For years, my vigilance helped me survive. It helped me anticipate danger, protect my children, and create stability when stability did not come naturally.

But survival skills do not always know when the danger has passed.

Sometimes they continue speaking long after the emergency is over, convincing us that love must always look like intervention.

I am beginning to understand that stepping back does not mean that I am abandoning my children. It does not mean I am becoming careless or unavailable.

Sometimes stepping back is how I show them that I trust them.

Sometimes love looks like listening without fixing.

Sometimes it looks like asking, “Are you safe?” and allowing the answer to be enough.

Sometimes it looks like letting them wait for the bus.

You will never convince me that screaming in someone’s face while declaring “I believe in you” is anything other than power, privilege, and harm dressed up as love.

I do not care how passionate it looks. I do not care how inspirational the video is supposed to be. I do not care how many people say, “But they have a relationship.” Screaming in someone’s face, using intimidation, and calling it motivation is not care. It is not safety. It is not relationship. It is abuse.

And it makes me sick because I have seen this before.

It reminds me of the urban school districts I worked in where the student body was almost entirely Black and Brown, while the teaching staff was overwhelmingly white and the administration was entirely white. Educators would come into these districts for the higher pay, the career opportunity, and the chance to “make a difference” in the lives of “those kids.”

Those kids who, according to them, needed saving.

Those kids who apparently could not find confidence, identity, excellence, opportunity, or a strong sense of self within their own homes, families, and communities.

That is the part people do not want to name. So much of what gets framed as service is really elitism. So much of what gets framed as “high expectations” is really control. So much of what gets framed as “love” is really domination. And so much of what gets celebrated as tough motivation is rooted in the belief that Black and Brown children need to be broken down in order to be built up.

Before I became an educator, I was a community organizer. Some of my earliest memories are of accompanying my mother as she marched for fair wages in our community. Later, my siblings and I would sit in the background while she organized clothing drives, food drives, summer lunch programs, and community meetings around equity and justice.

So when I talk about community, I am not talking about charity. I am not talking about saviorism. I am talking about people having what they need inside their own communities. I am talking about dignity. I am talking about power. I am talking about the difference between standing with people and standing over them.

Later, I learned about racism. Not the watered-down definition that confuses racism with individual bias or prejudice, but the real one: racism as a system of power. Racism as dominant white culture shaping what is considered normal, professional, safe, loving, rigorous, and acceptable.

And even later, I learned more about the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. I learned how much burden we placed on Black children in the name of justice and integration. I learned how instead of challenging adults, systems, decision-makers, and institutions, we placed the weight of change on children. I learned how Black schools were closed, Black educators were pushed out, and Black educational excellence was devalued when it was attached to Black teachers, Black principals, Black communities, and Black institutions.

We called it equality.

But too often, what replaced community was not liberation. It was proximity to whiteness. It was access to schools where Black children were taught by people who did not know them, did not come from them, did not understand their communities, and too often looked down on them.

And not enough has changed.

That is why people can still watch an adult scream in a young person’s face and say, “It’s okay. She cares. She is motivating them.”

That is why people can still defend intimidation as relationship.

That is why, in so many urban schools, you can still find adults screaming at children, using fear as classroom management, blaming families, and then calling themselves the only people who truly care.

I once attended a conference where the keynote speaker asked a question I have never forgotten. She asked the white educators in the room to imagine their own children going through school without ever being taught by someone who looked like them, shared their racial markers, understood their community, or reflected their lived experience.

People gave the polite answer. They said they would welcome the diversity.

But I do not believe we have ever been honest about that question.

If white children were educated in schools where nearly all of the teachers were Black and Brown, and every administrator was Black or Latinx, there would be public outrage. Families would move. Alternative schools would open overnight. Remote learning would become a preferred option for the privileged. People would suddenly have language for discomfort, safety, representation, and cultural mismatch.

But Black and Brown children are expected to endure that reality every day and call it opportunity.

That is the part I cannot ignore.

Dominant white culture shows up in schools every day through the words, actions, assumptions, and unchecked power of educators who enter communities they would never live in, send their own children to, or be accountable to. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it comes with a smile. Sometimes it comes through yelling, shame, and control.

But at the root is the same belief: Black children do not already have what they need. Their families cannot provide it. Their communities cannot provide it. Their own people cannot provide it. So someone else must come in, take over, correct them, discipline them, motivate them, and call that love.

I reject that completely.

I reject the idea that harm becomes love because an adult says, “I believe in you.”

I reject the idea that yelling becomes motivation because there is a relationship.

I reject the idea that Black and Brown children need to be humiliated, intimidated, or emotionally overpowered in order to be reached.

That is not love.

That is not teaching.

That is not relationship.

That is racism, power, and abuse wearing the language of care.

Some people will say, “Well, you do not understand sports. It is different.”

But is it?

Then let’s talk about sports. Let’s talk about who the players are. Let’s talk about who the coaches are. Let’s talk about who owns the teams, who profits from the labor, who is praised for toughness, who is expected to endure pain, and who gets to stand over Black and Brown bodies calling control “motivation.”

Recognize anything?

We have seen this pattern before. Black and Brown bodies used for strength, entertainment, performance, profit, and institutional pride, while the people in power call the harm discipline, development, opportunity, or love.

So no, I do not separate that moment from the larger system. I do not separate the screaming from the power dynamic. I do not separate the declaration of “I believe in you” from the spit, the humiliation, the intimidation, and the permission adults give themselves to overpower young people in the name of care.

Because that is the trick.

If you wrap domination in the language of belief, people will call it passion.

If you wrap intimidation in the language of relationship, people will call it coaching.

If you wrap harm in the language of love, people will defend it.

But not me.

Like I said at the beginning: you will never convince me that screaming in someone’s face while declaring “I believe in you” is anything other than power, privilege, and harm dressed up as love.

Never.

Go find somebody else to play with.

You cannot fool me.

I am always seeking knowledge, always consuming new information, always trying to understand a little more. For as long as I can remember, learning has brought me safety and joy.

I think that started in childhood.

We had a tall wooden bookshelf in our apartment, crafted by my grandfather. He was a talented carpenter, among many other things. On that shelf sat rows of Encyclopedia Britannica, arranged alphabetically, an adult set and a children’s version.

Whenever we asked my mother something she could not answer, she would tell us to “look it up.”

So we did.

On days when I could not get lost in the screen of our one family television, or when the weather was not warm enough for roller skating, bike riding, or making dirt piles outside, I would read. I remember the “B” book and how it described the development of children, starting with being a “baby.” I read every single one of the youth encyclopedias.

The big, heavy grown-up encyclopedias had their own special purpose when it was time for school projects and presentations.

This was before the internet. It would still be years before we heard the now-ancient sound of dial-up internet, blocking the phone line and announcing the familiar AOL welcome.

In between reading, I have vivid memories of sitting in the kitchen for regular, impromptu lessons. A chalkboard adjacent to the stove would sometimes reveal a Word of the Day. Our challenge was to determine its meaning and write a well-developed sentence within 24 hours.

Other times, my uncle would write a really long word on the board, “antidisestablishmentarianism,” and challenge us to make as many smaller words from it as we could. This is still one of my favorite tasks.

When we visited my grandmother’s home in New York, I would often find her deep in a Variety puzzle book, solving an anagram or working through a crossword. When it was my turn, I would complete the picture puzzles or circle words in the word searches.

I think the combination of these moments created in me a curiosity that felt safe and familiar.

Learning.

Safety.

Joy.

Synonyms.

But over time, I have also learned something else.

Sometimes the search for more information becomes a crutch.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that we need one more article, one more strategy, one more video, one more expert, one more assessment, one more workbook, one more opinion before we can make a decision.

As an educator and business owner committed to helping learners, families, and teachers gain clarity, I have been there.

I know what it feels like to search for the “right” answer, the “right” tool, or the “right” next step, only to end up with more information than direction.

For families, this can feel especially heavy.

When your child is struggling with reading, writing, math, focus, confidence, or motivation, the amount of information available can feel endless. Everyone has advice. Every program promises results. Every post seems to offer a new method.

So you keep searching.

You keep saving posts.

You keep asking questions.

You keep trying a little bit of everything.

And still, you may feel stuck.

Not because you do not care.

Not because you have not tried.

Not because you are not doing enough.

But because too much information without a clear next step can become overwhelming.

That is why a Learning Check-In can be so helpful.

A Learning Check-In gives you space to pause, talk through what you are noticing, identify what your child actually needs, and leave with a clearer direction.

It is not about adding more noise.

It is about helping you sort through what matters.

Because learning should bring safety and joy, not panic and confusion.

And sometimes the most supportive next step is not more information.

Sometimes it is a conversation that helps you know what to do with the information you already have.

If you have been collecting resources, trying different strategies, or wondering what your child needs next, schedule a Learning Check-In. Together, we can sort through the noise, identify your child’s next best step, and create a plan that feels clear, supportive, and doable.

Schedule Your Check-in HERE

The idea of chasing a life of ease and rest is a completely different concept than actually living inside of it.

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Many children are reluctant to write. They may say, “I don’t know what to write,” “My hand hurts,” “This is boring,” or “Can’t I just type it?”

And honestly, their reluctance makes sense.

Many students are growing up in a world where writing by hand happens less and less. Technology is everywhere. Students type, tap, swipe, dictate, and now they can even ask AI to generate ideas for them. But that does not mean writing is no longer important.

In fact, I believe writing is more important than ever.

Great writers become great communicators. Writing teaches children how to organize their thoughts, explain their ideas, make arguments, tell stories, ask questions, and reflect on what they believe. These are not just school skills. These are life skills.

And in the age of AI, strong writing matters even more.

Technology is helpful, but it is not a failsafe. AI makes mistakes. It can misunderstand a prompt, include inaccurate information, sound generic, or miss the heart of what a person is really trying to say. If students do not have a strong foundation in writing, they may not recognize when technology gets it wrong.

Writing gives children power. It helps them think for themselves.

But sometimes, adults unintentionally make writing feel negative. Here are three traps that can discourage young writers.

Trap 1: Treating Writing Like a Chore or Punishment

Many children associate writing with punishment. “Write this sentence ten times.” “Write an apology.” “Write because you got in trouble.”

When writing is used mainly as a consequence, children begin to see it as something unpleasant. Instead, we want children to see writing as a tool for expression, creativity, memory, connection, and leadership.

Trap 2: Passing Down Our Own Writing Anxiety

Sometimes adults say things like, “I was never a good writer,” or “I hate writing too.”

Children hear that. They absorb it.

Even if writing was hard for you, you can still model a growth mindset. Try saying, “Writing takes practice,” or “Let’s figure out how to get our ideas down together.” Children do not need perfect writers around them. They need adults who show them that writing is useful and worth developing.

Trap 3: Forgetting That Writing Can Be Fun

Writing does not always have to be an essay.

Children can write grocery lists, birthday cards, text messages, journal entries, comic strips, recipes, travel reflections, letters to family members, notes to friends, reviews of movies, or lists of things they want to do.

I grew up around list makers. I also remember the fun of passing notes in middle school. That was writing too. It had an audience, a purpose, and a real reason to communicate.

That is what children need more of: real reasons to write.

What Parents Can Do

Start small. Ask your child to keep a simple journal. Let them write a letter to a grandparent. Have them make the grocery list. Invite them to write a review after watching a movie. Ask them to keep a summer memory notebook. Let them write silly stories, comic strips, poems, or notes.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is practice.

Writing should not feel like something children only do when they are in trouble or being graded. Writing should feel like a way to express who they are, what they think, and what they want to say.

In a world full of technology, children still need their own voice.

And writing helps them build it.

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I recently read Sarah D. Sparks’ Education Week article, “AI Changes Its Feedback on Students’ Writing When It Knows Their Race, Gender,” and as an educator, instructional designer, and lifelong equity advocate, I found it deeply disturbing.

But I cannot say I was surprised.

The article highlights a terrifying possibility: that AI writing tools may provide different feedback to students depending on what the system knows, or assumes, about their race, gender, language background, or identity. For anyone who has worked in education long enough, this should not feel like a random glitch. It should feel like a mirror.

Because this is what happens when we treat racism, sexism, ableism, linguistic bias, and other forms of marginalization as if they are problems of the past instead of forces still shaping classrooms, workplaces, systems, and expectations every single day.

AI is not forming its ideas in isolation. It is not floating above society as some objective, neutral intelligence. It is being trained, corrected, refined, and shaped by human beings, human language, human decisions, human data, and human bias. We call some of this “fine-tuning,” but we need to be honest about what that can mean. If everyday people, institutions, and systems are informing AI, then everyday bias can become part of the machine.

This is why I am not comforted by the idea that AI can simply “personalize” feedback for students. Personalization without equity is dangerous. Personalization without context is dangerous. Personalization without human judgment is dangerous.

Last week, I also read about AI and gender bias in résumé feedback. In one example, when a man used AI to revise a résumé, the language and assumptions leaned more toward leadership, competence, and ambition. When a woman did the same, the response was more likely to frame her in terms of support, care, or dependency. That is not innovation. That is old bias wearing new technology.

And it is gross.

But again, it is not surprising.

I often talk about the danger of looking at data without seeing the whole child. One of the quickest ways to frustrate me as an educator, coach, and instructional designer is to reduce student progress to a color band. Red. Yellow. Green. Below benchmark. Approaching. On grade level.

Those labels may tell us something, but they never tell us enough.

Who is the student? Who are their families? What are their strengths? What standards have they mastered? Where are the dips? Where are the upward trends? What happened during the months when growth slowed? What was happening in their classroom, home, community, health, language development, confidence, or sense of belonging?

Too often, there is no clear answer because too many systems were never designed to see the whole learner.

And it shows.

This is exactly why the findings in this article matter. If an AI tool gives a student different writing feedback because it knows or assumes something about their race or gender, it is not simply helping that student improve a paragraph. It may be nudging that student toward a future shaped by bias.

It may decide, subtly or directly, that one student needs mechanics while another needs voice.

That one student needs correction while another needs expansion.

That one student needs confidence while another needs control.

That one student should be pushed toward leadership while another should be praised for compliance.

That is not neutral feedback.

That is trajectory-setting.

Writing feedback is powerful because writing is identity work. When students write, they are not only practicing grammar, structure, and evidence. They are learning whether their ideas are worthy of development. They are learning whether their voice belongs in academic spaces. They are learning whether their thinking is seen as sophisticated, promising, disruptive, deficient, or dangerous.

So when biased AI enters that process, the harm is not small.

It can limit imagination.

It can lower expectations.

It can reinforce the same boxes society has already built around Black children, multilingual learners, girls, disabled students, poor students, immigrant students, and students whose brilliance has never fit neatly into standardized measures.

This is why educators cannot afford to be passive consumers of AI.

We cannot simply ask, “Does this tool save time?”

We have to ask harder questions.

What does this tool notice?

What does it ignore?

What does it reward?

What does it correct?

What assumptions does it make about student ability, voice, language, culture, and potential?

And most importantly: who is harmed when we stop asking those questions?

I am not anti-technology. I use tools. I believe educators should understand AI, study it, critique it, and learn how to use it responsibly. But I am deeply against outsourcing our professional judgment to systems that may reproduce the very inequities we claim we are trying to dismantle.

AI should not replace the teacher’s ability to know a child.

It should not replace culturally responsive feedback.

It should not replace standards-based analysis.

It should not replace context.

It should not replace care.

And it should never be allowed to quietly sort students into futures based on biased assumptions dressed up as efficiency.

If we are going to bring AI into classrooms, then equity cannot be an afterthought. It has to be part of the design, the training, the implementation, the questioning, and the accountability.

Because students deserve more than feedback.

They deserve to be fully seen.

They deserve tools that expand their possibilities, not tools that shrink them into society’s oldest stereotypes.

And as educators, we have a responsibility to make sure that in the rush to modernize education, we do not automate the very harms we have spent generations trying to name.

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Source note: The article reports that AI writing coaches may change feedback when student race, gender, or learner status is known, and includes educator concerns about relying on AI without teacher judgment. (Education Week) I also found related reporting on gender bias in AI résumé evaluation, including examples where identical AI-generated résumés were judged differently based on whether the applicant was perceived as male or female. (Fortune)