Late last night, I was walking the dogs and churning over thoughts and feelings that I can’t seem to get out of my head. This afternoon, I decided to dust off this old blog and write them because, well, writers write, and I’m a writer. It’s one way I think. I decided to put these thoughts out there–not into “the universe,” because Bill Nye thankfully killed that phrase forever in this hilarious bit–but into my community, which is very much real and valued. And I could use your help.
Tomorrow, I’ll fly to Chicago for NCSM/NCTM conference week. Historically, I have LOVED conference week, and I usually return from NCSM/NCTM revitalized and rejuvenated. Last year, I missed my first conference week in a long time because my dad was dying. It was unquestionably the right call to stay home, and I’ll forever be grateful I was with him and our family at the end. No doubt. Looking toward this year, I’m sure I’ll enjoy seeing my friends and making new ones, and being together in community with so many colleagues who have also made more joyful, more effective, more empowering math teaching and learning the work of their lives. But I have to confess, I am heading to Chicago unsure what my roles will be in this community, going forward. The last time I went to NCSM/NCTM, in LA, I was serving as an editor of professional books by teachers and for teachers. I deeply loved that work, and I particularly loved approaching conference week through the lens of finding new voices with new ideas, and amplifying them, whether by approaching them to write blogposts or books, encouraging folks to speak at ShadowCon, or recommending them as presenters to other conference organizers across the year. At my last conference, I was still also serving as a part-time lead for math in my district, and over the last seven years, I have loved bringing ideas and research back from conference week that I could puzzle over with coaches and teachers and enact in our schools with our kids.
All of that has changed. I’m no longer working for a publishing house, so I am no longer acquiring books to edit. I have a few fabulous books I’ll get to finish up and put out in the world, and then I’ll hang up my metaphoric red pens for good. At the same time, the new superintendent disbanded the whole Academic Team in last year’s budget, so I’m no longer serving in any official role in my home district, (though my house is still the “math speakeasy” and the coaches text for coffees on the regular, which I love).
All of that’s to say, this conference week is coming at a time when I’m wondering what’s next for me. I’m coming up on 52, so I have at least one or two major work chapters ahead, and I want to put them to good use. I’m just not exactly sure how…
Here’s what I know. Inspired by colleagues such as Elham Kazemi, Nicora Placa, and Mike Flynn, I’m really good at working with groups of teachers and admin and students over long stretches of time, creating conditions for meaningful change in practice. We build relationships and trust. We do math together. We dig into the literature. We experiment with our teaching (myself included), as we learn how to work together, turning toward one another as our best resources to get better at this incredibly complex work. We reflect on our questioning, on student work and thinking, on our choices, on our biases, on how to position all students as mathematically competent and smart, on changes we could make to use students’ time better, on ways to press on student thinking, on the messaging we send explicitly and implicitly about who can do math, on always centering student thinking and listening closely to our students. It. Is. The. Best.
I also know that doing that sort of work has become harder and harder to pull off because of the systems we are working in, and the ways they are breaking down. It’s awfully hard to have shared learning and teaching experiences if we can’t get coverage because there are no subs. If teachers come to the math lab completely overwhelmed because of other curriculum adoptions going on. If admin can’t participate because they’re in full triage mode, all day every day. If staffing shortages mean we are not meeting our IDEA requirements and we’re considering dropping to a four-day week. If the framing of the pendulum swing in literacy is demoralizing teachers because they are being told everything they’ve been working so hard to do for years is now considered “harmful” or “negligent.” If kids aren’t arriving at school because there aren’t bus drivers to drive them. If teachers working hard to disrupt inequity and teach antiracism and LGBTQ+ equality got hammered at last night’s school board meeting and in today’s paper by angry community members saying schools are “indoctrinating children” with wokeness and evil. If teachers, counselors, and social workers are spending planning times trying to find ways to reach and support unhoused families. If planning together is a pipe dream because stressed-out teachers are retiring, and their positions are being filled with unqualified emergency certificate recipients who never had a math methods class and don’t know how to signal students for attention, especially not students who came through covid schooling, fear school shooters, and think they’re doomed anyway because of climate change and the rise of fascism.
In my state, all of this chaos is playing out during an ongoing struggle to raise minimum teacher salary to an insulting $40,000. Many edtechs, custodians, and bus drivers start at an hourly salary lower than my teenaged daughter is paid to work at an Escape Room. Little wonder that enrollment in teacher ed programs is down by 53% since 2010.
For months now, I have been thinking about a parable that my husband’s med school class was told their first week of medical school. It went something like this:
Two doctors are walking along a river bank when they notice a drowning body in the river. One doctor takes off her shoes and coat and jumps in to fish the person out. While she is treating this patient, she notices another person in the river. She jumps in again, and pulls the second person out. A few minutes later, a third person floats down the river. She prepares to dive in one more time when she noticies her colleague taking off, running upstream. She yells out, “Hey! Where are you going?! I need your help here!”
He replies, “I’m going upstream to figure out why people are ending up in the river.”
The point with the medical students was to ask what sort of doctor they might want to be. We need people at all positions. Do you want to be an ER doc, and treat the drowning people in the river? Do you want to go into preventive medicine, primary care, or public health, and prevent people from drowning in the first place? Do you want to be a specialist who figures out how to treat one body system that’s impacted by the river? All valid; all needed. What feels right to you?
If I can extend the metaphor to education, I’ve always been someone who keeps an eye on what’s going on upstream, but I find the most joy being in classrooms with students and teachers I know well, pretty far downstream. Lately, though, it feels like there are so many bodies in the river that the work is becoming impossible.
I talked to my friend and colleague, Carl Oliver, about this a while ago. He said it used to feel like teachers made a human bridge across the river–holding hands, holding each other up, catching those kids. With the increased stress, high rate of turnover, and breakdown of some of our key supports (e.g., the loss of the teacher ed community on twitter after Elon Musk broke it), it feels like we are having a harder and harder time hanging on, and some of us are getting swept away too.
I know I sound grim. I feel grim. That’s because these thoughts aren’t at all abstract or hypthetical to me. When I think about folks getting swept away, it’s people I know well. I know you know some too. For me, it’s an extraordinary math coach taking a medical leave because she was in a terrible mental place after basically being expected to carry two full-time jobs in a huge school with constant principal turnover. It’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever seen–a 25+ year veteran whose classroom community (see pic) and teaching practices are what dreams are made of–looking increasingly stressed out year over year, and finally taking a leave for this school year. It’s the talented young teacher everyone tried to wrap support around, but she went home crying every day after school, and she didn’t make it to Halloween before resigning and leaving education altogether.
I find myself wondering, a lot, about what I can do in this current situation. Do I keep my head down and try to do the meaningful work in schools that I know really helps teachers and kids? Do I ignore the rising tide around me as much as possible and hang on? Create little pockets of joy and calm and purpose? Or do I go farther up the riverbank and try to help the systemic issues? What does that even look like? Politics? Policy? Blech. That sounds as frustrating as can be, especially when the education committee in the legislature is constantly dealing with anti-vaxxers and book-banners. How can they do what’s needed, which are bold actions like doubling the salaries of everyone working in education, publicly valuing and fighting tooth and nail for schools, fighting off the disinformation campaigns, supporting teacher ed programs and establishing loan forgiveness, coming up with ways to rethink teachers’ time so they can collaborate, etc. when there’s no money in the budget and there are endless distractions?
So basically, I’m not sure what to do with myself. How can I use whatever skills and status I’ve accumulated to be part of solutions? How can I do that while maintaining my sanity and mental health? How can I do that while caring for my family? As much as I’ve written about doom and gloom here, I also feel hope and promise, and I feel very aware of my privilege in even asking these questions. There is excitement in the openness. And, looping back around to where we started, that openness is a big part of why I’m excited for conference week. I can’t wait to see what connects for me this year. What’s exciting? What’s inspiring? What do I want to be part of? I really hope to find some guidance and listen to a lot of folks wiser than me as I contemplate possible next steps, or figure out how to create a path, if one doesn’t exist already.
Going in, I do have some non-negotiables:
- Whatever I do, it has to have real, positive impact for kids and teachers. The work can be frustrating, and it can be slow, but it has to be part of meaningful progress. I won’t go in circles.
- I will not compromise my integrity, and I don’t want to be asked to. Related, I want to work somewhere motivated by mission, not profit.
- I need joy! Historically, I find joy in my time with students, in my relationships with adults, and in the awesome experience of bearing witness to people’s transformative experiences. There is lots of joy to be found–even in these tremendously fucked-up times–and I need it.
- I need great colleagues. I’ve been spoiled, working closely with colleagues such as Suzy Peters and Terri Peterson as teachers; Toby Gordon and Kassia Wedekind as editors; Graham Fletcher as a co-creator; and the former PPS Academic Team and central office, Kristin Gray, the IM writers, and outstanding math coaches and teachers during seven years of joyful work here in Portland. I need people like that. People who make me smarter and make me laugh. Related, I don’t want to work with any assholes. It’s one of those privileges of being over 50 that I really love–I just say the thing, even more than I used to. Life’s too short to work with people who drain my life energy.
- I need balance. As much as I want meaningful work that gets me out of bed in the morning, I don’t want sleepless nights. I don’t want to compromise my mental and physical health for work like I used to, and I need to be there for my family. Related, I am definitely considering becoming a classroom teacher again–I was returning to teaching when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and my life went in a different direction. I never felt done. I would LOVE to teach again, but I think I can’t do that for a few more years, given my family situation.
So, my community, if you have any ideas for me, or are likewise feeling a little stuck, or just want to have an adult beverage and talk about it in Chicago or over zoom, I’m all ears.
Even after all that I’ve typed here, I want you to know I’m not cynical. That’s because I’ve spent my working life with educators and children, the very best people on earth. So while I’m angry about teachers’ working conditions and the public devaluing of public education, I am as inspired and hopeful as ever, because of you and what you do, and what my colleagues and I have done.
In gratitude,
Tracy