Four times this weekend, people with doctorate degrees said to me some version of, "Oh, you're actually smart!?"
I'd chalk it right up to sexism or ageism playing out the way that racism does when a White person "compliments" a Black person, "Oh, you're articulate!"
But, I don't know. There's not a shortage of women or young people at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, so it's not like it would be unexpected for folks there to talk to a smart young woman. Puzzling.
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And I went to a pretty cool session with lots of time for talk among panelists, among audience members, and across those lines. The driving question was, "How can we at AERA better engage the public?"
Really good question. But also carries the embedded assumption that teachers are not Educational Researchers. Because, like, um, every day public school teachers engage the the public?
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The best part, easily, was getting to spend some QT with my people. At lunch one day, I got to catch up with a dear teacher-friend who'd shared with me earlier this year her idea for a civil disobedience campaign during the PARCC. ("9th graders spend 6 hours taking the ELA test," she reported, "That's the same amount of hours as the MCAT.")
Her idea (Brilliant!) was this: Read. Resist the mind-numbing, inhumane, and theoretically unsound assessment of literacy by engaging literacy authentically!
In order to ensure absolute compliance with state standards for test administration, teachers proctoring the PARCC are not permitted to read/grade/anything while students test. Just supposed to actively monitor. It's actually against Illinois law for a teacher to read during the test. There's something beautiful about the image of a teacher being arrested for reading.
(A legal provision for "opting out" does not exist in Illinois, but students/parents can refuse testing. Yeah, that's what it says here. So kids could read, too!)
She had some titles picked out and everything:
(1) The New Jim Crow
(2) Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(3) Beyond Standardized Truth
Good ones, no?
We were gonna try to use our networks to spread it: #ReadingWhilePARCCed.
She didn't end up doing it for fear that the district would face sanctions, which would end up in her suspension, which would make things difficult for the course-team that she's on since it's mostly made up of new teachers that look to her for guidance. And the kids would have to take the damn thing again. So we called off our would-be nationally viral campaign (!).
She told us at lunch: "You know, I did end up reading. But nobody noticed. None of the administrators said anything."
I wonder if that woulda put a wrench in our mass-scale civil disobedience plans? If teachers' work is so invisible that even our civil disobedience goes completely unnoticed...? I'd like to think that maybe #ing it could help. But I don't know.
---
Teachers should just do whatever the hell they want. No one's listening to them anyway.
I'd chalk it right up to sexism or ageism playing out the way that racism does when a White person "compliments" a Black person, "Oh, you're articulate!"
But, I don't know. There's not a shortage of women or young people at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, so it's not like it would be unexpected for folks there to talk to a smart young woman. Puzzling.
---
And I went to a pretty cool session with lots of time for talk among panelists, among audience members, and across those lines. The driving question was, "How can we at AERA better engage the public?"
Really good question. But also carries the embedded assumption that teachers are not Educational Researchers. Because, like, um, every day public school teachers engage the the public?
---
The best part, easily, was getting to spend some QT with my people. At lunch one day, I got to catch up with a dear teacher-friend who'd shared with me earlier this year her idea for a civil disobedience campaign during the PARCC. ("9th graders spend 6 hours taking the ELA test," she reported, "That's the same amount of hours as the MCAT.")
Her idea (Brilliant!) was this: Read. Resist the mind-numbing, inhumane, and theoretically unsound assessment of literacy by engaging literacy authentically!
In order to ensure absolute compliance with state standards for test administration, teachers proctoring the PARCC are not permitted to read/grade/anything while students test. Just supposed to actively monitor. It's actually against Illinois law for a teacher to read during the test. There's something beautiful about the image of a teacher being arrested for reading.
(A legal provision for "opting out" does not exist in Illinois, but students/parents can refuse testing. Yeah, that's what it says here. So kids could read, too!)
She had some titles picked out and everything:
(1) The New Jim Crow
(2) Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(3) Beyond Standardized Truth
Good ones, no?
We were gonna try to use our networks to spread it: #ReadingWhilePARCCed.
She didn't end up doing it for fear that the district would face sanctions, which would end up in her suspension, which would make things difficult for the course-team that she's on since it's mostly made up of new teachers that look to her for guidance. And the kids would have to take the damn thing again. So we called off our would-be nationally viral campaign (!).
She told us at lunch: "You know, I did end up reading. But nobody noticed. None of the administrators said anything."
I wonder if that woulda put a wrench in our mass-scale civil disobedience plans? If teachers' work is so invisible that even our civil disobedience goes completely unnoticed...? I'd like to think that maybe #ing it could help. But I don't know.
---
Teachers should just do whatever the hell they want. No one's listening to them anyway.
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