4 Jan 21 – But I’m Still Right About Other Stuff

I don’t want to seem braggadocios, but I’m pretty good at Guess Who. We play a lot of it over here. I mean, A. Lot.

Tonight, the 9yo and I were playing a round. I was the mustachioed Jake. If it’s been a minute, peep the image below. That’s Jake in the front row center. Shock of white hair, eager gleam in his eyes. Jake’s a paragon of happy-go-lucky. Look at that chin.

But, where is Emily going?

So, the 9yo asks, “Does your person have milk on his face?”

I reply in that tone parents get to use when their kids are charmingly naive, “You mean a mustache, buddy?” Gotta love the “buddy,” right?

He examines the faces before him. “No,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure you mean ‘mustache’,” I repeat. He’s been known to dig his heals in from time to time, so I decide to let it sit for a while. He’ll come around.

“No,” he says, “It’s not a mustache. It’s like milk right here.” He rubs the bottom of his chin.

Looking at my pal Jake and his stunning display of illustrated facial follicles. Poor kid’s confused.

“That’s just called a mustache,” I say, beginning to wonder why he’s having such a hard time with this. Also, why does he think a mustache is on the chin? Do I need to plan a teachable moment around facial hair? “Do you mean a milk mustache?” Placement would still be wrong, but I understand how he could forget the word.

Honestly, though, at this point I’ve used the word mustache at least three of four times. I’m wondering why he’s not picking it up.

9yo let’s out a sigh I swear had a whisper of “okay, boomer” in it. He removes his own playing card from his board, places it face down on the table and turns his board around.

Not pictured, my dignity.

In what I now realize was an enormous act of self control, he says, “Like this. It looks like milk on his chin.”

But his Jake didn’t look like my Jake because his Jake was Jon. That layabout hippie can shave a mustache, but can’t be bothered to shave his milk chin.

3 Jan 21 – Parenting is Cleaning the Kitchen

Parenting is just an ongoing attempt to clean the kitchen. Just when you’re about to get a counter cleared off, a spoon, an empty orange juice container, an errant paintbrush appears. Just as you’re moving to get the spoon to the dishwasher, orange juice container to the trash, and paintbrush to the art closet; you turn to find the neighboring counters have been invaded by things you did not know were in your house in the first place

a pot sitting on a stove in front of a window

And, this is your day, a domestic Battle of Helms Deep. And, you thought you were going to get to the crossword…or a shower.

But you’re not. You will always be cleaning the kitchen. You will always be learning new things. Rubbing alcohol gets Sharpie® off the kitchen table. (It also gets “thinking” putty off a 10yo’s favorite blanket.) Cooking half a cup of red lentils before adding the marinara sauce will help you feel like you’re making a much healthier meal. An at-will snack basket and refrigerator drawer that closes an hour before meals will save more headaches than you can imagine.

Asking for everyone’s high and low from the day at dinnertime will help you to see moments and know feelings you missed during the day. A ritual of putting a penny in an old peanut butter jar after dinner as each person shares what they’re grateful for will sometimes turn around the most violently aggressive days.

Guess Who with cups of cocoa can feel like a hug. Painting rocks can last as many hours as you need because you’ve got unheard of rock access.

Learning which is the trash and which is the recycling is hard. Knowing which goes in which is harder.

You will never know how messy you are until the dogs are away for a night.

Parenting is cleaning the kitchen, and it’s so much better than cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the living room or cleaning under the beds. It’s in the heart of the house. It nourishes the family. It is warm and hectic. It is never done.

2 Jan 21 – The Long Road

The kids and I, after appropriate and vigilant isolation, went home to Illinois for Christmas. My moms have also been isolating. My sister and brother-in-law have also been isolating. This meant we got to be a big old isolated pod.

I hadn’t appreciated how cut off I’ve been from my family this year. I knew it in a logical way, but had been cordoning off grieving that separation. It lived in a box underneath all of the other detritus that took up 2020.

Here’s the thing, it’s also meant almost the entirety of my first year of parenting was spent without the physical presence of my family. Thinking back now of all the questions in my home study interview that invoked my family as my support network, it seems impossible to have made it through.

Honestly, there were moments of figuring out who we are as a family this year that also had me wondering if we would.

In those interviews, my caseworker asked me, “What do you think could change as a result of placement of children?” My answer, “Everything could change. It won’t all change, but I need to be ready to deal with anything changing.”

If I’d only known.

These two weeks, though. Watching the kids really respond to our larger family as THEIR family. Seeing them with their baby cousin, who has never known a version of our family without them. Watching them hug and receive hugs freely. Again, I appreciated logically that this would all happen – eventually. Emotionally, though, I held back hope that we’d see it this Christmas.

I’m a bit worried I might be holding back hope on a more global scale. Not all hope, mind you. More like, I’m keeping a bit of it back in situations where I’d normally be Head Optimist in Charge.

A former student posted yesterday on Facebook that a former therapist of his advised sitting and making a list of the things he’d accomplished within a year. A tool for regaining perspective. The idea has been knocking around in my brain since reading it. After 900+ miles of driving today, I don’t have it in me right now, but it feels like a good step in the pathway to claiming back more hope.

1 Jan 21 – The Year Ahead

I’ve been silent here. I’ve been silent a lot places this last year. Everyone has, right?

So, when I thought about whether I wanted to commit to a post a day here again in the way I have in years past, I was hesitant. Then, I recognized that hesitancy as a need to commit. To be sure, the pandemic has meant silence in a lot of places I’m used to using my voice.

Parenting, though, has been the bigger silencer. My mom has asked me a few times if I’m journaling. It’s the tool she’s used as a parent to help her check in and see how she feels. At the beginning, I didn’t quite understand it. Now, more than a year in, I understand how single dad-ing can mean I get to the end of the day and find I’m carrying the feelings of an 11 and 9 yo, but might not know what I’m feeling, thinking, doing.

And, thus, I’m here, typing, again. Committing to finding out where my voice is and how it sounds as an educator and single parent.

I’m doing it here because I’m thirsty for conversation, community, and gut checks. Inspired by the near-constant uncertainty of parenting, I’m more doubtful than before that anyone’s on the other side. It’s all new territory.

Let’s go.

The one word I keep

It’s my first year returning to school as a parent. The new reality has me thinking about conversations of hybrid, distance, in-person, synchronous learning differently. While I can’t know how childless Zac would have thought through these options, single dad of fifth and third grader Zac keeps coming back to one word, listen.

It is my deepest hope for the adults into whose care I will be entrusting this little humans for the coming school year. Listen.

In the best case scenario, my kids would be coming to their new school in a new district as part of a new family. All that new would be enough. But that’s not all they and their peers across the country are starting back with. They are the first children of pandemic in generations. They have quarantined, teleconferenced, and fought loud battles over why they can’t go play with friends down the street, “WE SAW THEM YESTERDAY WHEN WE DROVE BY!”

My kids, like all kids, are walking into school this year carrying so much more than they should. Because I know some things about learning and human needs, I also know they need places to lay down all they are carrying before they can pick up the important work of reading, math, music, Spanish, science, PE, social studies, and the rest.

They cannot lay down what they carry unless they know someone will listen.

Both kids, but particularly the 8yo, have this habit of telling me something and ending the statement with, “Right?” I learned early on this “Right?” is not to be ignored. It is a check in to make sure I have registered what has been said, and that I can validate whatever fact or opinion has been shared. Did I hear them? Did what they said matter? Was I paying attention? Was I listening?

As I think about the listening we will need to do as adults, I also think about the listening we will need to do to adults. Few of any of us has had the time and space to grieve what we’ve lost in the last half of a year, and that’s just speaking of the routines of life. For those who have experienced losing someone they love from a distance, that grief must remain all the more raw.

I’m fairly good a creative solutions to complex problems. I love a good conundrum. And, I am terrified of how I will navigate these next months as I feel through the intellectual dark to find what will become normal. And, so, I hope those to whom I turn can listen. I hope all those who care for the adults who care for our children will listen. We have not been this way before.

I hope my kids’ teachers give them spaces to express. I hope journaling in words and pictures and questions is part of every student’s day in the coming weeks. I hope they have the time to get out what needs expressing before they’re asked to ingest standards and facts and the ideas of others.

I hope I remember this too. I hope I listen to those with whom I work, because I cannot be the only one who feels as though he’s got the world in that spot right between his shoulders. I hope I remember self care will do in a crisis, but that I can care for others and ask for their care as we work toward what’s next.

Love, Zac

Be patient with me, it’s been a minute.

Part of being an adult who grew up closeted and queer, for me, is reading a ton of queer YA fiction as an adult. The stories that were kept from me and labeled gross, perverse, and inappropriate by peers and – by way of their silence – my teachers are stories I relish now. As much as it is about helping the students I serve see themselves in the pages of the books our district’s English teachers feature in their classrooms, it’s about applying a balm to the scars left by shame in my childhood.

This is how I first approached Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015). It was another text to help me somehow feel better about my adolescence. And it was another book to keep on that shelf of my mind for the occasions a caring teacher asked for a recommendation that started with “I’ve got this kid…”

While Albertelli’s Simon is in many ways your standard coming-out/of age-story, it also does what few queer novels had done at the point it was published. It erred more on the side of coming-of-age than coming out. It was more popcorn than tissues. Simon was going to be okay and no one was going to be disowned, beaten, or killed for being queer.

As others have pointed out, Simon is also problematic. While the main character might be othered because of his sexual identity, he’s doing just fine in pretty much every other privilege category. Part of what made the story so warm was knowing his parents were going to be amazingly accepting by the end.

Those problems followed the book into its adaptation to the big screen, albeit with more ethnic variety in the casting than was explicitly stated in the book.

The strengths of both overshadow the flaws. This is why I sat down the other day to start the Disney+-turned-Hulu spinoff of Simon – Love, Victor.

I will not talk much here about the details of Love, Victor, save for the notion that, if any of the above interested you, Victor will pull your heart. I meant to watch an episode. It turned out to be the first and only show I’ve binged since my kids arrived at the beginning of December.

Whereas Simon showed me another queer kid, Victor showed me a queer kid whose path and experiences felt so real and complicated that I found myself sobbing when they got too close to my own.

But that’s not what I’m actually writing about…

And while I really, really, really recommend Love, Victor, it’s not what finally dragged me out of the deep writing slumber to put my thoughts to pixels.

Yesterday, Kristina binged the show on my suggestion and we were texting about it as she wrapped up. I noted, were I still in the classroom, I’d love to do a comparative analysis of the original Simon text and at least a few episodes of Victor to think through how race, class, privilege, religion, gender, and sexuality play out in both pieces of this shared world.

Then, today, as I was playing with this idea that will never happen, I heard this voice in my head say, “But what about the straight kids?”

I’m 39-years-old, and I’ve done some stuff with my life. I am out and proud. To get to the place where I feel comfortable typing any of this has meant putting in some tough work.

With all of that, in thinking about a story I can personally attest reads as truthful and important, I still worried about taking up space of straight people. I recognized the guilt of taking time away from the traditional narrative. I questioned the value of my own story. Still.

In processing all of this, I’ve come to realize my relationship to texts featuring queer characters has been solely focused on mirrors. Never once in all the time I’ve been doing the work have I acknowledged the value inherent in a straight kid reading about a queer kid. And, it makes sense. When those stories were so absent from my own growing up and still too-difficult to find for queer kids coming up now, I get how my brain has put importance on making sure kids (and adults) who feel like they’re living in the shadows can interact with texts that shine light where shame cast a cloud. Kids are killing themselves because these stories are still banned, ignored, or shunned.

But to think only this way is to accept the narratives do not have value as windows and doors. I’m embarrassed not to have thought of this before. It is possible, before today, if you’d asked me if I thought it was okay for a kid to make it through 13 years of public education and never encounter queer characters, I might have said something like, “Not the queer kids.” I would have begged off taking up space or putting explicit value on stories like the story of my life.

It turns out, I am not only applying balm, I’m still learning from these stories too. As you or your colleagues start to plan your syllabi or reading lists for the coming year, you are doing it wrong if you are not including queer characters. You are continuing to tell your students – queer and straight – that queer folx need not be given space on the page or in the world. That lesson sticks.

In which a district administrator and a classroom teacher have a civil conversation

Had a meeting with a middle school teacher today. He and his team were asking for a specific app to be moved into our self service directory for their middle school students. The app proports to help students develop their vocabulary skills, so it got funneled to me in the chain of command.

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

To be honest, this app has been a thorn in my side since I started the job. It’s not horrible, but it’s not great. When I’d been forwarded the initial request, I’d responded that I was pretty sure it was already in self service and, for what it’s worth, that I was reticent to recommend students using any app during class time which took away from real reading and writing.

It turned out, I was wrong.

It turned out, I was wrong. Not about the reading and writing, but about the app already being in self service. The last time I had this conversation, we were able to allow apps to be accessible at a school level. Now, we are not. This meant I would be approving access not just for one school, but for all middle schools.

What I’d considered as one kettle of fish had turned into a whole other of said kettles.

Thus, the meeting with the teacher. We started with him suggesting I talk through my thoughts on the app and then he’d fill in with his team’s plan. I laid out my concerns and he said, “Yes, we think exactly the same thing.” Then, he explained the team only wanted the app so students had something to use outside of class to think through vocabulary. Remember, it’s not horrible, and in the face of so many possible app which are horrible, the team was attempting to stem the tide of horrible.

“I mean, we’re professionals.”

“We want them to be doing real reading and writing as much as possible too,” he said, “I mean, we’re professionals.”

He didn’t say it defensively or as a form of semantic brinksmanship. He simply mentioned he and his team’s professionalism as a reason they too would not want their students using this app during class time or as a way to supplant real reading and writing.

I told him I understood exactly and had assumed as much. I then explained how our infrastructure had changed, shifting their ask from one of a single school to one of all middle schools. “Oh…” he said, “I understand.”

I explained that I had to consider inclusion of the app as possibly being interpreted as at least a tacit endorsement – something that particularly worried me when considering novice teachers who might be looking for anything to get them through their first few years. I went on to explain I’d approved the inclusion of the app and I’d be writing and sharing a blog post from the department blog outlining guidance and my reservations for other middle school teachers in the district.

He had told me early in the conversation that this app wasn’t a hill he was interested in dying on, and my explanation was meant as a signal the same was true for me.

I wish it didn’t strike me as so odd how civil and respectful our entire conversation was. Since taking a role in district leadership, my default expectation for the tenor of such conversations has shifted to one of combativeness. I work “downtown” after all or I’m from “the district” or “central office.”

I wonder if this teacher entered into the conversation with the same sort of expectations. Did he think I was going to issue a summary judgement or simply pretend to listen to his concerns and then make the same decision I’d planned on when starting the meeting? Perhaps.

That makes me a bit downhearted. When I talk to folks about what I do, I have and always will explain my job is to support students and teachers. I can only be successful at helping all of our students become fully literate citizens if I can also support all of the adults in our system get the learning and resources they need.

Understanding all of those needs means having as many conversations as possible like the one I had today.

Building Essential Questions for ELA Classrooms

Pulled together a group of teachers last school year just after things wrapped up for them. Middle and high school English teacher folks from around our district who had answered a call to help us design our new secondary English language arts curriculum were assembled in one of our unaffecting conference rooms.

Image of a sidewalk with the words "Passion led us here" imprinted on it with the feet of two people visible standing below the sentence.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

We’d talked through some of the big pieces, overviewed processes, and were ready to build something practical – something foundational.

I broke the teachers into groups, each with the same charge – use your time, your chart paper, and your collective knowledge to come up with grade-level essential questions worthy of guiding a year’s worth of ELA learning in each grade from 6-12.

The teams scattered, most of them choosing to find places in the grass of the building’s ho hum lawn. Putting back on the familiar suit of habits when I was teaching middle and high schoolers, I began to circulate between the groups. Attempting to be observant and unobtrusive, I stayed with each group until I felt the moment when someone looked to me as though I’d stopped by to supply the “right” answer. Then, I excused myself and made my way to the next group.

As team a team started to get to a draft they felt was stable and worthy of sharing, I begged off being presented to and gave them their next direction. “Great, see that team over there? Go combine your team with theirs, take turns sharing drafts and combine your lists into one.” Eventually, they’d become two groups, representing separate halves of the design team – both mixed with middle and high school teachers, honors and general ed, AP and college prep.

We came back to the conference room, and I put the chart paper with the two teams’ drafts up on the wall. “Okay, now we need to combine these into one draft. What do you notice that can help us with our work?” They set in, talking, pointing out, what if-ing. We moved things into an almost working draft, and I spelled the room for lunch. While they were gone, my colleagues and I took a look at what we’d wrought and made some minor tweaks.

After lunch, I pitched our edits to the team, and they consented to the moves. What had emerged – and I cannot emphasize strongly enough how unlikely we could have made it so elegant if we’d tried – was a series of three themes that cycle twice from sixth to eleventh grade with accompanying essential questions. And, then, having looked at those themes through multiple lenses, we drafted a capstone twelfth-grade theme and essential question that lends itself nicely to an attempt to synthesize those three themes.

G6 – G12 Grade-Level Draft Essential Questions

  • G6: Communities: Understanding changing communities: What is community?
  • G7: Identities: Redefining identity and values in the face of struggle: Who am I?
  • G8: Culture: Determining courage and cowardice in the real world: What is culture?
  • G9: Communities: Understanding others’ perspectives: How do we build community?
  • G10: Identities: Building resilience and using your voice: How can my voice be used?
  • G11: Cultures: Deciding who you want to be: How to morality and ethics shape the individual?
  • G12: Interdependence: Connecting with the world: How do I want to impact the world?

A few things strike me as I look back at these questions almost five months later:

First, they hang together. If you were to look across our current curricular resources, each unit or module is complete unto itself. Look for a larger thematic or spiraled link, and you’d find none. Imagine what it must be to be a student moving through our system. The ideas of your sixth-grade ELA class only connecting to seventh or eighth grade only by chance. And connecting to your final years’ experiences in high school? No, certainly not.

“Those questions outside your space, they’re great. I mean, you could really think on those for a good long time.”

Also, they they were drafted by teachers representing almost every secondary school in our district. They were literally asked to come up with the big ideas they might ask our students to play with and consider as readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and thinkers; and they came up with some pretty good ones. These questions, along with their quarterly sub-questions hang on chart paper outside my office. A few weeks ago, our district CIO leaned over in a meeting and said, “Those questions outside your space, they’re great. I mean, you could really think on those for a good long time.” I agreed and explained how they are serving our project. “That’s great!” he replied, “Do you have them typed up somewhere that you could share them with me? I really do love them.” I assured him I’d send them his way.

This raises the element I think I like most about these questions – they are hopeful. And, if not hopeful, then at least loaded with possibility. I’d like to think that comes from the fact they were born of dedicated teachers sitting together, collaborating in the sun, noodling over the best they might do for their students. Either way, they are a long way from “This is when I teach Book X” or “This is my dystopia unit”. So many texts will help our students winnow their ways to answering these questions, and those answers will likely not be well served by activities that ask students “list the important characters in each chapter” or other such drilling that waves at the coast of maturing as literate citizens, but never quite makes it ashore.

The English Teacher & The Scientists

A few months ago, some of the good people at ISTE asked if I’d be interested in co-hosting a new grant-funded podcast they were producing.

In conjunction with their new learning sciences initiative – Course of Mind – the podcast would be an investigation of the learning sciences from a school- and classroom-based perspective.

I signed on with the inimitable Shana White to co-host, and we started talking. More precisely, we started listening. Imagine if you could corner your favorite professor immediately after class to shower them with all the burning classes they just inspired. Now, imagine each of their answers worked to directly chart a path to improving your teaching practice. That’s the Course of Mind podcast.

Four of our episodes are out in the world with four more coming this season. I’ve listened to the finish project a couple times. Each time I get the sense of excitement that leads me to backchannel Shana during each conversation with something akin to, “I can’t believe we get to do this.”

You can find our episodes via Apple Podcasts here or Stitcher here or here or here.

So far, we’ve learned about general and personal teaching efficacy, reflective practice, what the learning sciences are, and how learning works. So, you know, just the little things.

The thing that is most thrilling on the whole endeavor is we’re making a podcast I’d want to listen to. In the uneven and rocky soil of education podcasts, that feels like a win.

A Little Reminder of Mattering

Today, I was visiting classrooms in one of our elementary schools. In a grade 4 class, there was a little guy who was having trouble writing what he was thinking. It was his turn to share in his circle of six.

He didn’t want to read what he wrote.

He was a little embarrassed because he hadn’t quite written an answer to the prompt.

I asked if I could read it to the group. He nodded.

I read aloud wha he wrote and said, “So, it seems like he doesn’t think he should have to choose a most important piece because he thinks they are all important. That’s pretty cool to me.”

We moved on.

A bit later in class, he sat next to me to read a book about shark trivia. His fluency and decoding were amazing, by the way.

We chatted for a while and other kids came to talk to me.

When it was time for me to visit another class, I stood. I said, as I usually do, “Thank you for letting me learn with you today.”

He very quietly said, “Thank you for helping me.”

This was 15 minutes later.

There is no more important job than this.