My two cents (Week of Mar 8, 2021)

For each school day of the 2020-21 school year, I will be writing two sentences to capture some of the impressions, feelings, experiences, or thoughts I had that day. This is the 22nd post in the series.

Monday (Mar 8)
A student in the eighth period volunteered to replace me this week in our daily ritual “Mr. P and the Random Thing,” where a student from our class names a random object that I have find in my apartment (or something close to it). Today a classmate asked her to get an orange; she ended up showing us three different types!

Tuesday (Mar 9)
For a few weeks I was feeling uninspired and unsure about the impact of the Future Educator Club. But after a couple of the students encouraged me to not drop the ball, the Future Educator Club met again after school and made plans for the next few sessions.

Wednesday (Mar 10)
Found myself slowing down several times in my classes to express deliberate amounts of patience; my students weren’t readily offering up responses, but I tried to remain empathetic. In the past, I would have done this in a way that was passive aggressive, but today I was more understanding — I genuinely waited for them to be ready to engage.

Thursday (Mar 11)
Excitedly, I attended the first of four workshops centered on the work of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad and her book Cultivating Genius, which I read last year. An uplifting thought: after teaching from home since November, one week from today I’ll be back in the building.

Friday (Mar 12)
My co-generative dialogue focused on how we could structure the class to have one “work day” every week or every other week (e.g. a day where students who need 1-on-1 help could get it, but those who would like independent work time could be excused from class altogether). The anti-asian hate workshop went really well with the staff this afternoon; I think the racial and social justice collective (of which I am a member and who plans these bi-weekly workshops) seems to be finding our stride.


bp