Disclaimer: This post is snarky, a little exaggerated, and in no way is meant to be anything more than me just hamming our meeting up.

We like having people talk to you. So says my school. Which is why they bring in consultants. And honestly, although it may sound like kvetching, well, it is. But it also has a larger point.

We have consultants for curriculum mapping, for drug and alcohol training, and just yesterday, for creating an “anti-bias” curriculum. I want to talk about yesterday.

My school is amazing in many ways, and one of the ways it excels is with its diversity work. Our diversity coordinator (yes, we have a full time person with that title) has been pushing for us to move to the last frontier: take what we’ve already done so well at and start applying it to the curriculum.

I can definitely get behind that.

So after school we heard a consultant tell us how we can do that. And throughout her whole talk, I did what I try never to do with the speaker in the room. I rolled my eyes. A lot. I might have been having eye seizures. Yes, it was that bad. Maybe worse than the consultant who told us to “imagine we were on a plane… but the plane wasn’t built… and we were building it while it was flying…” In that instance, we were getting an analogy for, well, maybe how to write terrible analogies. Who really knows? All anyone remembers from that consultant is the bad analogy, not what it was for. But that was then. Back to my eye rolling speaker.

So this speaker comes to us, in my opinion pretty unprepared [1] and with bad powerpoint skills, repeats “that’s why they pay me the big bucks,” and spews off either commonsense as Great Knowledge Being Imparted or pure tripe.

I know you’re just salivating now for an example of pure tripe. And it’s juicy. Her math example. How to make math anti-bias. (And, I should preface, that in the beginning of her talk, she mentioned the questions we may be having, like how to make polynomials anti-bias, and then later when asked what her answer is, she responded “I don’t even know what a polynomial is.”) Here it is:

Passive curriculum: “There are 200 miles between point A and point B. Driving at 15 miles per hour, how long will it take to get from point A to point B?”

Multicultural curriculum: “Jose lives 20 miles from school. Driving at 25 miles per hour, how long will it take Jose to get to school?”

Anti-bias curriculum: “Jose needs to get from his home to the far side of the city. If he goes the most direct route, how long will it take him? But Jose can’t go in certain parts of the city because they are dangerous. So how long will it take him if he goes an alternative route.”

No, seriously. SERIOUSLY. SERIOUSLY! I can’t tell you how dead serious I am. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever heard.

Later, when pressed on it, the consultant admitted the problem was bad and then changed it to some problem with numbers of people on a bus and the probability that someone black would get out somewhere… wait that sounds wrong… by then, my head was expelling smoke and I couldn’t really focus…. but it was something like that.

Individually I talked with her and turned the screw by really giving her the lowdown of what math in a high school is, and how statistics easily lends itself to these sorts of social justice questions, but much of what we do doesn’t. And that I don’t see why we would want it to. It felt somewhat vindicating to hear her concede and say that the math teachers couldn’t really make an anti-bias curriculum.

She was — in my opinion — playing a giant joke on us. Giving us a parody of what an anti-bias curriculum might look like. You know, to get us to rebel and talk amongst ourselves about what we really think one would look like. Right? RIGHT? Hey, if that’s the goal, it worked. I have had three conversations about anti-biased curriculum since, all initiated by the “do you believe that consultant yesterday?” If that wasn’t the super double secret plan, then I can’t believe the school just spent goodness knows how many dollars to waste my time.

I know this is a rant. And I need it to be a rant. Because even though I love my school, sometimes I wonder what they are thinking. Knowing nothing about an anti-bias curriculum, I could have given a better talk. After my second year of teaching. That’s what infuriates me.

I know a lot of people I talked to were upset with the speaker. I don’t blame the school for working on this initiative. I love that we’re a school that actively works on diversity issues. The only thing I ask from the administration is that next time we meet, they agree with us that the consultant wasn’t up to snuff. Just hearing that would make me feel the administration understands us teachers and is on our side and we are working together.

My larger point: consultants are soooo overrated.

Signing off,
Sam

[1] Example: One of the go-to examples of how to create an anti-biased curriculum was a lesson designed around “To Kill A Mockingbird.” And the speaker said she hadn’t read it in years, and had cagey phrases like, “if I remember correctly…” If this is your paragon example, shouldn’t you really have read the book and know it pretty well?

Today I decided to do my classic “tie with a polo shirt” look.

Oh yeah, there was a hat.

One of the great things about my school — torn between being progressive and traditional, nurturing the whole child but with the looming vista of college admissions at the end — is that this tension is actually generative. It has its moments of maddening frustration, but it also allows for some pretty great things to happen.

Like what I wear to school everyday.

Let me explain. In my first week of teaching, I wore kakhis and button down shirts. (Which, by the way, I look awful in.) I had been told from everywhichway that your dress matters. That you need to dress older, to gain authority. I think even that horrible “First Days of School” bible gives the prescription of dressing in a suit everyday for guys, or something crazy like that. So I tried it out. And I noticed that some of my colleagues dress more relaxed, so each week I very consciously started dressing down. Button down shirts to polos. Kakhis to jeans. Dress shoes to grey sneakers. Polos to t-shirts. Grey sneakers to colorful Adidas.

No one commented. I hadn’t broken any norms.

Then, afterwards, I started adding to the outfits. A hat here. A scarf there. 5 pins one day. A cardigan with binder clips the next.

Why am I bringing this up? A couple reasons.

1. I was stopped on the street two times today by strangers because they needed to tell me “I found Waldo!” (One had alcohol on his breath.) And a few colleagues said something similar, and one said something about “Papa Smurf.” But he said it to me last week too, because I’ve been wearing this hat almost daily. It’s pretty kickin’, right? Okay, so I just thought it was neat and wanted to share.

2. I definitely think dressing up for teachers new to a school is important. Each school has different norms and they have to be carefully navigated early on. But I really, honestly think that people need to rethink this whole “you have to dress up to have authority” trope. Majorly. I get if putting on a suit makes you feel older, and that feeling gives you confidence, fine. But the suit does not make the man. I know I have control in the classroom. I can stand with a certain look and bring my class to silence in 3 seconds. My kids don’t take advantage of me. We have a good time. But I have control of the classroom.

And it’s not because of what I’m wearing. Wow, yeah, if that was a meterstick of anything, I would be an EPIC FAIL.

3. Most importantly, because of today, I was thinking again of why I dress the way I do. I’m not fashionable, I know. But I love my fashion choices. And it all started when I was in high school. My clothing was how I expressed myself. Badly, but it was. And in college, well, let’s just put it this way: one of my friends snuck in my closet and took out some of my signature pieces and was ME for Halloween freshman year, and definitely didn’t need to explain his costume to tons of people. (More impressive: my parents are from India, and his parents are from Korea. In other words, we don’t look at all alike.) Clothes are about individuality. And one benefit of being able to dress the way I do is that I get to express myself to my kids, and they see that it’s okay to express themselves in quirky, unfashionable ways. I don’t know if any of them take that away, that it’s okay to be yourself, by looking at me. But today, when I was pondering, I thought it might be nice if one of ’em did.

You know, teachers as role models, and all that stuff.

If you really want me to return full circle to the idea that the school is “torn between being progressive and traditional,” it is this: it is only because of this tension in my school am I allowed to express myself in this way, and still garner the respect from my students and from my colleagues that I think I have. 

Sam