Since I’ve been writing daily, I’ve occasionally lost my sense of time and space which is common when you fall in love. Writing and commenting in this space, where teachers gather and share and comment – this has been my daily anchor – a routine that can be relied upon.

And since I’ve been writing daily, I’ve noticed changes in myself. Writing has slowed my thinking and my responding. I have fallen in love again. Although writing takes time, it was a luxury that I afforded myself and often, it came before anything else. There was one day this week, as I was doing my usual thinking and researching potential topics for writing, when it occurred to me that curiosity is a form of empathy.

I fell in love again because I became increasingly curious about the ways that others wrote, about the topics they chose, and about them as human beings. I watched the emotional waves of life experiences rise and fall and rise again. I watched the comments lift and support and validate all of the diverse voices. This space became a place for me to visit and stop by a stranger’s place for a chat. This witnessing of the stories unfold and the sharing of emotions which, at times, were so deeply personal made me realize that in this community of writers, there is an unwritten code of trust. A trust that writers can share the private parts of themselves with no risk. The writers are always supported in this web of care. And then, I realized that we were participating in an act of love.

One of my favourite philosophers is Cornell West. I love his wild and wonderful hair, the gap in his teeth, his infectious laugh and smile, but most importantly his incredible intellect. He has the rare ability to distill a complex topic to something tangibly human. He said, that “Justice is love made public”. And since I believe that this is true, then this blog space is justice in action.

I want to thank everyone for their love in this space.

P.S. This list is not exhaustive, but I am forever grateful for the writing and feedback from the following:

Sherri Spelic

Elisabeth Ellington

Glenda Funk

Susan Kennedy

Eddie Hren

My new friend, Lisa Corbett

And my dear friend, Amanda Potts

I read the comments on my recent blog post and wondered, How many possibilities have I lost?

This internal question slammed into my chest and the density of fear, of impotent inaction, made my heart thud. This response is not the usual spasm of self-doubt or shame. This was much stronger; this was loss.

I had that book. I bought it, then gave it away without considering it. Now, another blogger says it has been her patient guide through a writing life. What possibility did I miss?

But it seemed so small and obscure. Why might this matter?

My thoughts scanned past events for an answer and I remembered that important diversity event missed because I felt overwhelmed emotionally, was behind in my evaluations, and the chaos of paper mangement had set in so substantially that I was hiding piles of paper in filing cabinets under some persistent delusion that I would organize it all “in the summer”. But, if I’m really honest with myself, I missed it because my armour was slipping and bits of my brokenness were poking through.

That day that my mother moved out of the family house, when I was fifteen,  I remember because the sky was bright and sunlight filled the front room as my father and mother lifted her suitcases and belongings out the front door, his rearend propping open the aluminum screen door as she moved in quick spurts of fastideousness, rushing the unusual departure, but brows still furrowed and firm. I went back to my room and lay on my bed, which was made up for the first time in a while. Both arms were outstretched behind me resting my head in my hands. I knew that I should feel something, scanned for evidence, but came up empty.

The years passed and we carried on after this loss mostly as usual though I was beginning to run wild. My father is a man of few words and he has rarely ever commanded and demanded. One day from nowhere, he asked me what I wanted to do after high school, and I said I was thinking of becoming a childcare worker. He spat a response; “why don’t you become a doctor or a dentist!” This novel outburst fractured my seventeen year old dismissive veneer. And I felt empty. Not because I was committed to the field of caregiving, because in truth, this idea had only just floated into me from some invisible force of popular culture like a dandelion seed planting wild thoughts of a future I could not imagine. Ideas rooted in soil that was not tended. She had been gone for nearly three years at this point, and he was a good father, but he was at a loss.

I woke up this morning and wondered how many of us are now at a loss, chronicaling missed ouropportunities, or thinking that maybe now, in so much absence, we might see a way to reconcile, to release and let go of past practices which have not worked for so many. Today, scrolling social media was a grief-laden endeavour, so I shifted my focus and decided to listen to voices of possibility and potential. I needed something to move me past passivity and inaction. The wisdom and powerful words of Tarana Burke and Brene Brown in an episode of  “Unlocking Us”  had me captivated. She once said,

“If I found a healing tree in my backyard, and it grew some sort of fruit that was a healing balm for people to repair what was damaged, I’m not going to just harvest all of those fruits and say, ‘You can’t have this.’ If I have a cure for people, I’m going to share it.”

The grieving for the losses began a transformation as if something was grafted onto me, a twisted and gnarly stem still growing through the losses both within and without.

“It doesn’t matter how you see it, it doesn’t matter how your mind perceives it, the moon is always full. ” B. D. Schiers

We drove along sidewalked streets of the suburban neighbourhood looking for a place to call our home. We were new to one another, but we had done this before. This shopping for houses, for neighbourhoods and schools, and places for our children. The tending of lawns and mending of fences. We had pushed bums on swings, bandaged scraped knees, and cheered from the sidelines of “swarming soccer” – that was our term for the six year soccer players who gathered around the ball like a swarm of bees moving about the field where no one scored and they all played for the same team.

Finding a place mattered. We took our time and weighed each decision like an ancient treasure valuable but fragile. The bay window in front was the first tendril of imagination drawing me in, then the ornamental garden and the interlocking driveway, the wooden screen door and we knew this was the place.

We booked a viewing and it was late, the sun dropped quickly behind the houses across the courtyard, but we still wanted to see inside. Walking into someone else’s home had always felt like an invasion so my attention was reigned and cautious; I had to avoid picking up someone else’s life lingering in the objects. I walked up the steep flight of switchback stairs and turned left to the front of the house wanting to see out the bay window up above the living room one, it’s twin one storey above. This would be my first son’s room.

The sun was gone and the moon in full view, not quite full but familiar in shape and texture as something approaching completion. In that moment, some distant idea blew through me and landed near the tip of my tongue – I’ve been here before. My eyebrows lifted, he asked what I thought but I needed to think, so I just filled the space saying, “it’s nearly a full moon.”

There is imagination in the wanting, something vague and transcient, not quite yet ready for full expression. Not ready for words, but having been before. But it didn’t matter because my mind could percieve it, even in its absence.

I feel the danger of writing about this topic. but, as Amanda Potts so cleverly wrote in her blog, Persistence and Pedagogy,

“Just do it! Go out on the limb, take a guess, ask the question! Try the hard way, make a fool of yourself…Let it all hang out, be yourself, be human.”

So, I take the first step and look to mentors.

Pran Patel Tweeted,

“Allyship is first an act of vulnerability. It’s about reaching into a world you can never enter and taking the worst parts of it. Then it’s an act of reflection to recognise that you benefit from that worst. Finally it’s an act of surrender in giving up your power in support.”

I didn’t enter the teaching profession for the money or status or “summer’s off”. I certainly didn’t enter it for some myth achieving “success” through a professional label. I entered it following the birth of my disabled daughter, life’s literal slap across the face yelling at me, wake up and deal with this! In perhaps some small way, I know about reaching into a world I’ve never been before and having to take the worst parts of it.

Glancing back over my years in teaching, I wonder at this system of education which uses labels to sort out the vastness of humanity, to make sense of the individual uniquenesses. The system then categorizes the students “at risk” or students who need “Individual Education Plans”, but I haven’t met a child yet who wouldn’t benefit from an indivdualized plan for their education; they are just that, individuals. I wonder at these labels which set some students apart from their peers which is somewhat ironic since this act of creating difference is antithetical to the teen experience; they don’t want to be different. Yet, when we really look at who is “different”, who is considered “at risk”, then we should not be surprized that these students are also on the margins of ability, poverty, and race. Sometimes labels are the dividers which separate the systemic problems from reality.

So, I don’t want the label, “ally”.

Shifting the focus inward, I’m working with Pran’s plan, being vulnerable here, and elsewhere, making myself sit with the discomfort of ruffled fragile White feathers, refecting, and waiting for the opportunities to surrender power.

I don’t want the label, but will do the work of being an antiracist educator, an ally. And I know this means most of the work has to happen within before I can work on the systems without. I know this means I will remain a student (because I need to learn about racism and poverty in perpetuity) with an individual education plan (because I’m White and middle class) and work at equity, act for equity, and give over power to those marginalized by either poverty or race.

Last week, I posted this image on Twitter which generated a series of probing questions from Chris Cluff. These were interesting questions, and they had me back peddling and reflecting. Eventually he DM’d me and we spoke on the phone while I was walking the mostly empty streets of my neighbourhood in Ottawa, and he was walking up a hill in Newmarket petting cute dogs as they passed. It was a thoughtful conversation about education and what we want, our deep desires and the barriers which get in the way.

He is without doubt an incredibly creative thinker and I listened carefully – his work is on the margins. I’m still processing his words and reflecting. I told him that I don’t want my equity work to be about me. I am not here for attention. In fact, quite the opposite and I am content to sit on the sidelines in the shadows.

He said, “But at some point it has to be about you. Draw the attention to the issue and then turn it over to someone else. Surrender.”

So, I continue, until I can surrender.

Yesterday, I felt a chasm open and a sludge of panic filled my gut. Significant change has marked much of my life, so I was perplexed by these emotions. I had been on a twelve-hour-a-day Twitterfest, staying connected in virtual meetings, and preparing for distance learning, so I suppose it should be of no surprise. I was thinking more about school and teaching and learning and equity while trying to manage a new normal.

I have also been doing a LOT of reading and thinking about ways to teach my students online and I was inspired by John Warmer’s recent article, “If it Doesn’t Make Sense…Refuse” in Inside Higher Ed .

This was a signal for me. I decided to define my refuse:

1. I will not comment on American politics on Twitter. I’m not American, and while I do have a vested interest as a fellow human being, what I witness at a distance on Twitter confounds and distresses me. I won’t feed that part of the internet.
2. I will not post platitudes and seemingly simplistic thoughts on eduTwitter. It only draws challenges and the ire of some who might be tired of the “starfish”.
3. I will not challenge the platitudes and seemingly simplistic thoughts of some on eduTwitter unless they are racist or sexist or elitist. This is the line that I will hold firmly.
4. I will not expect others to respond to me on Twitter, in email, or to my writing or podcast. I am learning through both silence and critical feedback. Silence is its own form of feedback.
5. I will not expect others to join me in my willingness to bend to the needs of students and parents for online teaching at this time.
6. I will not give up on my willingness to bend to the needs of students and parents for online teaching at this time.
7. I will not spend money needlessly, but I will indulge myself and my students in books and educational material, conferences, etc.
8. I will not stop sharing what I can with those who have less.
9. I will not stop working for my students.
10. I will not give up my optimism.

It is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination today and I have agreed to participate in a Twitter chat with some educators from Australia. The time difference (11 hours) has me realizing that I’ll be late to the online chat, but I’m not concerned. Asynchronous learning has so many benefits and I’m anxious to listen to more voices.

This personal interest in equity and racism is not new for me, but my intentional self-education is. I’ve read more and listened more and have purposefully acted more for inequities in the system for racialized students. And it was unnerving when I realized the extent of the resistance to listen to student voice and reflect on the changes required for equity in education.

I overhead several pockets of discontent and grumbles of  White teacher discomfort following our school’s Black History Month assembly; Black students had publically called out White teachers for erasing them from the curriculum. They called them out for teaching books with the “n-word” and not providing historical context or recognizing how they might feel when a White student reads the word aloud. They called out their classmates for asking for the “n-word pass”. And, teachers knew that we had helped with this assembly. They saw me and my colleague in the student video. They saw me say that we should decenter Whiteness for equity. They saw her say that White people should never say the word.

I was ruffled too, but only by their response. The students were voicing their truths. I resisted my own capacity for fragility. But, I had a series of questions and wrote an email to Adrienne Coddett, a Black teacher who runs the Black Youth Forum and just casually mentioned the disruption that this event had initiated. She wrote back and reminded me why it’s important to resist the pull to comfort saying,

“For those people who are challenged I say, ‘It’s just your turn to even briefly experience what it’s like to not be the centre of attention’.  It’s important for people to sit with those feelings. Doing nothing about it means they are part of the problem.  Not wanting to transform that experience means they are part of the problem.

Students will know the difference between those who stepped up to the challenge and those who want to promote a “status quo” that continues to stifle the opportunities for Black students.”

That’s it. I’m done. I’ve got nothing more.

(Click on the table)

“You expect me to work independently, without you? Like, I can just crawl inside that pea-brain and figure out the words on my own?”

(Silence with only breathing)

“I know you’re struggling, sitting there with your head in your hands, taking deep sighs expecting some muse to suddenly appear. But, I can’t do this without you! We have to do it together.“

(Silence)

“Okay… I get it. You’re not paying attention to me because you’ve run out of ideas, you think your writing all sounds the same like some banal-grey-oatmeal-mush of blah! Ya, and maybe you’re even feeling a bit sorry for yourself in your impotence, like some imposter pretending to be a writer, maybe even pretending to a be a teacher – and ya, I know that one hurts the most, but, geez… Get a grip on me and start! Start somewhere! Hell, start anywhere. Start in India on the balcony of some lush palace. Start in Australia in a remote village. Start…”

Wait, what? Why would I want to start somewhere that I’ve never been?

(Pause)

“Because you’ve never been.”

(Click from the table)

I guess I could write some kind of a dialogue, but, not one with people – done that already. Maybe…one with an object. Like a pen, and even if it doesn’t feel good, at least I’m writing something different and stretching myself.

(Silence)

“Uh huh. Looks like you’re already done.”

We see her from our kitchen window, walking early with purposeful strides, and three, sometimes four, large cloth bags loaded on her short stout frame. Two are slung on her right shoulder, resting on her back as she tilts forward with each step to keep them there. Over her left shoulder, her dark brown hair veils her Latinx features, and another bag hangs with soft fabrics spilling over the opening. We wonder about her parcels which go back a forth and speculate that she is a seamstress carting frayed fabric home each evening, and returning them repaired each morning. She is mending the neighbourhood.

We see him from the front window most winter mornings in a white pickup truck with a plow of the front, preparing to push mounds of snow out of driveways making way for cars to move. My husband who has, for many years, ascribed nick names to our neighbours, calls him “Grumpy Cat”, and my youngest chastises him for what he sees as cruelty. I admire this man who lives with his two teen children and his cancer-ridden mother a few doors down the street; his garage and front yard is a mechanics shop, small engines and trailers and metal equipment strewn about in some attempt to organize. Last summer, he build a structure inside his pickup holding his tools in place to prevent them swimming about the back on his way to tend to the lawns of the neighbourhood.

We see her sometimes, but not often. She lives in a building of rent-to-income apartments just a block from where we live facing the transit way, a bike path running alongside the front edges of its lawn. We see her bent down in the earth, tending flowers, pulling weeds, beautifying the beds that flank this twenty story tower. Each time that we pass, I hope she will turn her youthful dark brown face in my direction so I can smile and wave hello to my neighbour. But she stays facing away, looking only at her plants proccupied in tending them, the life growing in front of her.

We see him struggle up the sidewalk, cerebral palsy gripping him, his chin jutting up towards the sky, each stride a monumental task in forward motion on the toes, hands gripping the metal bars of his walker with each push along the pavement. Deep lines are carved into his face but it is difficult to tell his age. Sometimes we see him sitting on a park bench, the only time his body is still, and as he passes us this morning, my husband playfully asks, “Staying out of trouble?” His face lights up, and his smile overwhelms me as I see the lines move up towards his gleaming joyful eyes. We all laugh as we glide and he stutters by and I feel the neighbourhood in his presence.

The glossy magazine announcing our neighbourhood arrives on the door and I seeth a bit inside. White perfect people, families of wealth and privilege, are the only versions in this two dimensional unreality. In my mind I am screaming, “This is not my neighbourhood!” I think of sending a letter asking them why they do not profile these people of the neighbourhood, but I know why. I then decide to send it anyway.

I am reading Jesse Thistle’s memoir, From the Ashes, this week, largely due to the inspiration of Lisa Corbett who proposed a March Break Reading Club on her Twitter account. I responded, then Amanda, and before we knew it, the author agreed to join us for our conversation. Lisa’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion on Twitter turned into a major event and even online, I can feel the buzz of energy and enthusiasm amidst the pandemic.

And this unusual blend of complex emotions hovers about me as I wrestle with reading tragically painful descriptions of his childhood hunger, the descent into drugs and homeless, I am thinking about the reading group, what we might want to discuss, how to make use of the author’s generous gift of time. It feels weighty.

M. Keats posted a link to the CBC website with an article and this sent me down the rabbit-hole of internet research and all my time was vacuumed up, my previous plan to complete some essay evalutions now abandoned and part of a looming list. I skimmed his Masters dissertation, scrolled through his website, and scraped together as much understanding about the book and author as possible. He had clearly been interviewed extensively, pressed by the press.

He said “I only chose the events that would make it understandable, relatable and interesting to the reader. Because if you read one horrific thing after another, then it’s just a series of unfortunate stories. There’s no arc to it. My publisher and editor helped me choose the stories that I needed to include — and then let the dead space in between those stories speak for themselves.”

And as a reading group, what are we doing with “the dead space in between the stories”? Are we filling it with stories of our own? I’m reminded of a key concept in Media Studies which suggests that interpreters of texts negotiate meaning through the filters of their own experiences. We figure out meaning as it relates to our understanding of the world.

On a morning walk with our dog and my husband, I talked about Jesse’s description of elementary school and graduating grade 5 functionally illiterate. I wondered about his teachers, I wondered about my own blind complicity in my career. This conversation in motion gave me the space to connect my emotional response to something informed and actionable. Our discussion with the author is one that is with educators and can be about education. In fact, we’ve been talking a great deal about “trauma-informed teaching and learning” of late, and here it is – right in front of us. The lived experience from a celebrated author and academic.

Suddenly my reading of this memoir changed and I thought about this hefty group of nearly 30 educators sharing an experience of reading and what we can collectively do to change the narratives, to work towards equity by listening and speaking the stories. Can we ever measure the weight of reading conversations?

I am a lover of words and when I decided to make a list this morning, my imagination began creating an array of images and implications.

I thought about the lists on Found Magazine and the podcast that explores “personal stories of love, loss, hope, transformation and aspiration through the lens of lost and found notes”. Then I remembered listening to a story of a grocery list found in a shopping cart.

• bread
• milk
• eggs
• improve myself
• start doing it before it’s too late
• ignore what they say because it’s not true and I just can’t
• leave

I love the implications of this list, and the way our minds, ever creating narrative, fill in the gaps of information; I’m reminded that we read ourselves into the narratives that we create perhaps without even realizing it. When we read them, they become a dialogic form.

My family have long been amused by my listing habits and I’ve noticed that my 94 year old father increasingly uses them as markers for living.

What narrative do our lists reveal? What about the way we write? He’s always used all caps, long before this convention signalled yelling. So, I’m listening closely to the lists of my father and looking for signs of slipping…of listing, that is, leaning or tilting. His lists will let me know when I need to step in to prevent the fall.

While this isn’t yet a list, it is my thinking about the stories that are woven out of this necessary human activity and how listening to our lists helps us understand one another.

I have often felt affection for the two-toed sloth and gravitate to their modest unharried expressions of serenity. The wonderful patience and steady determination it must take these gentle creatures to reach a goal makes me wonder if their minds wander while limbs move in puposeful motion. While I don’t share their demeanor, I do sometimes feel like a slow learner. It takes me time to bring my swirling thoughts to ground and sort them into comprehensible congnition.

I’ve always loved writing, but never dedicated serious time to the craft until a few years ago, my dear friend, Amanda Potts , raised this important question with English Department Heads.

“We are teachers of writing, yet how many of us actually engage regularly in the practice of writing? How many of us would call ourselves writers?”

Amanda and I have talked extensively on this issue and her insight on this cannot be understated. This truth became even more evident when we attended a three day conference with Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher in the summer of 2018 as they launched their book 180 Days: the Quest to Engage and Empower Students. We returned fromm the conference significantly changed as readers, as writers, as teachers.

Amanda and Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher showed me that becoming a teacher of writing means writing and publishing and giving and taking feedback. I started to write with them and took feedback from them revising my work with their suggestions and they more readily accepted it from me. We became better together.

So when Amanda introduced me to the Two Writing Teachers Blog, I knew I should join and begin a writing practice. I started the school year and wrote a “slice of life” each Tuesday, and then eventually committed to this month of March – 31 days of writing.

Despite my adherence to this writing promise, I admit to feeling like I’m a slow learner. My moments of inspiration have waxed and wained, yet changes have emerged, sprouting out from cracks, but not quite ready for full expression. I am learning more about ways to comment and give feedback and I am learning to broaden the range of my writing from reading the posts of others.

This morning, I quickly made a list of writing moves to make:

• write in the third person
• make lists
• questions and answers
• write from the voice of an object

Writing for #SOL has required patience and steady determination always reaching for a goal just beyond me, mind and limbs in puposeful motion. So much can be learned from the sloth, but even more from a writing community.

We work out together in the weightroom after school a few days each week and while running stairs to warm up, I mentioned the strangeness of this day, this moment before three weeks of school closures for the COVID pandemic. He says something that takes me aback, but then which quickly makes sense.

“We are healthy and safe. This isn’t a civil war.”

He says this so quietly, it sounds almost like a whisper. He has a gentle demeanor and previously mentioned his Indonesian ancestry. On Tuesdays, he leads free yoga sessions for teachers. I begin to wonder if he or his family might be familiar with civil wars, so I mutter agreement between breaths as we descend the stairs preparing for another ascent around the building. I’m suddently out of my body and my worries, and in my head in the lives of others.

His statement lingered, so once I was home, I decided to look into the history of Indonesia and found that the Indonesian Communist Purge from 1965-66 resulted in an estimated 500,000 to one million deaths at the hands of the government. This is new learning for me, but I have seen the aftermath of war. It has touched my family and I know it’s residue remains in the blood and bones of my parents. I have witnessed war in the students at Adult High School, many new Canadians; one of my Sudanese students in Writer’s Craft had one arm. Others wrote about their own emprisonment, torture; these pieces were painful learnings for me. They were transformations.

Suddently, the strangeness I had felt earlier seemed small and insular. The closing of schools as safeguard against a pandemic took on an air of reassurance, a small comfort that we are looking after one another.

We just finished reading The Marrow Thieves and we’ve been talking about the author’s descriptions. They talk about the sixteen year old protagonist as if he exists which I believe is irrefutable evidence the author has been successful. I remind them – this is a 44 year old woman writing from the voice of a 16 year old boy. A few eyes shift left and I read a sense of awakening with the audible shifting in chairs, an “oh yeah”, and smiles blossom.

We then talk about the central premise that Indigenous people are being hunted for their bone marrow because they are the dreamers and eveyone else has lost the ability to dream. They seem to like this idea and there is no need to explain the importance of dreams to teenagers.

“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.” (Dimaline 18)

We talk about the scientific role of bone marrow as the source of blood – a metaphor for life, connection to others, identity. They understand without explanation nodding to let me know without words. Checking for comprehension is sometimes quantifiable and often not; I decide to trust my instincts not looking for levels and numbers to justify my findings. I believe they are following, making connections, and feeling the importance of dreams in their own lives, but I don’t have a data point.

My literary reverie is broken and the shards of reality peirce my comfort. I remember those who released their dreams, put them aside to care for younger siblings, work a part-time job, or help an ailing parent; their dreams are muted and constrained.

There is a student in her class that we have been watching closely. Poverty is an ever present guest and his home life is more than difficult, more than a 16 year old boy should be managing. Like Frenchie, he’s on the run, trying to hang on to his dreams and we are in his wake, behind invisible structures trying to bend them out of existence. As he leaves class today, I catch his eye in the hallway, smile and we exchange a look that isn’t quantifiable. I hope he hears me whisper inside, “We’re with you. You’ve got this. Keep dreaming.”