bensk - Tumblr blog

bensk · 4 years ago

Text

Be curious. Be humble. Be useful.

I was invited to give the annual Taub Lecture for graduating Public Policy students at the University of Chicago, my alma mater and the department from which I graduated. This is what I came up with.

---

I am incredibly grateful and honored to be here tonight. The Public Policy program literally changed my life.

My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a 2012 Public Policy graduate, and I will permit myself one “back in my day” comment: When I was a student here, the “Taub Lecture” were actual lectures given by Professor Taub in our Implementation class. I’ve spent the last nine years teaching in the South Bronx. For the past two years, I have served as Head of School at Creo College Prep, a public charter school that opened in 2019.

I was asked tonight to tell you a bit about my journey, and the work that I do. My objection to doing this is that there is basically nothing less interesting than listening to a white man tell you how he got somewhere, so I'll keep it brief. I grew up in New York City and went to a public high school that turned out Justice Elena Kagan, Chris Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others…none of whom were available tonight.

We, on this Zoom, all have one thing in common — we have been very, very close to graduating from the University of Chicago. I have never sat quite where you sit. I didn’t graduate into a pandemic. But the truth is that everyone graduates into a crisis. The periods of relative ease, the so-called “ends of history”, even the end of this pandemic, are really matters of forced perspective. This crisis isn’t over. Periods of relative peace and stability paper over chasms of structural inequality.

You went to college with the people who will write the books and go on the talk shows and coin the phrases to describe our times. You could write that book. You could go into consulting and spend six weeks at a time helping a company figure out how to maximize profits from their Trademark Chasm Expanding Products.

You could also run into the chasm.

What is the chasm?

It is the distance between potential and opportunity. It is a University on the South Side of Chicago with a student body that is 10% Black and 15% Latinx, with a faculty that is 65% white.

It is eight Black students being admitted to a top high school in New York City...in a class of 749.

What is the chasm?

The chasm is that in our neighborhood in The Bronx, where I’m standing right now, 1 in 4 students can read a book on their grade level, and only 1 in 10 will ever sit in a college class.

It is maternal mortality and COVID survival rates. The chasm is generational wealth and payday loans.

It is systemic racism and misogyny.

It is the case for activism and reparations.

In my job, the chasm is the distance between the creativity, brilliance, and wit that my students possess, and the opportunities the schools in our neighborhood provide.

In the zip code in which I grew up in New York City, the median income is $122,169. In the zip code where I have spent every day working since I graduated from UChicago, the median income is $30,349. The school where I went to 7th grade and this school where next year we will have our first 7th grade are only a 15 minute drive apart.

In my first quarter at UChicago, I joined the Neighborhood Schools Program, and immediately fell in love with working in schools. I joined NSP because a friend told me how interesting she found the work. I’d done some tutoring in high school, and had taught karate since I was 15. I applied, was accepted, and worked at Hyde Park Academy on 62nd and Stony Island in a variety of capacities from 2008 to 2012.

At the time, Hyde Park Academy had one of very few International Baccalaureate programs on the South Side, and every spring, parents would line up out the door of the school to try to get their rising 9th grader in. I worked with an incredible mentor teacher and successive classes of high school seniors whose wit, creativity, and skill would've been at home in the seminars and dorm discussions we all have participated in three blocks north of their high school.

In my work at Hyde Park Academy, I learned the first lesson of three lessons that have shaped my career as a teacher. Be curious. I had been told in Orientation that there were “borders” to the UChicago experience, lines we should not cross. I am forever grateful to the people who told me to ignore that BS. Our entire department is a testimony to ignoring that BS. We ask questions like, why did parents line up for hours to get into what was considered a “failing” high school? Why had no one asked my kids to write poetry before? Why are they more creative and better at writing than most of the kids I went to high school with, but there is only one IB class and families have to literally compete to get in? I learned as much from my job three blocks south of the University as I did in my classes at the University...which is to say, I was learning a LOT, but I had a lot more to learn.

I knew I wanted to be a teacher from my first quarter here. I did my research. The Boston Teacher Residency was the top program in the country, so I applied there. I was a 21 year old white man interested in education, so...I applied to Teach for America. In the early 2010’s, I looked like the default avatar on a Teach for America profile. It was my backup option. I was all in on Boston, and was sure, with four years working in urban schools, a stint at the Urban Education Institute, and, at the time, seven years of karate teaching under my belt, I was a shoe in.

I was rejected from both programs. Which brings me to my second lesson. Be humble. We are destined for and entitled to nothing. There is an aphorism I learned from one of my favorite podcasts, Another Round: "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." If you are a mediocre white man, like me, do as much as you can not to be. If you look like me, you live life on the "lowest difficulty setting." This means I need to question my gifts, contextualize my successes, and actively work against systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity.

Over the last two years, I have interviewed over 300 people to work at this school. There are a series of questions that I ask folks with backgrounds like myself:

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked on a team that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked for a boss/supervisor/leader who was a person of color?

The vast majority of white folks, myself at 21 included, could not answer “yes” to these three questions. This is disappointing, but I've also lived and worked in two of the most segregated cities on this continent, so it is not surprising. By the time I sat where you’re sitting now, I had learned a lot about education policy and sociology. I'd taken every class that Chad offered at the time. I'd worked at UEI, I'd worked in a South Side high school for four years, and I still thought I was entitled to something. Unlearning doesn't usually happen in a moment, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but these rejections were the best thing that has happened to me in my growth as a human.

I moved back home to New York, was accepted to my last-choice teaching program, and started teaching at MS 223: The Laboratory School of Finance & Technology. I ended up teaching there for 5 years. I had incredible mentors, met some of my best friends, started a Computer Science program that’s used as a model at hundreds of schools across New York City…and most importantly, while making copies for Summer School in July of 2015, I met my wife.

All this to say — if you aren’t 100% convinced that what you’re doing next year is Your Thing, keep an open mind…and make frequent stops in the copy room.

I learned that teaching was My Thing. I didn't want to do ed policy research. I got to set education policy, conduct case studies, key informant interviews, run statistical analysis…with 12 year olds. This was the thing I couldn’t stop talking about, reading about, learning about. I really and truly did not care about the “UChicago voices” of my parents and my friends who kept asking what I was going to do next. My answer: teach.

If you look like me, and you teach Computer Science, there are opportunities that come flying your way. I was offered jobs with more prestige, jobs with more pay, jobs far away from the South Bronx. I was offered jobs I would have loved. But I’d learned a third lesson: be useful. If you have a degree from this place, people will always ask you what the next promotion or job is. They will ask "what's next for you" and they will mean it with respect and admiration.

Here’s the thing: teaching was what’s next. “But don’t you want to work in policy?” Teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason we have the privilege of choosing a career, and it is a career worth choosing.

I had internalized what I like to call the Dumbledore Principle: “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.” This meant unlearning the very UChicago idea that if you were smart and if you think and talk like we are trained to think and talk at this place, you should be in charge. The best things in my life have come from unlearning that. Learning from mentors to never speak the way I was praised for in a seminar. Learning from veteran teachers how to be a warm demander who was my authentic best self...and more importantly brought out the authentic best self in my students. Being useful isn't the same thing as being in charge…and that is ok.

I believe this deeply. Which is why, when I was offered the opportunity to design and open a school, my first thought was absolutely the hell no. I said to my wife: “I’m a teacher. Dumbledore Principle — we’re supposed to teach, make our classrooms safe and wonderful for our kids.”

I also knew that teaching kids to code wasn’t worth a damn if they couldn’t read and write with conviction, so I started looking for schools that did both — treated kids like brilliant creatives who should learn to create the future AND met them where they were with rigorous coursework that closed opportunity gaps. In our neighborhood, there were schools that did the latter, that got incredible results for kids. Then there was my school, where kids learned eight programming languages before they graduated, but at which only 40% of our kids could read.

We were lauded for this, by the way. 40% was twice the average in our district. We were praised for the Computer Science — the mayor of New York and the CEO of Microsoft visited and met with my students. It felt great. I wasn’t convinced it was useful.

Kids in the neighborhood where I grew up didn’t have to choose between a school that was interesting and a school that equipped them with the knowledge and skills to pursue their own interests in college and beyond. Why did our students have to choose? I delivered this stressed-out existential monologue to my wife that boiled down to this: every kid deserves a school where they were always safe, and never bored. We weren’t working at a school like that. I was being offered a chance to design one. But…Dumbledore principle.

My wife took it all in, looked at me, and said: “You idiot. Dumbledore RAN a school.”

Friends, you deserve a partner like this.

The road to opening Creo College Prep, and the last two years of leading our school as we opened, closed, opened online, finished our first year, moved buildings, opened online again, opened in-person (kind of) and now head into our third year, has reinforced my lessons from teaching — be curious, be humble, be useful. These lessons are about both learning and unlearning. A white guy doing Teach for America at 21 is a stereotype. A white guy starting a charter school is a stereotype with significant capital, wading into complicated political and pedagogical waters. The lessons I learn opening a school and the unlearning I must do to be worthy of the work are not destinations, they are journeys.

Be curious

I didn’t just open a school. Schools are communities, they are institutions, and they are bureaucracies. If you work very, very hard, and with the right people, they become engines that turn coffee and human potential into joy and intellectual thriving capable of altering the trajectory of a child’s life.

First you have to find the right people. I joined a school design fellowship, spent a year visiting 50 high-performing schools across the country, recruited a founding board of smart, committed people who hold me accountable, and spent time in my community learning from families what they wanted in a school. There is studying public policy, and then there is attending Community Board meetings and Community Education Council Meetings, and standing outside of the Parkchester Macy's handing out flyers and getting petition signatures at Christmastime next to the mall Santa.

I observed in schools while writing my BA, and as a teacher, but it was in this fellowship that I learned to “thin slice,” a term we borrowed from psychology that refers to observing a small interaction and finding patterns about the emotions and values of people. In a school, it means observing small but crucial moments — how does arrival work, how are students called on, how do they ask for help in a classroom, how do they enter and leave spaces, how do they move through the hallways, where and how do teachers get their work done — and gleaning what a school values, and how that translates into impact for kids. Here’s how I look at schools:

Does every adult have an unwavering belief that students can, must, and will learn at the highest level?

Do they have realistic and urgent plans for getting every kid there? Are these beliefs and plans clear and held by kids?

Are all teachers strategic, valorizing planning and intellectual nerdery over control or power?

Is the curriculum worthy of the kids?

Can kids explain why the school does things they way they do? Can staff? Can the leader?

If I'm in the middle of teaching and I need a pen or a marker, what do I do? Is that clear?

What’s the attendance rate? How do we follow up on kids who aren’t here?

How organized and thoughtful are the physical and digital spaces?

Are kids seen by their teachers? Are their names pronounced correctly? Do their teachers look like them? Do they make them laugh, think, and revise their answers?

Would I want to work here? Would I send my own kids here?

Be humble

I learned that there are really two distinct organizations that we call “school.” One is an accumulation of talent (student and staff) that happens to be in the same place at the same time, operating on largely the same schedule.

These were the schools I attended. These are schools you got to go to if you got lucky and you were born in a zip code with high income and high opportunity. These are schools where you had teachers who were intellectually curious, and classmates whose learning deficits could be papered over by social capital…and sometimes, straight up capital.

“Accumulation of talent” also describes the schools I worked at. These were schools where if you got lucky and you were extraordinary in your intelligence, determination, support network, and teachers who’d decided to believe in you, you became one of the stories we told. “She got into Cornell.” “That whole English class got into four year colleges.”

Most schools in this country, it turns out, are run like this. I knew all about local control and the limits of federal standards on education and the battles over teacher evaluations and so much other helpful and important context I learned in my PBPL classes. But when thin-slicing a kindergarten classroom in Nashville on my first school visit of the Fellowship, I saw a whole other possibility of what “school” can be.

School can be a special place organized towards a single purpose. One team, one mission. Where the work kids do in one class directly connects to the next, and builds on the prior year. Where kids are treated like the important people they are and the important people they will be, where students and staff hold each other to a high bar, where there is rigor and joy. A place where staff train together so that instead of separate classrooms telling separate stories about how to achieve, there is one coherent language that gives kids the thing they crave and deserve above all else: consistency.

We get up every morning to build a school like that. It’s why my team starts staff training a month before the first day of school. It’s why we practice teaching our lessons so that we don’t waste a moment of our kids’ time. It’s why everyone at our school has a coach, including me, so we can be a better teacher tomorrow than we were today. It’s why we plan engaging, culturally responsive, relevant lessons. It’s how we keep a simple, crucial promise to every family: at this school, you will always be safe, and you will never be bored.

Be useful

Statistically speaking, it is not out of the realm of possibility that several of you will one day be in a position to make big sweeping policy changes. You will have the power to not only write position papers, but to Make Big Plans. I will be rooting for you, but I hope that you won’t pursue Big Plans for the sake of Big Plans.

The architect who designed the Midway reportedly said "make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." I had that quoted to me in several lectures at this school, and you know what?

It’s bullshit.

I am asking you not to care about scale. Good policy isn’t about scale, it’s about implementation, and implementation requires the right people on the ground. Implementation can scale. The right people cannot. We can Make Big Plans, but every 6th grade math class still needs an excellent math teacher. That's a job worth doing. I could dream about starting 20 schools, but every school needs a leader. That’s a job worth doing. Places like UChicago teach us to ask "what's next" for our own advancement, to do this now so we can get to that later. I learned to ask "what's next" to be as useful as possible to as many kids as I have in front of me.

I hold these two thoughts in my mind:

The educational realities of the South Bronx have a lot more to do with where highways were built in our neighborhood than with No Child Left Behind or charter schools, and require comprehensive policy change that address not only educational inequity, but environmental justice, and systemic racism.

The most useful policy changes I can make right now are to finalize the schedule for our staff work days that start on June 21, get feedback on next year’s calendar from families, and finish hiring the teachers our kids deserve.

I will follow the policy debates of #1 with great interest, but I know where I can be useful, and I’ll wake up tomorrow excited to make another draft of the calendar. I hope you get to work on making your Small Plans, and I will leave you with the secret — or at least the way that worked for me:

Find yourself people who are smarter than you and who disagree with you. Find problems you cannot shut up or stop thinking about. Do what you can’t shut up about with intellect and kindness. Use the privilege and opportunity that we have because we went to this school to make sure that opportunity for others does not require privilege. Run into the chasm.

Be curious, be humble, be useful.

Thank you.

5 notes · View notes

bensk · 5 years ago

Text

Call to Action

I’m sharing the remarks I made at our whole-school gathering today, because I believe school leaders have a duty to speak up. As a white school leader, I am and will always be learning how to navigate my privilege and utilize my power to stand for justice and against racism, to stand up for black lives, elevate black voices, and center black needs. I’ve read too many statements from brands and coffeeshops and superintendents and politicians that did not include the word “black” or “lives”, much less “Black Lives Matter” — an obvious truth, and a necessary declaration. I hope that sharing these may be helpful to other schools or organizations. It's not perfect, it's not enough, but it is what I believe, and what we stand for as a school.

I will echo another white school leader and strongly suggest that non-black leaders have teammates, colleagues, and friends read and push your remarks. I’ll go one step further, and specifically suggest having black and brown teammates read what you write. The remarks below started as a first draft and incorporate feedback from half-a-dozen colleagues, mentors, and friends who push my thinking, every day.

I’m speaking to you as your principal. I’m speaking to you as the founder of this school. I am speaking to you as a white person. I am speaking to you as a man. Because of these things — principal, white, man — I have power, and because I have power, I am called to take action. Here is what I am called to do:

I will use my voice to call for dismantling — taking apart — unjust systems.

Personally, I choose to donate to community bail funds (to help protestors and others unjustly held) and mutual aid organizations that help people directly. This week I wrote to every member of the city council calling for them to defund the NYPD, because I think we should take the money the city spends on police and spend it on schools and healthcare.

Professionally, as a principal, I will ask every politician and business person who visits our school, for Career Days or other reasons, what they are doing to change racist laws and racist systems, and uplift black and brown people.

As your principal, I promise you will never see a cop called to Creo. You have seen some of your classmates in crisis. You have seen kids yell, or lose control. Some of you have even seen some of your classmates push me. All of those things happened and everyone was safe. I was fine, the students were cared for, and we never called the police. We will always have a social worker, we will always deescalate, we will always find the strength and love in our arms and our hearts to hold each other safe, and not bring in anyone who can put any of our students in danger.

You will never see “school safety” at Creo. Many of you and your families, many of us, have walked into school through metal detectors, and past people in uniforms. The only uniforms worn in Creo are the ones you proudly wear, and I will never ask you to walk through a metal detector or assume you bring something dangerous to school.

I told you when we first met, whether it was in your home or your first day at Creo, that there were no bullies here. We do not allow people who use their words and their bodies to scare and hurt others in our school building. If that person is a child, we educate them, we love them, we offer them counseling, we talk to their families, we are there for them. If that person is an adult...well we do not allow those who use their words and their bodies and their uniform and their badge to scare and hurt others in our building.

I will never allow someone to think they belong more in our space than you do. You will always matter more in this school.

Those are things I will not allow, as long as I am in charge. Here is what I will make sure:

Every year you are here, you will have a social worker. Someone you can go to when you are hurt. Someone you can go to when you have hurt someone else, and you don’t know what to do. Someone who will come to you, and listen, and be a counselor — someone who gives us guidance when we need it most.

Every year you are here, you will have teachers who look like you. You will have teachers who are black, and brown, and white and Asian.

Every year you are here, the white teachers will pronounce your name correctly, and if they don’t, you will be welcome to correct them. If I say your name wrong, I will practice until I get it right. People apologize when they mispronounce my name, because I am a white man and a boss and people think that means they should get my name right. You are the most important people in this school — everyone should get your name right.

I will always tell you why, and I will always tell you the truth. We have a lot of rules at this school. We think they are there to make sure you are always safe, and never bored. You can always ask why we have a rule, and you should always expect an answer.

Your voice matters. It is our mission for you to assume responsibility for identifying and solving problems in our world. That means that when you speak up, it is our responsibility — my responsibility — to listen and amplify your voice.

Your voice matters.

Your life matters.

Black lives matter.

2 notes · View notes

bensk · 5 years ago

Text

Always Safe and Never Bored

This year, we opened a school.

We closed one, too, but more on that later.

I wish I had taken more time to document the past year, for my own sake, and because leaders I admire share their thinking and learning in public.

The last time I wrote here (2 years ago 🤦‍♂️)

Families everywhere sacrifice and work hard. There are nerds, everywhere. Theater nerds, physics nerds, bits of both. Some get to go to a school where they are never bored, and always safe. Some don’t.

Since August 28th, 2019, we've been building a school in the South Bronx where every kid is always safe, and never bored.

Our school is very data driven. We geek out over NWEA MAP results. We look at student work every day. We have a part of our school day dedicated to tutoring and reteaching. Data gives you a direction, but you need a motivation to drive there. For us, every internal goal and external benchmark, comes back to this:

Every kid deserves to go to a school where they are always safe and never bored.

The most exciting, the most scary, and the most sacred thing about running a school is that, while kids and adults are in our building, we have the power and responsibility to make this true.

Always safe

We do home visits for every student. We ask a lot of our kids when they come in our building, so we think it's important to take the first step- before I ask you come into my house and do things my way, let me come to your house and learn how you do things. We learn so much, about how we can be partners with our families and build on what they're doing, about where we need clear lines of difference, where we can learn from our families, and where we may need to be a support or a respite.

We greet every kid, by name, before they enter the building, and several more times before they enter their classroom.

We talk to our families at least once a week, rain or shine, positive or negative news.

We have small-group advisories that meet every day.

We have clear, consistent, and logical consequences for student behavior to celebrate when our students demonstrate our values and educate them when they choose not to.

We serve healthy and nutritious food that's so good, I eat it most days.

We have yoga for every kid, every day.

We have kids from 72 different elementary schools across the Bronx who feel safe in our building, every day.

Never bored

Our school is designed for content nerds. Our teachers are content nerds. Our kids are content nerds. It's awesome.

I've been privileged to work with tremendous educators in my careers, and the best teachers are content nerds. Love for kids is a prerequisite. High expectations are essential. Content nerds are, well — If you get excited about Tier 3 vocabulary words, the area model for multiplication, demonstrating phases of matter, adding conditionals to code - you're a content nerd, and our school is designed for you.

Our day is long and varied. Every kid has English, Math, Science, Computer Science, History & Geography, and Health & Wellness, every day. The academic day starts at 8:10 and goes until 4:45. Like I said, a long day.

So what does a long day designed for content nerds look like? Our teachers only teach half the day.

At most schools, here's what that looks like: a constant ping-pong between teaching and "prep" periods which are also your only time to grade, call families, attend meetings, eat, use the bathroom, be a human being, etc.

At Creo, it looks like this: if you teach English or Math, you only teach in the morning, and have the entire afternoon to give feedback on student work, plan ahead, collaborate with colleagues…and be a human being. If you teach CS, Science, History, or Health & Wellness, you have all morning to do this, and teach only in the afternoons.

There is a tremendous amount of intellectual labor that goes into good teaching. Every great teacher knows this and we think that in order to be a great school, we should provide and protect our teachers' time to do it.

I could go on- about our curricula (shoutout to Uncommon Schools' Reading Reconsidered Pilot of which we are a proud member, Core Knowledge's incredible and free knowledge-building resources, Amplify's Science curricula that have made our kids scientists, our internally developed CS and Health & Wellness resources…curricula could and should be a whole post to itself), about the results this has had for our kids (they love coming to school, and…we do have midyear NWEA MAP data that is very, very encouraging), and about how our families have embraced and supported and informed the work we do.

I really want to write that post, and I will.

However…

March 14

I am writing to let you know that effective Monday, March 16, we will be suspending in-person classes at Creo College Prep until March 30. This decision was not taken lightly, but we believe it is in the best interest of protecting our students, staff, and families in these uncertain times. In the last 24 hours, more than half of the charter schools in New York City have closed, and we have decided to follow their example rather than wait for the DOE. Our most important responsibility is keeping your child safe, and this is the best option we have to do so.

On Friday, we sent all students home with lessons for next week, as well as a novel to read. Our team is committed to preparing lessons for students for every day that we are out of session. We will be preparing video lessons for students to continue learning new material, and holding office hours to ensure that students are able to ask their teachers questions.

Our school year began with visits to many of your homes. Our school opened this year in temporary space. Next week, we will “open” in a new way, on the internet and in your home. We are committed to each and every student continuing to learn, and supporting you however we can.

March 26

Today we begin Distance Learning at Creo. What does this mean? On Friday, students brought home homework packets to begin learning at home. Today, our teachers began preparing video lessons for everyday learning and creating work that can be completed at home.

Here is how it works:

Visit creoprep.org/distance-learning. There is a letter there for students. Students should read the entire letter, and then be able to explain to you their responsibilities.

Students should visit creoprep.org/distance-learning every single day. There are videos for every subject, every day. Teachers are recording their lessons so that students can make progress every day.

After watching the video, students should complete the lesson for that day. For each subject, teachers have prepared a packet for the week.

Our teachers are holding Office Hours. During this time, students will video chat with teachers. They will get feedback on their work, receive grades and THRIVE points, and be able to ask questions.

April 11

While we hoped and intended for a very different last three months of fifth grade, we have a plan.

Here is what we will do:

Continue Distance Learning, every day, 9am - 3pm. We can’t send our students to school, so we will continue to send the school to them. As long as your family wants a Creo education, a Creo education will be available for your family.

Continue social-emotional supports for our students, including daily small-group advisory check-ins with every student and counseling sessions.

Continue to support you with accessing technology and critical services, including food, internet, and technology.

Here is what we will not do:

We don’t give up. A year ago, our school had never existed. By last month, our students received as much instructional time as a DOE school has in an entire year. We still have 48 days of school left, and we’re going to use it to do great things, together.

We don’t lower our bar. We still expect every student to be in class, every single day. We still expect them to try their best on their work. We still expect them to be consistently kind to their classmates, their teachers, and their families.

We don’t pretend this is normal. We know that many of you are working on the frontlines of this crisis, in hospitals and grocery stores, on trains and buses, in danger and in our thoughts. Some of us are caring for the sick, some of us are grieving the lost. Our first concern is making sure our children are safe. If we can help reduce stress — around deadlines, promotion to 6th grade, technology access, food — we are here for you.

At Creo, you’ve seen us wear and say “Creo in the Bronx.” I believe in the Bronx. Now, that is true more than ever. Together, we made a new school. We will not be back in the same building until next school year, but the school is not the building.

Today, we can say this: Creo in Creo. I believe in Creo. In your living rooms and kitchens, our kids continue to learn. In their living rooms and kitchens, our teachers continue to teach.

It is normal to feel grief and frustration, because we are all experiencing loss, every day. We wish it were different, but so does everyone in these times. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

If you need time to process, to grieve, to care for your family, take it. If you need us, we will be where we have been since August 28th: building knowledge, skills, and character, educating your student to thrive in college and to assume responsibility for identifying and solving problems in our community and our world.

Always safe and never bored

I spent 116 schooldays as Principal of Creo College Prep, a corporeal school. I've spent the last 33 days as the principal of an online school that we never intended to open. There are as many approaches to distance learning as there are schools in the world, and we don't know yet who's "right" or "high-achieving" or appropriately and capably responding to trauma, and I won't claim that what we've done in the past 33 days is right for anybody else.

We know where our kids are, because we've sat in the living rooms and kitchens where they're now logging on to Office Hours. We know who is safe, and who needs help, because we know our families and our we reach out, every day. We can't keep our kids and families safe right now, because the world isn't safe right now and no school can't change that. We never could, even pre-pandemic. All we could do, pre-pandemic, was show up every day and work hard to make a school where every kid was always safe, and never bored.

If you're logged in and thinking about Number the Stars or the area of a rectangular prism, or biomes, or debugging code, or perfecting a yoga pose, you aren't safe from the world, but you are safe to try, and fail, and try again with us. This is the same fiction, the same magic we conjure in school every day. We aren't safe from the world, but we can feel the safety of teachers and classmates celebrating our successes and learning from our errors. Our team of content nerds is still making that happen. Our team of content nerds- the teachers who keep teaching, and students across the hardest-hit borough in our city who keep showing up, never bored.

0 notes

bensk · 7 years ago

Text

Hunter Alumni Day Speech

I was nominated to be the class speaker at my 10 year high school reunion. I'm proud of how this turned out.

Good morning. My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, class of 2008. Ten years ago, I had the honor of speaking for my class at graduation. Like our graduation speaker that day, I went on to become a public school teacher. Unlike our graduation speaker, I did not go on to write Hamilton. If you ever find yourself following Lin-Manuel Miranda on stage...don’t.

I have four minutes to speak to you on what Hunter has meant to my classmates, in the same vein as the speakers up here.

I’m not going to do that.

I’m in a room full of people who have won the lottery, and so I am going to take my remaining three minutes and thirty seconds to ask you to make an investment.

What lottery did we win? When we were in sixth grade, or maybe when we were in preschool, we held a ticket to take a test, and everyone we ever met here won that same lottery. We're not smarter than the four year old who sat next to us who missed the cut score. We're not smarter than the 6th grader who didn’t have the test scores to even take the Hunter test. I won the lottery and I came to this school where I was never unsafe, and I was never bored.

Not everyone wins that lottery, but we did.

New York City is the most diverse city in the country. We also have the most segregated schools. We rode from five boroughs to get to Hunter. Ride the 6 train 20 minutes from here and you're in District 12 in the Bronx. In seventh grade at Hunter, we read To Kill a Mockingbird. In District 12, fewer than 1 in 5 7th graders can read on grade level. One in ten will go on to college. One.

We rode from five boroughs to get here. We won the lottery. Our families worked hard and sacrificed. Some crossed oceans- some of us crossed oceans. We worked hard and we sacrificed. All of that is true. All of that is true, and none of it is unique. All of that is far more comfortable to say out loud than to admit that we were at some juncture in our pre-K or 6th grade year unbelievable benefactors of a sequence of events, test scores, prep courses, family supports, and luck. Families everywhere sacrifice and work hard. There are nerds, everywhere. Theater nerds, physics nerds, bits of both. Some get to go to a school where they are never bored, and always safe. Some don't.

I've spent the last five years teaching in the Bronx, and next year will found a public charter school in District 12. Over the past year, alongside a team of parents and teachers and community members, we’ve made the case for a new school, researched best practices, and travelled around the country to study the highest-performing schools. We got to see the inner workings of 50 schools that, like Hunter, are full of lottery winners. I'm about to run a public school where our admissions criteria is a literal lottery. I chose to be a teacher because I got to go to a school where I was never bored, and I was always safe. I won the educational lottery.

The thing about winning the educational lottery is that you have to invest your winnings in making the world a better place. You have to give a damn.

I know that I am speaking to a diverse and distinguished crowd, so please know that I know that some of you undoubtably give some of what I am about to ask.

Our public schools will only be good if people like us give a damn.

That could be giving money to a school, and I won’t say no.

That could be volunteering in a school, and I won't say no.

But giving a damn isn't giving money, and it isn't necessarily giving a lot of time. Giving a damn means the next time someone says "those kids" you ask who, exactly, are they talking about. Giving a damn means participating in community board meetings, and Community Education Council meetings, and when you hear an angry parent claim they are entitled a seat for their child because they want it, but a black or Latino family is undeserving, you call it what it is. We all have opinions on what good schools are. Sometimes, giving a damn means wading into a debate with an open mind, and a closed mouth. If we truly care about public education, if we truly want to invest our winnings, if we truly give a damn, we cannot look away.

Someday soon, probably today, or at a reunion event tomorrow, someone is going to ask you about your job. A brilliant high school student is going to ask for an internship. A college student is going to tell you they have good grades and then tell you that they have no idea what to do with the rest of their life. They won the educational lottery, too, but they don't know what to do with the winnings. If they can learn, and if you trust them, please tell them that with a steady hand, an attentive eye, and a straight back, they could make a school where kids are always safe, and never bored.

Tell them, worst case scenario, they become a teacher and take four minutes of your time at a reunion a few years from now.

Tell them, best case case scenario, they teach for a year, and go write Hamilton.

Tell them, teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason they can choose a career, and it is a career worth choosing.

10 notes · View notes