Bending The Arc August 2024

A Social Justice Newsletter for Educators

Well, hello there!

Happy August, friends! I hope you are well and thriving wherever you are in your particular cycle of teaching and learning, working and recovering. For many of us, the start of a new school year is right around the corner. I’m in my final days of vacation and noticing a well of feelings bubbling up at the prospect of returning to campus. Not surprisingly, my emotional forecast for the next few days is sunny and cloudy with a 50% chance of precipitation. I’m both looking forward and looking the other way. I want to use this space to consider how that is playing out and what it may mean for entering a fresh school year that is also my 29th in the same institution.

What did you learn this summer? What did you practice?

These are two questions I would prefer to ask and respond to when I reconvene with colleagues. The perfunctory “How was your summer?” tossed around on repeat often leaves me feeling a bit empty. I know that it’s polite to ask and also expedient in contexts where we expect to have many such brief exchanges with both friends and strangers. That said, I want to challenge myself to break the mold where I can and introduce other conversational options. Asking about what people learned and practiced invites some kind of reflection. Imagine!

It’s also true that learning and practice characterized some of the best parts of my summer break. I dedicated many hours to receiving instruction and practicing new or unfamiliar skills. I spent a significant chunk of time at ‘dance camp’ by participating in three workshops (2x5 days + 1 weekend) of 8-10 hours each in addition to numerous public open dance workshops available all summer across the city (like this one). I attended an online webinar on creating comics for folks who cannot draw and have tried to draw at least one thing per day since. Finally, inspired by an interview about the book, Making Things by Erin Boyle and Rose Pearlman, I dove into a maker’s frenzy of activity: knitting a bathmat and potholder out of old sheets and t-shirts, weaving a flyswatter out of strips from a brown paper bag, and completing other smaller projects that proved both meditative and satisfying.

Old sheet/bathmat knitting project in progress

The joy emerged less from finishing things and more from the curiosity that was sparked. I got fired up to find out if I could actually do the things that were being shown to me. The quick steps of the club style afro dances that threw me in the first workshop, the uncertainty of whether my pattern of string weaving actually matched the given instructions, the gradual willingness to create pictures to represent thoughts - no matter how imperfectly - all of these opportunities let me rediscover myself as a beginner. When you’re a beginner, you can really only get better. And you get better with practice, with repetition.

So that feels like my big winning lesson of this summer - reconnect with curiosity, find ways to be a beginner again. Here’s why that feels deeply necessary. Bending the Arc is coming up on its 5th birthday. When I started it, I had no idea how it would pan out or whom it would reach. In five years readership has grown from a handful of friends to almost 1200 subscribers. It’s wonderful and wild and sometimes daunting. Also, we are 4 years past the ‘racial reckoning’ pandemic summer of 2020. DEI was the talk of the town, the campus, the schools, the streets. It’s 2024 and we’re deep in waves of violent backlash. So many who spoke up and out against any and all forms of oppression have faced harsh consequences and brutal pushback. Given that, indulging in the privilege of learning new things materializes as both resistance and restoration.

I refuse to let the authoring of this Newsletter become a chore. After 5 years, I am no expert but I remain deeply curious about what’s possible. Following other people’s steps and directions positioned me to enjoy learning for its own sake. Bending the Arc then, is one way I write towards continued curiosity and welcome you to join me in that pursuit.

With that in mind, I want to offer a few hopeful readings which I hope inspire, remind and encourage us to stay curious and embrace our students’ wonder in as many ways as possible.

• For all those who teach the youngest students, I think you’ll find in this blog post about fostering calm in the classroom a set of helpful reminders that self-regulation is a journey for all learners. I particularly appreciated this line: “I wonder if your body has any messages for you?” as a way of assisting a child in recognizing their own state at a given moment.

• Social studies teachers, Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, write compellingly about developing a timeline for teaching about climate change. “Our goal is to historicize the climate crisis, showing that it was not inevitable, but created under a particular set of conditions, by particular groups of people, according to particular systems for organizing human life — imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism.”

• What do you know about the origins of techno music? Were you aware of its Black middle class Detroit origins? I had no idea. Read this interesting portrait of the godfather of techno, Juan Atkins.

• Start the year off with this book about motivating adolescents by Dr. David Yeager, 10 to 25. I got to listen to Dr. Yeager speak to a group of educators on release date of his new book and I suspect this will be a resource we’ll want to investigate with colleagues.

• For those following the US presidential election with perhaps cautious optimism, consider this break down of why Tim Walz’s background as a HS social studies teacher presents a welcome change of pace from the preponderance of lawyers and career politicians seeking higher office.

• One hopeful discovery of my summer has been listening to the podcast Vibe Check hosted by Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones. They offer you thoughtful, wise and heartfelt insights on culture and politics. This is the one just trust me rec in this bunch. You’ll thank me.

I’m going to leave it there. In September, I’ll (maybe) get a little more into school-specific leads. For now, take these gems to close out your summer vacation groove and ease gently into a new school year. I know that I have many more thoughts to share particularly about the opportunity to observe so much effective teaching through dance and I’ll save it for another time.

Until September, here’s hoping you find your groove and relish it!

Be well,

Sherri

PS: Signing off with a video from the choreographer I worked with in the first week, Trisha Agia. She opens the video and then you see her students perform the same sequence in solos, pairs and small groups. What I love are the diversity of bodies represented and imagining the many hours it took to arrive at that level of movement confidence. Enjoy!