13 Comments

Yes. Evidence for the correctness of this claim can be found in many ways. Easiest is to ask any adult who went to school as a kid: Did a teacher ever make you feel dumb?

Thank you for distinguishing between politics and partisanship. I wish more people grasped this distinction right about the time they start to criticize teachers, especially teachers of History. But as your post makes clear, we all communicate crucial messages about Value, independent of subject area or lesson content.

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I agree, and thank you for reminding us that our work is ultimately about humans who are of infinite value. We are always practicing politics and we are always practicing ethics. Your post reminds me of a speech by Francis Su that made the internet go-round more than a decade ago. Maybe you're already familiar with it? https://www.francissu.com/post/the-lesson-of-grace-in-teaching Also John Dewey from Experience and Education: "What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul?" All kinds of connections coming together in my mind!

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So beautiful in so many important ways. Thank you for reminding all of us what one of our most important roles is when teaching. I feel uplifted and improved when I read your Substack. Thank you so much.

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Thank you for this reminder.

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Thank you for this post, it validated my views that education cannot and will never be an apolitical space. Reading the sentence "politics is the way a society defines which people have value and which people get value" leads me to a wondering. I've noticed that the videos of instruction this newsletter and Desmos highlights almost always feature white and/or white-presenting teachers, and I'm wondering if y'all at Amplify have discussed and reflected on how this decision can lead to implicit communication of which teachers "have value" and "get value".

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Man, I disagree with you here, not about what teachers should do but in your definition of politics:

"Politics isn’t partisanship. It isn’t which party you belong to, who you voted for yesterday, or how you feel about who won. Instead, politics is the way a society defines which people have value and which people get value."

Just not how I see politics. But I do agree with your proposed outcome.

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Bravo. It's the same for the arts.

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This was perfect. Thank you for your message.

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Dan - I love your work and I think this commentary is spot on. But I also think you are missing a critical point.

And I think you are missing it in the same way that a lot of conversations about education miss: by looking at a lesson, or a curriculum or teacher behavior or edtech tool, in isolation, absent the necessary context that a considerable majority of the young people in this country are lacking the grade-level skills we say they need, and often wrongly assume they will have.

So I agree that the question which you ask - "how can we recognize students' value even when they don't get the answers right?" - is an important one.

But if we really want to meet every learner's needs, we should ask a different question instead. And that felt too long for a comment so I ended up writing my own Substack instead 🤣

https://open.substack.com/pub/meeteverylearnersneeds/p/the-real-political-question-in-education

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I love this. What is the source for your definition of politics?

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I'm pulling from a lot of materialist thinkers, but I think this quote from CD Hooks is a lodestar for me:

> That’s what politics is — the way we distribute pain. It’s not a sport or a fraternity or a game. It’s how we determine who gets medication and who dies young, who learns in a class of twenty kids and who learns in a class of thirty, whose school has a counselor that’s trained to look for signs of sexual abuse and who doesn’t.

https://medium.com/@cd_hooks/stakes-is-high-6b45374e0157

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I teach a Quantitative Reasoning class using Carnegie's Quantway College curriculum. Up on the screen I've got a google doc of the questions in the lesson, large font, one question per page. Students work in groups, I drop in and ask a student to tell me about their work, often I'll say "I like how you put that, could you please add that to the doc?" And then they go up to the front of the class and type in what they said. Or I might say, "I like how you included the units in your answer, be sure you do that when you put this into the doc" and they go up and do that.

And it's a small class, so I do my best to remember the name of each student who contributed, and to use their names when we get to whole-class discussion, "Now let's compare Jesse's graph with the equation that Gabrielle gave us." But I want to say each student's name to the class at least once, and be aware when I fall short of that.

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A beautiful expression of a political commitment.

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