I took advantage of being together with all my TFA friends and colleagues last weekend to make mini-samplers for two of my teammates/friends. I like making tiny hoop samplers (this is still one my all-time favorite projects), although at first glance these both seem pretty weird:
Let me explain. First, Shannon:
She lives in New Mexico, which explains the red and yellow sun symbol at the top. Her favorite NM food is green chiles (she even gave me a green chile candle once), and she also really likes beer and brewing, hence the beer and chiles at the bottom. She lived in Baltimore for five years, and her favorite Baltimore thing was eating crabs, which is where the little crabs come from. Lastly, our team mascot for reasons that predate me and I don't fully understand is the hedgehog, so I added them in to round everything out.
Now Stevie:
First and foremost, I know that monkey at the top looks crazy, but I swear it's a real thing! Specifically, it's a red-shanked douc, aka the monkey Stevie is studying for the anthropology PhD she is working on part-time, and it really does look like that:
She also loves Star Wars, hence R2D2 and Chewbacca, and has two dogs that I tried to portray at the bottom. I made her hedgehogs purple to add some color, because there was so much brown from the monkey, Chewie, and the dogs.
Now back to my never-ending list of wedding samplers!
This past weekend was TFA's 25th Anniversary Summit in Washington DC! At the 20th we had 11,000 attendees and I couldn't believe how many people that was; this year we had 15,000. We took up the entire million square feet of the convention center, and could no longer fit in any one room of it - the only time all 15,000 attendees were in the same place was for closing ceremonies in the Verizon Center. Just like five years ago it was a re-energizing and inspiring weekend for me as I think about the work I do and why.
Me looking cool with my lanyard and buttons by the Philly sign.
Besides running around squealing and reuniting with TFA friends from all over the country (including Ms. L, who is now in her eighth year of teaching!), I got to attend some pretty great sessions. One highlight was a panel on "What is the role of white leaders on the path to educational equity?", which was moderated by Dr. Beverly Tatum, who I have a HUGE professional crush on. I was helping set up the room for the session before it started, when she came in and introduced herself to me like it was no big deal, and then SHOOK MY HAND!! Alas, I don't have any photographic evidence that this happened, but it did and it filled my heart with joy. The panel itself was pretty great too:
From left to right: Dr. Tatum, Elisa Villanueva Beard (our CEO), Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, the principal of a local DC school, and John Deasy (former LAUSD superintendent)
(Seriously, if you haven't seen Dr. Duncan-Andrade speak before, definitely click the link and watch the video.)
My other favorite session was on intentionally diverse schools, since as Ben and I get closer to starting our own family, we have been talking a lot about the type of school where we want to send our hypothetical future kids. We both agree we want a racially and socioeconomically diverse public school, but those are few and far between - and ever fewer and farther if you want such a school that is actually integrated, and doesn't track its students by race and class under the guise of "ability." The panel consisted of four principals of intentionally diverse schools, and was moderated by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who you may know from a recent piece she did on This American Life - The Problem We All Live With. That's another one you need to listen to as soon as you can if you haven't already. You can also watch the full panel online if you are interested - I learned a lot, but honestly left feeling discouraged about the backwards progress that seems to be happening in school integration across the country.
The closing ceremony at the Verizon Center was great - there's nothing like being in a stadium full of people passionate about working towards educational equity.
Photo shamelessly lifted from the TFA twitter feed.
I'm embedding the video below - you can watch the full thing if you are interested, but there are a few highlights I particularly recommend:
First 10 minutes - three different groups of student performers: students from Hawai'i performing a hula, students from New Mexico performing a drum circle and hoop dance, and a drumline and dancers from a DC high school
0:43 - a second generation corps member (aka a TFA teacher who was taught by TFA teachers) talks about his journey to end up teaching students in his home community of the Rio Grande Valley
1:02 - President Obama!! (sadly, he was present via video only)
1:22 - an alum's powerful spoken word piece, it's hard to explain but just watch and you won't regret it
1:27 - a truly amazing student leader from Baltimore (and hopefully a future TFA teacher!)
1:36 - Memphis parent activists and organizers (I will be sending this segment to everyone who trots out the old "but those families don't care about education!" racist bullshit from this point on)
Also - a small personal highlight for me was that in our CEO's closing remarks (last 10 minutes of the video above), while listing out the many identities that comprise the TFA community, she said "we are a community that is Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Humanist, and Atheist and so much more." There are a lot of religious folks at TFA, mostly Christian, so there is often language that is unintentionally exclusionary to atheistic folks like myself (e.g. "please join us all in praying"). A few years ago I started a small resource group for secular people at TFA, and several times in the intervening years we've contacted the CEO when she says stuff like "we're all praying" to let her know we exist and ask her to consider more inclusive language like "our thoughts and prayers." So the fact that she included "humanist and atheist" in her list was very exciting to me, since it means she knows we exist and proactively thought to include us, and I think I can take some small amount of credit for that fact. It was a very small thing in a weekend bursting with big things, but it was a very personally satisfying note to end on.
My last post about my efforts to better use my privilege generated an unexpected (and welcome!) number of people emailing me with suggestions for additional reading (including one excellent comic) and/or interest in reading and learning along with me. I'm really happy that others are interested in doing this work with me - but now I also have a lot of reading to do! While I'm working on that, I'm going to also focus on doing things besides reading. Today's theme is doing things at work - not necessarily the actual work that I do, but the way I do that work. I share the below not to pat myself on the back for being such a great person, but because it’s been a difficult, multi-year process for me to get to where I currently am – with lots of people pushing me to get better, and lots of mistakes on my part – so I want to share what I’ve learned, as well as what I’m doing to get better.
What I have done so far:
When I had the opportunity to hire someone for the first time a few years ago, I did what most hiring managers do and started asking around in my networks for candidate recommendations. I got a lot of suggestions, but I noticed that they were all very similar to me - young, straight, cis, white women from middle class backgrounds who attended great schools and whose strengths were primarily in analytics and operations. I already had one of me on my team, so I didn't want to hire another one. I started reaching out to a broader swath of people and groups for recommendations - e.g. I asked the African American Managers affinity group, and I asked teacher coaches about their teachers about to finish their two-year commitment (since the role was entry level and so someone could be competitive for it straight out of the classroom). I ended up being able to build a very diverse applicant pool, so when I found the person I wanted to hire I felt confident she really was the best person for the role, not just the best person in my immediate network. Hiring in this way is important both because it makes it more likely that you get the strongest talent, and because hiring only within your networks is one of the ways that privilege is consolidated and protected. In the words of that study's author, "most white Americans engage, at least a few times per year, in the activities that foster inequality. While they may not deliberately discriminate against black and other non-white job seekers, they take actions that make it more likely that white people will be employed -- without thinking that what they're doing amounts to discrimination."
Creating a diverse team is not a useful end goal, though, because numeric diversity is worthless if your workplace isn't also inclusive (everyone feels safe, welcome, able to be themselves, etc...) and equitable (people have equal access to knowledge and power, input into decisions that affect them, etc...). When I hired someone who had a different background from me in so many ways, and who had a completely different set of skills and growth areas, I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to manage her in a way that allowed her to really thrive. I only knew how to manage someone who worked the same way I do, and I was afraid that in trying to manage her to work like me I would quash her ability to work like herself, and in turn stifle her ability to really contribute to the team. I asked a white colleague who manages a diverse team, and has really high staff satisfaction and engagement, for recommendations, and she suggested I read The Inclusion Paradox. It can be a little self-help-y at times, but it was really helpful in terms of being very concrete about what to do to foster an inclusive work environment.
The most helpful thing I learned was "the seven dimensions of culture." The basic idea is that there are seven big cultural ways people often vary in how they approach their work and their lives, and problems arise when one way is taken to be the only right way. For example, one of the dimensions is how people manage time - there is a spectrum from synchronous (very flexible with regards to timing and deadlines) to sequential (very focused on punctuality and having deadlines for everything). I am undoubtedly way at the sequential end at the spectrum, but until that was called out for me, I didn't even realize it was a cultural preference - I just thought it was inherently The One Correct Way Of Operating At Work. The person I hired is much more on the synchronous side of things. When she first started, we actually went through all seven dimensions and diagnosed ourselves, then talked about where there were discrepancies and how we would handle them - without automatically assuming that either way of operating was right or better. It was really helpful to have a common language and shared framework to guide our early conversations about how we work most effectively. Now we work really well together - we align on when something does have a non-negotiable timing/deadline component for a specific reason, and when something can be more flexible. Of course, there are still occasional bumps along the way that make one of us wonder what the heck the other one is thinking/doing, so we sometimes have to revisit our earlier conversations to figure out what is/isn’t working and how we can adjust moving forward. In general, I've found that operating in this way with everyone I work with, not just people I directly manage, has led to a lot of benefits - for example, I have been in many meetings that reached the scheduled end time but the conversation wasn't finished. Before I would have just ended them because the time was up, but now I ask if folks don't mind staying a few extra minutes to wrap up. We often are able to land in a much better place as a result, and we avoid having to schedule an entire follow-up meeting to resolve something that only took a few more minutes. Being inclusive makes work better for everyone!
What I'm committing to do next:
My biggest growth area is in making sure my team is not just inclusive, but actually equitable. Do the people who are most affected by my decisions have a seat at the table while I'm making them? I recently discovered Chris Crass's Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change… and other people socialized in a society based on domination, which is a very concrete checklist for just this task. I have printed it out at my desk and am trying to be much more conscious of dynamics at work, particularly when I am in a position of power (due to my title, my race, my education, my class, or any combination of the above). It's really hard, and it can be painful to realize that I have been dominating discussions or hoarding power in ways that I didn't even realize. But at the same time I can already feel it making me better as a person and helping me to operate in a more equitable way. It's definitely something I will need to continue to be conscientious about so long as I am alive, it's not a list to check off once and then be done, but I'm hoping to get to the point where I've internalized it and it's much more automatic for me to operate in this more equitable way. And just like a more inclusive culture is better for everyone, a more equitable culture makes work better both in terms of how it feels, and the actual quality of work that gets done.
I just finished the 3 consecutive weeks of travel part of my fall, and am embarrassingly excited to sit at home and do as little as possible for the next few weeks. When I travel for work I am mostly working the whole time I'm in whatever place, but I did manage to squeeze in a little bit of non-work over the past few weeks.
The night before my St. Louis conference began, I went with some work friends to Lambert's Cafe - aka that place where they throw rolls at you across the room and walk around ladling out fried okra from a giant bucket. It was a two hour drive from St. Louis, and it was worth it!
Yes, that is the "small" drink size.
After that conference ended we had about two hours to kill before our flights left, so of course we went to the (free) St. Louis zoo, where we ate pumpkin funnel cake à la mode and drank beer as we walked around.
Living in PA has made drinking in public a very surreal experience for me.
This past week I was in Milwaukee, and I flew in a day early so I could spend time with my work friend who lives there. It was totally worth it because I got to go trick or treating with her ADORABLE niece and nephew.
Anna and Olaf
Best day ever!
Then we pretty much worked forever (I was there to execute a big project with her), but we did eat this:
Monkey bread!!
And this:
Ethiopian food!
And - finally - we got to try PUMPPLE!! Pumpple is the infamous "turducken of cakes" made here in Philly (it's a pumpkin pie baked into a chocolate cake layered with an apple pie baked into a vanilla cake), and when this friend was in town over the summer we tried to get some, only to discover that it is seasonal and only available in the fall (I guess because of the pumpkin part?). Anyway, I got a slice before I left and brought it on the flight to Milwaukee, and we had it for breakfast the next day. Each of the constituent parts was good, but having four different cakes/pies in your mouth at once was just kind of... weird. Oh well. It still doesn't deter me from wanting to try this.
I'm here for a conference this week - and while I've been at conference sessions pretty much the whole time, the view from my hotel room is awesome. This was the sunrise this morning:
Heading home to Philly tonight and will be there for two whole days before the next trip!
I was looking at my schedule for the next few months and realized that, like emsque, I might need to create a sidebar to keep track of my insane travel schedule:
October 3-5 Boston for baby party (yay!)
October 12-13 Maryland for a wedding (yay!)
October 14-16 Boston again for work
October 17-19 Rehobeth with friends for the weekend (yay!)
October 20-23 St. Louis for work
October 25 wedding in Philly (yay!)
October 26-29 Milwaukee for work
November 1 Friends staying with us in Philly (yay!)
November 17-20 Houston for work
November 26-December 1 Chicago for Thanksgiving
December 2-7 San Francisco for a wedding (yay!)
So... yeah. There might not be too many updates here for the next few months...
We recently moved into a shiny new office building, which is great in almost every way (for instance, now we have windows!). The one thing that is kinda funky is these silhouettes along the walls - the ones near the entrance are of small children playing, then they gradually grow as you walk through the office until you reach grads in caps and gowns at the opposite end. Except, somewhere in the teenager section there is this:
Apparently the guy on the left is holding his backpack and the guy on the right has a book in his arm, and they are walking to or from school together. However, I'm finding it impossible to see it as anything but a mugging - and apparently enough other people have the same interpretation, because they are getting the "artist" to come back and modify it to look less like an armed robbery. I will sort of miss it when it is gone...
Over the long weekend I made another small sampler for a work friend:
The joke is that we were working on a big project together and getting a bit punch drunk with the long hours, and at one point he sent me a spreadsheet and told me the data I needed was in "column X as in xenopus." Ever since then we've included random frog pictures in all our email exchanges.
I like the style of stitching where you make a gradient in the shape of the image, then you go back and outline over it and suddenly you can tell what it is.
I have been making lots of little projects for coworkers lately. Here's the latest:
Johann always answers the phone "hey buddy!" and he is obsessed with golden retrievers - he claims to have been raised by them (only child, spent a lot of time with his pets), and we often joke that he is a golden retriever based on his personality. Hence, this sampler!
I am in Madison, Wisconsin for a conference - I flew in this morning via a connection through the Detroit airport. The connection was tight so I had to hustle between opposite ends of the airport, but I wish I could have lingered because holy cow the Detroit airport is awesome! Check it out, they have a driverless robot train that runs inside the terminal:
Picture from wikipedia because I was running through the airport.
Then, to get between terminals, you go through this groovy underground tunnel that has undulating lights and music as you move through it:
Another google image search picture.
My flight home has a longer connection, and I am dorkily excited to hang out in the Detroit airport!
My friend and fellow Jew at work mentioned that her roof has been leaking, and she was nervous about it ruining all her stuff if it got worse while she was out of the house. I said if it did at least her insurance would cover it, she said she didn't have renter's insurance, and I said she was the worst Jew of all time. I also told her I would make her a sampler if she got renter's insurance to protect it - she held up her end of the deal, so I made her this:
This is a quote from our conversation about why she should get renter's insurance
A friend at work has been exceptionally supportive with a challenging situation lately, and she is also obsessed with Harry Potter. Hence, this small weekend project for her:
Nothing like releasing work anxiety in embroidery form!
I just got back from four days in Tulsa, for a conference. The conference was fantastic, but I didn't really leave the hotel for most of the time I was there (partly because of all the conference events, and partly out of a fear of cricket swarms). I did manage to get one picture of my time in the Sooner State, though:
The building that houses the San Francisco TFA office is undergoing some renovations, so part of the lobby is blocked off with temporary drywall. The wall has some colored lines painted on it to make it less construction-zone-y, but this week there was a new decor addition:
Yes, those are dozens (hundreds?) of creepy fake birds. It looks kind of like a demented taxidermist got a hold of a glue gun and went to town.
Honestly, I'm not even sure if it was a purposeful redecoration or if it's a prank - it seems too weird to be intentional, but like too much effort to be a gag. Maybe this is California being way ahead in the home decor fashion scene, and in a few years we'll all be hot gluing stuffed animals to our walls...
I was lucky enough to go to Sacramento this week as they welcome their incoming teaching corps - this is only their second year of existence, and this year's 30 teachers are double the amount they had last year, so the experience was so personal and magical and wonderful, especially compared to when I went through it myself as one of 500 new teachers in NYC. I was mostly working and so not taking pictures, but I did snap a few on the train ride there, since the view was so different than what it usually is on the East coast:
Ocean!
Distant mountains!
Also, one night we got to eat dinner on a boat. I neglected to take a picture of the boat itself, but here is a tiny model:
And here is a sign they had posted in the entrance:
Word.
Spending this time with incoming teachers has got me all worked up and excited to get started on the 2014 admissions season!
Everything in my life has been just wonderful lately. We went to NYC for a weekend of hanging out with college friends, and spent 24ish hours doing nothing but eating, drinking, and bullshitting (just like college!).
View from my spot on the couch in the room of happiness.
I got promoted at work, and also got funding to run a conference I've been wanting to make happen for over a year. It was this past week, and it went awesomely - it looks like I'll be able to turn it into an annual event based on how successful it was. I don't really have any fun pictures of it, but here I am in a hat made for me by my colleague in St. Louis (a coworker from Hawai'i came and brought me delicious candy, but I ate it before thinking to take a picture):
I love this hat!
Lastly, I finally remembered to order the recently-published book of one of my former professors, and I am in the acknowledgments section (I helped transcribed interviews for her):
I am famous!
In conclusion, it's only a matter of time before I get hit by a bus, because no one gets to have this much good luck and happiness all the time.
Guess what? I am so cool I got to write a guest blog post for the national Girl Scout blog! (TFA has a new partnership with the Girl Scouts, so they asked for staff who are GS alums to volunteer). I'm famous!
I had jury duty a few months ago, and was put on a case that lasted a week. I thought I would write about it here because I was sure it would be the height of ridiculousness, but it ended up being a surprisingly emotional experience. I did eventually write down some reflections on what happened, mostly as a form of catharsis, but hesitated to post anything here because it is so different than the silly stuff I usually share. But I recently ran into one of the other jurors on the train, which has me thinking about everything that happened again, and I am also currently reading The New Jim Crow, which has me thinking a lot about my former students and my work in general, so I have decided to share my experience with a (very slightly) broader audience.
