At the California Math Council-South (CMC-South) Conference on November 8, I gave an Ignite talk on how my struggles in my first years of teaching helped me understand why teachers need community to thrive. (Ignite Talks are five-minute talks in which slides automatically advance every 15 seconds).
A video of my talk is here: https://bit.ly/bw24ignite. I did the closed captioning myself, with the help of Microsoft Clipchamp. I added my slides in the upper-left corner of the video.
Here is a transcript of my Ignite talk.
So I wanted to talk about how my personal story brought me to this point. And I got this idea of sharing my personal story from someone that some of you may know. (applause) Bernadette gave an Ignite talk a couple of years ago in Pennsylvania that I attended, and I was just blown away at her inspirational story. She talked about how her story brought her to where she was.
So I grew up in New York City. I grew up in Elmhurst, which is an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Queens. My parents were working-class immigrants from China. My dad was a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. My mom was a seamstress. And they worked long hours. They worked really hard. They taught me the value of hard work. They said, “You know, if you work hard, you’ll do fine in life.”
And so when I became a teacher in 2005, I worked really hard. I worked really long hours on my lesson plans and I started getting tired. I started feeling stressed and I thought, like, “Is this it?” Because I started to realize that teaching – as I got on in my career, teaching was actually in a lot of ways getting harder. There were all these other things that were affecting my career that I had no control over. And I thought, like, “Is this it?”
So my colleague Larisa Bukalov introduced me to this organization called Math for America. (applause) It sponsors a fellowship that supports teachers. And when I started this affiliation with Math in America in 2009, I discovered this community of educators that were supporting each other. I mean, here were teachers that were supporting each other emotionally, sharing ideas with each other with professional development run by actual teachers.
And so I started getting the confidence to present at conferences like this. I started connecting with all of these amazing educators from around the country and I thought, wow, this is a great community. This is where I feel like I belong. And so I also started getting involved with state committees that revised state standards, that recommended changes in graduation requirements. I thought, this is cool. Here I am, a classroom teacher, a seat at the table, making decisions.
But as I started to get more involved, I also started to notice and wonder a couple of things. OK, so here I was, an Asian male math teacher from New York City, and I looked around as I was with these other policymakers and I thought, well, most of these other policymakers, they’re not teachers. Where are the teachers? Why is it that teachers are not an integral part of this conversation about policy?
I notice that most teachers that I know don’t feel like they can be a part of this conversation. They feel, you know, it – “I mean, I’m too busy. I have tests to grade. I have parents to contact, you know, just let me close the door to my classroom. Let me do my own thing. It is what it is, whatever.”
And I wonder, why do we as teachers feel like we have to leave the classroom in order to make a difference? I wonder, why is the system working to keep us so busy, to prevent us from being an integral part of these conversations about our own profession?
We need teachers to be part of professional communities that nurture us, that nurture us emotionally, that nurture us professionally, so we can grow from each other, learn from each other, learn from professors, learn from consultants, learn from experts so that we can develop these levels of state and local talent – state, local, community organizations, a national organization of math ed that actually is a community of teachers of mathematics.
We need a community of teachers that doesn’t just support us emotionally, doesn’t just grow us professionally, but gives us the opportunity to make real changes in our profession to make this more sustainable.
In times like these, it’s so easy for us to just walk away, to close the door and say, “Let me do my own thing.” We can’t do that anymore. There are people who want to knock down the door and disrupt the system of public education that we have.
And we don’t just need a seat at the table because this is our table. (applause) We as teachers need to be an integral part of this conversation so that we can make this profession more sustainable and this educational system better for everyone. Thank you.