Teachers are NOT the Problem, They are Part of the Solution

We are losing qualified teachers at a staggering rate. But, to be clear, teachers should never be blamed for the teacher turnover problems our country is facing. The shortage of teachers in America and the decrease in college students seeking a teaching career is a multifaceted and complex problem. 

The Teacher Shortage Crisis Series

In this limited podcast series, we discuss exactly what got us to this crisis point in the U.S. education system. Click the links below to be directed to that part of the series. We recommend listening in order. 

1. Pay Scales for Teachers are Oppressive and Outdated

2. A Discussion with a New Teacher Who Chose to Leave the Profession

3. The High Cost of Becoming a Teacher

4. How Red Tape is Exacerbating the Problems

5. Outsourcing Teacher Expertise to Canned Curriculum

6. An ESL Teacher’s Stand Against Canned Curriculum and the Shocking Consequences

7. True Educational Equity Reforms Aren’t Happening and the Repercussions are Severe

8. Gender Equity Issues in K-12 are Undervalued and Neglected

9. Courageous Teachers Speak Out Against a Serious Problem Being Overlooked in K-12 Schools

10. Forgotten Narratives from the Frontlines of the Reading Wars

11. The Revealing Reality Struggling Readers Face in the U.S. Public Education System

12. Our Public Education System is in Crisis and the Solutions are Obvious

13. Teaching in Turbulent Times: Our Reaction to “Y’all Won”

14. Educators or Pawns? Unpacking the Realities of Being a K-12 Teacher in the U.S.

15. Fixing Oppressed Systems: Teacher Prep, Induction, and Pay

Stay tuned for the last few episodes wrapping up this limited podcast series!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Trina: Hello, everybody. We are back with Amanda and Jess. This is Trina, your co host for the podcast. And we are here today with Jess to get her reaction to the can ned curriculum episode, specifically when we interviewed the two teachers at the secondary level, the high school secondary level, who were speaking about the harmful impacts of adopting of adopting a can curriculum, which is not typical at the secondary level, but really is standard practice in elementary.

[00:00:35] Trina: And. I’ve never taught elementary. I’ve only ever been a middle school teacher. And the two teachers in the episode were high school teachers. And I’m really excited to get the big takeaways about this from Jess. So what were your reactions? What are your insights? Take it away, Jess.

[00:00:56] Jess: Well, thanks for having me back on you guys.

[00:00:59] Jess: It’s been great. It’s been great being back on so far. Yeah. So I listened to this episode about a month ago. I went on a big trip to Scotland. I’m glad I took notes because, you know, after a two or three week trip to Scotland, I kind of forgot everything going on in my life. But I remember listening to the episode and the first quote I wrote down from it was.

[00:01:22] Jess: I felt like a pod and a game I didn’t want to be in. And I was like, wow, this is my entire, this is, this is my teaching career in a nutshell. This is my whole career. Like put it on my tombstone right now, because this has been the last 12 years of my life. I have been a pawn in this game that just keeps getting more and more whacked.

[00:01:50] Jess: I like that shook me to the core because I was like, this is, this is my life. This is everything wrong with my life right now. I am a literal pawn in a game and I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in the game anymore, but like, I also don’t want to quit being a teacher, but like, what do you do? Amanda, do you have any thoughts on that?

[00:02:13] Jess: Like, do you ever feel like that yourself?

[00:02:17] Amanda: Yeah, I love, I love that quote. And I forgot that that was said. And I think many, many teachers. I mean, we are in the middle of our summer break. It’s what July. What is it, July 10th? And, and we’ve had a lot of time to witness, you know, the effects of what it’s like to be a teacher today on our mental health.

[00:02:43] Amanda: You know, I’m a basket case. Yeah. And I look back on this last year and I don’t feel like, yeah, I’m definitely, I feel like that, that quote you just said, being a pawn in a game, I didn’t. want to play. I feel like that applies to other realms of my life too. Like my role as a mom, my role, you know, that I’ve kind of fell into, honestly, as an entrepreneur because of being a creative person, because of having, you know, combination type ADHD, hyperactive and inattentive I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs and teachers, you know, these are great professions for neurodivergent people like myself because they are very stimulating.

[00:03:31] Amanda: But it’s like, I almost feel like, you know, like I go through this school year and I just go, go, go nonstop and I don’t, I just sacrifice myself, you know and, and then everything comes to a screeching halt during summer break and it’s, I don’t stop I don’t know. This is just my personal experience, but it is it’s frightening and, and also just a pawn in our society and the way that it’s set up and our culture and being, you know, a citizen of the United States.

[00:04:05] Amanda: I don’t know. I’m going all over the place here. You are

[00:04:07] Trina: digressing big time. I love it. I’m sorry. No, I do think schools and the things. That play out in them are a microcosm of our larger society at times, but I also see that it is an esoteric insular world and there’s some weird shit that goes on in K 12 that does not go on outside of it.

[00:04:29] Trina: And I think we don’t understand the extent to which the people outside of our world who have direct responsibility to shape our world don’t understand it. Our voice is critical in fixing this problem and even defining the problems because I don’t think the problems in K 12 are even well understood or that the fact the extent of the problems.

[00:04:52] Amanda: I just want to say I forgot one role which is a role of mother. You know just the, the, the, what we’ve been sold as what these roles, like, mean, like being a teacher, you know, being part of the education system, being a mom, being part of that culture. I

[00:05:11] Trina: also think the things you’re talking about are female roles, which gets to the heart of where I think Jess wants to go with her observations about her big takeaway.

[00:05:21] Trina: So. I think we were talking offline before we started and just was like really moved by the fact that there’s a big difference in teacher autonomy and secondary versus elementary and for the secondary teachers to lose their autonomy suddenly. For the veteran teacher who has a degree in ESL education to not be utilized because he had a fucking opinion that made things complicated for the people who aren’t teaching.

[00:05:58] Trina: And I think that Jess’s observations about her like reactions to the differences in secondary versus elementary and how like the way we do elementary is kind of bleeding into secondary and what that means. That’s like something that we need to get into. So what, what were your thoughts about that?

[00:06:20] Jess: Well, when I was first listening to the episode, I was sort of like angry.

[00:06:25] Jess: I was mad because I, so I wrote down this quote and it said, we’ve always been given the freedom to try new things and throw them out if they didn’t work. And I just thought. What? Like, that’s never been the case in elementary school. You can never just go off and go do something new and say, Oh, I wonder if this is going to work or not, because it’s just really high stakes teaching people how to read and The basics, right?

[00:06:52] Jess: Like elementary school, it just always feels so high stakes. And I know that’s kind of a systemic problem though, too. Because of the amount of women employed in elementary school, right? Like in the system, it’s been kind of, it’s kind of broken like that, but I got so mad, I’m like, what do you mean you’ve had the choice?

[00:07:12] Jess: Right. But then I, then I had to take a step back and tell myself that’s not the way you shouldn’t be so quick. To like want to attack a colleague because they’ve had certain freedoms and that’s how oppressed we’ve become in the profession is that we tend to like, we’re quicker to attack each other and like see flaws and like maybe other colleagues or teachers or, you know, people that are in our building more than like the system itself.

[00:07:41] Jess: Like that’s how messed up it is. Oh, that’s so good. That’s so good. Jess. It was like a can of worms. I had to really evaluate, like, why are you so angry at this person who’s had this major disruption to their career? But it’s because I had to recognize my own oppression. And that was, like, huge. I was like, oh my gosh.

[00:08:04] Jess: It’s not, it’s not this person. It’s, it’s you and where you are, you’re the pawn in the game. It’s the game! It

[00:08:14] Trina: is the game and I think I a point I had not considered, but I just don to me while you were talking. You say elementary is high stakes, and I believe it is too. Unfortunately, that’s not the way the world, or even K 12 addresses elementary, they, they put all of the resources.

[00:08:33] Trina: And all of the emphasis on secondary, specifically high school. Right. And if you look at like the pay structure for high school principals versus elementary principals, for some reason, they get paid more, and they are more largely male. Right. So we have all of this and the pay structure represents how much the extent to which we value or respect and trust these people, right?

[00:08:57] Trina: It’s considered harder work to lead a high school than an elementary school. And I don’t believe that’s the case at all, but that is completely baked into this because the male dominated and I don’t even think it’s dominated. I don’t know what the exact numbers are in teachers at high school, but if we’re overall, 70 percent of the profession is male.

[00:09:16] Trina: Female. Okay. I would say that’s mostly in elementary, right? So there’s a lot more men in, in high schools, but then more frequently go on to become high school principals because they’ve experienced teaching high school. And then those are the people that get elevated to the district office and level of superintendent.

[00:09:39] Trina: But the reality is elementary education is critical and we are messing it up and sold a story. Describe that beautifully. But what it doesn’t describe is why the teachers who were teaching the queuing method were not self possessed or empowered to describe, notice, and describe the problem and push back.

[00:10:00] Trina: And that gets to the matter of teacher autonomy. And so yeah, we can listen to these secondary teachers Describe these new experiences of our bullshit model being forwarded at the high school. But the problem is that we don’t value and trust teachers to describe their own realities. We somehow buy into this idea that people who don’t teach or who haven’t taught in a long time.

[00:10:24] Trina: Or in many cases, never taught or taught for a very short period of time, somehow know more than we do about what we should teach and how we should teach it. That is ludicrous. And that’s how we got into this mess in the first place.

[00:10:39] Jess: I agree. I agree. So, Amanda, I had a question for you. I know that In recent years, you know, you’ve kind of taken this podcast from a writing kind of point of view, right. And to wanting to empower students. So like for you, like what, what does empowerment mean to you in like teaching or having autonomy in your teaching or like how, how, like you must have had a, I know you had a major like mental shift going from like.

[00:11:12] Jess: Writing and writers workshop to wanting to empower people like what could you maybe like talk about that a little bit is I think that’s really important because you’ve kind of empowered yourself and making the switch. Don’t you think?

[00:11:29] Amanda: Yeah, I think that gosh, that’s a really huge question, Jess, you, yeah, you just kind of stumped me a little bit I mean, cause I, I also just keep going back to the fact that I have taught third through ninth grade now you know, and I, I attribute that to ADHD.

[00:11:49] Amanda: You know, like, I, I, I, not many teachers move around like I have, or like you have or Trina for that matter, but like I have, I do have experience teaching third grade and not knowing and having a canned curriculum, being appreciative of it, but then realizing that it, that it wasn’t working, even though the research said that it was supposed to and then taking on this, well, I, you know, I get so passionate and excited about engagement and, and I realized that really early on in my career.

[00:12:25] Amanda: And I, I feel like I became a rebel. I mean, I’ve always been a rebel but in my own classroom and, and, and feeling like. The, the program that people were talking about in districts that was not necessarily the canned curriculum but was much, gave teachers and students much more autonomy was workshop.

[00:12:52] Amanda: And so that’s why I grasp, grasped so strongly onto it. I mean, it became Thank you. you know, a special interest for me, like it’s something that I became obsessed with, you know, and something that it’s all I could talk about, you know, I was so obsessed with it. And, and felt so strongly that it worked that I started a business around it and you helped me do it just like 10 years ago.

[00:13:20] Amanda: You’re the one that came up with Amanda right now, you know, it just was like, okay, because I just, I was so convinced that the way to teach students how to write is to help them feel like they were real writers, you know, and that what they were doing and what they were saying mattered. And I still believe that, but it’s so much more complicated.

[00:13:43] Amanda: And so I’m trying to answer your question as best as I can. And then, so why did I suddenly drop workshop? And I mean, I think there’s a lot to that too. And why did I shift to, you know what, this is not just about teaching writing or the workshop method. And yes, I was very impacted by all of the things that happened to Lucy Calkins you know, and, and, and the reading wars and, and her.

[00:14:08] Amanda: Really being called out by a lot of people, you know, the science of reading people, you know, I was very impacted by that. But I was also impacted by George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and and learning about neurodivergence and learning about you know, the fact that I need structure in order to I don’t know, be healthy.

[00:14:28] Amanda: Like I need a school structure. Being at home for years by myself was really, really, really hard. And, and so I just, and I started to kind of learn more about different brains and and developing so much deep empathy for the students in front of me, middle and high school students now and, and what they’re going through, you know, and so it just, I guess I, I just expanded, you know, I still believe in like engagement and writing and teaching writing workshop, but I also believe, and then I met Trina.

[00:15:01] Amanda: You know, and, and like she blew my mind with the connection she was making about the way that the education system was even created and like how this history of it, you know, the roots of it and the, and the you know, the, I don’t know, Trina, you can speak more to this. Like I’m probably talking way too much here.

[00:15:22] Amanda: There’s your answer though, Jess.

[00:15:23] Trina: I, what I love, thank you. I, what I love about that response. Is that, I mean, I think, okay, so Lucy Calkins, right? I, when we talk about reading and writing workshop, the way we handle reading and writing instruction, when you’re on the continuum of learning to read skills, first and second grade, and then kids in third or fourth, even later grades that still haven’t mastered those foundational skills.

[00:15:52] Trina: That is one animal. And then how we finally tune it and refine it in later years is another animal. So I think Lucy Calkins model works well for students that already know how to read, have the basics down. We want them to get better in the English language is hard, writing well is hard. But if you’re using workshop for kids that haven’t mastered Phonics.

[00:16:16] Trina: That’s not going to work. And that’s where I think the nuance was missing. Those robust conversations were not being had because we were not included in those conversations. Teachers were not included in those conversations. Well, and I felt like a

[00:16:29] Amanda: fraud.

[00:16:30] Trina: Well, but when school boards make a decision about pedagogy and curriculum, they can’t understand the nuance of all the developmental stages.

[00:16:38] Trina: You know what I mean? I, I love close reading and so what I, what I wanted to say is, is this, like what I heard you drawn to was basic frameworks, guideposts, not canned lessons. That is the problem. We are a heterogeneous society and we all have our own unique strengths. We need to be able to create things that are nuanced and tailored to the exacting circumstances that we find ourselves from classroom to classroom, from kid to kid.

[00:17:08] Trina: From teacher to teacher and use a framework right to guidance with the science of reading stuff from first and second grade. There’s less wiggle room. I will say that it’s got, it’s all got to be in there. And if for anybody who’s still mastering the foundational reading skills, the problem is, is there’s a lot of nuance that needs to be had in these conversations and we need to be the ones having them.

[00:17:33] Trina: I’m going to come back to the American Medical Association and the National Bar Association. Would we ever. Expect non lawyers or non doctors to come up with the standards of practice, who would be evaluating, you know, what we ever want non doctors evaluating doctor. No, but somehow it’s okay and education, because of the structural sexism that got.

[00:17:59] Trina: Built into this thing from the very, very beginning. You know, again, when I talk to like very social justice minded leaders in K 12 and throw out this idea that if a teacher has the self possession and wants the higher education to learn how to build curriculum, they should do it. And it seems ludicrous to them.

[00:18:17] Trina: I mean, oh my God, we have to unpack so much structural sexism in order to understand where that shit’s coming from. You know, Jess, what do you think?

[00:18:28] Jess: Well, I kind of had a big aha when Amanda was talking about how, and I was just thinking about like teachers in general, how I was thinking like, what if we did have the autonomy, like, and all of these, almost every teacher I know, the teaching part of their life bleeds into other interests.

[00:18:47] Jess: Maybe they start businesses. Maybe they get advanced degrees. Maybe they’re on a lot of committees, but it like, unlike any other career, like you don’t talk to like a data scientist who is doing data science things on the weekends. Right. But. You do talk to teachers that are doing teaching things on the weekends, coaching businesses, tutoring taking extra classes.

[00:19:12] Jess: Like we’re constantly learning. We’re constantly evolving. And I was thinking, I wonder if a lot of this is because we don’t have any autonomy. In our careers. So we’re creative. We’re so creative. We are neurodivergent, right? Neurodivergent people are drawn to teaching because it’s a way of being creative and a way of doing a lot of different things at once.

[00:19:34] Jess: It’s a totally different way of thinking. And I was just thinking like when Amanda was talking about like how You know, her business exploded, like it kind of expanded from this one idea of writing workshop. It really is amazing in some capacity. And then it just grew and grew and grew into this idea of student empowerment.

[00:19:53] Jess: But so much of that was also like who Amanda is. And like, what if in all those classrooms you were in, You didn’t have these stifling, you know, canned curriculums and all of these rules. And like, you were, you were in charge of how everyone was going to learn. And I know you’ve broken a lot of rules. We all have over the years, right?

[00:20:14] Jess: Like we’ve broken tons of rules and I know you’ve done so many different creative lessons and really gotten engagement up, but like, what if like you had a bigger Ownership piece in, in what the students were learning and how they were learning and when they were learning it. I mean, would you find the need to still, you know, go off and do all these other things?

[00:20:35] Jess: Because like, it’s, it’s not very typical in other professions to behave in this way, right? Like to want to just expand into every area of our life. And I know like, it’s so hard to find balance as a teacher because. That’s what we’re doing. But I did have this weird thought, like, what if, what if like we were, we were the, we, we were the change makers.

[00:20:58] Jess: We were the ones, we were the policy makers. We were the change makers. We were the ones in control of like our own careers, our own professions. And we actually felt like true professionals. Would we always have this need? To keep filling up our time and space and heads with like, you know, education all the time.

[00:21:19] Jess: Or would we feel a little more satisfied in your careers? Like we could just leave it, leave it at school and go explore other parts of our life. You know, it was just kind of a big, and I know like we’ve all done like really amazing things and it’s, it’s I love the teacher community, but I do feel sad for us sometimes because we are so consumed by it.

[00:21:40] Jess: Right. We’re so burned out. Yeah. I

[00:21:43] Trina: think when you’re time. Yeah, well, I think you brought up, you just made me think of something dress your reaction to Amanda, just made me think of something, I think, I think I would push back just a little bit around the fact that we’re all these neuro divergent creative hardworking people, I don’t think a lot of us are.

[00:22:01] Trina: I mean, I think we’re hardworking, but innovative and neurodivergent, no, I don’t think our profession attracts those innovators because they aren’t compensated for that. We are a profession attracts as personality type that one safe in the box, predictable profession. And so, yeah, followers. Exactly.

[00:22:23] Trina: Amanda’s right. And so I think, though, that that kind of person doesn’t think about the problems that are so entrenched in K 12. And those of us, and come up with solutions, right? And those of us who are like this, like the three of us,

[00:22:37] Amanda: And the people listening right now and

[00:22:40] Trina: the people listening are so driven to come up with these solutions because nobody else is.

[00:22:49] Trina: And that is what animates us. We see the problems, we see the oppression and no one else is talking about it and no one else will listen to us. We have to continue to create podcasts and conferences for us. That is where all of our time is going. Like, hello, you guys. No, don’t see these problems because we do at my side.

[00:23:10] Trina: I’m, I’m, I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about my individual people that work with, but at my site, I’m a rarity. Most people just clock in clock out, go home and don’t give a shit like this.

[00:23:21] Amanda: Well, and also they thought they like the can curriculum. Some of

[00:23:25] Trina: them do

[00:23:26] Amanda: well, they don’t like

[00:23:27] Trina: it. Nobody likes it.

[00:23:29] Trina: But they’re willing to do it. Yes. That’s what it is.

[00:23:32] Amanda: Well, guess who’s kind of relieved and feel like I’m going to kind of fall back on that because I need to protect myself from burnout. When I start, you know, teaching LD, we just adopted a new CAN curriculum and it’s okay, you know, and they’ve told us that we have, you know, creative license to kind of like, we have to use it.

[00:23:55] Amanda: But we also, and I think this is the difference between high school and elementary we, and middle school, I mean, I think that they’re getting more rigid about all schools and equality and giving all students equal access to, you know what is it, quality curriculum, research backed quality curriculum, you know, that’s what everyone’s saying these days about why we use CAN curriculum.

[00:24:20] Amanda: Right. And so I was told, you know, we’re getting where you I piloted the can curriculum this year too. And, you know, thankfully the one that I, you know, preferred or was chosen, but we, they said we could have creative license to like, you know, bring in other things. Depending on what our students need.

[00:24:42] Amanda: Whereas I think at the elementary level, they might not have said that they might have said, like, do this, you know, but like, and I do think like with can curriculum and we’ve mentioned this before, like that. It’s helpful for math teachers. It’s helpful for K through 3 or K through to the explicit direct instruction.

[00:25:01] Amanda: You know, and the scripts, and our episode was with an ELD teacher. Don’t you think that scripts are necessary? And like, you know, for a newcomer, you know, LD class, because learning English, it’s like, it’s like they’re a kindergartner. You have to teach like very specific phonics stuff.

[00:25:24] Trina: Let’s be clear.

[00:25:25] Trina: The scripts are necessary when you hire people that don’t have the ELD training. This teacher has.

[00:25:31] Amanda: Yeah, like, and,

[00:25:32] Trina: and, and that’s why they write the scripts because they don’t want people that have a strong opinion, Amanda. And right now you don’t have that training. You just, you don’t, but eventually you will start because you’re smart and you are student centered, you will notice the flaws in it.

[00:25:49] Trina: And by then you’ll have done your time and they’ll give it to the next new teacher showing up. And that’s what they do. By the way, I sat down and talked to that teacher, the veteran teacher who had that class taken away from him because, and he had his entire graduate degree, English language instruction, did his entire thesis on exactly how best to do this stuff.

[00:26:11] Trina: Okay. And now he’s not able to do it. So what he found out by talking to people at his site who do summer school is the number of ELD kids in summer school, because they flunked English is Has it has grown exponentially. The program isn’t working. It isn’t working.

[00:26:36] Amanda: And he left, or he was not asked to teach ELD anymore, even though he had all the experience, all the training and he said he was asked to not teach ELD anymore. I just want to remind everyone of that episode and I’ll put a link in the show notes to it because that is, this episode is Jess responding to that episode about that teacher and now they just teach.

[00:27:00] Amanda: Just regular English and just regular taken from from from them. So yeah, it was shocking to hear his story. And now to hear that the data is showing that this research back program isn’t doesn’t work. And is anyone going to do anything about it?

[00:27:19] Trina: No, because ELD students are marginalized. They have no agency, relatively small agency.

[00:27:26] Trina: Their parents don’t speak English. So they know that they can get away with this. They get away with much worse than this. We know that. They will get away with this and they are saving money. This is a cost saver. You guys is greed. It’s dollar and cents, pure and simple. And then they cook up narratives that sound good to defend it.

[00:27:45] Trina: Like, you know least restrictive environment, like an immersion ELD class for newcomers, sheltered classes sound. Oh no, no, no. They need to be in mainstream classes. They need to they deserve equal education. That’s such baloney. You guys,

[00:28:03] Amanda: you know,

[00:28:03] Trina: and, and they would deliberately hired people that just have this clad, right?

[00:28:08] Trina: They don’t have an opinion about it yet or new, which is exactly what happened in that scenario that we, in that episode was they gave it to a brand new teacher, a brand new teacher who was not tenured. And it’s like, you eventually earn the privilege. This is the way it works in K 12 guys. You earn the privilege to have easy classes of kids who don’t have special needs.

[00:28:31] Trina: You get to graduate from the schools that are hard culture and climates. You get to graduate into AP, all AP classes if you want. So our veteran teachers, the one who will the most knowledge are in this privileged position usually where they don’t make any money, but at least they have an easy go of it because they’ve done their time.

[00:28:50] Trina: With the hard stuff. And that is the opposite of a productive model. The people who know the best should be in the hardest positions and they should be paid for it. That’s it. That’s the way it works in the private sector. Come on, guys.

[00:29:05] Amanda: Jess, do you have any last words in response to this episode or do we want to wrap up?

[00:29:12] Jess: You know, I’m kind of looking at all my, I did write like, I don’t know what there was in the episode, but I did write like pivot, you know, that was like, oh, I get such a horrible, such a horrible term. We should have a whole episode someday on.

[00:29:26] Jess: Pivoting because I feel like they use that as like a buzzword in schools, like, Oh, we got a pivot. And it just means more of the saving money as I did write. A lot of my notes were about trying to make this cheaper, bigger classes and like how it, and I wrote like, it all boils down to money, right? Like a lot of this boils down to money.

[00:29:50] Jess: And trying to cram these kids into these classes that are gigantic. Huge problem in my district. I’m sure it’s a problem in your districts too. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a really good episode. Just kind of like, you know, kind of revisiting this idea. And I think we hit on a lot of important things, you know, like I mean, and one thing I just, I didn’t really realize, like, because I, I try to surround myself with really, you know, like people that are movers and shakers and positive people.

[00:30:18] Jess: And Trina, you kind of hit on something that like, people are just accepting the way things are. Right? Like, and I didn’t, I didn’t realize that because like, when you surround yourself with like minded people, you don’t realize maybe that, but like, you know, it’s there because you see it at school. Right.

[00:30:35] Jess: But I just ignore it. I’m just like, Oh no, they don’t, they don’t get it. Right. But like, I, I, I, that did give me a lot to think about on this episode, how like the listeners right now, people listening to this episode and how, you know, obviously the people in this room, like maybe we are a little different.

[00:30:52] Trina: No, we are. We are. We’re neurodivergent and so necessary to reform the system. And We are weirdos who are compelled to continue to think about it, and that’s why knowing, claiming my neurodivergency, and Amanda’s been a big part of me accepting this about myself, and moving away from just calling myself weird and punk, which I still claim those titles, but neurodivergent, is because I am able to grant grace to the people who don’t see these things.

[00:31:28] Trina: They are not neurodivergent and we need neurotypical people in the world. I tell my kid this all the time. If we were all like this, oh my God, nothing would work, right? But the world also needs us too. And we are in short supply in K 12. I want to animate all teachers to elevate their voices and never shut up.

[00:31:49] Trina: You guys are essential to the process. You should be leading the work. Bring your own chair to the table and forcefully put yourself there. That’s what I say.

[00:31:58] Amanda: Well, and neurotypical teachers care deeply about students, too. You know, and, and I, every year, because all summer long I’ve been like, I’m going to be neurotypical next year, I’m going to be neurotypical, I’m just going to fall, I’m just going to leave work at work, I’m going to not worry about this, I’m not going to overcommit, I’m not going to care so much, I’m not going to get all uptight and weird in meetings and, and cry my eyes out in my car.

[00:32:30] Amanda: I’m just gonna like leave work there and like do the bare minimum and I say that every year And it never happens You know?

[00:32:41] Trina: Thank God! I love you exactly as

[00:32:44] Amanda: you are! Yeah. I don’t know. I am trying really hard to like, figure out what my priorities are next year and to try and stick to it, you know? So stay tuned!

[00:32:58] Amanda: Should we end there? I

[00:33:00] Trina: think so.

[00:33:01] Amanda: Awkward toodles, or?

[00:33:03] Trina: Toodles!

[00:33:06] Amanda: Happy fingers! Yay.