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May Teacher Spotlight

How long have you been a teacher? 
Nine years. I see myself as a sophomore in the span of my teaching life. This is my first year at Sci High (NO Charter Science and Math HS), and before this year I was at Frederick Douglass (KIPP) High School for two years. Charter schools are still new and somewhat strange to me. Before moving to New Orleans in 2018, I taught in district schools in NYC—five years in Brooklyn and one year in the Bronx. I’ve always taught social studies. For a long time I taught Constitutional Law (which was basically a civics/debate class). I’ve also taught AP US History and the LEAP-tested US History students take in Louisiana. This year I’m teaching World History, which I’m doing as a “History of Capitalism” course—it’s kind of an economics history course through a social justice/ anti-racist lens, or at least that’s the goal.

Why did you choose teaching? 
Before I became a teacher in my early 30s, I worked in nonprofit public policy and journalism focusing on criminal justice issues, but working on a computer in a cubicle in a NYC office building came to feel very ivory tower to me. Teaching was alluring precisely because it wasn’t remote or emotionally detached. Teachers get the privilege of not having to constantly question the purpose of our professional existence. The pride and joy we see in our students is real. The feeling that our kids leave stronger and more powerful than they came to us is real. So much of what people outside of teaching do all day long doesn’t feel anywhere near as real as this.

What’s a funny or inspiring anecdote you have from teaching? 
The other day my students were super focused and doing great work on a writing assignment, then “All the Single Ladies” came on and a couple kids started dancing in the aisles. Some were singing, but quietly, like an in-person Zoom dance party. The song ended and everyone sat back down and returned to work without any need for me to do any redirection or get them back on track, and then they wrote these incredible paragraphs. In my head I was like: Yes, THIS is what school should feel like, and this is what we’ve been missing all year.

What advice do you have for new teachers?
Become a content expert and write your own curriculum. There’s a clear trend in secondary education that sees teaching as executing a specified set of teaching moves, rather than being a deep expert in your content. This is especially pronounced in the larger charter networks, where there’s so much teacher turnover and many early career teachers. Professional development at these places is about how to stand in front of a class, and almost never about content or course design. Administrators and coaches hand young teachers a curriculum like it’s a script, as if this profession is nothing more than reading other people’s lines. I don’t understand how that works. It’s bad for kids, it’s bad for young teachers’ professional development, and it’s bad for the profession. The more we know about our content, the more agile and creative our teaching becomes—and the more likely we are to stay in the profession.

How has the last year changed your teaching?
I hope I’m more humble, that I project greater recognition of the limitations of my experience and perspective. I’ve always considered myself a “social justice” teacher, but I used to think the way a white male teacher like myself should push towards a more just society was by promoting and fostering professional opportunities for non-white kids. So I used to always talk about how “you need to do this because this is what your professors will expect,” or “in the professional world, you’ll need to talk like this…” When kids resisted my teaching, I invariably responded with something about “the need to be more professional” or “in college, you need to…” 
This year of societal breakdown and long-repressed racial reckoning has changed the way I think about social justice teaching. I look at the old teacher I was and I think my practice was more than a little bit racist. I assumed that liberation meant access to institutions of white privilege—training kids to basically be more like me. In my teaching practice, I wasn’t able to question the legitimacy of those institutions or the history of violence and exploitation they were founded on. I certainly wasn’t ready to do the painful work of examining my own complicity in perpetuating systems of oppression and shutting down students’ abolitionist impulses. 
I think teachers need to be more radical now. So I’m trying to learn from the people who are far ahead of me in their anti-racist teaching practice. I’m trying to be more self-reflective. I’m trying to be much more careful in suggesting that providing access to institutions of white privilege for our students is the only reason for us being here; providing opportunities for our students matters, of course, but perhaps not as much as equipping them with the ability to question why those institutions exist in the first place.

Who inspires you?
I’m thinking of two people. The first was a mentor teacher I had in my first year. He was in his 20th year teaching, most of it at the same NYC district school. He had no desires or ambitions to go elsewhere; he just wanted to be a great teacher and continue to grow and learn to be better. This stuck with me because I think there’s a tendency in our profession to always look for more. So many good teachers leave the classroom and end up becoming administrators, and so many talented young teachers end up leaving the profession to go into other fields (a trend that has definitely been exacerbated by the charter movement). I just really like the idea of seeing teaching as the end in and of itself—not as an experience or a stepping stone. Another person I’m really inspired by is John Oliver. I think he’s a true leader in showing liberal-minded white guys like myself how to undo some of the damage our privilege has foisted upon the world. He’s humble and self-deprecating and weirdly charming. His show is all about exposing all the messed up stuff that white capitalist patriarchy has enabled. He’s my rabbi.

To read more of Matthew’s engaging interview, click here.