appreciate
weekly reflection, updates & good stuff 5.4.2021
Friends,
This year, Teacher Appreciation Week runs from May 2-8. This annual observance brings a much-welcomed series of surprises to teachers - as the academic year winds down (along with teachers’ reserves), messages of love, support, and gratitude sometimes turn into gifts and public recognition - but the observance always left me unsatisfied for a few reasons.
First, a week? Like African American History Month, National Coming Out Day, and countless other attempts to prioritize the experiences, contributions, and needs of historically marginalized groups, a week (or a month, or a day) is insufficient. If each school, each region, or the nation moved through the week and actually came to recognize both the deep and broad impact of teachers and the unrelenting pressures on them, a recognition that would necessarily spur essential and structural changes that currently fail to protect, support, and advocate for educators, I’d be the first one to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week. Until teachers are regarded in word, deed, and policy as experts, professionals, and human beings, every week should be Teacher Appreciation Week.
Second, in May? We wait until the final weeks of the academic year to “appreciate” teachers? As wonderful and as joyful as teaching has been for me, by the time May came around I was hanging on for dear life. Hanging on to - what, exactly? Not my sanity. That typically evaporated around March. If the school year is a marathon, formally appreciating teachers in May is like throwing a cup of water in runners’ faces in the last 500 feet of the course.
Third, how, exactly, are we recognizing teachers? Gift cards and catered luncheons (in which forms the outpourings of gratitude took at schools where I worked) are lovely, but what does that actually do in terms of “appreciating” teachers?
Oxford tells us that “appreciation” comes from the Latin for “to set at a price,” and it’s used to mean:
recognize and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something; gratitude; a piece of writing in which the qualities of a person of the person’s work are discussed and assessed; sensitive understanding of the aesthetic value of something
a full understanding of a situation
increase in monetary value
Does Teacher Appreciation Week meet the standards of its definition? Perhaps, to a point - certainly, students, families, and colleagues strive to demonstrate their gratitude, but, perhaps to the disappointment of advocates and unions alike, there’s no evidence that anyone has a full understanding of teaching, making the third meaning a laughably moot point. One year, I tallied the amount I received in gift cards from families of students - the sum total of gift cards for holiday celebrations, mid-year messages of appreciation for this or that thing, Teacher Appreciation Week events - and it amounted to a little under $600 (not much of a boost to my under-$50K salary at the time), about a year’s worth of weekly grande almond milk lattes with two shots of sugar-free vanilla. I wish I had the gumption at the time to refuse such gifts, to ask families to take the time and money they spent on such presents and use it instead to advocate for teachers, for establishing equitable and sustainable salaries, for support, training, and material resources that teachers so desperately need, but I was probably busy grading.
UPCOMING
Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST & Thursdays, 9am PST (starting April 8!) via Zoom
Good Stuff V | 4-week symposium on Wednesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on June 2. Sign up here!
UPDATES
In case you were waiting for my Symposium schedule to finalize your summer plans, here’s some info about upcoming series:
Good Stuff: talking about listening, seeing, feeling, and other ings. Each Good Stuff symposium explores a different variety of things to talk about - music, videos, art, excerpts from books and blogs, poems, ideas, questions...it’s all driven by what’s on my mind and what’s interesting to the group. Interested about exploring new stuff and generating lovely and lively conversations about it? I have four Good Stuff symposia pencilled in on Wednesdays this summer:
Good Stuff V (Wednesdays June 2, 9, 16 & 23)
Good Stuff VI (Wednesdays: July 14, 21, 28 & August 4)
Good Stuff VII (Wednesdays, August 11, 18, 25 & September 1
Good Stuff VIII (Wednesdays: August 8, 15, 22 & 29)
Rituals, ceremonies, traditions: starting points for understanding, engaging, and constructing ritual life (Thursdays: July 15, July 22, July 29, August 5)
The Rituals symposium will introduce “performance theory” and apply it to get a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of rituals and formal events in our lives. If you’re interested in learning about ritual from a different angle or want to adapt or update a tradition, let’s connect on Thursdays in July!
Madonna: a case study in religion & pop culture (Thursdays: August 12, 19, 26 & September 2)
“From ‘Holiday’ to ‘Medellin,’ when it comes to pop I’m still your queen.” So sang the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 12 in “Madonna: The Unauthorized Rusical.” We’ll look at four particular threads that run through her career - Madonna as social commentator, cultural parasite, reinventor, and catalyst of postmodernism - by diving deep into her music and videos and unpacking often-missed and -misunderstood symbolism and juxtaposition. Along the way, we’ll get a better understanding of how artists spur us to create, critique, and reconstruct culture.
Miss Jean Brodie is past her prime: teachers in film (Thursdays: September 9, 16, 23 & 30)
Sages, mentors, innovators, boundary breakers, meth addicts...what does the depiction of teachers in movies tell us about the real lives of teachers? Not much, but it does tell us a lot about how teachers are perceived in American culture. We’ll explore eight seminal films, reminisce about our own memorable teachers, and think about what it all tells us
Check out my website for more information and to sign up. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run - if you’ve thought about participating, now is the time to sign up!
Cat Dillon’s Routines & Rituals Symposium continues! Cat drops two, 30-ish minute videos each day, each capturing a conversation about developing routines and rituals toward healthy, sustainable, and balanced living. The experts she’s tapped for the series reflect a wide variety of experiences and approaches. Register here for the symposium!
Guided meditations via Zoom continue on Mondays at 4:00pm PST and on Thursdays at 9:00am PST! These morning (on the West Coast)/mid-day (on the East Coast)/evening (wherever else you might be) sessions will be just like the Monday session - our aim is to practice being present and finding a little peace and quiet. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays or Thursdays, visit the meditation page on my site to sign up!
GOOD STUFF
Learn
May is Asian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month (I know...only a month)! If you’re looking for resources to learn about the experiences or celebrate the contributions of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islander-Americans, check out this collaborate resource from the Library of Congress, National Archives, NEH, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, or explore the lectures, performances, and events featured by the Smithsonian.
Watch
Taylor Mali is an educator, author, and performer whose spoken-word poems generated a lot of attention in the early 2000s, and one particular poem resonated beautifully with the experience of teachers. “What teachers make” carries insights, inspiration, and vicarious satisfaction for all the things teachers should be celebrated and recognized (or, well, appreciated) for.
Delight
Keith Haring would be 63 this year (as a point of comparison, he was about three months older than Madonna). He’s still making waves - his art inspired one of Gottmik’s looks on the finale stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, his style, bridging graffiti, fine painting, humor, and love, is ubiquitous, and last year Matthew Burgess and Josh Cochran published Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring. Don’t have any children to buy a book for? It’s a tender and loving portrait of Haring that’s as good a read for children as it is for adults.
Listen
What’s the perfect song for Teacher Appreciation Week? Well, I don’t think it’s been written (suggestions are welcome!), but the title and refrain of Erasure’s “A Little Respect” provide a good starting point. Add to that the upbeat, late-80s dance beat, and in my experience, it’s the perfect song to walk, run, clean out a classroom, or charge the dance floor.
If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist
Read
For this week’s meditation, I used a poem by Chicago poet cin salach.
“Change Loud, Breathe Between”
cin salach
The bareness of the branches,
The holy of the bones,
The brilliance of the standing,
The bareness of alone.
The holy of the mandate
The brilliance of our home.
The holy of the branches
The brilliance of the bones
The bareness of the standing
The holy of alone.
The brilliance of the mandate
The bareness of our home.
The brilliance of the branches
The bareness of the bones,
The holy of the standing
The brilliance of alone.
The bareness of the mandate
The holy of our home.
My gratitude for loudness,
in the silence where I roam.
