My Job

I'm one unique cat. My job is to support the teachers at my school by expanding their capacities to embrace and teach all of their students with equity. That's not the same thing as equality.

Equitable practices recognize the historic, social, economic, racial, gender, lingual, cultural, and yes, even sexual orientational inequities that have been the established paradigm of pedagogical reality AND says ENOUGH! No more. Not here. Not gonna be our paradigm.

That's a lofty mandate. The roots of our social consciousness are deep and for all stripes of even progressively leaning people, the baggage of prejudice, the comfort of their status quo, and the butt load of menutia that weighs down their inclinations to change are nothing short of amazing.

So where to begin? For me, I'm beginning yet again with a game. Why not?

Our Leadership Team will be blessed to play a game of "Clue" in guessing who has made the following choices: 1) Their favorite Food, 2) Their favorite location to have a meal, and 3) The person living (whom they've not met) with whom they wish to share that meal with. Those are the rules, everything else is left to there imaginations.

To stimulate their thinking, I created game cards with the following images on them: 1) FOODS: Spaghetti & Meatballs, Pad Thai, Gallo Pinto, Injera, Biryani, and Shrimp Po-Boy; 2) LOCATIONS: a Villa in Tuscany, a Caribbean Beach, the Russian Tea Room in NYC, a Japanese Garden, a Parisian Cafe, and Sydney Harbor in Australia; and 3) LIVING PEOPLE: Rita Moreno, Desmond Tutu, Condoleezza Rice, Lea Michelle, George Takei, and Landon Donovan. My goal was to be as inclusive as possible and step outside of their comfort zones even as I could embrace those same zones.

Participant task: To write on the back of the three cards they've been given 1) Their Ideal meal, 2) the ideal location for the meal, and 3) the living person with whom they'd love to share it with (a person they've never met).

The team's job will be to guess the member as I read out their choices over the course of our meetings.

It's really a minor part of my job during these meetings as I also collect and present student data and help to develop our plan for improving our program in the next year. But it's also a critical aspect of helping others to think outside of their own boxes.