Neurodivergent or just in 7th Grade?

The article "What is Neurodiversity?" by Caroline Miller gives a level of flexibility to the concept of atypical neurological behavior.  Miller notes that the term originated from working to reduce stigma around lifelong neurological conditions such as autism or dyslexia, and now is broadly applicable to a range of conditions or even a self-diagnosis of neurodivergence. The article argues that the most important thing in all cases is to work from a perspective of strengths, what they are good at, and things they need to improve. This creates a growth mindset that is open, welcoming, and acknowledges that no two brains work exactly alike. 

As Miller says, neurodiversity can be something particularly appealing to a middle school perspective. Giving a young person an easy explanation for challenges can help them understand their difference, and can even create a sense of community with others who might identify as neurodiverse. I have met many students who are self-diagnosing as neurodiverse, and I think Miller's analysis of the clarity that they can derive is accurate. However, I have also found that while these types of diagnoses provide students with a potential answer, the transition to real action or addressing these challenges is a less frequent occurance. 

The challenge for me really begins when working with students through their neurodiversity challenges. To begin with, both years I've taught students who have severe ADHD and lack consistent access to medication. They are left with the challenge of school without something that has worked for them in the past, and I think this really adds a layer of frustration and anger to the students' reality. I cannot imagine how frustrating it is to have a much easier time at school because you've finally recieved medicine, and then having that taken away. 

Additionally, thinking about strengths and growth areas makes perfect sense, and Miller focuses on parents at several points in the article. But in the school where I work, I think most of the pressure to identify those growth areas and work with the student on improving falls on to a teacher. While I am not trying to deny our responsibility, I also feel underqualified to do this type of work. I can try to lead from a place of support and empathy, but identifying how a 12 year old can work concretely to address focus or learning isseus feels like a very heavy challenge.

Get ICE, AI, and other Acronyms out of Schools

An essential part of being a teacher is caring about our students' lives and the communities we serve. 

This quote from the opening editorial of Volume 40, No. 2 of Rethinking Schools stood out to me as the overarching thesis that connected the stories of this issue. Whether used to describe the leadership of teachers and our unions in pushing back against ICE, a tension point in negotiating how to best support trans youth, or examining AI in schools, this essential component of care centers the manner in which teachers engage on these issues. For me, it is simultaneously why teaching is the hardest job I have ever had and why I cannot imagine doing anything else. 

In "Kicking ICE Out of Our Schools and Communities," the editors of Rethinking Schools examine the rising pressure on school communities to protect our vulnerable community members. While the article correctly notes that ICE is not new, and the damage incurred by both the Obama and Biden administrations, I think it is also essential to remember that at the beginning of the Trump Administration, many officers left ICE. This paramilitary force that exists now is filled with recruits who specifically joined the administration to participate in these brutal, inhumane raids and crackdowns on our most vulnerable community members. It's against this force that teachers have emerged as strong and consistent opposition. 

Two components of this editorial stood out to me. The first was the note on the power of educating students and the broader community on their rights. After seeing so many incidents of violence and abuse, it is easy to feel like our legal rights are insignificant. However, as the editorial notes, educating people and children about their rights during searches or when questioned has proven to be a powerful weapon. "Ensuring community members know their rights increases their willingness to defend each other against abuses." 

The importance of unions in this fight was also significant to me. The examples of the Chicago Teachers Union or the United Teachers of Los Angeles leading this charge show the vital importance of organized labor. Joining a union is a real factor in why I became a teacher, and this editorial shows how much more powerful teachers can be when we have the backbone of a union. I think it's also been a real factor in the modern fight against teacher unions. Whether disguised as "pro Charter School" or under the excuse of looking for waste, teacher unions have been the target of many attacks in the past years. It's hard to separate these attacks from a desire to limit the political power and influence of these groups. 

Supporting Students in Schools Outside of ICE

Two articles stood out to me in this issue in addition to the ICE articles. In "Trans Teacher, Detrans Student: A Roadmap for Transformation," Jaymie Metivier discussed the real difficulty in navigating how to support their gender nonconforming students. As the first adult that many of these students have met that mirror their own gender identity, Metivier discusses the real challenge of wanting to serve as a positive and supportive adult while also hyper-aware that they could be accused of grooming or encouraging young people to go against their parents and families. Reading about that difficult balance, I again thought of the quote at the head of this blog. I relate to the feeling of wanting to be an advocate and support system while also aware of our limitations as a temporary adult in these young people's lives. 

In "Educators over AI" I also saw this quote emerge. I think as teachers we see the negative impact of AI in a direct and constant way. The section discussing an AI generated unit on World War II in particular stood out to me. As a Social Studies teacher, I am deeply concerned with how AI treats history as black and white. Students type in complex questions and they receive a clear definitive answer. Rather than understanding that history differs depending on perspective, or that sometimes clear answers cannot be found, students walk away from their computers thinking that there are right and wrong answers. I am incredibly skeptical of these tools in an educational setting. 

I really enjoyed this magazine, and got a lot out of many of the articles. I particularly liked, and will end my reflections, on Linda Christensen's piece on using writing to embrace humanity. I worry teaching history about the lessons that students can learn. If you teach world history as I do, the reality of the world becomes a pretty brutal realization for students. My curriculum goes through colonization, the genocide of Indigenous Americans, revolutions, globalization and industrialization, the partitioning of Africa, and the World Wars. What lessons are students going to take away from this class? That humans are violent? That might equals right in most historical circumstances? 

Christensen discusses how to build student awareness of the power of positive action. She notes on the power of having students reflect on circumstances where people stood up and helped, and how to work with students through reflecting on regret. I think this type of intentional work, building and encouraging students' humanity, is essential to add to my curriculum. 

Sidelining Joseph McCarthy

Reading over some of your [my classmates'] blogs this semester, I have occasionally grown concerned by my often myopic focus on the larger policy conversation around education. But as Popeye would say, I yam what I yam, and so I could not help but be drawn in by the Summer 2021 issue, Defy Bans on Racial Justice Teaching. 

My oldest sister worked in one of the largest educational research firms in the country for nearly a decade. At the beginning of 2025, she had several projects focused on integration in urban schools, equitable access to afterschool programs, and just generalized work examining how the American education system repeatedly fails most students who are not wealthy and white. Within two months, her entire portfolio of projects was decimated. The Department of Education pulled over $90 million from the organization, and nearly all their projects were shuttered.  

This issue was released four years before the second Trump administration came into power. However, many of the articles feel like they could be issued today. The opening editorial shares a rallying cry for post-Civil War southern education programs, "The Alphabet is Abolitionist." Knowledge is power. Education is powerful. This is why our educational programs have been under relentless attack from waves of legislation that have been passed in over half the states in the USA. From eliminating funding to trying to police the words we say in our classrooms, there are political forces in this country who are desperately trying to return our schools to that Prussian dream of obedience and efficiency. 

I think it's incredibly important to pay close attention to this legislation, depressing as it is, because it shows the fear of the regressive and racist forces in our country. Centered in so much horrible language is this, "The United States and _[Insert State Name Here]__ are not fundamentally, institutionally, or systemically racist or sexist." I would argue that this statement is really at the core of our current political debate. 

How Does This Work? The McCarthyism Example

In "More than McCarthyism," Ursula Rolfe-Rocca used the example of how an era of activism from 1945 to 1960 is remembered in textbooks. The "Second Red Scare" centers one person in the narrative of how we teach this period, he even gets in the title of my section here. Rolfe-Rocca unpacks how centering Joseph McCarthy in this historical narrative erases the victims, consequences, and real motivations behind the vicious crackdowns of this era.  

Rolfe-Rocca notes that even the term first and second Red Scares diminishes the reality. Essentially, from the conclusion of World War I through to the Civil Rights Movement, the American government used various committees and intelligence agencies to illegally arrest, harass, and spark violence against nearly any organization that was working for some form of equitable societal improvement. Rolfe-Rocca looked over five textbooks to see how this event was covered. 

As I noted before, Rolfe-Rocca notes that centering McCarthy in this history is hugely problematic. McCarthy, a genuinely evil person, is afforded line after line of details, anecdotes, and analysis of his motivation. The victims of these attacks and arrests are rarely recognized, named, or segregated to inserts or additional readings. It also creates a very convenient narrative that McCarthyism ends in triumph, as Congress condemns him in 1954 for conduct unbecoming to the Senate. 

A larger evil that Rolfe-Rocca describes is that the books' focus on McCarthy obfuscates the actual political fight that was occurring. The books give a cursory description of communism and note that McCarthy's investigations went far beyond economic beliefs, but then move on. They do not share with students how the people targeted were those trying to address the systemic inequity at the heart of American society. They do not connect the ideas of communism with the idea of protest. 

Ursula Rolfe-Rocca ends by describing how she has altered the unit. Instead of teaching about McCarthy, she teaches about 27 different people who were attacked. They are men and women, immigrants and native-born, young and old, racially diverse, in and out of government, rich and middle class and poor, Queer and straight. She then uses their stories and experiences to teach this history. 

Connecting the Two Threads: 

Something terrifying continues to happen in the Trump Era of America. Similar to McCarthy, we allow one person to occupy all the space in our stories. After Elon Musk left his short-term position as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the press really stopped covering the impact of these cuts. We stopped talking about the funding that was taken away, the programs that were shuttered, the impact of erasing these funds so rapidly and callously. Instead, we have some conveniently attention-grabbing figures to focus our attention on. 

As lawsuits proceed against the Department of Government Efficiency (the famous Must-led DOGE), a video clip of a deposition came to light that rapidly became viral. The video shows a former DOGE staffer who personally shuttered millions of dollars in programs. He discusses using AI bots to comb through grants, struggles to define any terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and explains that a documentary about female Holocaust survivors is discriminatory because it's only about women. People enjoyed this video because it shows discomfort and no small amount of stupidity. But also think about the impact that giving THIS person so much power to erase work he clearly has no comprehension of.  

What is happening in America today deserves more attention. We again are at a point in history where people trying to address the systemic inequity at the root of society are being attacked, marginalized, and silenced. Let's hope that in 50 years when this period of history is covered, we don't just have to read about Donald Trump. 

Teach Out Proposal: Revisiting a Flawed Report

 Step 1: Choose a Text

While I intend to use a fair number of the concepts and topics that we've covered in class, I intend to use The Silenced Dialogue by Lisa Delpitt and One Room Schoolhouse - Chapter 2 by Sal Khan as my main two texts. I think both of these texts challenge conventional ideas of education by examining how our educational system is largely designed not as an effective education tool, but rather a system with more complex and less-lofty goals. 

Step 2: Choose an Audience

In 2023 and 2024, I was the Mayoral Designee on a Legislative Commission created to provide recommendations on labor-management standards for the Providence Public School District. The robustly named "Special Legislative Commission to Review and Provide Recommendations for Professional and Labor-Managment Standards that Provide School-based Flexibility and Accountability for Employees of Providence Public Schools" never actually issued our final report, as the two members of the commission representing the two teacher unions quit in protest when the final draft of the report was written. That report can be found here. 

For my teach-out, I intend to hold several meetings. I intend to meet separately with: (1) former Commission Chair Senator Samuel Zurier; (2) My former boss and replacement at the Providence Mayor's Office, and (3) hopefully the members of the Unions, though I think that is my most uncertain meeting. 

Step 3: Choose a Format

I think for a structure I will use 1:1 or 1:2/3 meetings that I record. What I would like to do is talk through the top-level recommendations of the report, and how I now see this report through a new lens as a teacher. I want to use the Khan and Delpitt texts to really unpack with Senator Zurier and Chief of Policy Sheila Dormody some of the inherent and flawed assumptions we make about what needs to stay the same in education, and make an appeal for boldness when we think about education policy. I also want to bring some of my personal experiences into the framework for talking specifically about student behaviors and management within a structure that (as Kahn describes) is not designed with their well-being in mind. I would like to emerge from these meetings with recorded audio, and some interesting notes or questions raised by these two phenomenally intelligent policy minds. 

Creating Helpful Guidelines or Passing the Buck?

Introduction 

On May 1, 2019, then-Mayor Jorge Elorza signed a "Plastic Bag Ban" into effect in the city of Providence. This ordinance unequivocally banned businesses from using single-use plastic bags to contain the items purchased by their customers. And yet, five years later, I had to stop the deli just two blocks away from Providence City Hall from putting my Friday-Treat sandwich, iced tea, chips, second bag of chips, and cookie (I'm a weak man) into a plastic bag. Huh? What? Why? I remember walking down the street with food flowing out of every pocket, a living example of the distance between "policy", "execution of policy," and "desired behavior change." 

The issue with the plastic bag ban was an issue of enforcement. In Providence, businesses were supposed to face a series of escalating fines for noncompliance, but the ban did not specify the agency responsible for inspecting and fining businesses. The ban did not have a budget to finance those increased responsibilities or a funding apparatus to ensure they did not lapse. After an initial flurry of communication, the ban was delegated to a newly created Sustainability Office alongside other small responsibilities like addressing the disproportionate impact of climate change on low-income frontline communities. And so, a policy of a complete ban was relegated to newsletters and social media posts, and failed to achieve any desired behavior change.  

How Do We Create Safe Schools? 

I could not stop thinking about this dilemma as I read through RIDE's "Guidance for Rhode Island Schools on Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students," PPSD's  "Guidelines and Implementation Strategies for Nondiscrimination - Transgender and Gender Expansive Students," and my own Woonsocket Education Department's "Transgender Student Non-Discrimination Policy." In line with the chapter "Queering Our Schools," I saw a central argument that schools should be places where every child, parent, and staff member feel comfortable openly occupying all parts of their identity. However, the central question in my mind is how these policies actually create the conditions necessary for that to occur. 

The authors of "Rethiniking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality" published their work in January 2016, a year before the first inauguration of Donald Trump. They spend a large amount of time and space focused on individual actions that people can take. It cites the work of advocates like Sasha or Jeydon Lordo in advocating from the ground up, credits the role of administrators and unions in supporting staff, and cites the responsibility of social studies teachers like myself to provide historical context. I credit all of these examples as important, and yet feel obligated to copy and paste the text that appears above a blog from the Indian Health Service's fantastic description of Two-Spirit, a topic I always cover when we discuss pre-Columbian America: 

Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59 PM, February 14 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate, and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.

I would guess that there was a glaring lack of support for gender nonconfirming students in 2016, and unfortunately I think it's only been upgraded by active opposition. But I'm a good civics teacher, and so I know that education, and particularly safe guarding students who have unique educational needs, falls to the state. And so I turn to the RI Department of Education (RIDE). 

RIDE's Guidelines do some incredibly helpful things. The systematic review of federal and state laws provide the backbone to this document and lend weight and validity, while the definitions provides each district with a rapid and necessary education. Providence and Woonsocket mirror the format, definitions, and policies provided in these guidelines, though I do particularly appreciate small differences like Woonsocket's note that teachers may use their discretion when sharing information with parents. I think Delpit would agree with me when I say there can be a gulf between the comfort a liberally-minded Social Studies teacher feels on these issues versus a Woonsocket parent. But is a set of well written policies really going to accomplish RIDE's goal of ensuring a safe and supportive environment for all students? And is delegating ALL of these responsibilities to the schools going to create actual behavior change? Or is this just an empty policy without any form of execution? 

In Providence, they claim they will have Transgender and Gender Expansive Student Point Teams at every school. As I was writing this blog post, I recieved an email from my building principal. It says: 

The MLL Department in Woonsocket is looking for any educator to join the MLL Regulations Implementations Team. You do not need to teach MLLs. All voices are welcome. [. . . ] Due to the scope and complexity of new regulations, this is the team that is responsible for a phased and thoughtful rollout. [. . . ]

This is not a good sign. I think more often than not, this is the end-result of handing off complex and difficult responsibilties to already overstretched districts. 

What if . . . 

So I will go back and start with an asset mindset instead of a deficit one. We have a good  goal of creating a safe and supportive environment for all students. And we have a reasonably good set of guidelines and policies. And I think that in every school we have students and faculty who could come together and support this work. We are bursting with all the conditions necessary to actually make this goal happen. 

What we lack is that bridge of "execution" that connects policy to behavior change. What if instead of just guidelines, we had funding incentives? What if instead of instructions we had an Office of Civil Rights at RIDE to make sure this work happened? Policies are fine, but people are the ones who actually make the work happen. 

Tell Me How the Sausage is Made

My first year teaching (aka last year), I received the advice to only create a few, simple, easy-to-understand classroom rules. The four rules I created included cell phone use (none), touching each other (please don't), and being respectful (what does that even mean?). Students also created class norms over the course of several classes for each group, but the rules were mine. Midway through the year, trying to get a student to stop wandering around my classroom and/or yelling to her friends across the class, she said something along the lines of, "Mr. KV, you have so many confusing rules and you don't write them down!" 

In the chapter "The Silenced Dialogue," Lisa Delpit notes that oftentimes white liberal educators create a white supremacist culture of unspoken expectations and rules that mirror the SCWAAMP power structure we've discussed in class. Delpit argues that students should be explicitly taught that structure and codes of power in the classroom, and to do so teachers need to be in consultation with adults who share their students'  culture. Delpit follows a theme of this "culture of power" that exists within classrooms, reflects our current society, and is often blindly perpetuated by overly defensive do-gooders. 

Early in the text,  Delpit provides several examples to demonstrate how unhelpful ignoring unspoken rules or expectations is for someone who does not comprehend how they are failing to meet that standard. Her example of the interview hints or asking questions that are intended as directions illustrate how accepted language can derail someone. Classroom rules often perpetuate this issue, for example in the image to the left. What is "showing respect" in Rule 3? What are safe choices, or active participation and cooperation? Will a student be rewarded if they excitedly yell out their opinion during storytime? Or will they be confused on why their active participation was not wanted? These are the indirect ways of telling students that there is a code of conduct that they are expected to follow. This code will be simple and easy for some students to follow, and meanwhile others will be continually confused why they are failing to meet opaque expectations. 

To borrow an idiom, Delpit's chapter seemed to me like a detailed argument on teaching how the sausage is made. She notes several students' frustration with indirect methods of instruction, as they vent that the teacher did not do anything to actually teach them. She references a prevailing worry that there are secrets being kept and deliberately not shared with students who are outside of the existing power structures, when in fact it's more likely that teachers are designing lessons based on reinforcing or reviewing information that they assume students already possess. In the middle of the text, Delpit notes that the strongest teaching methods that she sees are explicit direct instruction, followed by student-centered conferencing. 

And yet, there still lies the question of how. I struggle with this question, because of the balance that must exist. I agree with the point that ignoring these power dynamics perpetuates the status quo, as it mirrors work that I've done earlier regarding aspects of white supremacist work culture. However, with a classroom there is a delicate balance that I'm not completely confident in navigating. It seems like a thin line between trying to incorporate instruction and committing the type of cultural genocide that Delpit references early in the text. However, luckily for me, she provides an answer. 

The last key point that Delpit notes in the idea of consultation. She notes how liberal academic spaces silence people who can speak from direct experience, and how ostracized the community can be from schools. It's only by working within and with that community that teachers will be able to navigate these questions. Because not all lessons are as easy as realizing you need to give direct instructions on 7th graders. Luckily for my students, that one was a quick one for me. 

Tell Me What You Can Do, Not What You Can't

 Bill Belichick had a philosophy when it came to drafting or recruiting players. He would look at several key metrics that he thought were essentially important, and then would ask his scouts to tell him only good things about that player. He would then make decisions based on how different players' skills would make them valuable contributors to the team, rather than trying to measure or rank different players against each other. And while he was absolutely atrocious at selecting wide receivers, Belichick routinely found undervalued contributing players by focusing on their talents rather than their flaws. 

In this week's reading, Shannon Renkly and Katherine Bertolini argue that by reorienting to an asset-focused model, schools could better serve all of their purposes by proactively focusing on student growth, community building, and staff development. Renkly and Bertolini note that an asset-based model necessitates a community-based approach, meaning that it must occur for all members of a school community. This approach also necessitates involving a larger community of parents, guardians, siblings, and the neighborhood to support student learning. 

I teach 7th-grade Social Studies at Villa Nova Middle School in Woonsocket, and the article's argument that middle school years are essential years for this approach resonates strongly with me. American schools create a very harsh transition for students from elementary school to middle school, and one of the most difficult things I see is how negatively many of my students view school. They view it as a trap, a forced requirement, a place where they do not see any positive associations. My warm-up question when we return will be "What's one fun thing you did with all of this snow?" and I already know that many students will just write "Not going to school" and when pressed for more will write "sleeping." Despite their hatred of school, they are not finding creative employment outside of it. School is still largely the place where young people find (or don't find) the social, creative and intellectual interests that will propel their lives. 

In noting the impact of this paradigm shift, Renkly and Bertolini bemoan the overly reactive nature of schools and how a deficit-focused mentality focuses on "fixing" a problem. In my experience, even when schools offer positive support, they come with a perogative to "fix" aspects of the student so that we can start offering that help to the next failure. I have an emerging bilingual student from Brazil who writes entire paragraphs and pages in English to my warm-up prompts and Exit Tickets. She despises her reading support class where she must progress through an online curriculum, answering multiple-choice, matching, and one-word answer questions until her ACCESS scores improve. Imagine her reaction if instead she was told that her brilliant effort and creativity had earned her a spot in a writing workshop. Imagine how much she would improve if she actually had the chance to work 1:1 with a teacher on her writing, instead of getting feedback from her Social Studies teacher on one piece a week. It wouldn't require any staffing changes, it would just require us to stop thinking that learning and creative interest are unrelated. 

In the middle of the piece, Renkly and Bertolini note that asset-based models are also better at building community. By focusing on the strengths and growth of students we can better engage caregivers, connect students to opportunities, and bring in the external community to the school day. It provides a vision of what better schooling can be. It makes me think of the scene from the "Precious Knowledge" documentary where students watched lowriders bounce on hydraulic suspensions. Every student could have seen that moment differently. Some could have thought about wanting to be mechanics, some could have thought of future rap careers, some could have been excited to talk to their neighbors about their cars; the positive ripples are endless. That is the potential for an asset-based model in education.