bail project – Fluid Imagination

The 2019-2020 school year marked my tenth year of teaching. I taught at the college level for the first two years. The next two years were at both the college and high-school levels. The next four years were at the middle-school, high-school, and college levels, and the last two years were at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels.

All of which is to say that I approach middle schoolers in completely the wrong way — I expect them to be college students before I expect them to be themselves.

My understanding of middle schoolers doesn’t get much beyond the idea that all the middle-school brain cares about is the social dimension. Regardless of whether you ask them to parse a sentence or divide a fraction, all their brain will focus on is what they believe everyone else around them thinks about them.

The progressive response to this reality suggests taking middle-school kids out into the world and letting them explore: bring them to museums, theaters, natural wonders, local haunts, places of work, places of worship, places of celebration, places of mourning, carnivals, recycling factories, beaches, forges, bridges, trollies, ferries, abandoned warehouses, hospitals, sawmills, canning factories, coffee shops, activist headquarters, state houses, volunteer fire departments, parks, science labs, concerts, car garages, wood shops, architects’ offices, etc,

The key to the middle-school brain is exposure. If they focus on how they relate to their various peer groups (what this person thinks about that person, what those people think about them, etc.), let them focus on those things while being surrounded by a wide variety of opportunities. If their brain coincidentally blinks into focusing on something other than the social dimension for a moment, we want to make sure they have something interesting to focus on.

If that’s what their brain is going to do regardless of what adults might want it to do, the question becomes: how do adults help them do it in a healthy way?

First we have to recognize what it means for a middle-school brain to act healthy. In a lot of the education-focused literature I’ve read, the problem comes from the difference between the adult’s expectation of what a middle-school brain ought to be doing and what a middle school brain naturally does. Advice usually revolves around a foci of engagement and excitement, anything that will distract the students from being distracted by their peers.

Instead, I say let them be distracted. Social skills are way more important than math and reading, so adults ought to focus attention there. While we shouldn’t stymie any middle-school child from diving into a book or working on a numerical problem, we don’t want to push too hard in those areas either. We need to work to build an honest and trusting relationship so that the middle schooler is willing to take our healthy advice on how to approach their social challenges. If a teacher struggles to get a student to comply with a homework assignment, how much more will they struggle to get the student to share their hopes and fears?

So, after six years of working with middle school students, I guess that’s my advice: offer them opportunities to explore the wider world and earn their trust so they will believe you when you tell them the only thing they can do to solve their problem is have a difficult talk with the person they most don’t want to talk to.

Oh, and PS: get rid of their fucking cell-phone. You’re handing them a crack pipe, and while it can make a parent’s life so much easier in the short term, it’s doing untold damage to their brains that you (and they) will pay for later.

[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]

Today marked the first day of my two-week summer break. So what did I do?

I fucking terrified myself.

I watched the long-form videos and read the long-form articles and scrolled through the lengthy and well-sourced tweet threads. I read Gorsuch’s bullshit undergraduate-essay of a Supreme Court decision (“Webster’s dictionary defines ‘frozen trucker‘ as…”), which thankfully came out on the only logical side of history in spite of the 11th fucking Circuit’s retreat to a previously invalidated precedent. And I discussed with my wife our various opinions and perspectives on various local and global events.

In short, I tried to catch up.

One of the articles I read today (thanks to a link shared by a white colleague) made the observation “When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs.” Tomorrow, my white wife and her white colleagues will gather for a meeting of their summer book club, the first assignment of which they’ve dedicated to issues of race.

Written by Tre Johnson, the article (which is fantastic) offers a clear critique and alternative:

[W]hen things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.
What they do is never enough. This isn’t the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it’s the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they’ve personally caused.

He continues:

The right acknowledgment of black justice, humanity, freedom and happiness won’t be found in your book clubs, protest signs, chalk talks or organizational statements. It will be found in your earnest willingness to dismantle systems that stand in our way — be they at your job, in your social network, your neighborhood associations, your family or your home.

So here I sat, in rural Vermont, a super white village in a super white state in a super white region of a super white-supremacist country, and I was being tasked with dismantling systems that stand in the way of black justice, humanity, freedom, and happiness.

I wracked my brain about what to do.

A white friend of mine recently attempted to be the fastest known woman to complete an unsupported run across Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness. She asked people to pledge $1 per mile to one of three organizations that “support BIPOC folks in the outdoors and sports [including ultimate frisbee]”. She “hiked/ran/stumbled-through around 57 miles, unsupported, with 10,000 ft. of elevation gain in 25 hours” before a knee/IT band injury forced her from the trail.

That’s something I could do — not run (I can’t do that) — but a pledge drive! I can do a pledge drive.

My friend is a runner. I fancy myself a writer.

Maybe I can get people to pledge money to a worthy, relevant cause by writing something.

First, I needed the cause, a place where 100% of the money would go directly to the front lines of black justice, where and when it is needed the most.

I chose The Bail Project.

The Bail Project works like a Kiva micro-loan, where the money doesn’t come back to you, but “back” to another person in need:

We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. Because bail is returned at the end of a case, donations to The Bail Project™ National Revolving Bail Fund can be recycled and reused to pay bail two to three times per year, maximizing the impact of every dollar.

The question then became, what to do as a writer to drive pledges?

Well, who better to ask than you? For a donation of $5 to the Bail Project, you get to tell me what to write about. It can be on any topic you choose, but not any thesis; you don’t get to make me write an essay denying the Holocaust, for example, but you can make me write an essay about the topic of Holocaust denial.

I know this isn’t much (as one of my friend’s sarcastically said when I suggested the idea, “The opportunity of a lifetime!”), and I know this plays directly into Tre Johnson’s critique of his white, liberal, educated friends who “read [and] talk about their reading,” but writing is the labor my body does best, and this is the only way I can think of to put its product to use on the front lines.

So please, pledge at least $5 to the front lines, and then get a kick by having me write about whatever you think is fun, important, educational, stupid, arcane, fantastic, deep, idiotic, meaningful, controversial, ridiculous, etc. And remember, part of the fun is not just reading the result — it’s also getting me to spend significant time researching and formulating thoughts on whatever it is you want.

For example, the first person who donated to this campaign asked for “a critical appraisal of the vaporwave genre of music.” The assignment came with a 22-minute YouTube documentary to get me started on my research. For comparison’s sake, I watched a two-hour documentary on Miles Davis last night. And now I have to watch one on “the vaporwave genre.” I am not looking forward to this.

But thankfully I’m free enough to do it. With your donations to the Bail Project, other people can be free as well. So please don’t $5 to the Bail Project and then influence the writing that shows up in this space.

(After making your donation, just leave a comment on this post with your topic idea).

PS: This project that will as long as The Bail Project is needed, so if you’re stumbling on this post through some random Google search three years in the future, and the Bail Project is still running, then yes, you can still make a donation and still force me to write on whatever topic you choose.