Member-only story
Rigour is a Trap
Thoughts from a recent conversation.
Note: In this week’s post, I continue my recent trend of discussing relatively recent events from my work life. Which means that I once again run a real risk of coming across like I’m saying that there’s something wrong with what people I work with did. As always, if that happens, it’s a rhetorical failure on my part. The colleague with whom I had the conversation I discuss below is wonderful, and a true advocate for the things that I, personally, feel are some of the most important things our school can do. Similarly, the work I discuss in our chemistry curriculum is not my work, alone. Nor is it anything that has not been built on a giant pile of similarly pointed work done by my incredible colleagues (one of whom is leaving this year, much to my sorrow!).
I had an interesting conversation with a colleague the other week. The colleague in question is one who is pretty similarly oriented to me around the work that we do as teachers. We’re both middle-aged white people, and I think we were both pretty good at school back when we were young white people. But I think we both use our roles to work to subvert the dominant systems of school in ways that benefit more students than a place like ours has historically served. Perhaps that’s why I keep thinking about this conversation.
