I tried to write a blog post but I failed so instead I'm gonna write a few tweets.

I started teaching 10 years ago. I taught mostly students from inner city San Jose who were bused to the wealthy k-8 school I taught at in Santa Clara.

I only taught there one year and I did my best. It was enough and absolutely not enough. There were almost no white students in my classes, I used words that embarrass me now because well, it was what I knew.

I learned a ton on twitter. Not about race, racism, whiteness

or community but about math and teaching.

And then I got RIF'd and moved to upstate NY to teach at all girls boarding school and asked several times until I got sent to the Stanley King Counseling Institute. I don't know if you know this but there are lots of teachers of Color

like lots of them. I didn't know cause I was (hopefully was) a sheltered white teacher.

SKCI was eye opening for me, it was not a perfect experience but it kicked my ass into gear.

Then I did a lot of pushing here on twitter but couldn't find much traction.

I was really trying to do some sort of work while also figuring out what it was, while also fucking it up all the time (story of my life).

I think I was falling too much in to the "trying to help" category. Hello and welcome to my (then unexplored) white savior phase.

I moved back to CA in 2016. I wasn't on twitter much. I had a new job, I was learning what schools could look like, and I was busy.

Then I met @DingleTeach the queen of the DM. Who said something along the lines of, Hey it looks like you were trying to do some work here

want to try again?

Then #ClearTheAir and @ValeriaBrownEdu came in the picture and a rad group of white people who, like me, wanted to be better and were willing to publicly screw up.

Then I started my doctorate.

Which brings us to pretty recently and basically the purpose of this thread (100 tweets later).

I realized in the past two years that all my learning around race and racism had been really external.

Learn about others.
Do better for others.
Help others.

When really, what I need to do is

Learn about me and people like me.
Push myself and people like me to do better.
Help myself and people like me.

These are not perfect goals or perfectly articulated goals but they are closer to where I want to be.

One of the pieces of advice I often hear in anti-racist work is to pick a focus or thing you want to affect change in.

In 2001 @csleeter wrote about the "overwhelming presence of whiteness" in teacher education.

It's 2020 and the presence of whiteness is no less overwhelming.

My work is more specific than this and when it's done I will share tons but this million tweets was to say:

I am committed to sharing what I learn as I learn.

I am committed to helping those of us (white teachers) who have been in the classroom for a long time fight white supremacy in our classrooms, schools, and districts.

I am committed to taking feedback and not quitting.

Mostly though, I am committed to self evaluation and reflection.

Because our schools have white supremacy problem not a students of Color problem.

So that probably should have been a blog post. Thanks for making it to the end.

Also, I'm gonna start sharing what I read and more excerpts. If I say it here it will happen.