Notes From a Movement, Not Stapled Together Yet Because It's Sunday and I Still Have to Put in Grades

This weekend, through the support of my school district, I was lucky to attend the TFA 25th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C. 

Writing now feels like picking avocados in a rush at the supermarket, hoping they'll be ripe, hoping the whole pile won't fall to the floor when you pick one from the bottom. This weekend was so big picture - so much talk of news and history and a path forward - when my day to day is so small. I've been using words to illustrate the things on my desk and my kids' faces when they get in their mom's car at the end of the day. Using them to tease out a generational issue feels harder, further out of my reach, but necessary.

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Between the sessions and swag bags, around the cocoon of the privilege of discussing privilege in a huge DC conference center, hung a legacy of struggle and good will, hard work and resilience. That first corps members asked - how can I afford to fail? And the question today is the same, for Teach for America and for all educators. 

Education is a civil rights issue; teaching should be a fight. Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston gave a speech tying Selma to our march now to educational equity. The change we seek hasn't fully happened. Churches are still bombed, police still shoot, some schools in Memphis prepare only 4% of their students. But we've got to keep working. Quasi religious rhetoric: shining lights and climbing mountains. Words building to a crescendo just like the spoken word poet who reminded us to live like we have a microphone under our tongue - our words matter and our silence is dangerous.

I will be thinking about my words all week. I will be smiling at my kids more. I will be thinking about how I, doing my best job, can advocate for them. I remembered the love that needs to go into the classroom every day. Without that, you don't have anything; without that, teaching is just talking and making copies. 

I've been listening to Martin Luther King's speeches for the past few weeks now, ever since Spotify made a playlist that intersperses them with Common and John Legend and Jay-Z. We read about him and Rosa Parks and the kids wrote about him as their hero without my prompting. As I understand more and more the lack of services my part of the country receives - as I feel both outsider and insider for the privileges I have - As I listen to the news from Flint, from New Mexico, from New York- I've been thinking about and wondering if what I'm doing, anyone doing, is any progress at all. 

On Friday afternoon, I ran around the National Mall. I stopped near the Washington Monument, imagined the grass full of people, imagined a clear firm voice. I kept going. Three chalk-like boulders, a full story high, turned gold around rush hour. I jogged in. 

There's a small path, like someone split a rock face. Martin  Luther King stares out at the tidal basin, chin up, reminding of the way to carve a path through monumental obstacles. How you move doesn't matter, but you've got to move.

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(While my efforts to make #teacherstryna a trending hashtag were unsuccessful, you can read my notes from some of the sessions I attended here: https://twitter.com/charsnewweb )

On Uruguay: Painting with a Broad Brush and a Gourd of Mate in my Other Hand

The curtains on every bus I took around Uruguay opened  to green, rolling and rocky views - unexpected mountains, extensive grasslands. A nation of grasslands. To me, agriculture gives the country some coherence. But there’s a lot more to say than that, or that it’s the Switzerland of South America, or the country that elected as president a former guerrilla named Jose Mujica. The Uruguayan puzzle I've started to put together is part traditional mindset, part progressive politics - and part something else I haven't found yet. 

Over two months, I stayed in the capital, Montevideo; a mid-sized city, Salto; a large coastal town, La Paloma; and a tiny coastal town, Punta del Diablo, that in the summer swells to a resort. I passed through two other mid-sized cities, Tacuarembo and Rocha. In all of these places, I was struck by the general homogeneity of the houses. In Montevideo, of course, there are luxury towers and beautifully preserved (or elegantly crumbling) old palaces; but in general, people live in small, one- or two- story cement houses. Bars on the windows, and gates to a courtyard; maybe a place to park a car. It’s a place where people have enough money to live and maybe go on vacation in January, and maybe buy their kids Samsung cellphones (iPhones are rare here) - but the luxury is not apparent as it is in Buenos Aires. I’m sure that if I spent time in Punta del Este or more time in Montevideo, my view would be complicated. But from what I hear, read, and understand, Uruguay is just chugging along. 

Before I came south, I had subscribed to Google alerts for Uruguay that had made me think that the country would be booming. My inbox was full of links to World Bank press releases and the Uruguayan Investment and Export Promotion Agency’s home page: a solar plant here, a wind power plant there, a proposal for an open pit iron mine that had passed an intensive social and environmental impact assessment.

I see more problems in those stories than I did before. After being to Pilar’s ranch in Salto, the timber forests that push at the edges of pastures seems sinister. After spending time in La Paloma and Punta del Diablo and the wild beaches further north, the thought of a deep water port (since put on hold!) in the middle of that beautiful coastline, one that Brazil and Bolivia would use, too, seems short-sighted. There’s not enough need to justify it; there’s too much wilderness to permit it. 

And what people told me is that there aren’t enough people to do the work projected for those big projects, either. “People don’t have the same values as they used to,” I kept hearing. Because the government gives out social security to people under a certain income level, they don’t bother to work, I was told. Pilar has a real labor shortage on her ranch. “There’s money to be made, but only for who wants it,” the hostel owners in La Paloma said. For anyone else, the government can supply enough to buy mate and cigarettes and beer.

I don’t know the details of any development projects well enough to say for sure - perhaps sustainability is truly taken into account, perhaps they projects will create jobs that will boost people’s livelihoods, maybe the new infrastructure would be a blessing for everyone. The roads are invariably bad, in cities and in country. “We’re really still a developing country,” I kept hearing, “Have you seen our roads?”

***

On my last day in Uruguay, I went to a conference about Benefit Corporations, or companies that are required, by charter, to seek not only economic but social and environmental impact. In the conference room of a sponsoring law firm in Montevideo, we heard about the history of B Corps, the story of the first certified Uruguayan B Corp, and the beginnings of a process to create a legal framework for B Corps in Latin America.

The coordinators of the Uruguayan hub, which currently consists of two companies, said that Uruguay could be a good place for more B corps to grow. It’s small and progressive enough to change legal frameworks and business culture within its borders, they said, and can then influence other countries in the region. At the coffee breaks people drank organic tea produced by an Argentine B Corps and took notes on their iPhones. The organizers were pleased with attendance - not just “save the earth types,” they said at lunch afterwards, but lawyers and businessmen, the people who have the tools to change the legal frameworks and push industry to seek that triple bottom line (financial, social, and environmental). 

In the evening, I met up with one of the organizers and her boyfriend. They were sitting at a corner bar in their neighborhood, wearing yoga pants and jorts, respectively, drinking mate and beer. We ordered sliders. She is Uruguayan but was raised in the US. She told me that coming back to Uruguay has brought her back to the basics, in a good way, but that Montevideo feels sleepy, for 20-somethings who are working in movements to change how the world works. Uruguayans may allow progressive policies to pass in their legislature, but in the end, she said, this is a place where you buy the same type of squash from the same corner grocery for thirty years without wanting to change it up. 

I’m in Rio de Janeiro now. Last night, I went to a party hosted by a group of young Brazilians who work in city government, congress, and a grassroots community organizing association. Before we arrived at their door, they had been hosting a meeting for a campaign to block a law that would lower the age of criminal responsibility and send more teenagers to Brazil's dangerous prisons.

For the rest of the night, even as the sangria bowl emptied and the music pulsed louder, people wore bright red and green stickers on their t-shirts: Amanhecer contra a Redução, or "A new day against reducing the age." The whole campaign had been inspired, a friend told me, by how youth had mobilized and prevented a similar law from passing in Uruguay.