HAVING AUTONOMY IN THE CLASSROOM
"I really think having autonomy in my classroom—My classroom does feel like a refuge, I really can do whatever I want in my classroom."
BELIEVING WE CAN CHANGE THINGS
"I don't know if I'm involved in the union and therefore I am fighting rather than submitting, or I am involved in the union because I am a fighter—I don't know. Either you can say that these are problems and they're insurmountable and it's hopeless—and that is what burns people out—or you can be like, ‘I don't know, I have a kind of blind optimism that we can change this. I think we can fix this. What we need to do is get together and think about what needs to happen, and then try it and see if it works.’ And the union is a great vehicle for that.”
HAVING SUPPORT AND AN “ORGANIZER MINDSET”
“It's about having the places where you have some power and you have some joy, and having those relationships with students and with colleagues—and then just being able to draw boundaries and not bring it home too much. But it's like my husband would say—‘You bring it home a lot.’ I definitely bring it home all the time—the talking about what's going on, the school politics, etc. So I guess also having really supportive family who are willing to listen to you and friends who are willing to listen to you bitch about it and talk it through.”
“And then, yeah, I'm always trying to say, ‘Well, how can we organize around this?’ If I think it's a problem and you think it's a problem and everyone agrees, it's a problem. Then what can we actually do about that? Can we change it? And I feel in our building and in our union, we have been able to change some stuff because a lot of times the directives [from the larger system]—not only are they dumb and poorly thought out, but they're also totally flimsy, right? They make the directive and then sometimes they're really stubborn and they stick with it. And sometimes they're like, ‘Oh, it's going to be more work to stick with it than it is to just go with what everybody wants to happen.’ So I feel like that kind of organizer mindset is part of it, too.”