John Gruber on the difference between leadership and the Washington Post and The Atlantic:
If it had been a Washington Post reporter who was inadvertently included on the Trump national security team’s Signal group chat, would they have run the story? No fucking way with that abject lickspittle coward Jeff Bezos running the show.
Jackson was loud. His low, raspy voice would wake you up as good as coffee. It must have done that with the students in his math classes. And his athletes at practice.
He could get the kids to listen. With his booming voice, he would coax them to the whiteboard where they would solve math problems that he lobbed at them. Can you imagine? Teenagers at the board. Standing in front of peers. Doing algebra for all to see.
He was the first teacher I met here after I decided to teach. While I was still an intern, he enthusiastically welcomed me into his room and showed me how it all worked. It was loud. He wrote on the board in big sweeping strokes, slamming the markers as the math streamed out. He would turn on a dime and spring questions on the kids to check their learning. And if necessary, he’d slow down or do it again. Years later, when I emailed him to let him know I was applying to Austin High for a math job, even his reply was loud: joyful and welcoming and loud.
Since I’ve been working here, he has been my permission slip to not overthink things. He has answered weekend texts. He has checked up on me during the day. He has been my exemplar on how to reach kids. The job was easy, he would say — easy if you focused on doing right by them. Which is what he did every single day. And now he’s gone.
We will miss him very, very much.
I do not pledge allegiance to the flag. I pledge it to the republic for which it stands — one that is withering away.
The constitution in which we had so much prideful confidence, which we boasted was a template for others, which led us in blind hubris to claim to be so exceptional, that constitution no longer functions. It has been subverted from within. Its core principles have evaporated before our eyes. Democratically elected clowns and their brownshirt thugs have thrown wrenches into the machinery, smirking in pride as oligarchs and autocrats rub their hands together and salivate in anticipation of what is to follow.
There is no effective opposition, unless you believe UnitedHealthCare CEOs dead in the streets and Tesla dealerships and charging stations in flames qualifies.
What a world we have left for our children.
“Mr. Hasan?”
An algebra student was walking from the doorway to the front of the room, where I was standing at my desk.
“Yes?”
“Would you like a ham and cheese croissant?”
“What!? Yes! What’s the occasion?”
“Valentine’s Day, Mr Hasan!”
“Oh gosh. Thank you.”
I so needed something like that.
There were two students in the back of the room talking. Loudly. Furiously. It was fine.
You see, a couple weeks ago we had a class retrospective: List one thing that you thought went well last semester and one thing that we could do differently. The responses were varied, but the most frequent suggestion was for more practice time. Accordingly, today we had 30 minutes of practice time at the end of the period (more than usual, enabled by block scheduling).
Our room is laid out in 4-desk pods. Over the course of the year, the kids have gradually migrated from the initial seating chart to groups of their own devising. On a good day, their work is productive. On a great one, the room is filled with academic conversation, and they teach each other. Today was a great day.
The pods were at work factoring polynomials and then solving equations. Factor on the left, solve on the right. Rinse. Repeat. All the way down the page. And those two kids in the back were discussing one of the problems near the end. It was a difficult one (as they tend to be toward the end). There they were, the two of them: factoring, solving, leaning into each other. Scratching their heads. Each asking what the other was doing. Then one of them spoke.
“Wait,” the first one said to the second one there, shuffling papers on the desk between them. “Where’s your work?”
Oh be still my beating heart.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
