When I think about the riptide in educational content, what I'm thinking about is moments where we literally have no idea what is going on in the space.

In fact, we might feel quite futile in the moment, but if we take the time to reflect upon them, we'll become better educators and I think more capable of serving our populations meaningfully. 

Welcome to the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education Podcast. The space for Education Meets Resilience. I'm Dr. Joey Weisler, and in each episode we dive deep into the personal stories of educators, students, leaders, and frontline advocates who are navigating the complexities within modern education.

Whether you're just starting your teaching journey or are a seasoned professional looking for inspiration, we'll explore how to foster meaningful change, prevent burnout, and build trauma-informed communities within our schools. Now, let's take a seat at the front of the classroom as we get started.

I have been waiting a year for this to welcome back Dr. [00:01:00] Adam Wolfsdorf for a reprisal here on our podcast.

Now, Dr. Adam Wolfsdorf is the original founding member and the Humanities Department Chair at Bay Ridge Preparatory High School in Brooklyn, New York City. And he's also an adjunct professor at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Wesleyan's graduate liberal studies program.

And Dr. Wolfsdorf holds his PhD in English education from Columbia University and he has also served as the coordinator of InSTEP Masters program as well. And Dr. Wolfsdorf has written two books, one being Navigating Trauma in the English Classroom as published through the NCTE, or the National Council of Teachers of English.

And now his newest book is Teaching in the Riptide as published through Routledge. He has also published in Changing English, as well as the Columbia Literacy Journal, and he also has chapters in the Humanizing Grief in Higher Education and Deep Reading (Volume 2) as well. And outside of the classroom, Dr.

Wolfsdorf has performed [00:02:00] professionally for 25 years, appearing in the national tours of the Broadway musical Rent, as well as Grease, and he front the nationally touring rock band, The Energy. And Dr. Wolfsdorf has also received his master's in Psychology and Education from Columbia University and holds his bachelor's from Harvard.

And we're so glad to have him on the show for his second year in a row. Welcome, Dr. Wolfsdorf!. I'm 

excited 

to be 

back. Thank you for having 

me back.

Dr. Wolfsdorf and I were on the show together the day after Christmas a year ago to talk about his first book, Navigating Trauma in the English Classroom. And here we are again, almost to the very day.

Today is December 20th when we are recording this episode now talking about about Adam's second book, Teaching in the Riptide.

I was so excited when Dr. Wolfsdorf invited me to preview this text alongside him, because what it did is that it really enabled me to think about the instances and the situations that challenge our identities every single day in the classroom. And I'll let Dr. Wolfsdorf define this as well, but [00:03:00] when I think about the riptide as Dr.

Wolfsdorf creates this analogy, if you were to think of a surfer who's on the open sea getting unexpectedly smashed by crashing waves or the rip tide as we call it, it throws them off their guard. And the purpose of this work that Dr. Wolfsdorf is doing is helping teachers think about how to navigate the riptides in their own lives or the everyday that pops up unexpectedly in our classrooms.

And those disruptions rather through a eureka moment or a crisis moment that completely averts us, what that means for us in our every day. So Dr. Wolfsdorf, I wanted to see if you can begin today describing for us what the riptide looks like in the world of education. And you mentioned it in your book as well, but what also got you interested?

What was the catalyst that made you want to write about the riptide as you see it? 

Yeah, so when I think about the riptide, I want to start by talking about the non- riptide and then I'll talk about the riptide. So, excellent. The non riptide, I think about what it is that we think is going to [00:04:00] happen when we set out to teach people.

And so I think that we enter the space, I think that we have, if, if we're good at what we do, and if we're conscientious, we've done a lot of planning and we walk into the room with an idea about what is about to happen. And we've done our prep and we have our lesson plans or our ideas, right? And then we enter the space.

And it may not be the first class, it may not be the first month, it may not be the first semester. But at certain points along the way, things happen in the educational space that completely pull the rug out from underneath us. They are instances that we cannot prepare for even maybe if we tried to prepare for them when they occur, they disorient us.

I remember when I was a child, I was actually born in South Africa and my parents and I and my siblings went back for a visit and we were swimming in Durban, South Africa. And I got pulled under a wave and for the number of seconds it was that, I [00:05:00] don't know exactly. It may have been about eight years old.

I really didn't know in those moments if I was going to live like, maybe it was a short period of time, if it was five seconds, if it was 10 seconds, I really don't know. But I was lost to the power of the current. And when I think about the riptide in educational content, what I'm thinking about is moments where we literally have no idea what is going on in the space.

So there is an origin story, which I think I'll tell a little bit later in the episode when we talk about destructive subversions. But there have been many times in my career where I've been pulled into a dynamic that no amount of graduate school, no amount of preparation, and no amount on some level of pre-experience,

i've been teaching for 26 years, had led me to the point where I was capable of handling what was going on in a way that made any sense to me. And so I think that, in most careers, these types of riptide [00:06:00] moments will be disorienting and we can expect that they will be disorienting. I also think that they can be incredibly valuable and I think that in the book, that's what I think

I try to lean into the idea that these moments of getting sucked away into currents that are completely difficult-slash-impossible to navigate can teach us a tremendous amount about our students, about ourselves, about pedagogy, about the craft. We may not learn those moments in the immediacy of the incident.

In fact, we might feel quite futile in the moment, but if we take the time to reflect upon them, we'll become better educators and I think more capable of serving our populations meaningfully. 

Absolutely. And you've described this paradox as well in your work where you say that graduate level seminars for pre-service teachers are built of pre-service educators, essentially making up, the student dynamics.

So when they're exchanging discourse in terms of the day-to-day climate, it can't be mirrored because the [00:07:00] circumstances that they deal with are not the same as a 12-year-old. 

Yeah, I had a notable scenario which I write about in the book, which is when I was doing my doctoral work, I took a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful course on teaching of literature.

And the professor who taught the class who recently passed away, who's one of my great mentors, Sheridan Blau, was doing a workshop with us centered around the poem Nineteen. And he ran this activity that was workshop based, very collaborative, very communicative, and he took us through this 45 minute endeavor, getting into the poem, writing about it, talking with each other, et cetera, et cetera.

And I loved it. And the people around me loved it. And everything was so smooth and lyrical, and everybody had great ideas and people were super invested. And then at some point along the way, something kind of clicked in my brain and I almost started laughing to myself and I said, you know, Adam, this is incredible.

Guess what? The reason why this is incredible is because you have a bunch of graduate doctoral students at Columbia [00:08:00] University who are reading about literature and talking about it with each other. And of course this is going to work. It's analogous to giving a basketball to a bunch of NBA players and saying, go play some hoops.

But I think the reality of education is that it's oftentimes the teacher's motivation, the teacher's agenda, the teacher's will, for the experience is up against the panoply of different wills. Some of those wills are gonna be very much aligned with where the teacher or the professor's coming from.

Some of those students have very, very different agendas. So, I, I think in some ways, as wonderful as graduate school was for me, and I spent, I think it was seven years in graduate school, all told between my masters and my PhD, it wasn't a realistic reflection of what it means to actually get into a classroom space and work with real humans in a real context.

You talk about students with so many different agendas and I already had to chuckle 'cause I'm thinking about cupcakes, right? Let's start by talking about obstructive and constructive subversions as well. And first of all, define that for us and in the work that you have between [00:09:00] Bridget and was it Anabel?

Go with Yes. Tell us what those look like in context for us as well. For sure. So 

in the book I focus on three main types of subversions, but for now let's talk about obstructive subversions and constructive subversions. So first of all, when we think about a subversion, what we think about is the idea that somehow the power dynamic in the room is overthrown.

Okay? So like, you know, under kind of traditional scenarios, the teacher's kind of the leader in some either explicit or implicit way, and the students kind of go along for the ride, ideally. When things are kind of overthrown , in an obstructive or destructive way. US student or many students are directly opposing or standing in the face of what the teacher is trying to accomplish from a curricular pedagogical perspective.

So the story that I love to tell, which really set this book in motion in all of its gory details, is I was teaching a graduate course at one of the universities that I teach at, and one of the students was [00:10:00] particularly boundary pushing, and her name was not Annabel, but let's call her Annabel, right?

I call her Annabell in my book and we'll call her that today when we talk. So Annabell sent me an email one night or prior to the class that evening and said that it was one of the students' birthdays and she would love to celebrate by bringing in cupcakes and, under some circumstances, it would've been perfectly reasonable for this particular course that I was running

we were actually doing a workshop on trauma informed pedagogy, and I was a little bit worried about the idea of having a birthday celebration and cupcakes in relation to trying to get students to be serious and tuned in to trauma-informed pedagogy, which I know you and I have spoken about a good amount, right?

Yeah. 

So I was careful about not wanting to shut this down because I thought it was motivated on some level by goodwill. I also knew the particular student who was asking had boundary issues, and she had kind of violated norms on a number of different occasions where it seemed to me that she was quite uncomfortable with the idea of me being the [00:11:00] one who had kind of ultimate power in this space.

it was it was a complicated scenario for her that she frequently wanted to test and push. So I did agree to it because I thought it was a nice idea. And then what I asked her is I said, look, this is what we'll do the last 10 minutes of, of the class, which was a hundred minute class. The last 10 minutes we'll have the cupcakes.

It'll be a nice way to celebrate the student's birthday, and merrily, we'll roll along and it'll be nice. And so I thought that was a reasonable compromise. She said, sure. And then what wound up happening is that wasn't the end of the story by even, even a long shot. So what wound up happening is I came in that night to teach the class, and the moment that I walked into the room, I was confronted by balloons streaming all over the classroom.

So it looked like a sweet 16 party, which is unlike anything I've ever dealt with pedagogically. And remember, these are graduate students. They're not high school students, they're not middle school students. So my room is coated in balloons. Right. Okay. And then all across my desk where I was set to set up my computer, run the [00:12:00] PowerPoint and do the work, there was about 30 cupcakes that she had strewn across and there was also a knife and there was also confection or sugar.

I walked into the room and immediately knew that somehow the night that I had planned for was gonna be quite different from the night that was going to occur. I also knew that this particular student who had boundary issues, I was very careful because I had sensed that there was some type of competitive, discomfort with my role as, as the professor.

And I didn't want things to explode. So I tried to be kind about it, and I requested in a kind way that, you know, let's, let's put the cupcakes to the side here. Let's do the work. And then at the end of the night, we will resume with the intention that we had talked about.

So she agreed to that, but I still had to deal with the reality of teaching in a room filled with balloons, with cupcakes in the wings. And then, um, what wound up happening was I ran the [00:13:00] workshop and then at the end of the workshop I have the students come together to do some trauma informed pedagogy prep on their own and then present to the group.

And so with about 25 minutes left in the class, Annabel stands up, comes over to my desk holding a knife, which was presumably for the cupcakes, although maybe she had different ideas in mind as well, okay, and looks at me and I look at her 'cause I'm like, what is going on right now? And she said, so are you done with your thing yet?

And I was like, my thing, like the course that I'm trying to teach. Sure. So at that point, always lost. She leads the group in this rousing, happy birthday rendition or whatever. And, um, that was the end of that. It was so disorienting for me. I, I literally had no clue.

What to do in this scenario. And I think we're living in an age of cancel culture. We're living in an age where students can rate their professors. I wanted to make sure that this didn't escalate further and I [00:14:00] sensed a degree of disturbance in the particular student. Like if I confronted or too much on this or tried to shut it down completely, it could really blow up in my face.

So that there's a term in economics, I think in negotiation theory called BATNA, it's Best Alternative To a Negociation Agreement, and sometimes the best move is no move. Which I kind of made. And I, I wasn't particularly proud of it, but I kind of allowed her to win that night, and I thought about how to deal with it, but in the moment it was very much a riptide moment.

'cause I had no idea what to say, actually what to do. So I would describe that as a obstructive subversion. So should I talk a little bit about constructive subversions now? 

And I'll interject because Yeah, go for it. Please. I completely resonated when you talked about like I'll say that I treat ratemyprofessor as a paranoia where I would literally mm-hmm.

I think students write on it maybe, I mean, I have one school I teach at and I only had three reviews and I've been there for four years, but I still check it multiple times a day as if I'm checking my [00:15:00] Gmail just to be sure if there's anything that ever pops up, I can capture it in the moment so I can get a sense as to who was thinking about it and why not to confront them, but just to analyze what I could do differently going forward.

Like you call it career threatening when we make the wrong move in those types of moments. 

Yeah. And 

in, in the public face of ratemyprofessor, that's quite true actually. 

It can be for sure. And people are fallible and everybody makes mistakes and, you know, people are doing the best they can oftentimes, right.

So there is something kind of incendiary about these moments, especially if we feel like our students have a particularly strong need. And we're trying to kind of wrestle with the psychological need, and especially if that psychological need is coming at the expense of our curriculum and also potentially at the expense of every other student in the room who are there, you know, they're paying $6,000 per course to learn, right? 

So that was something that occurred that was so intense for me. I, I, it really shocked me, because it, [00:16:00] it came in the wake of multiple other smaller kind of infractions that it felt to me like she was really trying to say something to me. And so I really had to think about what it was that she was trying to say.

And I had to have the knowledge that, like we were in week seven of a 15 week course, I had eight more weeks to go. So I really wanted to think about how can I understand what's going on here to kind of work through this and set up everybody for more success for the next eight weeks.

And at the same time you mentioned about this idea of like, how do we save face in front of an entire classroom when we see an obstructive subversion happening. Because like for example, when students come back on Monday, after a whole weekend of being away, we don't really know what's going on between the doors of our students from Friday to Monday.

And the way you phrase it in your text, how does a teacher compete with something like that? We call it a competition. Exactly. That the pop culture in front of us and just the devices available to students and by devices that could be digital or even physical devices to our students. 

just wanna say, and we don't [00:17:00] know at all about what type of psychological

reality, they're bringing into the space. We don't know their backgrounds necessarily. We don't know their histories. We don't know their relationship with their parents or caregivers. We don't know their relationships with their family members. We don't know what's going on in their relationships, in their lives, what's happening with other professors in their lives, right?

Where they're at socioeconomically, et cetera. How they're feeling about the political climate, all sorts of things that can come into the room. And so in some ways, like what we're dealing with, whatever interaction we're dealing with, we have a very superficial knowledge of it on some level. And as the educator in the space, we're susceptible to a number of different potential directions that that classroom can go in.

And so we kind of have to be, I, I do think of it a little bit like the Matrix, right? Where like Canner Reeves is getting shot at and he is kind of dodging the bullets. Like we have to be quite flexible, and prepared to make something constructive out of scenarios that could be quite challenging.

[00:18:00] Absolutely. And then on the other side of obstructive subversions are also constructive subversions. So what does that look like in that classroom and how does it differentiate from what we already spoke about with the obstructive? 

Yeah, so, so I guess, you know, just like with obstructive subversions, it kind of comes down to power on some level.

Like, where is power situated and how do we think about that? So I really screwed up and I didn't do anything but I, I was wrong about what I thought was gonna happen with a group of students. So I was working with a group of ninth graders in a creative writing class.

This was about four years ago. 'cause I'm actually still teaching that same student now. Now she's a senior in one of my classes. And I had this idea that these students weren't gonna be particularly amazing creative writers. And that was based in my idea that they're 14 years old, it's the first week of high school.

You know, how much life experience have they really wrestled with that they could craft something really meaningful. And I think about, there's a great line, I think sometimes it's [00:19:00] attributed to Ernest Hemingway about writing. He said writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter until you mind bleeds.

Right? Like, there's something about I think becoming an adult where you can wrestle with your past a little bit more definitively and capture more of the conflicts and the tough things and give them articulation in words. So I didn't have these big ideas about what my students would create and

I wasn't undermining them, but my expectations were lower than they maybe should have been. And so I asked my students, this is the first assignment of the year was in September. And I said, I want you to write a poem about an experience in your adolescence that challenged you in a meaningful way.

And I expected, like, my first sleep away camp or, maybe a first crush or, my bar mitzvah or, you know, things that are kind of a little bit stereotypical in a way. And maybe like the, something that, like a ninth grader might be like, all right, my teacher wants me to write about something.

I'm gonna give you this. And what wound up happening was, and, [00:20:00] and can I do this? Can I just read what the student wrote? Because actually that might be powerful. So, so I, I was, I remember exactly where I was sitting and the student's name is Bridget, and I can say that it's her real name because she's allowed me to use her real name.

And her mother actually allowed me to use as well when I got permission for the book. So I'm, I'm sitting in the office, I'm reading these submissions and I'm like, you know, I'll read one more. And, and so. Bridget submits this piece called My Favorite Vegetable, and this is the poem. My favorite Vegetable is not a plump red tomato, nor is it crunchy green lettuce.

My favorite vegetable is not a healthy orange carrot, nor is it sweet yellow corn. My favorite vegetable cannot be eaten. My favorite vegetable has no memories. My favorite vegetable is terminally ill. My favorite vegetable, forgot who I was, my favorite vegetable spent his last days in a nursing home. My favorite vegetable died last May.

My favorite vegetable is [00:21:00] my father, and so I read this poem and I was so blown away. First of all, I felt like I had been punched in the stomach, like all the wind got knocked outta me. I was just like completely blown away by the craft, the content, the honesty, the subversive nature of starting this thing off in this like simple, almost like nursery rhyme type of like my favorite vegetable, like almost like a little girl, right?

With like very little, um, nuance in a certain sense. And then she just twists the whole thing on its head and is so revealing and so honest and so vulnerable. And I remember exactly where I was. I remember like, it, it just like literally, I, I welled up with tears and I, and, and I felt intensely moved by it.

And that to me was a moment of what I referred to as a constructive subversion where the student not [00:22:00] only takes the bull by the horns, but goes so far beyond anything that I as a teacher or anybody as a teacher maybe would expect from them. These moments are inspiring, they're catapulting,

I think that the thing that obstructive and constructive subversions have in common is that they change the way the educator thinks about the idea of education. 

Mm-hmm. 

Right? Like all of a sudden, the idea of what is possible in this space is totally overwhelmed. I write about this a lot in the book, what does it mean then to spend the rest of the year teaching this person? Yeah. Knowing what she shared. You know, you talked about being at Parkland during the shooting. Right. Um, you know, there are certain incidents that change you, they change you, they change your relationship to your students, to the event, to the experience.

And so I really had to think about. My own thinking in terms of what I had thought for these students. And then I also wanted to think really [00:23:00] meaningfully about what Bridget needed for me going forward to make it the best year possible for her. 

And I think about the way these constructive subversions work as well, because I'm reflecting on what we spoke about in our episode from last year as well, where one day,

I was teaching of Mice and Men and I'll make a confession, and also that I got part of this assignment off with teachers, pay teachers, and I adapted it as my own. And it was a, it was a very simple task. It said, Hey, if you ask your students what it feels like when they are an outsider, they now know what it's like to connect with George, what it's like to connect with Lenny and Crooks and Curly's wife, if they can make that personal investment into what isolation is, they got the book and I thought, brilliant. That's right. Yeah. They'll definitely understand the book that way. So when I posed that innocent question to my eighth grade class, eighth grade Cambridge class, that was high achieving and accelerating.

Mm-hmm. What is it like for you to feel like an outsider? Just answer it, wipe [00:24:00] your hands and be done with it? Mm-hmm. I got privy to so many of my students' mental health issues because of that. Mm-hmm. Some struck me with sexuality, others dealing with suicide. Mm-hmm. And the competition and the entitlement that existed in that space.

Mm-hmm. Because of them being such a high achieving group. And what escalated from that was them turning onto me and saying, okay, Mr. Weisler, so you open the door. How are you gonna enter now to recognize that we're dealing with all this? And to me, that was a very constructive, subversive moment because of me recognizing like, okay, this really has transformed the relationship that I'm going to have with these students because of what I now know. And we had a very deep conversation a year ago about not deliberately opening up Pandora's box that puts us in those circumstances or ways to draw those boundaries.

So let's revisit that conversation to say, yeah, when, when those constructive subversions happen, how do we stay in our boundaries and still build a relationship with those students? [00:25:00] 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think about, you know, it's interesting, good learning and good teaching, especially in like more humanities based spaces.

I think defacto tilts in, like, it opens Pandora's box, right? 

Mm-hmm. 

Like, it brings in opportunities to really reflect meaningfully on deep, complicated material. And then. Now the question of the educator is how do you lean into that in a productive way that I, I write about this a lot in, in Navigating Trauma in the English Classroom.

I write about the idea that, how do we do that in a therapeutic way without it moving into therapy and, you know, being a situation where boundaries are problematic or, you know, you, you had mentioned, you know, when you spoke before about like having a savior complex, like, I'm not so naive, or don't have so much bravado that I think that I'm gonna now save Bridget and be her replacement parent, but at the same time, I can use what I learned from her [00:26:00] to create academic and appropriate opportunities for her to build out this part of herself and work on her identity in a meaningful way that I can support.

Absolutely. And I think about that as well to readdress that idea of the savior complex. In our pre-conversation here, I was mentioning how just this past semester I received, which is not uncommon, a final exam essay about sexual assault, which is a direct connection to one of the books that we had read during the semester.

And my final exam prompt is using the books where you read the semester, write me something awesome, even if it's creative nonfiction. And that was by consequence, one of the submissions that I received. And when you see something like that, how can you either be subdued or maneuver that feeling of having to become now the savior for the student?

How can it be either subdued or maneuvered in a way that is both effective and respectful of the student teacher boundaries? 

So to me, I mean, first of all, it's a really difficult question because I think if we're empathic and we care about what we do, we wanna be very helpful, [00:27:00] right? And at the same time, I think the move becomes a matter of metacognition, right?

Like, to what extent are we making the moves that we're making for the benefit of the student? And to what extent are we making the moves that we're making to solve our own conflicts, to resolve things in ourselves that we maybe haven't thought enough about yet, right? So I make the argument, and, and most of the things that I write that navigate this type of space, that teachers need to do a lot of work on who they are, right?

Because if we know who we are, if we know what our conflicts are, even if our conflicts are unresolved and we all have unresolved conflicts, right, we'll be able to not blur the lines as to what our students need versus what we need. 

Absolutely, because I think about when I was dealing with those students in crises, back from that first year who were dealing with, for example, suicidal ideation.

I can confess again now, six years later, that I think my attempts to rescue them [00:28:00] was to compensate for the feelings that I was struggling with in the loss of my own friend to suicide. 

Yeah. And I 

think that that was when it became a danger zone because I was trying to work on saving myself from that as well.

A hundred percent. And so

why is it that in the classroom we have some students that wish to obey and some that choose to completely subvert the nature of the classroom.

So I think that that gets a little bit into what I was talking about before, which is that, we just don't know what they're bringing into the room. We don't know if they've been abused. We don't know if they've been sexually assaulted. We don't know if they've, um, have a lot of anger towards their parents.

We don't know if they feel like they're better than their parents, right? We don't know what their experiences has been like with other teachers and other professors. So I think that in some ways, what they're bringing into that space is a pretty good predictor for how they're gonna deal with us oftentimes.

Mm-hmm. And I think that, you know, I make the argument in the book that just because somebody is [00:29:00] subversive doesn't make them a bad student at all. In fact, there are instances where some of the best thinking is quite subversive. And then on the same level, I think we have this implicit idea that when people are quite obedient, it means that they're wonderful to teach.

And actually, I think in some situations, sometimes I want my students to disobey, sometimes I want them to not ask me what it is that they should be writing. I want them to write what they want to write and I want them to think less about what they think I want and more about what they want in the space.

Because true thinking is pretty radical. Right? When you really take a step back and think about what it is that's going on in the world, everything on some level is fairly arbitrary.

And so I think that students need to embrace an exploratory mindset and not have a will to conform. And I write about that pretty adamantly in the book about resisting conformity because if you're just conforming, you're not really learning, and if [00:30:00] you're just staying in your lane, you're not really learning.

So I happen to have a 10-year-old child who's quite subversive. He pushes my buttons all the time, and I think he's pushing my buttons because he sees opportunities and moments for him to stretch his thinking and challenge my authority in meaningful ways, and I respect them for it.

And so I, I also make the argument in the book that I value students who think through things in a way that they need to think through things and will challenge authority. So like, when we think about the concept of authoritativeness, authoritarian is really problematic because it shuts down true thinking.

So if people are authoritarian, they don't want their students to challenge 'em, they just want to be obeyed. But if people are authoritative, they have this idea that they're in charge, right? But at the same time. They feel good about students who are gonna challenge their authority and force them to think in different ways.

And even if the educator's not capable of thinking in different ways to accept the way [00:31:00] students think, if it's different from how the teacher thinks. 

Absolutely. I have the students all the time that are asking me for exemplar papers, and I'm like, I, I could give you a model of what's been done in the past, but even what, what I've done in the past.

And sometimes I do, but I tell them that the classroom culture is not gonna grow through their own compliance. I don't want them to repeat something that has been produced before. We're not gonna grow as a whole classroom dynamic if we're just reproducing that same sense. Correct. I mean, I think about the student that would come into my class in 2018 and literally drink the hand sanitizer.

Like when that student is causing that. Oh yes. Oh yeah. In a, in a really good school too. But when we have, so like that causing the subversions, like I would walk out of that room every single day thinking like, why me? Like, why would he choose my class? 

And I, I don't, I don't think I talk about this in the book, but it just occurred to me as we're talking right now.

Uh, so thank you for giving me this opportunity to have a new thought. Maybe the idea of, of respectful subversion, right? I respect you. Mm-hmm. I respect [00:32:00] your mind, I respect what you're doing, but let's rock the boat here because if we rock the boat, it's gonna be interesting and we're gonna see things that neither you nor I are necessarily seeing.

Yeah. So, so I think that, that a certain amount of challenge to authority is growth promoting not just for the students, but for the educator. And the educator should have the humility to kind of take a backseat at the, at these moments. 

And in getting to the psychology of the instructor side, you talk about an experience from some of your university studies as well, where this professor's really tried to put students through this sense of alignment.

And in doing so, they really subdue creativity. Like I remember the first time I myself ever got a C plus on my first term paper in college. I asked a professor, I said, okay, here's your rubric. Here's what I did. Can I come to your office and talk to you about it? I'm not asking for a different grade, I just wanna talk to you about it.

Mm-hmm. And her answer was, if I were to help you, that wouldn't be fair to everybody else, would it? Wow. [00:33:00] And I think at about moments like that, where now we're getting to the psychology of the instructors as well. And I mentioned another situation in grad school that was, 

yeah, kinda 

different as well in terms of how we set up the classroom.

But in that program we really emphasized labor-based grading contracts and a labor-based grading contract is, I guess a mindset is a good way to think about it. Where students are told by the syllabus contract that if they do X amount of assignments, they're going to get an A. If they do less than that, it's gonna be a B than a C than a D.

But it's more about the completion and the attempt and leaving comments on it rather than like a rubric based outcome. Mm-hmm. And that was useful because I knew that if I gave it my best, I would do well. But at the same time, there was this other element of, in doing that, whenever we would ask that professor like, well again, what should this look like?

Same thing. Now I get it because I'm, I'm the same way as a professor. She would always say, [00:34:00] I don't know. What do you want it to look like? We're like, dude, you're gonna be the one grading this, what do you want? What do you want? Right. And that's our mindset as students we are mentally boxed in because of our title as the learner or the student, that we need to have some element of compliance.

And that's hard for us to come in with this liberated sense of thinking. So how do we handle that? So in terms of like working now in the mentality of the instructor, how can we help bring our students into creative freedom and creative expression in our classrooms without subduing who they are?

Well, I, I would make the argument that if we are providing spaces for them to be truly creative and imaginative, that defacto is actually providing pathways for them to explore themselves organically as thinkers and creators.

Right. I took a course in graduate school. Actually, I write about this in the book. I took a course in graduate school on psychology and Creativity. I was so excited for [00:35:00] this course. I couldn't think of two subjects that would be more enthralling, and the professor was incredibly rigid. The professor, I think, didn't have a keen handle on the material. Sometimes professors are assigned to teach a course that they don't know a lot about, and sometimes professors take on courses because they wanna learn about them, and they're learning is part of your learning.

So to give you an idea of what this professor did with this particular course, is that the final exam, and this epitomized the entire course, the final exam was a five question, multiple choice test. And this was a course on psychology and creativity. It made absolutely no sense to me how is this assessing psychology and creativity?

So my argument is that there's so many different types of teachers. There's so many different types of professors, there's so many different types of instructors. But when I'm working at my best, I think my students feel compelled to be creative. I think that they find creative opportunities and ways of thinking about the material in ways that are really [00:36:00] specific to them, and also go beyond talking about the idea of subversion, go beyond what they normally would do for a class.

You know? So maybe Bridget, maybe intuited something about the type of teacher I was when she felt comfortable enough to bring in this very vivid, very personal poem about the loss of her father. But I've had situations, I've taught the musical Hamilton, which I love. And

I allowed the students to do any type of final project that they wanted as long as they ran it by me. And I had a student who created a 256 slide PowerPoint video game of Hamilton, where he came into my classroom in his video game and took me back into the past and taught Hamilton through experience, through this video game that he created, which was talking about another constructive subversion,

it was so far beyond anything that I could have imagined. I've had [00:37:00] students compose music to some literary texts that we've done. I've had students film themselves doing dance performances of Hamlet. So I think that when we are thinking in meaningful ways, it's kind of like the conversation that you and I are having right now.

Like we had, yeah, some idea of what we would talk about, but then me sensing things about you, you sensing things about me and each of us being curious and interested things come out of our mouths and out of our brains that we didn't think about because we are enjoying learning together. Exactly. And to me, that I think is what education is.

It's not something that you can perfectly diagram. It's not something that you can perfectly capture. You create something that has parameters, but then you allow for possibilities for those parameters to move in multiple directions. That further the aim of learning for everybody in the population.

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that we're trying to focus on now, especially in the [00:38:00] rise of ai, which is a tool that has all different potentials and pitfalls for how learning works. The best thing that we can do is not make learning feel so transactional for students. Not like I pay the tuition, I'm gonna get the grade and call it a day.

If we give them the space to still think freely, then they'll grow the way that we hope that they would. Absolutely, yes. 

Maybe the last thing that I wanna say, if you're cool with it, just because I think it's something that's so important. Like, I wasn't a conventional student at all. I was always somebody who had a Pretty like original way of looking at things I did, I often didn't agree with my teachers or even if I agreed with them, I saw other ways of looking at things. And so one of the things that I talk about a lot in the book, and one of the things that I think is important to embrace is thinking about the ways that we are subversive as educators.

Maybe it's not in a classroom context, maybe it's not when we're teaching [00:39:00] "Streetcar Named Desire", or "Beloved" or the civil War or whatever it is, right? Maybe we, maybe we have subversiveness in other spaces of our lives, maybe in our social lives, maybe in the friends that we hang out with, maybe in the type of trips that we like to take or the type of music we like to listen to or the type of food we like to eat or whatever.

But I think there's something important to metacognating on the ways that we personally are subversive, so that we get to know that part of ourselves and we don't eliminate it. And we don't make it inappropriate for the classroom, but that we actually welcome that part of ourselves into the classroom.

Because I think that when we see subversiveness in other people, if we are more comfortable with the ways that we are subversive, then we will embrace their subversion rather than shut them down. And I think if we learn to embrace their subversiveness in a meaningful ways and channel it appropriately, we create growth opportunities for them.

I [00:40:00] think if we shut it down, we just inculcate anger and we can, we, we can retraumatize them, you know, to your point, or we can just make them feel like we're just like any other adult in their life who doesn't really understand them. So I think a lot about that. And, and, I write a, a lot about it in the book, and I think that when kids, and I'm talking about, you know, maybe middle school.

You know, mid adolescents, even later adolescents, when they sense that we are comfortable with their subversiveness, it completely deescalates the tension in the classroom and we become allies rather than enemies to them. And I think that that is so important because I think that a lot of educators come into the space who maybe were like excellent students, were very obedient, did what they were told.

And as much as I value that, and I really do value, and I work with people like that, and I love them, some of them are my best friends. Right. I also think that there's something about having [00:41:00] a bit of fun with disobedience. You know, you talk about civil disobedience by Thoreau, but having some fun with disobedience and allowing for it and taking some delight in it, that I think can foster a more collaborative and interesting way of learning that is not so traditional and doesn't feel so much like school.

When we come back, we're gonna talk about in future segments with Dr. Wolfsdorf as to how those different types of practices can still be respectful and avoid adding to the trauma that our students already experiences.

So, stick around 'cause that's what's coming up. I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you for joining us on the Classroom Narratives Healing and Education podcast. If today's episode inspired you or made you think differently, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or review wherever you listen to podcasts and stay connected with us on the at Classroom Narratives podcast over Instagram and Facebook.

Remember, together we can transform our [00:42:00] scars into stars and education, one conversation at a time.