Sioux Falls poet embraces dual identity

I am a privileged white woman in the middle of America, where I walk safely to my car at night, fit in most everywhere, and usually get the job. I also live with you in a progressive community, where we push boundaries and put up a fight at city council meetings and honk when we see a fellow Rainbow Buffalo pass us by on Minnesota Avenue. What could be wrong here? I fool myself when I see a little less oppression where I live and think we’ve met equality in my country. Yet I still couldn’t possibly walk comfortably in a minority’s shoes when he is ridiculed at the grocery store or attacked in a park. I wonder, could I rip the tape off my mouth and defend myself as much as they have to? Would I cry in private because it’s become too exhausting to teach the ceasing of hate? 

Here we have Angelica Mercado-Ford, a small and ferocious Mexican American activist in Sioux Falls who does not cry. Her family has had to hide in their home only to open their doors and choke on injustice another day, but her throat is clear. Mercado-Ford is ten years younger than me and yet is teaching me that the greater group of people who suppress a lesser group of people are also the only ones who can save them. 

So she comes to America for partnership in making sense of her dual identity, only to thwart the discrimination her family warned her about. But she still mustered one step farther than her ancestors, and she is running. 

My supple tongue speaks for two, she says in her poem “Tongues” as she strives today to honor both her parents’ sacrifices and broach her own isolating experience. When Mercado-Ford moved to Sioux Falls eight years ago, it was through art and poetry that she urged her community to better understand the life of an immigrant: a “journey toward becoming,” she says. It was in her writing that she raised her fists.

“There was something in me that needed to come out,” she says, “and I didn’t know about it until it did come out.” 

In America, migrant dreams are flightless birds.

In America, you, the migrant, cannot dream, lest you are dead.

This is what happens, you see? 

When the world becomes devoid of empathy, 

Filling in blanks with new names of the murdered, 

Of the lost, 

Of the forgotten. 

To the ones in power: We demand action. 

Words mean nothing

When Claudia cannot read, cannot see, cannot live. 

When motherless children have dreams

Of light-up sneakers,

And survival. 

Ejected from courtrooms, 

For their profane silence

When their mouths have yet to hatch the word ‘mama.’ 

– an excerpt from Mercado-Ford’s poem, “Freedom is a Fleeting Thing”

Mercado-Ford wrote her first book of poetry in 2019, an effort that still finds itself in the hands of seekers nationwide. Before publishing, she was invited to host an art installation featuring her work at the Washington Pavilion, which was the first bilingual exhibit for the venue. Mercado-Ford was also the first Latino woman to host a solo show.

“I featured poems in Spanish and in English so my parents could experience an art exhibit in their language for the first time,” she says. “It was so successful that they extended the show for a whole month. The community showed up.”

Her book is titled “Todo Revoluciona”: In it, her subtlety reminds us that, despite how much we may resist, everything changes, ideas transform, and humans evolve. We are not silent – as some people need us to be in order to participate in their own convention. Mercado-Ford speaks over this. She uses her fear to fuel her fury as her family watches on in worry and in frustration. Before she fought the world around her, she also fought inside her own childhood to deter conformity, and her book reflects as much. 

I have tasted autonomy,
and I know
I will never go hungry again. 

– an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona”

It’s valiant that Mercado-Ford would not give up on her mission, even without the initial support of her family, but the demand to do so began early in her upbringing in small-town Fremont, Nebraska, where she and her family emigrated from Mexico. But even a resting place that could fulfill the “whole immigrant dream” was poisoned with its own anti-immigrant rhetoric. So they fought for their rights without hiding their homeland – her father in “cowboy boots, the kind that make him look hombre” – and Mercado-Ford brought that unabating retaliation to here in Sioux Falls, where she implores her community now to overcome the same “dissolution and disappointment” she faced growing up. She knew contempt at home and then everywhere else, and she wanted less of it. 

“I’m proud that my family’s cultural traditions were very strong and alive, but I feel like I created Angelica here. I didn’t know who I was before this,” Mercado-Ford says. “I knew I needed to get out of there for my own survival. People were not accepting, I felt isolated, and my escape was education. 

“I needed to take my power back.”

Her family comes to the art shows and commends her beautiful work and has grown as she grew, too, but breaking those family expectations was at first taxing, and she admits she felt defeated. It was so much pressure to put on one person, forcing conversations at the family dining room table.

“We talked about what it means to be a queer, Mexican woman in America,” Mercado-Ford says. “We also started conversations about my mom’s role as a woman in the household. She never thought about anything more than what role was assigned to her, but she’s not just a mother and a wife.

“My mother always told me, ‘People will treat you the way they perceive you,’ and we always kept up with that. But I said to my parents, ‘I’m doing this to better myself.’ ”

Her family wanted her to be more brown, and her America wanted her to be more white, but it’s ok to live in the in-between and not be like everyone else, she says. We are all “in the gray,” and that doesn’t make one person less than another.

“There have been tough times where I put in so much of me, and it feels like no one sees,” Mercado-Ford says. She writes in her book, In my chest, a storm is brewing, but you will only see the sun. “But I read this quote once, ‘I don’t want to die on a day I went unseen,’ and it always resonated with me because I just want to leave a footprint that I was here.”

Today, Mercado-Ford teaches at Washington High School as the head debate coach, where she reminds her students that “any little thing they build upon can mean hope and liberation.” This optimism floods into an entire community who’s listening to her, too. 

“Growing up as a new American, I could not imagine a path toward ‘greatness’ … without a profession deemed serious or noble by my family and peer groups,” says Ngoc Thach, a Vietnamese American entrepreneur and marketing executive in Sioux Falls. “I never felt like I was enough, but (Angelica) acted as a beacon of truth and hope at a time when I couldn’t spare any for myself. 

“She is a voice of peace and power.”

Mercado-Ford says “confidently” that she does not face adversity in Sioux Falls the way she once did. Here her advocacy is not ignored, it multiplies. She came here to “feel seen” but stays here to discipline us, enough to mature our meager marches into a sprint until our queer Latino poet in the Midwest is no longer fighting alone. 

I am immune from her ache, but I am not unable. Together with the roar of Mercado-Ford and the voices she is giving us, we become the safe space. 

One day a new dawn will come and I will meet my people face to face and we will both know home and we will not worry about crossing over to the other side. – an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona” 

As published for Sioux Falls Live.

‘Shared history’ compels work

When Patrick Hicks was eight years old, he sat on the floor of his living room in Stillwater, Minn., and wrote a short story about World War II. Using a beat-up IBM typewriter his parents bought for him at a garage sale, the typeball would pivot before striking the paper, darkening with one sentence after another as Patrick The Kid shared a universal story with curiosity and ease.

This fervor never let up.

Next month, the U.K. celebrates Remembrance Sunday, when veterans march past the London War Memorial to pay their respects. In February, we honor Black History; in March, it’s Women’s History; and in May, we mind Asian American and Pacific Islanders. 

To us, this is an improved awareness of the past resurfacing itself. But to local author and educator Hicks, it has become a life’s work.  

“I was always a big reader,” he says. “My mom is an immigrant from Northern Ireland, so she gave me a lot of children’s books she grew up on. I read everything by Enid Blyton. How does this woman I’ve never met control my mind? I wanted to copy that.” 

To this day, many of those worn stories from Stillwater are still here, packed into shelves in Room 111, where Hicks sits as the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana, a university he’s called home for over 20 years. 

On a bottom shelf rests a few books on Winston Churchill, gifts from his Irish grandfather he no longer has use for, “but I’m not going to get rid of them.”

Writer Joan Didion once said that “character is style,” that who we are and what we think about is reflected in our success, and this is how we know Hicks. As a third grader, with an entire future of possibility and plans ahead of him, he instead thought about what happened before him, immersing himself in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” while his friends played sandlot baseball on a sunny Sunday afternoon. 

And we are all better for it. 

This month, Hicks launched his third novel, “Across the Lake,” a fictional tale based on the Holocaust about an all-female concentration camp: gender, violence, and survival, all recurring themes in his writing. 

To Hicks, we are not immune from the historical subjects in his books today. He writes not only with concertedness and the same interest he had as a young boy, but to “cast a light on a part of our shared history”: If it happened then, it can happen now. If it happened to them, it can happen to us, and there is bravery in that “clarion call” Hicks bellows through his books.  

“We’ve seen a substantial rise in fascism in our own country just in the past several years,” Hicks says. “That’s deeply worrying to me.” 

Even though the characters in his books are made up, the experiences are not: a cloudy day in Auschwitz, a pregnant woman in Ravensbrück or the reek of the gas chambers in Majdanek all happened to someone a long time ago.  

“I’ve spent 15 years writing about the Holocaust,” Hicks says. “I’ve visited 12 concentration camps, interviewed survivors. It’s taken such a toll. But I am really obsessive about my projects. Darkness just engulfs me, as it has to if I’m going to write authentically. To try to portray that monstrous darkness as anything other than that would be a crime against historical accuracy.”

To re-enact, he reads. “The Commandant of Auschwitz: An Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess” and “Hitler’s Furies” by Wendy Lower introduced him to his characters in the novels we read today. 

“I become really close to them – the good ones,” Hicks says. “Eli Hessel, the main character in ‘In The Shadow of Dora,’ it saddened me when I had to say goodbye to him. He was such a good guy. My main character in ‘Across the Lake,’ Svea, bad things happen to her, and she’s such a good person.”

But if not for fictional characters Eli or Svea or even Hans in “The Commandant of Lubizec,” we might not know the truth. 

“I don’t know exactly where the desire to write about the Holocaust came from, but sometime in the late ’70s, I saw this documentary on PBS showing the British footage of Bergen-Belsen: the bulldozers pushing the bodies into mass graves,” Hicks says. “I was just stunned at that monumental injustice, even at a young age like that, and the feeling has never left me.”

But sometimes, it must. Hicks says, “for his own mental stability,” he plans to take a break from writing about the Holocaust and is actually heads down on a book of nonfiction about his home state of Minnesota. There will still be history, but this time there will be humor, too. We can expect it later next year. 

There’s also his devotion to poetry, a subtle departure from the haunts in Nazi Germany. Not one to stray from his first love, we read about history in his stanzas alongside love letters to Europe, but here the words are mostly light, not dark; mostly playful, not scary. 

When I imagine how my parents met
in a Montreal bar, on a Wednesday in 1967,
I worry that it might not have happened –
that they might have turned from each other
to unconsummate me. 

Nonexistance begins when
my father walks to the restroom
his stylish lambchops blinkering his sight
and my mother drops something on the floor,
lipstick perhaps. They never make eye contact,
and I am blinded,
unloved. 

– an excerpt from “Lipstick Traces” by Patrick Hicks

Even though his office space at Augustana is no more than maybe 12x12, Hicks has two desks, two computers. On one he writes poetry, and on the other, he invents characters. I don’t know whether this is intentional, but the fiction-writing desktop is in the corner – in the dark and with his back to the door – and the other, the one on which he waxes poetry, sits right next to the light of the window, where students walk by and he gets a sure glimpse of the weather that day. In which space do you think it is easier for him to write? 

In many ways, Hicks is two writers for us – a dual personality he must succumb to, two different places he must go – but he is connecting us all the same. 

While his poetry can validate the universal experiences among all of us today – buckling in and tightening the car seat, riding on trains, traveling, and funerals – his fiction reminds us that, no matter how many generations have come before us, we haven’t changed as much as we might think. “There is still work to be done,” he writes in “Sitting on the Berlin Wall.” 

He has a masterful responsibility as he encourages us to weep and remember, understand and participate. In the dark and in the light, from his courageous quests to your reading nook at home, Patrick Hicks is steadfast in teaching us and then showing us the way.

As published for Sioux Falls Live.

Meet Rhode Island educator

Luis Oliveira arrived in the United States from Portugal at the age of nine. 

At the time, he thought of himself as a pretty good student. He was eager to learn and excited to start anew. But then he arrived to his first day. 

“I went from doing a really good job in school to having no confidence and feeling like I was stupid,” says Luis, who now teaches English language learners in Rhode Island. “And the reason I felt this way was because I couldn’t verbally express myself.” 

Luis recalls a math class in which the teacher was going over times tables. She had different problems up on the board and was asking the class for answers. 

“A lot of students were struggling,” he says. “I knew the answers, I just didn’t know how to say it! I was so frustrated that I got up and went right to the board to just write them down myself. I learned English pretty fast after that.”

Years later, he remembers that child vividly as he guides his students today. 

“Just because a student isn’t able to communicate does not mean they don’t have anything to say,” Luis assures. “We just have to find a way to bring their voice out.”

Advocating for Students, Teachers and Families, Too

Luis has been teaching at Middletown High School in Wickford for nearly 30 years. As a former Spanish teacher, he now works with English language learners alongside his role as an arts director, covering electives for the district and offering help as a tech coach for teachers as well. He discovered Flipgrid about three years ago during a professional development session. 

“I fell in love with it instantly because, right away, I saw how it could be used with my English language learners.”

His students responded likewise. 

“With English language learners, they don’t want to stand out,” Luis says. “They don’t want to be in front of the classroom until they’re comfortable with the language. But Flipgrid allows them to record in a quiet place alone. They can stop and record again, delete and start over until they feel comfortable enough, eventually giving them the confidence they need when they do have to finally get up in front of the class with everybody looking at them. I remember what that was like getting up in front of my class before I was ready.”

Luis says it’s the oral learning that has prevailed because he’s given his students an opportunity to see for themselves what they can achieve. 

“My students never believe they are showing improvement, so I use Flipgrid’s MixTapes feature all the time to say, ‘Look! In September, you were doing your video completely in Spanish. You couldn’t even speak in English. But, three months later, your videos are all in English!’ The proof is in the video.”

Luis has been training teachers, too, and even helping families acclimate to new technologies amid remote learning. 

“For many of these children, their families work in the restaurant industry, and, in many cases, restaurants are closed. Even under the best of circumstances, they are at a disadvantage,” Luis says. “So I have a phone log. I make a lot of calls to parents and deliver hot spots and laptops. I reach out in any way I can. I’ve been using Immersive Reader so families know where to pick up grab-and-go lunches.

“There were folks who did that for me a long, long time ago, and it’s why I got into education. We just have to think outside the box to fix any problems our kids are facing, so that’s what I do.”

Luis is resourceful, warm, persistent and kind. He empathizes with his students in a way that helps them feel a confidence in themselves without even knowing yet what’s possible. They keep going because he keeps going, and that little boy from Portugal should have known those steps toward the chalk board were for the millions of other children like him to follow.

“I am always thinking of the students’ needs and helping them where they’re at,” Luis says. “I am a very strong advocate for my kids – for all kids.”

Educators ‘co-pilots for life’

Early on in their marriage, Omar Lopez would walk into the garage to find his fishing lures color-coded. Again.

His wife, Fely, would then sneak around to tackle his office desk next, organizing paperwork and color-coding his folders there, too.

“I wanted to ‘fix’ everything for him!” Fely says. “I would organize his classroom the way it was perfect for me. And I’d be so excited and proud, like, ‘So, do you like it?!’ And he’d say, ‘No, no! This is not the way it goes!’ So now, I’ve learned to appreciate his own way. At least my desk is still neat!”

They smile at each other so big, her small hand on his big shoulder, with all the inside jokes and fond memories over the years and a respect for one another that could rule the world. 

“She’s linear and very organized, and I’m more abstract,” Omar says. “She sees long-term, I see short-term. Everything has to be just right for her, where I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s going to get done, but slow it down.’ Our energies are very different – she’s literally jumping all over the place, I’m more reflective – but we complement one another perfectly.”

With all the affection and all the passion anyone could muster in a day, Fely will get your attention, and Omar will make you stay. They are two fellow teachers in La Joya, Texas, who have been married for nearly 20 years, and if you’ve yet to meet them, any student will tell you this is true: Their love – opposite personalities and all – will inspire you to love that big, too.

Co-Pilots for Life

Omar and Fely met in an English class at a community college. Fely had recently moved to the United States after completing her education in Mexico, where Omar had grown up until age 10. After a year of dating, they decided to marry. 

“We told our parents on a Sunday night, and we got married Wednesday of that same week,” Fely says. “When we decided to get married, we had nothing. We only had money saved for a wedding dinner for our parents, and we didn’t even have a table for our apartment. Do you remember, Omar?” 

He nods slowly and warmly. “It was a folding table and folding chairs,” he says. 

“But we were super happy with it! And we worked very hard,” Fely adds. “We had my outline with all of our goals, and we accomplished a lot, little by little. We’ve been co-pilots ever since.”

Today, they are both educators at Irene M. Garcia Middle School, only a mile from where Omar grew up. He teaches eighth grade, and she teaches teachers as an ESL strategist. They both lead with empathy, warmth and, above all, passion.

“We have a lot of emphasis addressing the ELL population, because we see a lot of what we struggled with ourselves as far as the challenges,” Omar says. “We always start by looking at the strength and the value of each student and just help them do better. We know that everybody’s got something to contribute.” 

The Motivator and the Enthusiast

Fely speaks emphatically about the importance of building relationships with students. She addresses them as her “mi vida lindas,” jumps onto the tables to share her enthusiasm and looks up to them with a kind of confidence that leaves them all feeling invincible. 

“I remember my first year of teaching, my mentor said to me, ‘You’re not supposed to smile to the kids. They need to see you as their teacher,’ but I’m always super excited about teaching!” Fely says. “Unfortunately, a lot of these kids don’t see that smile at home. So, I think that affection and advocating for relationships is our responsibility. If you don’t love your kids, they’re not going to learn from you.”

“She will do anything possible to give these kids what they need,” Omar adds. “She’s passionate. She loves unconditionally, and there’s not a single student who doesn’t feel that.”

For Omar, Fely says he’s the motivator, the former coach who arrives rationally but always with the goal in mind. 

“I’m the crazy one, I’m the dreamer, but he’s very Zen, and the kids see that,” Fely says. “He has this ability to read the kids right away and to teach in different learning styles because he knows that not all of your kids learn the same way. So he adapts, and everything is about teamwork. 

“I will observe Omar talking to the kids as if he were on the field – motivating the students but from a very realistic point of view,” she adds. “He brings that Friday night football atmosphere to the classroom every day, and it’s beautiful.”

Of course, that teamwork exists at home, too. They both completed their master’s degrees while raising children and are now eager to get their doctorates together. Whatever kindness exists in their teaching, it began in the home, and it’ll end there, too.

“We’re always helping each other, pushing each other, pulling one another up and sharing ideas, but we do this for our children,” says Omar of their two boys. “It’s always about showing our kids the value of hard work, family and togetherness. Everything we do is together, but I can’t see it any other way.

He says it sweetly, with absolute conviction, and without breaking a glance from Fely, his co-pilot for life.

NYC’s The Met features educational resources

When Skyla Choi comes to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, she likes to visit the Water Stone most of all, a small Japanese-inspired stone fountain created by American-born sculptor Isamu Noguchi. 

As one of the last sculptures he created in 1986, water emerges nearly invisibly from a dark basalt rock and into a fountain bed made up of light stones from the Isuzu River in Japan. It’s also the only kinetic object in the entire museum – an opportunity for passers-by like Skyla to find some calm in the trickling water sounds. 

“The Asian art gallery of the museum is always really busy, like a condensed version of New York City,” says Skyla, who began at The Met as an intern four years ago and now works as a studio manager today. “All around you, people are walking and talking, phones are going off and tours are going on in adjacent galleries. 

“But when you walk by the Water Stone, you get a moment of serenity – you have to pause and just connect and breathe with it for a little bit, and it is so special.”

As part of her work today, Skyla helps to build MetKids, a beautiful, thoughtfully-curated digital feature that gives families anywhere in the world that same kind of sensory experience with the thousands of other calming works on display at The Met. 

With a hand-drawn interactive map, instructional videos, fun facts about art and projects to try at home, MetKids is inspired by and created alongside 7- to 12-year-olds eager to learn, explore, tell stories and create. 

“Whether it’s with school, their parents or babysitters, there are so many kids in the building all the time,” Skyla says. “Our story time is the hottest club on the Upper East Side! So we wanted to create a program that made the museum a welcoming, comfortable place for children. We want kids to look at the artworks and feel empowered to talk about whatever they are seeing!” 

Over a year ago, The Met was one of the first organizations to partner with Discovery Library, bringing the intimacy and nobility of a 150-year-old museum to classrooms and dinner tables around the world. 

Today, The Met has brought over its MetKids content to create over 120 Topics in Flipgrid, featuring stories of infamous portraits and sculptures that spark a newfound compassion for history. 

Students worldwide have spent over 300 hours of their time learning about mummies, “lucky dragons” in Asia, parades in Babylon and Judy Garland’s rainbow shoes. 

And they’re learning something new. Whether they’ve taken pictures on the grand staircase with their families or have only heard of the museum from afar, educators and students are participating in a century-old tradition of honoring time and cultures, and they’re reveling in the exploration. Art introduces itself to everyone differently, but it does intrigue us all. 

“Traditionally, The Met has a reputation of being an austere institution that was only meant for people who have art history knowledge,” Skyla says, “but our digital content has the opportunity to reach people beyond our walls, and our audience is so curious! 

“Every visitor comes to see their favorite artwork like they are visiting a best friend, and we can track that kind of popularity and then tell stories and launch videos based on those interests. Our audience is so eager to learn about more than just what they see.”

As published for Microsoft Flip.

On servanthood in parenting

I enjoy tending to my children.

I like to organize their socks, hang up their shirts, and cut up their apples just right. I’ll make their bed and tie their shoes and bake cookies just so they can lick the spoons clean. I don’t mind another book or another song at bedtime, and I’ll rub their back, tuck them in once more, and give them the last-minute drinks of water they need.

Because of this aim to please, it was difficult for me to first learn about Montessori. Although I was enthralled with the empowerment and freedom it could unleash onto my children, I felt anxious and melancholy, too. Motherhood is so fleeting and priceless, would I be losing even more time with my sons? If I were to help them pursue their own paths of independence beginning at birth, would we disconnect along the way? Would they not need me?

As I dramatically grieved all this devotion I wanted to give them, I realized that my parenting was distorted. I was tending to them, sure, and that still matters, but it was all for me.

I continued down this consideration of selfishness, and it only became more clear. When I made the beds and folded the laundry and put the socks just where they needed to be, did that please my child, or did it please me? When I sang another song or baked a double batch of cookies, did that make them a happier child or me a happier me?

To love our children looks many, many different ways, all of which belong to me and to you and to all families across the world. That kind of love is sacred, and if you fold the socks and snuggle a bit longer, that is yours to judge or not to judge at all. It simply is your love. But if I am to follow my child, to liberate him and free all the capabilities within his body and his life, then I must include him in my own thoughts of my own well-being. I must ask myself, “In the long run, will this benefit my child, too?”

I also realized in this dramatic consciousness that much of my parenting was immediate gratification. It pleased me to help my child zip up his coat and get us out the door in time. It pleased me to squeeze out the toothpaste or pour the milk instead — at least I’d avoid a mess that I’d only have to clean up later. But did it please my son? Does that kind of servanthood help him thrive?

To be a parent is like a servant, tending to a child’s needs and assisting whenever we see something is amiss. But not to serve can be exhausting! It is easier for the parent to step in and take care of the messes and write the thank-you letters ourselves, for we can ensure it will be done and it will be done as we see fit, but I believe this is where we lose the child for all he is able. This is where the child will feel inadequate, and only the parent will win.

Montessori speaks to the valiant importance of observing our children so patiently that we forego the intense desire to step in. “Like the astronomer who watches the stars swirl by,” she says, “it is necessary to observe and understand it without intervening.” As the adult, we know the answers and we can fix it and let’s just move on here — but because Montessori remained so connected to children in silence and in faith over 100 years ago, we have children today who believe in themselves more fully than many adults ever have. We have adults who are patient and understanding, humble in their work and giving to others, because someone like Montessori believed in them when they were two years old.

Because of Montessori, we have hope.

And so I try to think about my parenting with my child actually in mind. We don’t rear children because it makes us feel better about ourselves; we raise families because we have faith in humanity and desire for our children to affect positive change and help people and live a beautiful and happy life, right? So, will making my child’s bed make my house look cleaner and make me feel like a better parent? Sure, and there’s concession in that, too. But would inviting my child to participate in his own life instead be an opportunity to foster a growing independence that will help him serve a bigger picture? Could it strengthen who he will someday become?
Yes. The answer is always yes.

As published for Guidepost Montessori at Higher Ground Education.

A child’s appreciation for life

Like many children, my son is drawn to the water. He runs in for a cannonball, using all the breath within him to squeal as he leaps off the edge of the pool with delight. There is no other care in his world in that moment, other than to feel the water, again and again. Like all children, he feels everything.

This dissipates with age. Why do I not jump in for a cannonball just the same? Even if I jump in alongside him, I’m taking many thoughts and doubts and prejudices along with me — no wonder a child can reach the top of the water with such buoyancy. There is no other weight they carry. 

We can learn so much from the child, but this isn’t a matter of attempting to lessen our own constitution or to worry less. It’s about helping to elongate the genuine connection a child feels with his own life and the invigorating environment around him. 

When we step away from a learning opportunity and allow the child to cut his own bread in two, to tie his own shoe or to make it to the edge of the pool with his own bravery and our smile in sight, the child is awarded an appreciation that we no longer feel. And, that kind of appreciation only extends the enchantment of every encounter life brings — every splash, every shadow, every flower that’s bigger than it was the day before. The child sees things so reverently — including us — why would we ever want to disrupt that view? 

The water is such a big learning space. There’s power and a lack of mercy and so much allure at play. Even as an adult, we can be drawn to the water simply for its juxtaposition of tranquility and ferocity. Children feel this, too, but rather than fear the unknown, they crave the sensation of it. When I watch my son spin his little body like a fish or watch an infant splash wildly with gladness, I don’t see any reservation or hesitation, I only see gratitude. They see any body of water as something that is indeed bigger than themselves, but if we allow them the space to do so, they arrive to the edge with a spirit that matches the power of the water, and they deserve to feel and live in that purity for as long as they can. How can we help them in that?

Before we got out of the water, my son swam toward me on his back, his chin meeting the sky with a confidence that would have kept him afloat for hours, and when he got to me, I said to him, “I didn’t know you knew how to backstroke!” He replied with sparkles in his eyes, “I learned! I learned!” 

May he greet the day like this for years to come.

As published for Guidepost Montessori at Higher Ground.

New York high school teacher pushes through remote learning in pandemic

We’re all a little tired right now. 

In education and everywhere, we’re pushing ourselves perhaps more than we ever have before. Maybe we’re overwhelmed or anxious. Maybe it’s too lonely or too loud. Maybe we’re all longing for the same thing. Yet, just when we think we’ve reached our limit, we wake up and surprise ourselves once more. 

This is turning into a cyclical event – seeking answers and striving still – but it’s because we’re resilient. We’ll continue to be tomorrow, too. 

For Yaritza Villalba, a young and ebullient high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, bravery is on her side. Just like the rest of us, she longs for honest answers and clarity as an unknown school year looms, but her seeking is not without strength. 

Yaritza is not only courageous for herself, she is a tireless lion for all of us. She fights beautifully for the answers we seek – boldly encouraging teachers to stand up and innovate with what they do know – and then, when another day passes wearily, she remembers just who she is fighting for, and it’s enough to do it all again tomorrow, too. 

“I would hate for a kid’s memory of me to be that teacher who gave up on them,” says Yaritza, who’s been teaching history for over 10 years. “If I give up, I’m telling my students that it was impossible to learn, but anything is possible right now, and this is so much bigger than us. For me, I will always put the kids first. 

“Honestly, if I could choose my legacy, it would literally be that teacher who never gave up, you know?”

Giving What She’s Got From Afar 

Right now, Yaritza is teaching summer school online to nearly 300 students across nine different classes. She won’t get a chance to meet all these kids in person – playing music to keep morale high, showing off new sneakers or dressing up in costume to complete an assignment – but she’s thinking of each of them and their families more than they know, and she finds new ways to engage anyway.

“Kids are more likely to do work with someone they know, so I create opportunities for students to connect with me on Flipgrid, and then I get to see faces I’ve never seen before,” says Yaritza, who created a Flipgrid Help Center for her students to reach out privately anytime. “And even if that’s my first and last video from that student, I still feel like I made that connection, so I’ll be sure in my next video to shout out that student to say, ‘I’ve seen you, and I can’t wait to see what you built.’

“I just always want to encourage the kids. In my videos, I will say, ‘I know this is difficult,’ but then I always follow that up with, ‘Reach out to me. I’m always going to be here to help. I care about you. I want you to succeed, and I want you to learn.’ But I also want them to push themselves, because this is the part of life that shows you there’s nothing easy.”

She’s pushing her fellow teachers just the same. On difficult days, she advocates for building a roadmap that includes opportunities to “take a break, relax, learn and breathe.” She herself strives for endurance – “me and patience are like water and oil!” – and, in any classroom across the world, she asks for empathy. 

“I believe that we become educators because someone once shined the light on the profession for us,” Yaritza says. “Someone showed us that this is not only attainable, but that we can change lives. 

“I know teachers are feeling defeated right now, but it’s important to remember that we were all students at one point, too. We were that eight-year-old who just wanted a teacher to acknowledge us in the classroom, share lunch with us or rub our backs when we were taking a nap in kindergarten. Our students still need that attention today, and they need it more than ever. 

“I’m doing this for the younger version of myself and every other kid out there who’s like me. I won’t be able to rub their back right now, but I am going to let them know every day that we are going to be ok. I can tell you that.”

As published for Microsoft Flip.