On Qweens by Queens for Queens

Nearly every semester since Fall 2014 I’ve had some sort of opportunity to teach teachers about teaching. I TA’ed Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) courses as a graduate student. I taught incarcerated men running a GED program how to use backwards design in curriculum writing. I’ve been adjuncting at two Bay Area universities in their teacher preparation programs.

This year, some former students, now my colleagues in the world of public education, invited me to their group chat shortly after the end of our last semester together. Their chat is “Qweens by Queens for Queens.” Yes, please.

Qweens is where we share joy, ask questions, rage collectively, and get advice about bras, lipstick colors, and emails to administrators. We are: one experienced teacher, and eight first year teachers; eight high school and one middle school teacher; nine womxn at various places on the lesbian continuum; four English teachers, three art teachers, and two social studies; I think we’re all in our early 30s; half of us are white and half are Black and Latinx womyn of color; at least half of us are bilingual; eight of us work for public schools, one for a charter; eight in the Bay Area, one in LA.

This is the beginning of me writing the book my ego has been nagging me to write. A book about teaching in public schools, prisons, and universities in the United States — or at least in San Francisco, Oakland, surrounding parts, and East Central Illinois (which I’ll get into in later posts). Medium readers (Hi, Mom!), I’m testing these ideas out on you in hopes that I can find a coherent thread or two running through them, whip those threads into a book, sell that book, get very rich, and forget all about my critiques of capitalism! So I start here, indebted to the Qweens who keep me yimmer-yammering about teaching in such a supportive way that I just might believe I can do it.