Hey everyone! It’s Jim, from what was once a little-known podcast called Professional Development. Over the past few weeks of summer break, Marcus & I have been chatting about the podcast, what we want to do with it, and how we see it changing over time. Most importantly, we decided that we’ve really enjoyed doing the podcast, and are going to keep going with it this year.
Just about every day, I see some version of this tweet: “ATTN white men: you don’t need to start a podcast.” Which, to be fair, is very funny. All evidence points to the fact that podcasting, like many other spaces, is dominated by a lot of ambitious white men with cuffed jeans and clear-framed Warby Parker glasses with a receding hairline. I’d like to think of myself as slightly more self-aware than some of the other people who fall into this category, but maybe not. You certainly couldn’t tell by looking at me. Perhaps I think about it too much, because I’ve actually put a lot of time and effort into this little project that I find a lot of personal value in. Whether or not other people do remains to be seen. I don’t know; for some reason I wanted to just write a little bit about why we started the podcast, and how we’re thinking about the evolving show/publication.
So, here’s a little bit about how this happened, and where we are now. As the world suddenly shifted into remote everything, including teaching, I started spending way too much time looking at my phone. I was already too plugged into social media, but just like the 2016 election cycle, I really couldn’t tear myself away from what I knew was an unhealthy habit. Some good things happened though, including my old friend Brandon Piasecki really blowing up on Teacher TikTok, I’m guessing due in part to his relentless positivity and super fun middle school science teacher energy. With all of his cool videos of white steam spiraling out of clear glass vials, and his pure love for building a love of science with his students, it’s hard not to love him. I called him up, looking for other ways to connect with students online, and started asking about TikTok. What was it? How do you use it? What are kids doing with it? All that good stuff. And, in true Mr. P style, he said something like this:
“I dunno man, just get on there and have some fun with it. I think that’s what it’s all about.” Categorical advice, if you ask me.
After a few other conversations, we decided we wanted to reconnect after a long hiatus, and start talking about how our classrooms have evolved from our days in the Delta with TFA. Enter podcasting. We talked about how great it would have been as new teachers to just listen to other teachers talk about their classrooms, and all the ups and downs they still struggled with even after years of giving explicit instructions and turning around grades as quickly as possible. Most of all, we would have loved to just be reassured that we were doing a halfway decent job even though we knew we were a long ways off.
I think that’s one of the things that has kept me interested in this project: the incredible need to encourage people to sign up to be a teacher, or to stay in the classroom, and find a way to make it manageable. Every teacher who has ever stepped away from the classroom, including me, feels a tremendous amount of guilt and/or anguish with the decision, even if they know in their bones it’s the right thing to do. I don’t begrudge anybody who has to step away. I know how hard it is.
Still, I’ve found a way to come back to the classroom, and I’ve developed a skillset that is starting to make it a manageable long-term choice. I don’t see myself leaving any time soon, but I’m fully aware that it might be the right choice for me and my family one day.
After we posted a few Zoom-recorded conversations on social media, another old friend from TFA reached out & said he wanted to join in on the fun. Enter Marcus. As the school year hit last fall, we’d have a text thread going to see who could squeeze in a recording. Both Brandon and Marcus are parents, which is obviously much more important than a podcast you’re doing as a hobby. My limiting factor, besides walking our three dogs and working out, was just living on the east coast, while they’re both on PST. But we made it work. And had a lot of fun. The demands of dad life and marathon training have understandably prevented Brandon from recording as much as Marcus and I, but we’ve kept it going. Brandon: if you wind up reading this, you’re still on the team, and are hereby authorized to claim “founder: @thebrokencopier” on all your socials. I’m down to pod anytime.
This summer, Marcus pitched me on moving to Substack, not only because you can publish podcasts here, but also because we both like writing. After nerding out in podcast land for a year, I was listening to a podcast on podcasting, and the host said something that I imagine will stick with me for a while: “the biggest thing that prevents new podcasters from growing and developing, not surprisingly, is burnout. But keep going. Somebody out there will appreciate it, and you shouldn’t be afraid to put your voice out there.” As somebody who stared a podcast to encourage others to stick with something, I decided to take it to heart. So here we are.
On a personal level, I’ve always loved playing with cool tech toys. I’ve also been really interested in audio production & storytelling for as long as I can remember. Fun fact about me: besides TFA, the only other application I filled out as a senior in college was for an internship in Chicago with This American Life. We know how that turned out. Still, audio has always been really fun for me, so I’m just giving myself permission to use some of those useless liberal-arts skills (yes, in between my Creative Writing classes I wound up taking a few music production classes at SLU just for fun). I also used to keep a teaching blog that I really loved as a creative outlet, not just to share stories with people, but most importantly as a tool to help me reflect on my own classroom practice. I haven’t been doing it in a while, but I’ve missed it, so hopefully this will be a nice convergence of those two outlets.
For the foreseeable future, Marcus and I will share this platform to talk about teaching. We’ll both be posting here about our classrooms when we can, but it’s important to say that, productively, we both challenge and push each other in different ways. If you do wind up sticking with us, you shouldn’t take what I say as necessarily what Marcus thinks, and vice versa. Even if we did have the time to align on language before posting, we probably wouldn’t want to.
To that end, I think it’s important to acknowledge a few things. First, we’re not pretending to do anything new, as so many education people are. There are already a lot of brilliant educators, activists, and organizations who have been building out amazing work for a long time. We’d love to see ourselves as participants in that conversation, but certainly don’t presume any leadership of any kind beyond hanging out in the classroom for a while now. Second, we’re fully aware that podcasting is a very white space, and that while we can’t change who we are, we absolutely want to be intentional with sharing different voices when it comes to race, gender, orientation, or other lenses of identity that we know have such a fundamental impact on classrooms. Third, we want to share and celebrate all of our friends. I’ve had so many great conversations with truly inspiring people, and there are a lot of ways I’d love to gas you up. For example, my old high school friend, Tom Csatari, who I take ad-hoc guitar lessons with over Zoom, is a brilliant composer and Jazz musician. He had his family recently moved to Australia, but I’ve already talked him in to supplying original music for the pod, starting with some tracks from his 2020 album, Garden. Cool fact about Tom: one of the tracks on the album was written and used for Stacey Abrams’s Super-Tuesday effort in 2020. So, even if you’re not directly in the field of education, if you’re a musician, graphic artist, or any other type of creative who’d like to send us stuff to share, we’d love to do it. As a newly-minted economist told me recently, “it’s so tragic how underfunded arts are in public schools. That’s what makes you feel alive.”
For now, I’ll leave you with the idea that we need more empathy, kindness, and passion in schools. To move beyond the vitriolic attacks on teachers, administrators, and school systems in the name of culture war politics. We’re not engaging in that so much as trying to live out an example of what we want teaching and learning to look like. It’s a passion project, hobby, and creative outlet all in one. You’re invited, and we hope you like it.