Questions I'm exploring
These are the questions I am actually wrestling with. Each one carries what I currently think — which is a temporary position, revised whenever something better arrives.
Silence gets mistaken for compliance, respect, even contentment. But Dorothy Roberts warns it can also be chosen resistance, so I cannot simply read quiet as harm. The honest question is double: who is being silenced, and who is choosing silence — and can I even tell the difference from the front of the room? This may become a strand of the dissertation self-study: tracking who speaks, who is called on, who is praised for listening.
I think racialized rigor describes demands placed on students of the global majority that exceed what white students in the same building carry, justified as preparation for college and career and enforced through punishment rather than support. I am asking for feedback: does this phrase already exist under another name, and what would disprove it?
Public school seems to route it through discretion inside universal policies: who gets the retake, whose tone counts as defiance. Private school seems to route it through the scholarship or recruited-cohort role, where struggle reads as a question of fit rather than a need for support. Same differential, different delivery system.
Eye contact, timeliness, rapid verbal response, and stillness are treated as professionalism rather than as one nervous system's preferences made compulsory. The Week 6 audit of pre-internet social barriers reads like a list of things a school day still requires.
I want to know who pushes equity in each building, and whether that role is structural or personal. If it depends on one person's conviction, then equity is a staffing accident.
Deliberately weight neurodivergent-authored and minority-authored work, and treat podcasts, essays, and community writing as primary sources rather than as color.
I currently think belonging behaves like plumbing: invisible when it works, catastrophic and expensive when it fails, and almost never credited to the person who designed it well.
Expertise is rarely denied outright. It is simply not scheduled — and an unscheduled voice is functionally an excluded one.
Leaning toward repeated light-touch methods across a semester rather than one heavy instrument — more like weather observation than a portrait sitting.