Jess Cleeves book feedback

Hi Jess,

I’ve finished reading your manuscript–it’s really powerful! I think it’s going to do a lot of good when it finds its way into the right hands. I enjoyed getting to know your writing style, learning a few aspects of your life I didn’t know, and it made me happy to get a glimpse of Mr. Ayala!

Here’s some feedback and the requested advanced praise–hopefully both are useful to you. I know you don’t have a lot of time for revision (Sorry I couldn’t get this to you sooner!), but I’d be happy to talk through any of this if it would be helpful.

Hoping we get to see you this year,

Chris

FEEDBACK

Introduction:

  • I think it would be helpful from the beginning to position your own voice and establish ethos. Who’s talking? Why might it be worth listening?

  • Perhaps also it woudl help to address how to use the book and who might be most interested in which parts. Later on, I’m giving some thought to how individual-scale ideas (BD&E) and social-scale ideas (power, oppression, race, gender, …) fit together; a bit more of a road-map in the introduction could be helpful to some readers.

“but that won’t break us” Some readers might miss this colloquialism.

“We can’t sleep nor socialize gracefully” Powerful

“You are allowed to work hard…however, you’re not allowed to work so hard.” Confusing.

“are in no way in competition with us for material and unless social resources” Typo?

“the consequences for students can range from “bummer” to devastating—and illegal.” Unclear–illegal is easily read as qualifying the consequences, not the consequences at the extremely bad end of the range.

“This blame is what inspired my immediate, defensive, shameful denial” maybe ‘ashamed’ would be better than shameful here

In discussiong burnout (p. 19), it would be helpful to describe the timespan. Is being burned out something that happened this afternoon (and I’ll be fine tomorrow) or something that happened over this school year?

“Even in the phone-parent vignette, which doesn’t present as particularly moralistic” this is confusing to me. Are you using ‘moralistic’ in the sense of immorality (right/wrong) or in the sense of morale (presonal resources running low)?

“As my classroom rosters remained double-pagers” (p. 22) this may not be a familiar idiom. How about “as my classroom rosters expanded onto a second page”?

The contrast between “moral compassionates” and “psychopaths” (p. 23) feels off to me–is it helpful to suggest that these are fixed and redetermined categories “baked into our DNA”? I don’t mean to deny the existence of extreme psychological conditions, but it feels important to recognize that our behavior is highly-shaped by context, and that people sometimes cause harm even while making the least-bad choice available to them.

(Returning here after reading the new chapter 6) I was thinking about whether diagnosing a system as psycopathic might interfere with a structural analysis of who it serves. A note here pointing forward to the new Ch. 6 could be helpful.

(related to diagnosing the system as psycopathic) I’m remembering an article called “Voice, Exit, Loyalty” by an economist which analyzed what people do when they’re in systems with which they disagree. Voice is one possibility–trying to change the system. And exit (quitting) is another possibility. Cultivating a sense of loyalty is useful to the system to keep you from quitting even while denying the possibility of voice. That framework doesn’t address the main content of your book–living in/with the system without being able to change it–but it could be useful to note that intentionally cultivating a sense of loyalty is part of the psycopathic behavior of schools.

(p. 43) I don’t think anything would be lost by routing around the Chinese proverb and just making the point about deciding on the rules, stakes, and quitting time.

(p. 47) the section, “On Your Way Out Already?” came as a bit of a surprise and feels a little out of place. I can see how the idea of setting boundaries could progress to the most absolute form of boundary-setting, quitting, but it feels like we went from talking about boundaries as a way of managing the contradiction of trying to be a humane teacher in a psycopathic system, to deciding whether or not to stay.

“We know to be cautious about self-care when it’s offered as a remedy for structural harm.” (p. 51) Important.

[For the new Ch. 6, I’m using the index of PDF pages; the pages aren’t numbered]

(p. 3) Check the origin of “the soft bigotry of low expectations;” I think Jesse Jackson adapated it from George W. Bush, who first used it in a speech to the NAACP justifying accountability-focused NCLB. This origin would even more effectively underscore your point.

(p. 1-11) This chapter feels very important, but I worry that it will feel abrupt and off-putting to readers who might have picked up this book because they were thinking about quitting their teaching jobs, but didn’t sign up to unpack white privilege. A few thoughts:

  • If you have time, I think a little bit more integration of these ideas into prior chapters will be helpful. When you address structural power and oppression earlier, it’s in the context of the reader (a teacher) being oppressed. There’s room here for drawing parallels.
  • Earlier, you used a personal anecdote from classroom practice to guide the reader toward building an understanding of race. The same strategy could be helpful here.
  • I feel it would be helpful to develop the framework of race/colonialism from which you’re working in this chapter, and probably also to demarcate work you’re not going to be doing here. Right now, your use of terms related to indigeneity and race make perfeect sense to me, but for readers socialized into racist/anti-indigenous worldviews, it might feel implicitly judgmental or moralistic without explicitly explaining what you’re doing and perhaps also making room for readers who aren’t there yet. Then again, this goes directly to “right to comfort…”

(p. 11) I fully agree that US schools are designed to produce the results they do. This needs to be integrated with the psycopathic analysis earlier. (p. 11, bottom) Even more here, I feel like big ideas are getting introduced too quickly. What should a struggling teacher do with “racial capitalism” if it’s not already familiar? One possible way of addressing this would be to offset the structural critique from the individual level, possibly explaining to the reader what you’re doing. Another alternative would be to lead with p. 12’s emphasis on power dynamics as the root cause of BD&E, and then to offer these more specific analyses of power as elaborations on the basic point.

(p. 17) Is this a block quotation from another source?

On these thoughts around chapter 6, I’d be happy to chat more; I’ve been wrestling with similar issues in a book I’m currently working on with everyone in my grad school lab.

– back to the main draft –

(p. 91) I appreciate the disclaimer about comparing students to horses, but I think there will likely be residual discomfort for some readers, myself included, as the implied analogy gets really physical and specific: saddle and bit. It could be helpful to acknowledge this, but then to ask the reader whether the analogy isn’t unwarranted, and the discomfort might not be useful, considering some of the ways we treat youth in schools.

The final chapters are awesome. Point after point felt right on the mark, helpful, insightful, and grounded in the earlier parts of the book.

Re: COVID statement. This will be well-received. I think it might also be worth addressing the current backlash against racial equity organized around the maunfactured CRT crisis. (Dr. LaGarrett King, who just joined our faculty as the founding director of a center on Black historical literacy, helpfully refers to this backlash as being opposed to the teaching of history.)

PRAISE

I am comfortable with any of the language below being edited for length and format.

Planning to Stay offers a refreshing and honest jolt to the useless pieties offered to teachers trying to care for themselves and their students in inhumane and unjust systems. The distinction between burnout, demoralization, and exploitation provides a way in for teachers to understand what they are feeling and to make concrete plans to reshape our relationship to the classroom and the boundaries which protect the rest of our lives.

“In order to survive my classroom, I wrote myself out of it.” Starting from professional reflection on her classroom experience, Cleeves offers compassionate analysis and tough love grounded in the realities of classroom teaching, not the way we wish our schools were or the way we were told they would be in teacher preparation.

This book speaks to me–both as a former high school teacher and as a professor of education, reflecting back on my time in the classroom. If you are thinking about your future in the classroom, this book can help you feel and understand your experience. This deeply personal and insightful book is the mentor teacher you wish you had, offering reflections ranging in scale from systematic societal analysis to tips and tricks (pee breaks! email signatures!) to get you through the day.