Read time: approximately 11 minutes

This week

• Monday, 27 October headed back to Kruseløkka Ungdomsskole in Sarpsborg for workshops on how artists clapback and what it means to be American and Norwegian.
• Tuesday, 28 October headed back to Halden VGS to do a workshop on what it means to be American and Norwegian. On my walk back home I made an appointment to get my bangs trimmed!
• Wednesday, 29 October went to the Waldorf School in the area: the Steinerskolen in Moss doing workshops for all their upper high school students (there were only 24 of them) on slang and how artists clapback
• Thursday, 30 October back to Halden VGS to do a workshop on slang. The teacher was able to help me get a few numbers for where I can get a massage! On the walk back got my bangs trimmed!
• Friday, 31 October back in the office to prep and plan for next week! There was candy in the office for Halloween! But, like much candy in Scandinavia, it was licorice flavored. Not my fave. 
• Saturday, 01 November headed up to Oslo for a day trip: bought a membership at the National Museum and checked out a couple really cool exhibits on textiles and luxury items in Europe from about 1000-1700; ballet at Oslo Opera House and dinner beforehand with some Fulbrighters; did workshop prep on the train to and from Oslo

On the recommendation of a friend and realizing that my time in Norway is a time for me to rest, I’ve been reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. It’s not actually about doing nothing, but about what kind of life we want to lead, given the constant demands on and competitions for our attention. It’s about slowing down; taking time; being intentional in our actions, decisions, and movements; it’s about rejecting constructed practices that make us feel like we’re not keeping up; it’s about living in this world, but not being of this world. 

When I coached lacrosse, the defensive players used to give me a hard time about always assessing the situation before acting, and that assessment had to happen within the blink of an eye on the field. In teaching, it’s the same thing: you have to make split-second decisions without much time devoted to your conscious thought about what you’re doing. So how will you act and react? Will you just do what’s been laid out before you, or will you actually consider how those actions have caused harm—to yourself and others—and do something different? It’s not easy at all to live a life in which we aren’t doing things that everyone else is doing. This includes justice-oriented work. The section I last read in How to Do Nothing reminded me of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which the author eventually mentions. I used to read this with 11th graders when I taught American Lit. Bartleby annoyed the students to no end, but I loved him. His phrase, “I’d prefer not to” eventually lands him in more and more precarious situations, but you know what? He could live with those consequences of a life when he was rejecting the hustle that everyone around him was engaging in. I don’t want my choices in life to be just because everyone else is doing it. So I’m loving this book. 

One way the author, Odell, notes as an antidote to the onslaught of the competition for our attention and our money and our souls is connecting with community. I believe in another post here I’ve commented about how relationships and connecting with others is really important to me. I want to be connected to others, especially because it’s lonely when you’re in a small group of people rejecting the things that everyone around you finds value in. I’ll give you a school-based example. Lots of English teachers teach students the five-paragraph essay structure because they think that it’s a quick fix to teaching students how to write. I totally reject this idea. And I’m not going to continue to teach this structure that destroys how students conceptualize themselves as writers. I used to teach this structure, before I realized the harm it was causing. And I don’t do it anymore. I do teach that writing has structure; I just go about teaching it differently so that students can develop as writers and understand the power of their pens. “I’d prefer not to” teach writing the way most others teach writing. At one school, I wasn’t allowed to teach 9th graders anymore because I refused to teach writing as a template and I wasn’t able to convince my colleagues to teach it the way I was teaching it because they said that was too much work. The way I taught writing wasn’t valued, but I’m not going to do something harmful for young writers just because everyone else is doing it. 

I was talking with a graduate student about the importance of finding and developing community when you’re doing something that most everyone else isn’t doing. It’s so so so lonely to live this life, where you feel like you’re the only one doing what you know in your gut is the right thing for students, so that they can feel like they have a voice in their educations and not like schooling is being done to them. Where they can feel valued and that you as their teacher value them. 

These three months here have made me really miss my community back in the States, especially when it comes to my teaching community who checks me, challenges me, and affirms the kind of justice-oriented work that I do. These experiences here are reinforcing the kinds of community I want to seek out. When I get back to the States, I also want to investigate other ways to connect with a community that’s outside just work. I also brought with me Dr. King’s book Chaos or Community: Where Do We Go From Here, so I’m looking forward to reading that next.

But forming community here in Norway has been hard, which I gather is common when you live abroad. During our many Fulbright orientations we were told that Norwegians are quite reserved and often don’t necessarily or easily welcome in new friends. I feel that. I’m trying to build community where I can, reaching out to others. But people don’t always reach back. It’s hard to keep trying to make friends when everyone has their own thing going on. Or, the people who want to be friends, I don’t always want to be friends with them for a variety of reasons. I can be judicious! So I’m experiencing a kind of loneliness here, that’s especially acute on the weekends. I don’t go into the office. I might do some grocery shopping, or go to the library or a café to work or write or read. I go to church on Sundays. In these spaces I’m interacting with people, but it’s not the kinds of relationships I’m craving. I’m hoping that the plans that I’m making—the ballet this weekend; hopping on calls with friends; and heading to Bergen next weekend to explore a new place, hang out with some new friends, and see an opera, will help.

There’s another kind of loneliness, though, which I have experienced even back in the States and that I read about in Dr. Beverly Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, perhaps now over 15 years ago. I think I need to reread this book for another project, but one part I remember is when Tatum is talking about a Black student sharing with a white friend something racist that happens to her in class. The white friend brushes it off as like, oh that teacher is always like that, or that’s just them. And the Black friend is like, you just don’t get it. The teacher’s comment takes on a different hue because it’s not just words, those words carry with them a history of stereotype and baggage because of the racialized intersectional identities of the speaker and the listener. So the Black student turns to their Black friends and they get it immediately. This is why students form cliques based on their racialized identities, Tatum argues, because they get it. 

This week the same exact thing happened to me. And I know it’s happened before back in the States. But this week it hit completely differently. I was like, oh, now I know who to trust and who not to trust. Who gets it. Who doesn’t. It made me feel so many different feelings: confusion, betrayal, anger, hurt. I was really thinking about this on Friday, and just how isolating this feeling is, where you feel like you are the only one who feels this way. And I remembered that in a group of teachers of color my frolleague (friend + colleague) and I facilitate back in Colorado our refrain when teachers bring up what happened to them is, you’re not crazy. This happened to you and it was wrong and awful. And I felt like that’s what I needed to keep saying to myself. But I also felt a strong sense of loneliness in my feelings. 

Then that same frolleague, not knowing about what happened, recommended All the Fighting Parts and I started reading Friday night. The epigraph is from James Baldwin, who I adore. And it says, “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: [they] ha[ve] become a threat.” God he is so good. This quotation became so empowering for me. It is okay for me to be feeling all my feelings of confusion, and betrayal, and anger. But because I understand what’s happening and can call out the casual racism, I am a threat. This is so powerful. It makes me wonder who am I a threat to? What am I a threat to? I already consider myself a threat as a woman of color in the academy, a space that was only built for me to assimilate into, and even when I was able to achieve a high level of assimilation would never be fully accepted in. Because my mere body is a threat to the very fragile institution that seeks to perpetuate its own white supremacy. 

And identifying harm and how we can disrupt it is my literal job in the States. So it’s not a total mystery what I do and how it hits. I guess maybe I didn’t expect to feel that way here? I don’t know—I’m still thinking through this. In Norway my most requested workshop is how systems of oppression persist. People are curious and interested. I had a group of teachers request this workshop this week for a professional learning day. That was new. My literal job is to be able to “articulate the situation.” But when it spilled over into my personal life it hit differently.

Baldwin’s quotation reminded me of another quotation I found in graduate school from another of my favorite authors that I remind myself of often: Being on the margins “is not a privileged position, but it is an advantaged one” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 271). In the United States, and elsewhere because we have exported our special brand of settler colonial white supremacy too, people take pride in and fight over being in the center, away from the margins. We need this brand of clothes or we need to talk this way or we need this kind of education or we need to like this music or we need to hold these political stances or we need to go to this school or we need to vacation in these places. 

That center may be a privileged position, but the margins are a space of advantage. Because we have grown up with, because we have developed, a multiple conscious view of the world. From the same article:  “As Delgado (1995c) argues: ‘Many members of minority groups can speak two languages, grow up in two cultures …. And so, … who has the advantage in mastering and applying critical social thought?  Who tends to think of everything in two or more ways at the same time? Who is a postmodernist virtually as a condition of [their] being?’ (p. 8)” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 271). When I was brainstorming and jotting down ideas for this post it didn’t occur to me that I would connect the end of this post to the beginning. Writing is thinking! We develop ideas as we write! My whole life I have been countercultural, attempting to reject the ways of the world in favor of intentionality, relationship, mindfulness, connection, love. In favor of calling out what causes us harm. Heck, it’s my literal job to learn about and teach teachers to recognize and seek alternatives to harm. So yeah, it’s lonely. But it’s powerful. Now to find more people to be powerful threats with.