Lindsay Adams

A Note

This blog has been through a million and one iterations, though first and foremost it’s been used to hone my writing skills. Sometimes, I’ve been successful. Sometimes, less so. That’s alright. This space is mostly personal for me, a place to share my musings or my interests, my talents and my failures.

Once again, I’ve decided to take it a different direction. You see, I first purchased this site in March of 2020. I’m not sure if you remember much about what was happening, since we’ve lived about a hundred lifetimes since then, but Covid was at the top of the news cycle. Schools were shutting down, and I was a first year teacher. I purchased the site as a space my students could easily find resources in a world that felt uncertain.

I’m returning back to the roots of that idea. The world has changed immensely since those quiet, cooped up pandemic days. It’s become loud, angry, frightening. More and more, I wake up feeling like a hummingbird in a hurricane. I question how I can possibly make a difference in the face of such vast governmental and social changes. Furthermore, how can I teach children in a world where they are inundated with information? Not knowledge, no, but information. Noise. Static.

Every year or so, I read Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks. I do this as a reminder for why I got into teaching. I do this as a reminder for who I want to be as a teacher. I do this because it’s heavy, packed tight with information and ideas. And, frankly, I’m still trying to piece them all together in understanding. However, Hooks said,

“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom”

Education as a practice of freedom is why I became a teacher. For the next year or so, education as a practice of freedom is what I will blog about. I’ll do my best to provide insights from my classroom, resources that I find, and even some that I create. But, this is not a “teacher blog”. This is a blog of resistance. My own small account of how one teacher tries to make sense of a burning world while trying to teach hope, transgression, and resistance to the next generation.

Follow along on my journey if you like. Practice with me, or take what you need and move on. We are all simply doing our very best. Me included.