Latest / Color Commentary / Ep 31 | Office Hours: What Do You Do With a Kid the System Wants to Give Up On?
Transcript
- Charles Cole: Welcome to Color Commentary, a podcast where the stories shaping our world are told in black and white first, and then we dig into the deeper meaning in full color. Each week I'll be bringing you the news like this. First we'll talk about what I like to call the black and white section, a clear, straight-shooting rundown of the facts and the traditions of grace, like Ed Bradley, Walter Cronkite, and the classic voices of journalism. Then we'll shift into the color commentary section. where I add my own personal opinions and insights. Sometimes it'll just be me, sometimes we'll have guests, but let's figure out together exactly what this show can be with your feedback shaping this journey. All right, let's get into it. So today we're gonna do something a little different. I'm opening up a new lane on this show called Office Hours. Letters come in from time to time and just in the work that I've done my whole life, I get asked a lot of, for lot of advice around school stuff. So I'm gonna take a real situation, real problem, and then I'ma work through it live using our A &D framework, right? Which is awareness, navigation, and duty. So you're gonna hear me think my way through it. That way, like, you can kind of see how that conversation would go if I was working with a teacher, if I was working with an admin or a parent. And so I think that it's, I think it'll be good. So normally, like I use a script for like some of these main parts, right? Like I use it for my intro, I use it for the black and white section so we can get it right. Sometimes I'll script out some of the color commentary, but most of the time it's kind of just me in the moment. And that's what's gonna happen here. I've put this together, it's an amalgamation of a bunch of different issues. So that way, I can protect names and schools and locations and all that stuff. All right. But let me tell you why this matters and why I'm doing it. People make frameworks all the time. They write books, there's Ted talks, there's theory, there's models, curricula, there's new pedagogy, all that, all that, all this stuff. And I don't got no hate against none of it. I live in that world. I understand. But most of it is meaningless if you can't apply it to a real child or a real classroom or or on like a real Tuesday afternoon, like if the conditions aren't perfect, you know, ⁓ so we're going to apply it we're going to apply it in real time. So I just wanted to be very clear about that. I think for me, and I think it's important, don't, not being boisterous or anything like that, but I have a bunch of different careers that come into play with the type of work that I do. So for those that may not know, you know, from these real stories, I get to tap into that social work side of me where I actually started my career. ⁓ That as an education scholar, ⁓ scholar practitioner, somebody who, you know, reason research is a lot about what he does and then does it and publishes that data, takes in that feedback, cycles it over again, test different theories. ⁓ That of a community organizer, which I did for a long time and, you know, trying to fight issues in our communities. And then somebody who's built organizations with the community at the center of it. I get to tap into all those things simultaneously and have a real conversation with you. And I think filtering these problems through those lenses and naming at a front, I think it could be, I think it could be interesting. I think so. We won't do this every week, but I think as those, as more questions and things come in, especially now that I'm going to open it up and solicit them, like send me your thoughts, send me your questions, your ideas. ⁓ I'll do it more. I'll do an office hours here and there and if it's starting to cook well enough, maybe it can be its own thing on top of color commentary, but people want help. They want real help and I want to be able to offer it. ⁓ So let's do it. So if you've lived some version of this story, a letter that I'm going to read, cool. Like that's the point because again, The story that I'm about to read, letter that I'm gonna read, it is an amalgamation. I have dealt with this type of situation a double digit number of times over the years, and I took various examples from different cases, ⁓ and then we put the letter together, okay? With no further ado, here is the letter, all right? Let's go. Paper, good old paper. Remember that? Okay. Here's the letter. I teach seventh grade ELA at a middle school in let's just say black urban town USA. Okay. I have a student. I'll call him Malik. He's 12. He's one of the smartest kids I've ever taught in 15 years. He reads above grade level where he picks the books. He asks questions in class that I don't have the answer to, but he's fell in three classes. He's been suspended twice this year for defiance. ⁓ Last Tuesday in detention, he told me, and I quote, I'm not wasting time on this school shit. His mom is a single mom working two jobs. She's been called into this building. She's been called into this building six times since September. ⁓ And she told me on the phone last week, I don't know what to do anymore. ⁓ Ms. Ramirez, I am this close to just letting him be. The administration is pushing to move him into an alternative school setting. That meeting is occurring in 10 days. I know what that school is. I know what happens to boys who get sent there. I'm one teacher. His mom is exhausted. He's checked out. What do I actually do between now and that meeting? Please be specific. I have read enough theory. Okay. I have read enough theory. That's the situation. Now let me tell you the data ⁓ and let's work the problem. Again, we still gotta do our black and white section. So here's our black and white session. Here are the facts, black and white about kids like Malik. Black boys are roughly three times more likely to be suspended than white boys for the same behaviors that gap shows up as early as preschool. Gifted program identification rates for black students remain less than half of white students, even when IQ test scores and teacher recommendations are held constant. All right. That's saying that even when everything across the board is the same, you still have this delineation amongst race. The discipline category of defiance and willful disobedience is the most subjective and most racially disparate discipline code in American schools. It's the category most often used to remove black boys from a classroom. Alternative school placement rarely reverses. So nationally, fewer than one in five students placed in alternative school centers return to comprehensive schools and graduate on time, meaning that less than 20 % of all students that go to an alternative school ever return back to a traditional school setting, nor do they graduate on time. So some may see it as somewhat of a death wish if academics is the goal and graduating on time with full credits, okay? I have a lot of love for alternative schools. I work and partner with them and they do some incredible things for incredible kids. But everybody in those schools don't always belong in those schools if you get in my drift, okay? And the research on teacher expectations is also clear. When one adult in a building sees a black boy is gifted and fights for him accordingly, his trajectory can drastically and dramatically change. When no one does, that trajectory hardens. All right, that's the news. Let's talk about it. You're listening to Color Commentary with Dr. Cole. All right, so this is where I walk the A &D framework on Malik's actual situation. All right, we're gonna do application. We're gonna talk this out and we're gonna talk it out with the steps, just a way for you to think. It's not something that you gotta be some super scholar to do or be your nose is constantly in books. It's just a different way and mindset to think. Okay, so let's do it, right? And again, A &D stands for awareness, navigation and duty. So. What do we need to be aware of in this case with Malik? ⁓ Let's just start with what Malik actually said. Malik is frustrated, man. He's 12 years old, but he's already seeing, he feels, he doesn't have the words, but he feels like this system is pressing on him and working against him. And it is taking him out of the school setting. ⁓ And what I would say is around this awareness piece for you, for the teacher, for the adult is sit with his read on the situation. Cause there's some accuracy there. I would say to start off, let's not talk him out of ⁓ his correct assessment. Let's just start off by validating. I know we got things to do. know we got to make sure that things happen in his future, but let's just try, let's just do see where a little bit of validation goes, right? Because when we talk about defiance, that's normally a symptom, it's not a diagnosis. So when you're thinking about defiance, this willful piece of this stuff, what we're talking about is boredom or misalignment. ⁓ And especially sometimes with really, really smart kids, sometimes they end up getting punished for not being challenged. ⁓ So there's an administration meeting that's about to happen. ⁓ that's supposed to be about Malik, but it's really not, right? On some level, it's about building level data. It's about getting more evidence and having, you know, accurate reasons and rationale to potentially move a kid from one placement to another school placement that may not work for him. And in this hearing and in this conversation, I'm not, this email is not alluding to any Actual work being done on this kid meaning like he hasn't been tested here for his mental capacity Actually, well the evidence that we have is is that he's quite quite smart. That's the evidence that we actually have Okay, so Let's take a beat around this awareness. What else do we need to be aware of right? ⁓ Some people which I've heard in some of these cases and I think it's important to say this mom is not giving up on Malik ⁓ She's given up on this school. She's given up on this process, but she ain't given up on her son. And that is evident by even her ability or willingness to reach out to the teacher. Again, when you talk about somebody being pulled into a school building six times to basically be told how shitty of a parent they are, you tend to not want to fully engage. Now, nobody's saying it that blatantly, but that's what it can eventually get programmed as for a parent. We haven't even started to scratch the surface on this parent's experience with education, this parent's experience ⁓ with this school. But what we do have in our awareness bag is that this is a single mom that's working multiple jobs, who obviously loves her son, but is not able to get him. ⁓ to a point where he's having a good situation with the school or vice versa. These are the things that we need to be aware of. Now let's talk to the teacher. And this teacher is Miss Ramirez. ⁓ But you need to be really honest about your own position too. you know, this is the awareness that we're talking about if you're one of these educators. What's your political capital in the building? Who owes you a favor? What battles have you already lost this year, right? Awareness isn't just outward about that kid or a kid or that parent or whatever. There's also an inner awareness where you have to take inventory. So we're gonna try to help this kid. I gotta know what we working with as far as you concerned. Do you and the principal really get along or do you not? Do you have a decent record with this principal to where... If you ask something, they'll kind of take the benefit, the doubt from you and listen and want to, you know, do that. Or are you somebody that your principal got to constantly, hey man, you got your lesson plan. Hey, this is falling bit of a waste line. There's a whole economy of politics that's happening right now. And this is all part of that awareness piece. So when we are aware, just to recap in a situation like this, we are aware that this is a smart kid, but he's frustrated. We're aware that he's not fitting into this system at this school that they have set up. What we're aware of is that he does experience joy, but in these small pockets in our status quo in this building, it has the opposite effect of joy. And we also need to, in this situation, let's say with this particular teacher, because we don't know, let's say... that they're kind of neutral, right? So they have a decent relationship with the principal, wouldn't necessarily consider the principal a friend. ⁓ Probably has a nice access and reach since they are a professional teacher. Maybe there's a community around that they can dig into, which would become a lot more important later on, okay? So this is the awareness piece. The awareness piece is about stopping, stepping back, and assessing the situation with. with the data that you have. We're not gonna ghost data, okay? If anything, we can go ask questions and try to, you know, paint the picture more clearer, but don't, the reason why we do awareness is so you're not depending on you painting a mental picture of what you think is happening. Use the data that's available to you and seek out more. but you don't get to hallucinate ⁓ scenarios. We're not a faulty AI system. You're a professional, right? So that's the awareness part. Now let's move to navigation. So in 10 days, this kid is going up for assessment or IEP, some type of formal meeting where administration is gonna take a look at this kid, looking at kids' parents' eyes and say, hey, this way or that way, and we have insider knowledge, we are aware of the fact that the goal in this scenario is for this child to be transferred from this traditional school to an alternative school. That's what we know, okay? So the first thing you gotta do, if you're this teacher and you really care, and then since you reached out, right, you got to pull every bit of paper on Malik. You gotta pull up his test scores, pull up his grades, pull up his reading assessments, pull up stellar work that you might've seen from him that shows capabilities that might ⁓ be in conflict with what this kid is getting tagged with or as. I think if you really think he's that smart, ⁓ and sometimes these kids are, I've done research and it's shown to be this way. ⁓ It was like this in Beyond Grit and Resilience when I wrote that. Get him referred for gifted testing. Test him to see if he's gifted. There's ways that you can administer these tests that really can let you know if you working with something a little different. ⁓ Because sometimes that is the issue. Sometimes really high performance students or high mental capacity students tend to act out or get bored in classes, especially if they The class ain't all that. If they like are so far ahead or the teacher ain't great, I don't know. I do not know. But you can ask. And what you're doing is you are standing on your own level of agency and will be able to introduce new evidence that changes the awareness. You have that power. You. And you're going to hear this a lot in this episode when I'm talking about this because my A &D framework is not and excuse for jacked up systems. It is not victim blaming. What this model does is it allows you to have a framework where you are somewhat the captain of your own ship. You are participating in your own rescue. You are thinking through these things clearly. You are exercising critical thinking skills. And we say these terms without practical ways to necessarily apply them. And when you see that so many people are not having ⁓ common sense, are not having critical thinking, or if they have it, they're not acting on it, then we have to shift and give actual examples of the things or the processes that we want to see. I am never going to tell you what to think. I built the framework to give you some guidance and support on how. to think. You following me? Cool. So now we've pulled every piece of paper on Malik. We have gotten him referred for gifted testing. That also builds you goodwill with the parent and the community to show that, before I go in on your kid, before... this administration piles up and this kid is left to be jumped by all these adults and their parent is coming in and already exhausted from this is now the seventh time that they've came and you are subsequently saying that they are terrible parents, a little goodwill goes a long way. So you trying to get him tested for like it to see if he's gifted can actually move some mountains. in both your relationship with this parent and this kid and how your team, your administration team sees your ability to be a self-starter and work. Now, granted somebody could get mad, if somebody, if an administrator got mad that you looked at this stuff, ⁓ I would say that that has more to do with their insecurities than not. And also you sometimes gotta be willing to have people pissed off at you if it's the right thing. The next thing. This black boy, we're talking about navigation still, right? What we're dealing with in this kid is not making a connection with a lot of people, sometimes they make a good connection with you. Is there a black male in that building that they could trust or like? That is where you go to them and you say, hey, I just need you to spend a little bit of time Malik, man. I just, he's a gifted kid. Give him the lowdown and like, maybe we can find some other things for him to do. If there's not one in your building, well, I need you to be resourceful. When I used to train teachers, we used to power map. We used to power map the entire community so they could know where resources were should they need them. They need to know where the boys club was. They need to know where the YMCA was. They need to know where the barbershops were. Like they need to know these things so they can utilize them. So in helping this kid navigate and building systems and things around them, bringing this, you know, a positive influence outside of you to also step in and also like. looking at the things in that community that we can take advantage of. I mean, this, now we're starting to navigate. Now you're starting to be resourceful. The next thing is call mom and don't, we're not calling mom to complain. We're not calling mom to pile onto this kid. We're not calling mom to talk about a negative behavior that Malika's had. We are just calling her to ask what she wants, to ask how she's doing. and tell her that you're gonna fight for that. Like you have to build this trust. Again, another exercise that's really good to do with teachers is at the start of the year, let your first call be a positive call. What do I mean? Parents get calls every day as they should about their kids showing the entire ass. Now, if you're the parent, and let's say you had a bad experience with schools before, whatever, and the first time you get the call, you're like, okay, cool, but you keep getting these calls. And there's never anything positive. It changes your relationship with that school. And you tend to lose trust if you are that teacher. So make it a habit of when young people are doing well, that you're also sending those messages out too. So when we do have a problem, you've already primed this parent with trust and they know that you got this kid's best interest at heart, that they're listening to the problem differently. You'll get the problem solved because they trust you. You don't have to go through another trust ritual in the moment. And many of those moments fail, by the way, right? So I think the next thing too is this idea of counter narratives. I know this is that whole college stuff, just that, that grad school stuff. Maybe, I think it's effective. A counter narrative is something that goes against the conventional wisdom or in this case, ⁓ this kid. is an asshole with an attitude problem and this kid needs to be moved to an alternative school. A counter narrative, one page, bullet pointed out, is debunking that. It's talking about this kid's strengths with examples and then there's a plan, like I'm proposing this plan and this plan is rigorous, right? Like the plan still has to actually get to the root of the issue. We gotta solve the problem. Kids still can't just act how he wants to act. But there's some resources we can build around him. By doing this, you're showing a few things. One, you're highlighting in front of this kid and their mom the strengths and the beautiful examples of who this kid is. He gets to be a whole child. That's one. But two, you are again signaling to your team and your boss that you are willing to do the work and that your key priority is making sure that students, kids, families are happy and well served. Okay? That's what this is doing on a navigation standpoint, right? ⁓ After you do that, I will connect mom to other black parents in the building that have navigated this. I will look at other parents where maybe this mom is feeling left out. She's a single mom, she's working multiple jobs. Sometimes she's gonna need some cover. Introduce her to these parents so she don't have to walk alone in this stuff and maybe she has to go to work during a basketball game or a parent teacher conference and somebody that's in her new parent fan group. can step in and help out and be another voice of support. And that also signals to that teacher and to that school that this young person has a community, has a village around them. Kids with a village around them tend to get treated differently than kids without a village. I promise you. And then I would also say with Malik, you gotta give him something, give him a real project, give him something in this neighborhood, like make it do. on a particular day and challenge him and challenge him in a way that is complimentary to who he is and what he likes. After we figured out what he liked, like, let's tell me more about that. Show me more. Show me more about that. Right. The other thing is, depending on what our relationship is with your principal, again, you gotta be a professional. Pre-brief your principal. Do not, you don't want, no. Do not surprise your boss in this meeting. I know sometimes we can get self righteous and we're going on these crusades. Is it your job? And unless it's just a completely toxic, continuous relationship or situation, unless there's like some crazy reason why you shouldn't, you want to pre-brief your principal. You want to let them know your plan. You want to let them know, you know what you're doing. You want to signal that this kid has some support, that you got this kid's back and isn't this not going to be that simple. ⁓ by the way, which I'll tell every student, parent, teacher, whomever that I'm working with, document everything, time step every conversation. Like you may need this paper trail later. You want to be able to end, not even just ⁓ as a CYA or cover your ass situation. You might need to be having a come to Jesus moment with this parent or with this child. And they might say something like, well, nobody has ever actually supported us and nobody's ever done it. Wait, wait, hold on a second. Here's all our communications. Here's everything that I've done. Here's how much we've talked. Here's what I've done outside of that. Here, show your work. Hey, if you're, especially if you're a math teacher, show your work. Y'all know this statement. Show what you did. Because sometimes in a moment people can't see it. but this conversation allows you to ground and get beyond that emotion to actually deal with the root problem. So we can actually do what we came here to do and support Malik. Sidebar. Do you see how easily that young person can get lost even in this shuffle? Just something for you to be paying attention to. All right, once you've done all this, now we gotta get to duty. For Malik. Checked out is the posture of a kid who feels alone. The antidote to nihilism is a purpose. And you need that purpose to be bigger than yourself. So connect him to something or someone that he is responsible for. For Ms. Ramirez, the duty just isn't Malik, it's to the rest of the kids in that building that's fallen behind as well. Like, this is that work. We are not. When I work with educators, and I've seen this over the years, even in the worst schools in America, there's always gonna be some kids that's gonna be successful. It's just how it works. And the school or the teacher loves taking credit for that student. They love it. They love it. But the rest of the kids that got failed, it's just they fault. It's the system. It's not the teacher. It ain't that the school possibly can't be good. It ain't that my class is not that great. It's not that I didn't actually have a lesson plan all year. It's not that I'm actually teaching multiple grade levels of literacy behind. It's not that, it's never that. It's the nameless and faceless system and it absolves educators. But in this case, Ms. Ramirez doesn't want to be absolved. She wants to fix the problem. Amen, kudos. So if that's the case, that means she's focusing on this kid and she's also aware of these other kids as well, right? This crisis is now like a case study, you know? How far are you willing to take this stuff? When you have these, this is the epitome of scholar practitioner. And look, maybe not in the fancy dancy way of you turn this into an academic journal article and send it to an AERA journal, like, There's more than one way that you can be a scholar practitioner. It's also in the real life practical application of I've captured these things, I've set these things. This is what the system and data is saying about this kid, but I have something counter. Let me take this to my principal. Let's take, and I know this kid isn't the only one that's dealing with this. Let's take this to my community. I am so in favor of teachers having newsletters. ⁓ I love when a good teacher got a newsletter. It's incredible. If you got a new union teacher, take it to your union. Might be surprised with what they say to you. Might come to find out that children are not their priority. Their priority is you keeping your job and getting the benefits and pay that you want. Sometimes we forget what a union's job is, the unions, it's the teachers' union fought with that because they market themselves and say that they care about kids. That's a whole different show, right? And I'm a union guy. But that teacher union is different. It's different. I've seen how these negotiations go. It is different. So, you know, your duty is also with this parent, right? Now you've built up this rapport. We don't want this parent to feel like they're walking alone. And we also don't want this parent to become dependent on you. We don't need to do parasocial relationships. We don't need to, you know, like they don't need to put all their hopes and dreams into you. There needs to be a partnership and also knowing that we can fight very, very hard and there's still a big, big chance we lose. Having this realization in your mind, it makes you move with a different type of purpose. So your duty doesn't require you to have some kind of credentials or some white papers or whatever the case is. It just requires a phone call. It just requires you have an emotional intelligence. It requires whether that parent is mad and upset for obviously for good reason that you. got some good tools to let them get that out and stay focused on the go. Cause this is their baby. Like this is one of your students. This is their baby. It's not another one's just cycling in the way that teachers are gonna get new students every single semester. So this is why I built my organizations. This is why the agentic Institute exists. Kids like Malik, they're not edge cases. Like they are the norm. I was able to build this out so easily. I just took a lot of stuff and just combined it to build out this scenario because it, and there was a lot that wasn't very different because it happens all over the place all the time. The amalgamation of this story happened in a multitude of cities across this country. That's what I'm pulling from. And the framework is the framework because I've watched it save real kids and real buildings for real reasons. Like I've seen it. The framework is the framework because I remember what me and other people that were successful from where we came from, what we had to go through and what we had to build up. And oftentimes, that student, that kid is kind of left to bear, you know, to fight on their own. Going on the years of like the eighties and seventies, even nineties a little bit, right? Where it's like your parent, I grew up in a house where the parent would not, my parents would not believe me over a teacher. Miss Hawkins was like my second or third grade teacher. she went to church with my grandmother. Boy, that woman ain't got no reason to lie on you. We are beyond that. And honestly, not only are we beyond that, I don't know if you can go back to that because the profession has changed so much. The profession has gotten a lot younger, which is a good thing. It's a good and bad thing. ⁓ There's a lot of different, you know, a lot of things are changing. A lot of things are changing and we have to kind of change with it. But what happens is that kids get caught in the lurch. They get caught in lurch. And so the duty is like, you gotta be on top of it. And a lot of this is just being organized. We're not saying you gotta be a magician. Nobody is saying that you gotta move mountains. It's just every bit of advice that I've given is around organization and execution. Nobody's asking you to be Merlin. Ain't nobody said go part the Red Sea. Ain't nobody said go in your pocket and spend all your money. I'm just giving you a common sense, common knowledge framework to help you think through these things if saving Malik is your goal. So let's recap. We get this letter, we talk about it, this kid is going through this stuff. We have the awareness, awareness around what this kid is going on. What does this kid actually stand? What has this kid dealt with before? How's my relationship with the parents? How's the parent's relationship with the school? All that stuff. are now aware. And what is the school ultimately trying to do with this kid? We have this awareness. That is the base of this report. that we're building in our head, right? Like, okay, we got a base because all this is to build and execute on a plan. So you have the premise of a plan now. You know what you got to solve for. You know what's at stake. You know who the players are. Now, as we're trying to get this larger, bigger systemic change, right? We know that Malik got to take his ass to school on Monday. We know in 10 days, Malik and his family are about to have this event with the administration that could land him in another school. So you have to navigate this current situation and you have to jump into action. We talked about ⁓ trying to find a kid a mentor. We talked about listening and validating him just to kind of get him talking some more and really understanding what he wants to do and really learning what interests him. And then we're building things that can kind of capitalize on that interest. We're showing this kid that they're not alone. We're showing this mom that she's not alone. We are working with our colleagues inside the building to get this kid help. We are communicating early and often with our principal and we're taking notes the entire time. We're time-stepping everything the entire time. Okay, scholar practitioner, you are, these are your field notes. Okay, I have a field notes. little notebook over here somewhere that would have been great to show into the camera right now, but damn it, I don't see it. but you gotta navigate this stuff. And then you have a duty to perform. You have a duty to execute. You have a duty to validate this parent and make sure that they don't feel like they're alone. And again, you can do all the right things. You can say all the right things. You can have all the right intentions and you can still fail. That does not mean that you stop. The best surgeons in the world have lost somebody on the table. You understand? There's always a risk of losing. There's always a risk of it not coming out the way that you think it's gonna come out. That is no reason to not do the thing. And if you are the teacher, the educator that is similar to the person in this story, You making yourself a martyr does no one any good. Not Malik, not your principal, not the rest of those kids, and most importantly, not yourself. You being a martyr does nothing for you. It doesn't make you better in your job. It doesn't make you a better educator. It doesn't make you a better friend or colleague. So don't do it. You don't have to. Be good enough in your field. And it's okay if you're not there right now. Get there. There is no shame in improvement. There's no shame. Most people are bad at their jobs when they start. And I'm not saying that anybody's bad at their job in this. I'm just saying, if we walk around so fearful of losing, you're never gonna win because you never play. You never get in the game. Would you not go all out for this Malik kid? Cause you don't want to put your heart into it and your heart gets broken. Well that's cool in a rom-com, with two adults. But what if one of the people in this story ⁓ is a kid that has so much life in front of them? But we know what happens as soon as that kid moves from a traditional school setting into an alternative one. We know what happens as soon as that kid starts getting suspended. We know the long-term implications. We know that a kid that's been suspended more than two times the chances that they will see a jail cell rises dramatically. We know this. Like we are aware. And these things still happen. So you have to be aware, right? You have to be able to navigate and then you have to be able to exercise that dude. Look. I want, this is a different type of episode and you know, I waffled back and forth between doing this topic and covering Dave Chappelle's recent interview with PBS. I'm a big Dave Chappelle fan and this has sparked up a lot of talk and I actually want to have a good conversation with him, but I think that conversation would be better served with people. So I'm see if I can get some people to come on that show. But I thought this one was good because, I care about people. I've been Malik and I've been Malik's teacher and I've also been the principal. I have empathy for everybody in this scenario. And whoever I'm talking to, I'm putting the onus on them. What does that mean? That means if I'm talking to the teacher, I'm doing awareness, navigation and duty through the teacher. If I'm talking to the principal, I'm doing awareness, navigation and duty through the principal. Like what, if no one else does anything, if everybody else mess up in their job, what are you supposed to do? If I'm talking to the kid, I'm using awareness navigation duty with the kid. And if I'm talking to the parent, so on and so forth. Ignorance will not protect you from the hell that's waiting on the other side of this failure if we lose this kid. It just won't. It might give you some relief in the moment. It might have people hug you later on and when you're telling that story about your fear and they embracing you. Damn, that just turned selfish. What about Lil Malik? We ain't talking about everybody as adults in this scenario. We talking about a bunch of adults in one kid with so much in front of him. So I enjoyed this episode. know I didn't get as juiced or as passionate about certain things, but this is what I do as a profession, as a vocation. And if you want it, I want you to be able to have it. I do want to take in more of these. I want to be there for people. Anyway, with that being said, I want to thank you for listening to Color Commentary. And before I go, we got two things, okay? One, if you have a situation like Ms. Ramirez or any other situation, send it to me. Give me as much detail as you can. Put office hours in the subject line and email me at colorcommentarypod at Gmail. That's at colorcommentarypod at gmail.com. One more time, email me at colorcommentarypod, c-o-l-o-r, c-o-m-m-e-n-t-a-r, y-p-o-d at gmail.com. We will read every single email that comes in and if it fits, we'll work it into the show. I'm gonna change names and I'll change some details. Don't worry, unless you just want that stuff out, but it'll be a judgment call if you still do. ⁓ my friends reached out to me with these problems all the time, or they know somebody that is going through that and they, we, we tend to get connected in that way. ⁓ so now I want to open it up to just everybody listening. If you are a teacher, a parent, a student, a principal, social worker, community member, whatever, and you're trying to figure out how to fight for this community, how to fight for a kid's education or a family's agency, bring it to me. I'm with it. And then two, if you want to support the show and rep the work and grab something from my agentic line, you can do so at charlescodedthird.com. You'll find stuff like this here. I designed this sweater. I love this sweater. I love it as a shirt. It's starting to get some buzz. know that now my love languages agency is just, that's the topper. That thing is always going to sell. But you know, there's some different new heat and I hope you get a chance to check it out. Every piece funds is research, the fellowship and you know, the communities that we're trying to serve. And if you like what you hear, subscribe, leave a five star rating, share it on social media and join us every Thursday for more color commentary with Dr. Cole. Until then, keep questioning, keep thinking and keep your head up. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. With that being said, y'all have a good one. All right, peace.