Glad tidings arrived a couple weeks ago. Fatima Ponzo — a former student we watched grow up in our school community at Shoemaker Campus — wrote to say she has her own classroom now. Seventh grade math and science, right here in Philadelphia. She’s excited about the school year, and she asked the question every new teacher asks the people who taught them: “any advice?”
I answered her the way our elders answered us. And because she is not the only one — several of our former students are walking into their first classrooms this fall, and every educator, first year or twenty-fifth, is walking into the first days of school — we’re putting the answer where all of them can reach it. So this letter begins with her and ends with all of us.
Dear Fatima,
First things first: welcome to nation building.
That’s not a slogan. Teaching is how a people builds itself, generation by generation. When you stand in front of those seventh graders, you are not just delivering math and science. You are shaping the adults who will raise the children who will inherit whatever we leave behind. You teach the child in front of you, and you teach that child’s grandchildren. That has always been the assignment. Here’s some advice.
Learn your content deeply. Build your relationships deeper. Some educators love their content more than they love children. You will meet them. The most effective educators love their students first and let that love discipline everything else — their planning, their grading, their patience. Children can tell the difference within a week. Master your standards, yes. Know your fractions and your photosynthesis cold. But never confuse covering material with reaching a child. We want rigor and relationships, love and steadfastness — and the outcomes that follow.
If they didn’t learn it, you didn’t teach it. Write that on an index card and tape it inside your desk drawer. Children are always learning something — the question is whether they’re learning what you intended or learning that school is not for them. When a lesson flops, resist the urge to blame the students. Go back to the tape like an athlete. Adjust. Reteach. Their learning is the only evidence of your teaching that counts.
Find your elders. Do not attempt the first year alone. New teachers who get real mentoring and collaborative support stay in the profession at higher rates than those left to sink or swim. Identify the veteran down the hall whose classroom hums, and ask if you can watch her teach. Ask early, ask loudly, ask often. Asking for help is a professional skill. The teachers who burn out fastest are usually the ones who suffered in silence.
Know the tradition you just joined. You are now part of a lineage that includes educators who taught reading when teaching reading was a crime. Black educators have always understood the classroom as contested ground and treated teaching as an act of resistance and love at once. Study that history. It will steady you on the days when the job feels impossible, because the people who came before you did this work under conditions far worse, with resources far fewer, and their students changed the world.
You come from an intellectual genealogy that treats teaching as the purest form of activism — a way of honoring both your ancestors and your descendants. It calls for deep preparation, intellectually rigorous study and practice, and a commitment to lead and serve your classes with your brilliance, patience, courage, and humility. Make your ancestors proud — and your descendants prouder.
Enlist in the right war. You will be invited into a new argument every week — gender wars, generational wars, staff-lounge feuds, whatever is trending. Decline. Useless arguments drain energy your students need. The war is against injustice, illiteracy, and innumeracy. Lerone Bennett Jr. taught that an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor — there is no neutral ground to stand on. The work is building skills and positive racial identity, learning your students’ aspirations, and inspiring them to achieve mightily. Anything that doesn’t serve that work is a distraction dressed up as a debate.
Embed yourself in the community. Learn the neighborhood, not just the building. Show up at the rec center game. Call families with good news before you ever have to call with a concern — make the first phone call home a celebration. Families are your partners, and the parent who seems hardest to reach is often the one who has been burned by schools before. Earn their trust the slow way: you earn trust by being trustworthy.
Mindsets matter most. Mama used to say that at many schools you’ll need to avoid the teachers’ lounge because of how some adults disparage children, their parents, and their communities. Today that lounge can live in inboxes, group chats, and text threads. We teach our high school teaching apprentices that mindsets matter most, and the same applies to us educators — really, to anyone. Guard yours.
Protect your joy. This profession will take everything you offer it and ask for more. Protecting your joy is part of the work. Sleep. Pray. Laugh with your people. Keep friends who knew you before you had a classroom. Set hours you can sustain for a whole career, not just a school year, and do not apologize for them. A depleted teacher cannot pour into anyone. Rhythm, wellness, self-care, and longevity in this profession deserve more than a paragraph — a whole post on that is coming. Please hold me accountable for writing it.
Stay. Your first year will measure nothing except your willingness to grow. You may cry in your car after a rough day — I certainly did — but getting up is what counts. You will teach a lesson so bad you’ll want to apologize to the whole class. So did we. Somewhere around year three, the things that felt impossible become instinct. Our students need you on the other side of that curve. Stay long enough to become the teacher your students will brag about.
We Are Cheering for You
Fatima, this last part is for you and for everyone else opening a classroom door in the coming weeks — first-year teachers and veterans alike, from Shoemaker and everywhere else. The first days of school make beginners of us all. If you had great teachers, pay it forward. If you were in a school that was wanting, become the teacher you wish you had and knew you needed.
To our former students stepping into schools this fall — classrooms and offices alike: your teachers know. Some of you are teaching, and some of you are recruiters and school communications teams, deans and counselors, behavioral health specialists and paraprofessionals — and at least one of you is now a principal. Nation building takes every one of those hands. We’ve been passing your news around like proud grandparents — your deans, your coaches, the teachers who wrote your recommendation letters. You were leaders in our classrooms long before anyone handed you a roster or a caseload, and now your students get what we got.
Pieces of this letter already belong to Kirby and the Amayas, to Chris and Maye-gan, and the Shirley Sisters, Foster and Xavier, Bryce and Jaya, Makiyah and Cook, Hamilton and Hodges, Vorhees and Armanie, Ricketts and Verlaina, Ariana and Ayatullah; to Tiyanna holding it down; to Rasheen and Rousseau, Jasmine Byrd and Kim Clark, Alana Smith and Daria Ross, Cherae and Sharia Mapp, Townes and Nashae, Chanel and Zabria, Manning and Tyler, Asia and Chavell, Chloe and Nafeesa, Sheena and Aliajah, Lashay and Morghan and Lenore, Whaley and Alexis, Aelin-Alexandria and JaNelle and Festus, Dominique, Tiffany and Kaiyah, Kimmyra and Shadiyah and Maria, Carese, Ziggy, Tierra Sedden (our first principal our the bunch), and the rest of the legendary #ShoeCrew — teachers and staff, some just beginning and many of them seasoned veterans by now, all of them making us look way smarter than we are.
In Iran we had a saying: say it to the door so the wall can hear it.
Fatima, this letter is addressed to you — but the whole ShoeCrew (and beyond) is meant to hear it.
The poet Amir Sulaiman teaches that we need the wisdom of the old and the zeal of the young. You bring the zeal; stay close enough to your elders to borrow the wisdom, and one day you will be the one lending it. Consider yourself part of the long arc of community building — an intergenerational freedom force. To paraphrase Mama Mary Church Terrell, we lift and lead as we climb — so be sure to pour into yourselves. Your craft is a game changer for your students, and what you inspire them to change in this world will impact us all sooner than you might think. Your students join that arc too: as they develop and hone their sense of purpose, coupled with academic and social skills and social and cultural capital, it will inform their political capital — and their power to touch the world in ways that God will bless us through them.
My favorite teacher, Baba Changa, used to tell us that students are known by their teachers, and teachers are known by their students. Let it be known — by your mindset and your actions, your preparation and your receptivity to feedback and accountability — that you are here for your students and for the trajectories of their grandchildren.
Baldwin, asked in 1970 whether there was still reason to hope, answered that hope is invented every day. You and your students are the hope we’ve prayed for — the hope our ancestors prophesied through their prayers and their actions. Why else would they have stood and fought so brilliantly, and for so long?
One more assignment, and it’s a long one. Somewhere in your classroom this year sits children who could be teachers with classrooms of their own one day. Start recruiting. Tell them what we told you: get an education so you can replace us and improve on everything we did.
If any of this proves beneficial in your lives, we’ll say what Malcolm said: that was from God. Only the mistakes were ours.
Love,
El-Mekki
