Good evening and welcome. I feel extremely honored to have been asked to speak on behalf of Berkeley's Teacher Education Program. It could have been many of us up here sharing our experience. And as I share mine, I hope you find something to connect with your own time in our program. Friends, family and people we belong to, I'm sure you're all wondering how we got the best, most creative, most brilliant and real future educators all in one program.
Trust me, I was thinking the same thing all year. Our K-12 students are so lucky to have a group of exceptional educators ready to teach them, and I feel just as lucky to have learned beside them. I remember walking into class on the first day of our summer session nearly a year ago, and trying to find where my home group was sitting as quickly as possible.
Home group number two Avery, Jesus, and Sarah, where my first tethers into a brand new space. I remember unfolding my name tent every day and putting it on the table amidst a sea of other personalized and colorful names. I remember holding the handheld mic and doing my best not to react when hearing my voice fill the room for the first time.
I remember chatting with Yena, Sophia, and Julian after our first observations and debriefs. I felt awkward, excited, and a little mortified after watching a video of myself teaching for the first time. Thankfully, I had my faculty advisor and mentor, Manny sitting next to me. And he affirmed my discomfort and then intentionally nudged me into reflection and a commitment to growth.
I reflect on who I was then and how it informed the kind of teacher I wanted to be. There were so many possibilities. The trajectory of how I developed as a teacher since that very first observation has not been a clear path. I was a comet that shot through space and crashed into everything as I made impact. I crashed into discomfort, non-closure, uncertainty and vulnerability. And there are marks that remind me of that path.
During my last takeover, a time when I assumed all roles and responsibilities of the lead teacher, I was in the middle of a lesson, and I started to crash. I was using every attention getter I knew and still could not hold the focus of my students. I started to panic, frustrated, embarrassed, and a little defeated that my lesson was not going as planned.
Manny, who was observing, calmly approached me in a moment of transition and asked if I was open to real time feedback. I enthusiastically and desperately nodded yes. He said, “you're being a little too nice. Be firm. Stand in your authority. Find your teacher voice. It's there. It's in you. Use it.” In this moment, as Manny reminded me of my power, he was my bridge.
In transformative arts, we read a piece of work called “The Bridge Poem,” by black queer feminist Kate Rushin. As a white woman, it's important for me to read the work of those whose voices are often excluded from mainstream storytelling. Proving that brilliant, truthful writing creates connection across identities, there is a line that resonated intensely with my journey this year, and it reads: “the bridge I must be is the bridge to my own power.”
When I first read this line, I connected to the essence of standing up for myself and believing in my own power. I spent the year surrounded by this group's authenticity and willingness to be vulnerable, inspired, yet sometimes feeling like an imposter. I had plenty of opportunities to learn from my mistakes and question my abilities to teach with the capacity that the BTEP faculty believed I could.
Reading this poem reminded me of all the power I had accumulated this year. All I needed to do was connect myself to it. As a teacher, I constantly bridge. I bridge students to school, families to their students’ learning, new content to background knowledge, languages to other languages. But I can only be this bridge, one that can transcend hardship and stay strong enough for others to cross, unless I have traced the path and memorized the route on the bridge to my own power.
The bridge I must be is the bridge to my own power, so that I can be the person who holds the hand of my students as they cross the bridge to their own power. I want to be the person holding a sign with their name on the sidelines, cheering them on. I want to be able to nudge them a little closer to taking the first step over open water.
Who helped you draw the blueprints for your bridge? Which person held your hand as you crossed it for the first time? Who passed you the tools you needed to rebuild your bridge after a storm? The bridge our students must be is the bridge to their own power.
So ground yourself and reach out until you've reinforced every piece of a child's wavering bridge. Hold the hand of every child as they cross their bridge to their own becoming. I've been stretched far too thin between different worlds, let too many people walk over the bridge across my back. But those days are over. I belong in my power. And so do you. And so do they.
Together we can create suspension and connection across seas for generations to come. There are people who came before us and people here now who have helped each of us build or find a bridge to something. The bridges are there, and they're only the beginning. Cross them.
Thank you.