A grid of webcam windows frames a portrait of educators from across the country. In this meeting of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network Book Club, a teacher on the Great Plains turns on his mic and sighs to an instructional coach in the Mid-Atlantic. A discussion of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress has turned to how we follow her lead in fostering progressive, feminist, and antiracist classrooms. The teacher furrows his brow, thumbs his gold-yellow copy, and searches for how to ask what’s been needling him: “How do I implement this in a space and school where just reading it might get me fired?” Next to him, an administrator in New England lowers her head. A support services case manager in the Deep South nods knowingly.

At the end of a teacher’s Monday, there’s little relief. After surviving Sunday’s scaries and Monday’s gauntlets of meetings, classes, planning, and grading, the reward is getting to do it all over again Tuesday. They and Sisyphus, both, find themselves back at the foot of the mountain, far away from Bread Loaf’s summer sunshine, warm connections, and high ideas.

This year, Genithia Hogges and I decided to intervene. Every first Monday of the month, we convened BLTN Book Club to bring teachers closer: to one another and to the pedagogical principles and social justice virtues we aspired to in The Barn.

It felt necessary. In August, I felt on fire about learning, literature, and classrooms like I hadn’t in years, in large part thanks to BLTN. I was desperate to keep that passion hot, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone. I thought to do what I’ve done with other dear thought partners before: to keep reading together. Gathering as a group, I hoped, we’d each be far more likely to fan our collective flame than burn ourselves out.

It’s been satisfying being able to offer each other some respite, if only for a brief hour each month. Each meeting begins with check-in on how each of us is faring. It’s a chance to celebrate our victories (promotions! births! marriages! making it through particularly rough patches!) and commiserate in our struggles (conflicts with colleagues, tensions with administrators and boards, managing our many competing obligations). We see each other, and for a moment, that we’re not in this work alone.

After, we dive into that month’s reading. Our texts and conversations have ranged widely. We raved about how Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X has engaged students across genders in our classrooms, and we pondered how to help kids appreciate the interior complexity of Rene in Nella Larsen’s Passing. We mapped out how to implement Lorena Escort German’s Textured Teaching framework, and we wondered how viable it might be, at our respective campuses, to realize  the vision of Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy. 

For me, revisiting Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed fifteen years into my teaching career was invigorating and nourishing. The way he elevates classroom dialogue to the struggle to truly “name the world,” as “the right of everyone” to point out its problems and solve them, made even routine journaling feel critical and urgent again. Hearing his call “to liberate [ourselves] and [our] oppressors as well” challenged me to reframe my curriculum and challenge my students anew. Conversations in my Humanities class have shifted from “What makes a good person?” to “How do we liberate all people to be their best, truest selves?”

Last month, discussing hooks, we sat with the Great Plainsman’s big, existential question. After he posed it, there was a moment of affirming, processing silence. Then, one-by-one, we did what we do best: Come together to embrace the challenge and wrap our minds around the problem. The New Englander strategizes how he might adhere to the assigned curriculum while fitting in, on the margins, texts in conversation with critical themes and questions. The case manager assures him that co-constructing affirmative learning communities with students is, itself, a resistance to replication of banking models of learning and systemic domination. The coach admires the teacher for shouldering this rock uphill, because doing this work is most valuable where it’s most hostile to do so.

I’ve left each meeting feeling warmed. It’s my hope that everyone’s felt similarly reassured, reminded both of the community of intellectual folks we’re a contributing member of, and of the moral- and resource-support we offer one another. With each other’s help, we got through Tuesday and took one step closer back to The Mountain. 

Brian Hotchkiss teaches at Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.