Rob Riordan:
We decided we should have a policy committee, students on it, parents on it, teachers on it. We met at my house. We decided, “Here are the goals.” It was not about policy. It was about goals and principles. One was diversity, celebration of diversity. One was about redefined student teacher relationships, and one was that anyone who’s affected by a decision has a right to participate in it. And the director who was in these things says, “I can live with that.” We made a document, and we put it up on the wall, The Goals and Principles of the Pilot School. Like 10 years later, Jonathon Saphier, teacher, researcher and stuff like that, written The Skillful Teacher, he comes in, and he said, “This is amazing. You’ve got these principles on the wall. I can see them in action in the school.” That embedded in me the importance of having principles.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. And that was the voice of Rob Riordon, co-founder of High Tech High, as well as the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and High Tech High’s former emperor of rigor. Let’s call him Emperor of Rigor Emeritus. In August, I sat down with Rob and Kaleb Rashad, High Tech High’s interim CEO. We’re going to release a series of fireside chats between Rob and Kaleb over the next few months. But for this inaugural episode, each of them talked about the paths that brought them here. We’ll start with Rob. Rob graduated from Haverford College in 1964 and joined the Peace Corps where he went to a village in Morocco’s Rift Mountains to be a teacher. I’ll let Rob take the story from here.

Rob Riordan:
I thought I was there to teach English as a foreign language. When I got there, I learned I was going to be a teacher of phys ed in French. So I was teaching phys ed in French, and it was very structured. It’s not so difficult to structure a lesson in French and phys ed. I mean, there’s the [foreign language 00:02:05], the [foreign language 00:02:05], [foreign language 00:02:05], [foreign language 00:02:05]. The [foreign language 00:02:10] where you practice what you did. And then I got to teach English a little bit.
But it was very structured and was very teacher centered, and I was a performer. And I got pretty good at that. And that’s kind of what I thought teaching was about. And I realized that teaching was something I knew I could do. So when I got back to this country, I applied to 12 graduate schools, and to my surprise, I got into Harvard where I was thinking, “Well, teaching is something I know I can do, so I’ll do that for a while and then I’ll do something else.” And then it turned out to be what I’ve done all my life basically.

Alec Patton:
And it was through Harvard, the next thing I want to talk to you about, that you end up at Miles College, a historically Black college in Birmingham, Alabama.

Rob Riordan:
So I had to do an internship, a teaching internship. They had a paid internship kind of year. It was a very nice structure. And I was assigned to go to a junior high school in Newton, Mass. And I was thinking, after having spent a couple of years in Morocco, I was thinking I didn’t really want to go to a suburban junior high school. But meanwhile, when I came out of the Peace Corps for a summer, I was part of the training staff for the next group. And I met this guy there, who’s part of the staff also, Badi Foster, African-American scholar who was part of the group.
And at one point he said to me, he said, “Where are you headed? What are you doing?” I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “You should go south. They need good people in the South.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” And I just filed that away. And when I was assigned to teach in Newton, at the middle school, that day in The New York Times, there was an article about a Harvard Dean that was going south to Birmingham, Alabama at Miles College, a historically Black college, to be the director of freshmen studies. He was leaving his position as dean to go and work there. So I went over to his office that day. I just went over. He let me in and stuff, and we started talking. I said, “I hear you’re going to Birmingham.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I want to go with you.”

Alec Patton:
And what was his name?

Rob Riordan:
John Monro. Really, really interesting and important guy. Working class roots, became a dean at Harvard, and started working in the summers at Miles. And the charismatic president there, Lucius Pitts, who was active in all of that civil rights stuff and stuff around Birmingham and so forth, convinced him to come down. So he said to me, “Well, if it’s okay with them, your program, it’s okay with me.” And I went to them and they said, “If it’s okay with him, it’s okay with us.”
And so that’s how I landed this internship in Birmingham, which was again, just a wonderful… First of all, I was teaching freshmen English there, and the first thing that we read with the students was the autobiography of Malcolm X, which was my introduction to the autobiography of Malcolm X. And so we had a curriculum, we read texts that were very important to my own growth and development, and my own growth of consciousness around race in America. And particularly what had been happening in Birmingham. I was there in 1967, ’68, and I was saying, “Wow, things look pretty rugged here.”
A group of us went to integrate a laundromat and this… We did some of that kind of stuff. But I was saying, “Wow.” And people said, “You should have been here five years ago.” They said, “This is nothing.” So there I was, I learned a lot. I learned a lot with John Monro. I mean, it was like your mentor. We had the same period off. So we would meet in the cafeteria together, talk about what was going on, because some of the stuff was new to him as well. So he was modeling everything.
This was the day of the mimeograph machine. You had to crank it up and it was inky and dirty and everything. So you run off these copies for your class the next day. I’d be there at 2:00 AM, he’d be there at 2:00 AM, and we’d be talking there too. So it was like this immersion in this effort to really figure out what freshmen English ought to look like in a historically Black college, like Miles, and so on. We had some very interesting young people on that staff, Black and white people who were just really inspiring. So it was a very inspiring year for me.

Alec Patton:
And when you say you learned a lot, what stays with you? What did you learn?

Rob Riordan:
A couple of things. One was the value of just plunging in and doing writing with students, doing expressive writing with students. So one of the things I had picked up at Harvard was this writing curriculum that was, it was James Moffett had developed it. And he wrote a whole book called, A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum. And it was the writing piece of that was about free writes with different prompts and so on. And I did a lot of that with my students. And it was working with those students. I mean, they were developing as writers that, not that they become great writers or something like that, but they became engaged writers and so on. So I learned something about pedagogy there, which was kind of a liberating pedagogy. As opposed to running a classroom where you’ve got to get this and I’m telling you what it is and you better get it and I’m going to test you on it and all that kind of stuff.
The other thing that I took from there… The thing that I took from Haverford was about looking at text and seeing what you see in it and sharing that. I mean, I had a freshman English seminar where every Friday you met with a group of three other students with the professor and read your paper that you had written about the work we were reading that week. One or two of you would read the paper and everybody would critique it. It was a pure critique session. It was a session of sharing your work and all that kind of stuff. So that is something that I brought with me to Miles dialoguing about what we’re looking at together and so on.
The big learning was this. I thought it would be a great idea to do a film series because there’d been a great film series at Haverford. So, let’s do a film series here at Miles. So I went to John Monro, I said, “Yeah, I’d be interested in doing these.” He said, “Go ahead, order the films, set it up.” It was like, “Just go. Go ahead and do it.” So the first film that I showed, on a Saturday morning, and students came to see it, was the Mouse That Roared Peter Sellers, a Peter Seller’s comedy. That was a great movie. It was a very white movie, very British and all that.
And I had in mind to bring in other movies that I thought were cool and everything. So a couple of days later, I was at the cafeteria taping up a poster advertising the next film, what it’s going to be and where it’s going to be. And Ronald Jackson, the head of the student body was not far from me talking with a couple of friends, and he said, “There goes whitey with his picture show.” I kind of blanched a little, blanched is the word for it, I turned more white almost. I was saying to myself, “Wait a minute, that’s not…” And then it took me a while, but I realized he really nailed me, and he really positioned me, and caused me to think in another way about why I was there, and whether I was there to bring things to people or not. Who was I, as a northern white person, to come and bring what, to students at a Black college. So it caused me to really think about my purpose a little bit and to become more humble.

Alec Patton:
Take me back to that thought process. What was going through your head at that point hearing that?

Rob Riordan:
I think it was typical white response, “Yeah, okay, I’m white, but I’m okay. I’m a good person. I’m here to help.” And all of that stuff was going through it. It was a kind of a missionary sense, I think. I don’t think I was ever a really cut and dried missionary. I don’t think I was terribly missionary. But there was a piece of that, that I really needed to look at.

Alec Patton:
When did you become aware that you needed to look at that? Was it while you were in Birmingham or was it later on, do you think?

Rob Riordan:
Right away. It was just right away. I mean, the other thing that was going on was I was a drummer. I had done a lot of jazz work and stuff like that. I brought my drums down there, so I played some drums. And I was interacting with other colleagues and so forth, really in a kind of collegial way and kind of making music together and this and that and so forth. So I was entering that community in other ways too. Even as I was learning that I was a white person entering this community, I was also doing stuff with people. So there were ways in which I felt like I belonged. The ways in which I was made to feel like I belonged.

Alec Patton:
Did the film program keep going?

Rob Riordan:
Yes, it did. And we thought, with other people, what films we ought to be offering. I remember we then offered one called Come Back, Africa, which had Miriam Makeba in it, and I think Hugh Masekela was in that. I remember that I shifted my sense and engaged other people to help me think about it in terms of what films ought we be looking at. Later I became an English teacher in the summer at a program called Project ABC: A Better Chance. For inner city kids, they would go up to Dartmouth for the summer. And they were all going to go to New England and sometimes even farther apart, but mainly New England prep schools. They were selected out of the inner city to go to these prep schools, and this was their summer preparation.
The year after that, I became the director of the English program at Amherst. And we did some pretty wild things. But the initial thing they did was to show, The Grapes of Wrath. Interesting movie, but a very white movie. And I argued with people there, I said, “That’s not the film you ought to be showing.” But we did stuff. We read with these kids, the autobiography of Malcolm. They put on skits of scenes from that text. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band came to perform there. They went with cameras. I got Polaroid cameras for all of these kids. They all went with their cameras, became journalists. So they were engaged very actively in stuff.
And then at the end of that year, the board of the program, they said… First of all, I had hired a Black colleague from Harvard, a Black reading teacher from Washington DC, and a Black reading teacher from somewhere in Alabama. So I had a staff. And we did stuff that say, “We want these kids to understand more about who they are, where they’re coming from, and that they’re coming from a rich tradition, so that they will be fortified when they enter these prep schools.”
And the prep school people said, “They’re not doing enough of what they’re going to be doing in prep school. And we want you for the next year to hire prep-school teachers to do this work.” So I went ahead and hired my old staff. And I invaded a meeting of the board. They didn’t know I was coming. I couldn’t believe I did some of this stuff. I invaded a meeting of the board to argue against all that stuff that they were saying about what they thought was the best way to prepare kids to enter these settings.
And then I got the word that the program was canceled. And I saw one of my Amherst colleagues a few years later, I said, “So it’s too bad that program got canceled because it was a good program.” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Did the fact that we were going to hire the same people have anything to do with it?” He said, “I think maybe it did.” So that’s a lesson too. You go and you decide you’re going to do something, and you don’t care what the bosses say, you’re going to go ahead and do it. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of kids lost out on a rich summer because of an uncompromising position that I took. I still think it was the right position.
But anyway. We’re getting way off track here. But it’s all part of what I brought to the table at the beginning of High Tech High. And what I brought to the table when I had a chance to work with people starting an alternative school within a school in Cambridge in 1970. I joined them in 1970. It was the second year of the school. But all the stuff about what do we put in front of kids? We read Native Son. We read Martin Luther King’s Birmingham Jail. We read later on Ntozake Shange For Colored Girls and so on.
I mean, there’s just a lot of stuff that was very, very rich. And we didn’t do it because we thought we were going to do something relevant or something. We did that stuff because we thought this was great stuff to read. And because I think we knew instinctively then that Black history is American history. We knew that instinctively. So that was a very, very interesting… I mean, the central office in Cambridge, we were reading Native Son and they made us black out, in all the copies, black out the swear words. So that’s something we agreed to do so that we could read this book with the kids and so on. But I mean, it was pretty wild.

Alec Patton:
That was a public school in a school run by Harvard?

Rob Riordan:
It was a public school. It was a collaboration of Harvard. I was funded through Harvard because I was a graduate student at the time. I was a doctoral student by that time. I had come back from Miles and so forth and Cambridge. And so there were four Cambridge teachers who were founders, and then there were several Harvard graduate students who were founders who were working in it. And I joined that the second year. So I became… Here’s another story. Here we go. I mean, I became the student government advisor. And I’ve always said, “Student government, it doesn’t matter. Student governments don’t do anything. What’s really important is where student of voices emerge elsewhere.”
Anyway, so I was student government. And most of the kids on the student government were Black kids. So we said, first meeting was, “What are we going to call ourselves?” And nobody knew anything. So I said, “How about the IDK?” And they said, “IDK, what’s that?” I said, “I don’t know.” And then they got it. IDK, it stands for, I don’t know. And they thought that was so cool that they adopted. They became the IDK. And they’d be walking down the hall and they’d say, they’re talking to somebody, “Yeah, I’m in the IDK.” And kids would say to them, “What’s the IDK?” And they’d say, “I don’t know.”
Anyway, I had a ball with it. So one day we’re in a meeting, and this school had been under attack because it was hippie dippy. It was multicultural and communist. There was this big public hearing. Somebody proposed that we disband the school the next day on the school committee. So we turned out. I mean the accusations were unbelievable. The crowning one was, “Walk up into that pilot school on the fourth floor, go into classrooms, you will not see anywhere in the pilot school, an American flag.” And that was the crowning accusation.
I mean, they accused us of being connected because the Harvard program, also called, Triple T, and there was a guy who was involved in a radical Brighton bank robbery where somebody got killed who had been in the Triple T program. So they linked us to that. We’re linked with bank robbers. And we’re teaching violence. They stole a story a kid had written that had vampires in it that attacked somebody. And they made copies, 500 copies they distributed to the auditorium of all the people in this hearing and said, “This is what they’re teaching in the pilot school.”
Anyways, so we had some slides to show. And in one of the slides, in a classroom, there’s an American flag flying. So the colleague who was showing those slides, we came to that slide, she just let it sit up there for about 15 seconds in silence. And then she said, “You will notice the American flag in the upper left-hand corner.” End of story, I mean, six to one. We made it through and all. So we’re under attack for this stuff.
This was a school where students sat on the hiring committee to hire staff, and they held the balance of power. There were more students on these committees. So there was a lot of student activity. So I’m with the IDK, and these kids are saying, the Black students there are saying, “You see what’s going on here?” And I didn’t know what they were talking about. It turned out what they were talking about was a new director who had come in. Because we had been under attack, we were undersubscribed the next year. Parents were afraid to take a chance on us.
So we needed 60 students for that year, and we had maybe 30 new students. We needed more students. So this guy came in, and knowing that, he admitted 14 new students and they were all white. And that’s what these kids in the IDK were seeing. “You see what’s going on here?” Got these new students coming in, and it changed a little bit the balance of classrooms and what that felt like and stuff like that. And so they decided they were going to protest. And they had a staff member who was helping them and so forth. And they made three demands, a moratorium on admissions, immediately, recruitment of Black students, and admission of new Black students, and hiring a Black counselor. And because we had some backing from Harvard, we were able to meet those demands. So it was student power that was happening.
But meanwhile, the staff said to the director, “You can’t do this. We’re about diversity and honoring and celebrating diversity.” And he said, “Look at these kids. Here’s the list. It’s diverse.” Well, it’s a diverse group of white students. So he said, “I can’t be the director here without some kind of policy directive about what I’m here for and what my role is.”
So we decided we should have a policy committee, students on it, parents on it, teachers on it. I chaired it. We met at my house. We decided, “Here are the goals.” It was not about policy. It was about goals and principles. One was diversity, a celebration of diversity. One was about redefined student teacher relationships. And one was that anyone who’s affected by a decision has a right to participate in it. And the director who was in these things says, “I can live with that.” We made a document and we put it up on the wall, The Goals and Principles of the Pilot School.
Like 10 years later, Jonathon Saphier, teacher, researcher and stuff like that, written The Skillful Teacher. He comes in and he said, “This is amazing. You’ve got these principles on the wall. I can see them in action in the school.” That embedded in me the importance of having principles. And this was long before I met Larry Rosenstock or got in that work with him or anything. It was like 1972.
And my doctoral thesis was a five-year case history of that school, and it was called, Education Towards Shared Purpose: The Evolution of Goals and Practices Over Five Years in an Alternative Public High School. So shared purpose has always been important to me. And the notion that it’s important to have a framework to work from became very important to me then. And so that when Larry and I started working in the New Urban High School Project, visiting all these inner city schools, people thought we were going to do a model. No, they were very different schools. Deborah Meier in New York, Chicago Voc, huge school, Hoover High here, very different schools. But what were the principles that they seemed to share?
And so we developed design principles for the New Urban High School Project, and that’s what led us. Three of those became, and then four, became design principles at High Tech High when we opened High Tech High. Just because we really felt like it was important to have that kind of a framework, so that people who came in knew what they were signing up for. And they may even misunderstand it and there would be conversations about it, but that was going to be the framework.

Alec Patton:
So I’m seeing a few things here. I’m seeing with the going out and getting the cameras and documenting Preservation Hall, I’m seeing project-based learning there. I’m seeing with the kids being on the hiring committee, I’m seeing not just student voice, but student power within the structure, shared power. I’m seeing culturally responsive pedagogy with the text that you’re choosing, making sure the kids see themselves in what they’re reading. And I’m seeing the importance of shared design principles that kids and adults are coming up with together. I want to give one more prehistory thing here, because I’ve heard this talked about, but I’ve never heard the actual story. I’m just going to jump ahead. You teach English at Cambridge, French and Latin. Incredibly old high school, public high school. Let’s get the meeting. What actually happened?

Rob Riordan:
So I came there in 1970. I met Larry in 1987 or ’88. So I took a couple of years out to write my thesis and came back to the school. I’d been in that school for 15 years. And then I left that little school within a school to start a school-wide writing center for the whole high school based on peer tutoring. Because I had developed some reputation as a writing teacher, and the coordinator of English had said, “We want to start a writing center. Will you do it?” And I said, “Well…” It was computerized. I said, “Forget the computer. Just give me some kids who know how to talk about writing and I’ll train them.”
But I was ready, partly because the way my family was developing and so forth, I was ready to leave that school and do something a little different, but stay within the high school. So we did this writing center. That’s when Larry’s carpentry students were coming up to the writing center for help with their writing and struggling to write a book report and so on. And writing differently when I would ask them how to design a circuit board or whatever, be present in the writing. I was seeing that.
So Larry, by that time, had been in the school maybe seven years. I think he came around 1980. And I had been there for 17 years, but we had been in the same building together for seven years and never met. And then we met on a faculty committee, and I talked to him about what I was seeing in the writing center with his students. And he was saying, “Well, yeah, they’re doing interesting math in carpentry, building furniture and so forth, and they’re failing math class.” So we just started having these conversations about what would it be like? And we shared this whole other thing about radical background and stuff like that. Anti-war. We had been on similar journeys. So we started talking about what would it be like to have a school where we linked hands and minds together, integrated the curriculum, integrated school with the world, and integrated the students.

Alec Patton:
And what did that mean to you at the time, linking hands and minds?

Rob Riordan:
It meant having kids designing and making things, and engaging in projects and linking their academic work to it. So your work in Polaroid, for example, on an internship, your experience there is the text for your humanities course. And we access it through writing and other ways and so on, and we connect that text to other important texts to read.

Alec Patton:
What would you say was the first time that you did a project with students that felt like, “We are doing project-based learning. This is a project”?

Rob Riordan:
I never thought that I was doing project-based learning. That wasn’t in the wind at that point. But I think the first projects I was doing, in a way, I think, that work with the IDK was a project. Shepherding that work to get real stuff done in the school. I had a particular writing course where we would read texts and we would respond to the text with some analysis of passages leading to essays, but we’d also respond with little autobiographical snippets. Like a time you run away from something. The guy in The Man Who Lived Underground runs away. He’s running from the cops. A time you ran away from something. I could tell you a story about a kid who wrote about the time she ran away.
So they would write these little things, but then they would collect these things as material and write an autobiography at the end. And at the end, we would go to somebody’s house and we would read our autobiographies to each other. Fabulous stuff, unbelievable stuff that kids were writing. But it was a presentation of learning and an exhibition sort of. So that was the kind of personal writing project that we did.
The other thing I got involved in was putting, at our school, we started putting on shows. So we had a drama teacher who actually was Matt Damon’s drama teacher, Ben Affleck’s drama teacher and so forth, who in the first couple of years wrote plays. Even before that, we had some Black students that got together and wrote a play and put it on called, Nothing Is Something. And you talk about a hip-hop ethic. I mean, this was 1973, and it was like a hip-hop ethic that they put this show on.

Alec Patton:
How do you mean?

Rob Riordan:
The notion of creating something out of nothing. Tupac talks about the rose that springs up from the concrete. Something from nothing was what this thing was about. I don’t remember the lines of it. I remember the title. I can see those kids putting it on, and it was kind of dance, it was kind of rappy and so on. Anyways, it was fabulous. But then the whole school started putting stuff on. And Jerry, the drama teacher, first couple of years wrote a script and we produced it. And most of the school was involved in one way or another in producing it.
There was a school committee member who came to one of our shows and said, “I’ve been to Broadway. I’ve seen shows. The show I saw last night was better than anything I’ve seen in Broadway.” We put on really good stuff. And then every year, even after I left that school, I was in the band. I played in the band. I played the vibes and the drums in the band. So I was a member of the band for 25 years for this school. For the annual show, for this school, it would pack the school auditorium for three nights. And it became less like plays and more like a review of skits, many of which would be then written by the students. And for example, students who had written some stuff from my writing class, I would say, “Wow, man, this belongs in the play. We need to put this on in the play somehow.” So we would pull stuff.
So that was project-based learning in a way. We didn’t think of it that way. And I didn’t think of my classes as project-based classes, but we were engaged in projects. And then there was a whole… I ran a three season wilderness program. So talk about projects. I mean, getting ready to go on the trip, going on the trip, doing first aid simulations on the trip, all this kind of stuff with student leaders. So taking student leaders for training to do this, going on scouting trips before you took the big trip with your student leaders to scout it out, and all this kind of stuff was going on. That was all projects. But that was all outside the classroom, as many projects are in schools, that was all beyond the classroom.

Alec Patton:
You sort of dropped this and then moved on. The girl who wrote the piece about running away, what happened?

Rob Riordan:
So we’re reading, The Man Who Lived Underground. I shared that with you, Richard Wright’s story.

Kaleb Rashad:
Love that book. Picked it up myself. Yes. It’s brilliant.

Rob Riordan:
It’s unbelievable. I love it. So we had the personal writing in connection to it. I said, the kids had six choices, “Write about a time you ran away. Write about a time you had a revelation about something.” And there were six choices. And there was always a choice of, or pick your own, write about something else you want to write about.
So this girl, her name is Francis. I knew her fairly well because she was a runner and she was a state champion miler. And she came into this class, and the class was full of really good writers, and she didn’t think she was such a good writer. She was a Black student, but there she was. And I run with her and stuff because I was a runner. So I knew her pretty well. So she writes this thing about running away when she was 10 years old from her foster home. And it’s impeccable. It’s no wasted words. And it ends saying, “I knew… This was my fourth foster home or something. I knew that I would be put away somewhere and that my life would never be the same. But he hit me for the last damn time and I was out of here.” Then she says, “I look back at my life knowing that my life would never be the same.” That’s the end of what she wrote.
So I read it. I’m waiting at the door the next day, the classroom door, and Francis comes up. I said, “Francis, this thing you wrote, this is really something. Would you be willing to read this in the class?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “Francis, this is a really good piece. If you’re telling me you don’t want to read it because you think it’s no good, that’s not a good reason.” She said, “Okay, I’ll read it.” So she read it. There was this silence in the classroom. It was a long silence. And I was thinking, “Oh, I’m the teacher here, so maybe I should say something about what she has just written and how it relates and so on.” But I didn’t. I just waited.
And a young woman, who was seen by many to be the best writer in the school, she’d write poetry, write stories, she would write raps. Our school was called the Pilot. She was called the Girl Rapper from Pilot. She said, “That’s the best piece I’ve heard in here.” And then other people started to talk. And Francis could not have had a better response than that response from that kid, that accomplished writer. Then we put that scene on in the play, the pilot play. There was a thing of kids watching a ball game on bleachers, and they were saying what was going through their minds. And there were kids who would come from different places and different pieces that the kids had written were presented as monologues. So Francis saw a student get up and deliver what she had written as a monologue, powerful stuff.
So I wondered and wondered, and wondered afterwards, that 15 seconds or 30 seconds or so of silence, what was that like? What did that feel like for Francis? What was going through her mind? So I don’t know, it was 10 or 15 years later, I called her up, she was back in town, and I said, “Francis, let’s go out to lunch.” So we had lunch. And I said, “Do you remember?” She remembered, of course. I said, “I just have been wondering, you read your piece, and then it was silent in the classroom. Do you remember that? What was going on for you?” And she said, “Oh, yeah, I remember.” She named every person around the table. I mean, she had that visual of everyone who was there. And I said, “So what were you feeling?” She said, “I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t know what to think. And then Libby said what she said, and then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I have something to say after all.’” That’s the end of the story.
Anyway, how did we get started on this? Part of it’s about student voice, about servicing and honoring student voice, and recognizing that our experiences provide us with text that’s worth exploring, articulating, and sharing with the world. So that’s sort of the piece de resistance about experience as text for me. Because we took it, she did it, it was in response to a text. We heard it and we put it on for the public.

Alec Patton:
Kaleb, what’s coming up for you?

Kaleb Rashad:
It’s hard not to go all the way back to all the things that Rob was sharing at the beginning because there’s just so many incredibly, powerful, intellectual, spiritual, social, ecological threads to pull on. For me, what’s coming up, is I hear this story about Francis the runner. First, I want to read that piece. Please send that to me.

Rob Riordan:
I’ll see if I can find it.

Kaleb Rashad:
I would love to just read that story and your take on it in writing too. I think what comes up for me the most, maybe, two things. Rob and I over the past couple of days have been having time and opportunity to spend with different staff, groups of teachers here across High Tech High. And one of the themes that has come up is about the sort of debunking that we are not just about projects, but really rather expressed differently. It’s an understatement to just say that we are confined to just being a project-based school.
The project is a process, and yet the content is so critical in creating a way by which a young person can unearth their lives, their lived experience. And then engage with someone, perhaps a loving, caring adult that can serve as witness to their experiences. That to me, the thing we have talked about, Rob and I, is that this is more than anything, a dialogical project, and dialogue helps sets the stage for healing, for the enlarging of your identity, your sense of purpose and connection and belonging.
And so to me, when I hear that story, I think about… So that’s part one of what comes up for me. I think the second part that comes up for me is thinking about where I come from and the kind of schooling that I experienced, and the kind of schooling… I’m from Florida, by the way. And the type of schooling my nieces and nephews experience right now, and I feel rage.

Alec Patton:
And when you say, what are they experiencing?

Kaleb Rashad:
It is a traditional sort of model of transmission, part one. Part two, there’s a sort of narrowing of what you can learn about on top of that. And then third, there’s a sort of militarization of how you behave is another thing. And so I think those three things combine together with mass batching of kids in these systems. They don’t find themselves in the work, in their experiences, and it just has all these really powerful deleterious sort of effects.
Three of my sister’s boys are all in prison right now. They are kids who are 18 and 20 and 21. All three of them went to the same schools. And so I feel there’s always lots of factors, no doubt about it. And this promise of public education, the way that it has in the evidentiary record since 1865 through this period that we’re living in now, has never been about the inclusion, liberation, healing, recovery of people like me and where I come from. And in fact, it’s been just the opposite. And so I feel a lot of rage about that.

Alec Patton:
Can I ask, when you said about that, if I can say, healing through dialogue that you were describing, that just talking about projects is an understatement and that what you saw in that story. Is there something that comes up for you, either in your position as a leader at High Tech High or in your own teaching where you’ve felt like, “That’s it or that’s heading towards that”? Is there a time that you can think of in a classroom that you sort of either experienced it yourself or seen it somewhere else?

Kaleb Rashad:
Well, yeah. I would start with myself. In my own experience being someone who, again, came out of these systems in the South. It’s hard for me to speak about me without understanding where I come from with my mom, my dad, who were teenagers, that is 18 to 25 during desegregation in the ’60s and ’70s in Gainesville, Florida. It’s hard for me to name my experience here, but I’m a sort of reflection of a lot of their experiences. And in one of those ways, my father, his name was Robert Lee Mentor, he named me as his junior, Robert Lee Mentor Jr. I never questioned that. It’s just a sort of monumenting within people. This is how the colonizer works. It’s not just the physical monuments out there, but they sort of occupy the most, most precious spaces.

Alec Patton:
And he was deliberately named after Robert E. Lee?

Kaleb Rashad:
Correct. Because he was a hero from some perspectives. And so it wasn’t until I got to college, and it wasn’t a project-based school, but it was dialogical. So we read incredibly dense text about questions of identity from multiple perspectives, and then we engage in dialogue with each other about it. So to my previous point about the work we do here at High Tech High about projects, yes, because it attracts young people to be able to do something that is meaningful to them. And it’s a ruse. It’s a way by which the young people might allow you to be in their lives in some way. It’s a venue by which young people can look at their lives in relationship with other people, in a particular place, and pose questions about that both critically and creatively.
In the course of doing that, in the words of Bell Hooks, “Even an abused child can recover with a witness.” And what she’s expressing in that is the power of a person who has suffered some sort of abuse, whether it’s intrapersonal, or with other people, or systematically, institutionally, having an opportunity to witness with another person, have someone to hold you, to give you a sense that you’re not alone in that, there is hope and the recognition of one’s humanity in another. And that is what I’m pointing to as I talk about this sort of power of dialogue through meaningful learning experiences. It’s just a way that young people and people in general can have an opportunity to see themselves. Present, past, and the future version of themselves. Absent of that, we’re shadows of a self.

Alec Patton:
And so were you inspired by that class, by what you were reading, the process that led to you changing your name?

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah, 100%. But more like that process of engaging with a thing, text, picture, an environment, engaging in the dialogue, posing more nuanced questions to myself. When I got out of the Marines, I was a knucklehead, man. I was hard on the inside. I was shaped that way. The environment I came from, you had to fight. You used to practice fighting because that was how you negotiated conflict. And so there was a beautiful woman. Her name was Toi-San Workman. She was probably 40 years my senior. And essentially she adopted me into her family when I got out of the Marines.
And the simple thing that she did, never taught it necessarily directly nor explicitly, but she would sit on the couch with me and she would listen. She would hold space for me to process all the anger, and rage, and frustration, and poor choices, and pose questions and affirm at the same time. I’m not doing a good job of explaining that. But Mama Toi could just sit with you and hear you and make you feel like you’ve been heard. That was a powerful way for me to see myself differently. And so that process has been the thing, for me, personally, about my own growth, my own constant change and transformation.

Alec Patton:
And why did you choose the names you chose?

Kaleb Rashad:
So I chose Kaleb because, well, again, I’m from the South, so we went to church a lot. My grandfather was the pastor, for 30 some odd years, of Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Gainesville, Florida. My grandma, Lonnie Mae, she was the first lady of the church. And so we went to church. We went to church at least three or four days a week. And so the Bible in particular held a large part of my canon of understanding religion, spirituality, my connection to something larger and different. So there’s a story in the Bible about two particular characters named Caleb and Joshua who were charged by God to go and take over this land, despite having giants occupying that land at the time. They were responsible for making a way.
And so I chose Caleb, flipped it to a K. And then I chose Rashad because I just thought it was pretty badass. And then upon actually digging into the name Rashad a little bit more, it comes from an Arabic origin, and it refers to one who seeks good counsel, who gives good counsel. It also refers to someone who seeks wisdom and gives good wisdom. And then secondly, digging a little bit more, when I started learning a bit more about part of my whole decolonization of myself included my spiritual traditions, which led me to questions like, “Well, given that I’m from the Aruba people of West Africa, what were the spiritual traditions of my people before Jesus?”
I can’t talk to my mom about that because I understand what her conditioning has been, and I understand her commitment and where her faith lies, and how that faith has helped her navigate some very difficult times as a Black woman in the South, who was particularly handicapped at the time, physically. So that question led me to some Kemetic principles and spiritual traditions as articulated in the Maat, which defines and describes a pantheon of traditional practices and principles of our people. So the name Ra refers to one of the original gods of Kemet.
So I am still trying to recover a lot of what was distorted taken from me and trying to find my way in that right now. But it circles all the way back to those conversations with Mama Toi sitting on the couch in her living room when she was my mama. She mothered me for 5, 10, 20 years. And then these courses that I was taking around critical thinking, and philosophy, and psychology, and that sort of pattern is just what I’ve just continued doing. So that’s not about a project, but it’s about the sort of deepening and expanding of understanding who you are and your connection to the people in your current time plane, and your historical time plane. Seven generations back, at least, and then thinking forward about the next generations to come.

Rob Riordan:
That goes deep.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Rob and Kaleb for sharing their stories. Like I said at the beginning, this is just the first of a series with Rob and Kaleb. And Rob made me promise that next time he and Kaleb will just be able to chat to each other rather than telling their life stories, which is why we’ll be calling them Fireside Chats. If you have questions you’d like me to ask Rob and Kaleb in their next episode, send them to unboxed@hthgse.edu. Thanks for listening.