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Natalie Yasmin Soto pours herself into her job teaching English as a new language to students at a Manhattan transfer school.
For 10 years she’s been at the James Baldwin School, serving students who tend to have struggled in traditional settings and are at-risk of dropping out. For the past three years, she’s also worked as her school’s teacher co-director, closely watching how local and national policy shifts affected not only students and families, but also educators and support staff.
This summer, she had the time, space, and funding to grapple with these matters and dream up some possible solutions. Through the Fund for Teachers, she enrolled in “Resilience and Well-Being Strengths for Teachers” and “Energy Tools and Mind-Body Activities for Self-Care” courses in Barcelona, Spain and Florence, Italy. (This year, 351 teachers across the nation won grants between $5,000 to $10,000 for self-directed summer study.)
“We are deeply invested in supporting our young people to become self-sufficient adults who are compassionate, healthy, inquisitive, and joyful contributors in the world. But doing this work IS work,” Soto said. “And you cannot pour from an empty vessel.”
Over the course of this year, she hopes to share the new skills she’s learned with her colleagues to help them feel more balanced while increasing their “capacity to serve and respond as we weather the changes ahead.”
In many ways, Soto said, the challenges of working with young people remain the same: making sure that students are learning things that feel relevant and useful. But now, there’s an added layer of doing that amid “an individual and collective fear and threat to the safety of themselves and their families,” especially for her students who are undocumented or from mixed status families.
She tries to stay grounded by finding the small victories.
“It’s when a student makes it to class on time or meets a deadline despite the responsibilities of work or sibling care. It’s when they become comfortable enough to talk to another student and they have lunch together,” she said. “The triumphs are in the moments when, despite all of the pressures and fears and noise, they get to be kids. They get to be learners.”
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
How and when did you decide to become a teacher?
I’ve realized my answer to this varies over time – shifts in perspective and all that. But I think the truth is I fell into teaching from a place of curiosity and indignation.
While in a Ph.D. program at an Ivy League institution in my early 20s, I taught a course I’d designed on short stories. From a compositional and grammatical perspective, students’ writings were often without major error. Their analyses were arguably adequate, but lacking in depth.
Shortly thereafter, I found myself teaching in a very different setting. Almost all of my students were first-generation college attendees, many children of or themselves immigrants from the Caribbean, and at least half were adults 20+ years my senior attending college for the first time.
But what I found, consistently, was that despite their depth of analysis in discussion and the nuance in their understanding of the connections and complexities of family dynamics and inequities, their writing – from a composition perspective – didn’t capture their brilliance, insights, analyses, or experiences.
I’d had students when I was teaching in the Ivory Tower who never once doubted their skills or their right to sit in a college classroom, despite an absence of life experience and still-developing critical thinking skills, and yet here were students who looked like me who lacked the confidence to continue. I thought, “How do I lower the first-year college dropout rate?” and figured, “Well, I’ll just leave academia and get licensed to teach high school.”
It makes me laugh a little that, to me, the solution was both so obvious and so simple – and maybe naive? But, years later, here I am.
Can you tell us a bit more about some of the challenges you’ve been seeing with those students and how this summer’s work might help?
For many in New York City Public Schools, the influx of newcomers in our classrooms has raised unanticipated challenges – ones that exceed the need for added language acquisition support and test the unconscious biases that even the best-intentioned harbor.
I’m really proud to be a part of a community that, I think, does consistently admirable work in meeting the emotional regulation needs of our students and their families – newcomers, long-term [English language learners], and home language speakers of English alike. I genuinely watch my colleagues and administrators in amazement at the skills they have in this regard.
But that skill demands a lot of labor and effort, no matter how many years in you are. It’s my hope that in expanding our adults’ reservoirs in this arena, we’ll be better positioned as a community to take on the work of learning how to increase our instructional capacity across English language proficiencies to better teach our city’s newcomers.
Any best practices you can share with other teachers regarding working with English language learners?
A best practice that I think too often gets overlooked is being deliberate in our communications with families and loved ones. Don’t assume because a child is not a designated [English language learner] that their families wouldn’t prefer communications in a language other than English. Confirm in which language families prefer written communications versus spoken ones. When utilizing an interpreter, direct your communications to the family member, not the interpreter.
Remember that, for so many families, schools can be scary. They can be intimidating places of judgment and even chastisement, and no matter a student’s behavior or academic performance, families are our partners in the work and deserving of dignity and respect.
What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?
At Baldwin, we have crew (advisory), and two of my absolute favorite lesson series to run in advisory are one based on unconscious bias and the other is more financial literacy related.
The first is great to run at the start of the year whenever you have a new-ish group. It’s fun for students because it gives them the permission to outline all of their assumptions about you and then work collectively to interrogate/reflect on what they’re basing those assumptions on. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it builds community and I’m all for it!
The other is both sociology- and financial literacy-based. It comes up whenever a student says they can’t wait to move out on their own after high school. (And there is always at least one!) We do a StreetEasy deep dive, project necessary budgets, and conduct asset mapping to interrogate what accounts for the differences across ZIP codes.
What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom (or your school)?
Censorship in education, at both the national and local level, is an undeniable force that both interferes with the education of young people and undermines the professional integrity and skills of teachers. There is a moral imperative to provide young people with information that is rooted in fact and teach them how to identify falsehoods, verify sourcing, and interrogate perspectives so that they can draw their own conclusions, take their own stands, and determine how they want to show up in the world.
When narratives are falsified, limited, and/or manipulated, when explicit and implicit gag orders are issued, we rob young people – and society – of the opportunity to build a compassionate world that is solutions-oriented and responsive, rather than retaliatory, self-righteous, and violent.
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.
