Nerd Farmer Podcast

This week Channel 253 is launching a new show called Gimme the Mic. They’re six-pack podcasts from folks in Tacoma sharing their unique stories and points of view on matters that impact all of us. Our first host is Stella Keating, a student in Tacoma Schools and a student activist. We’ll be back on Monday with our regularly scheduled episode chopping up “How Democracies Die” for the second time, looking at the further degradation in US democracy.

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In this episode, Stella kicks off the series talking with Collin, Arizona, and Kellz about consent, youth led initiatives, the marginalization of queer youth, impact vs. intent, and the ways PEEL is empowering youth.

Guests: Collin Veenstra, Founder & Program Director, PEEL leaders Arizona and Kellz.

Intergenerational Community Organizing: Youth-Led, Adult Staff and & Volunteer Supported

As a volunteer-run organization with an anti-oppression framework, PEEL works differently than a lot of traditional youth programs.

Our staff team are 100% volunteer and include adult community members who serve the Tacoma area as teachers, youth advocates, school resource support, teen librarians and more in their day jobs, and support PEEL youth programming in their lives beyond.

Our adult staff team work collectively with PEEL youth leaders in planning meetings, organizing events, and leading trainings on trauma-informed topics both within the group and at area youth programs. We host a monthly PEEL Planning Session, which includes both youth leaders and volunteer staff to ensure programming is as youth-centered as possible.

Links

• www.tacomapeel.com
• https://www.facebook.com/TacomaPEEL/
• Tacoma Peel on Instagram
• Channel 253 membership

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Tom Rademacher is loudmouth and I love him for it.

An author and activist, Rademacher is an outspoken, anti-racist educator, who was named the State Teacher of the Year a few years back. This bio should sound familiar. Tom is a writer and the author of “It Won’t Be Easy” one of the more vulnerable memoirs I’ve ever read. He is the 2014-2015 Minnesota Teacher of the Year and currently teaches middle school outside of Minneapolis.

“I sometimes feel like I’d be way more popular and have three times the Twitter followers, if I didn’t talk about race.”

We discussed what it’s like to be a teacher and an activist while the world (feels like it) is burning, to what extent do we think we’re making a difference as advocates in the profession, and Tom’s (loud) public anti-racist work.

The Wind Down

The Case of the Missing Hit, Reply-all Podcast

The Socials

@MrTomRad

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

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Man, we really picked a helluva year to move twelve timezones away…

I am amazed watching the various efforts to confront Covid-19 in the US. In particular, I am blown away watching people I care about on social media forced to jerry-rig masks, after being told for months by the CDC that they weren’t necessary or helpful. The toilet paper shortages, the lack of PPE for medical professionals, the inability of the President to articulate a coherent strategy about any it… 

It’s also really jarring to look homeward in contrast to what we’re seeing from leaders elsewhere, who are having more success combatting the virus (shouts to NZ, South Korea, and Singapore). The dire situation in the US could and should have been prevented. This irregular episode is a pandemic-centric conversation with IWL host (and my wife) Hope Bowling.

By the way, don’t worry about us. We are safe here in Abu Dhabi but we definitely are anxious about friends and family back home. So we decided to record some personal observations, takes, and reflections from here. 

Stay safe and stay home, if you can. 

The Socials

@Espionfire

IWL Podcast

Extra Credit 

@Crsailor’s Thread (get well, Craig)

@ConnMc Thread

Coverage of the Rona from UAE

The Dr. Drew heel turn mentioned on the episode

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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The Census, redistricting, reapportionment, gerrymandering — it is all up to you.

This week’s guest is Managing Director at the Washington Census Alliance, Kamau Chege. We discussed the 2020 Census and why everyone who listens to this show should make sure that everyone they know fills it out.

Undercounts among marginalized communities lead to reduced federal funding and reduced representation at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels. When socially and economically marginalized populations decline to complete the Census, they gift political power to the people responsible for their marginalization.

You can’t have a democracy without representation, you can’t have representation without the census — that’s it.

That’s the show.

The Socials

Kamau on Twitter

Extra Credit 

Kamau profiled in the NYT

Complete the Census online

Redistricting and Reapportionment

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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Fact, everyday black women in the US are simultaneously under assault from the forces of institutional racism and institutional sexism. 

They are the most educated demographic group: when measuring degrees earned, black women are the most educated demographic group in the US.

They are underpaid: black women in the US earn 61 cents on the dollar for the same job in comparison to men, with the gap not projected to close for literally 100 years. 

They are often taken for granted in the workplace: all over social media black women are reporting feeling burned-out or taken for granted in unhealthy workplaces. 

I recently came across a post on Medium by author, school counselor, and my friend, Christina McDade, on the tropes and narratives surrounding black women in our culture. The post begins “It’s 5 am, Wednesday morning, and I am exhausted.” Man, I want to use that to teach students about writing “a hook.”

Here’s a passage from the essay that really stuck with me:

It’s the narrative of the constant realization of the many roles that black women find themselves in, and the constant shifting that we have to do to simply be ourselves and who we are every single day. No black woman is immune to this struggle. For every Oprah and Michelle who can manage to be everyone’s best friend, you have the Gabrielle Union’s and Jenifer Lewis’ of the world who are a little too much and aggressive. Your star and proximity determine how varied the narrative majority spaces allow you to be.

Exhausting, right?

Obviously, I know what it’s like to deal with US racism. But I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to face sexism as well. It feels exhausting to even ponder and you can hear it in Christina’s interview. I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

 The Socials

Christina on Medium

@mscdmcdade – Twitter

The Wind Down

This is Love Podcast

Your College-Bound Kid

Bonus Listening

Burnout Hits Different When You’re Black — At the Intersection Podcast

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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In late January, I happened to be in Shanghai at a Model UN Conference when the Corona Outbreak began in Wuhan Province. Since then I have been watching events unfold in China and elsewhere. Throughout the last two months, I’ve been struck by two things:

• The comprehensive nature of the response in China: tens of millions of people were literally cut off from the world — imposed social distancing, mass in home quarantine, large scale deployment of chemical disinfectants, etc.
• The immediate closure of schools in China and how teachers were continuing to meet the needs of their students.

I’ve tweeted a bit about the former and I took careful notes on the latter, knowing that sooner or later our time would (likely) come. On Thursday, March 4, while we were out of the country on spring break, we were notified that school would not reopen and would remain closed — for at least four weeks. Moreover, we were told that we’d commence teaching online the following Monday… WOOF. That was a three day turnaround and I was ten hours away over in Indonesia… WOOF x2.

In a matter of days, our school leadership spun up a schedule based on learnings from elsewhere and we dug into the work of teaching online. We are now in week two and I decided to sit down with a couple of colleagues and share our thoughts and learnings so far. This episode is about the whats and hows of our online teaching experiences. The IWL Podcast will have an episode about equity issues related to online teaching this Thursday.

Cast of Characters

Jordan Moog, US History and Global Studies, Lute

Michele Curley, French, tri-lingual Canadian: English, French, and Swahili (yeah, she’s that dude)

Going Further

I’ve been cataloguing my experience teaching online thus far in this thread

Socials

Jordan Moog – Twitter

Michele Curley – Twitter

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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The Rundown

She describes herself as a “Dreamer, Blerd, Educator, Disruptor of Ridiculousness, STEM & Digital Access Advocate.” Rafranz is a former math teacher, former district director of professional and digital learning, and the author of “The Missing Voices in EdTech: Bringing Diversity Into EdTech.” She came on the pod to talk about the use of technology in today’s classrooms and all the ways teachers and school systems drop the ball when it comes to implementing educational technology in an effective and equitable manner.

The Wind Down

Rafranz is a BTS aficionado; she recommends you cop their latest album: Map of the Soul: 7

Going Further

Rafranz’s 2018 CUE Keyonte

The Socials

Rafranz on Medium

@RafranzDavis

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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Two-time show guest Claudia Rowe is the author of Time Out, an e-book about Willard Jimerson. Jimerson was a young black man for South Seattle who was charged as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to 23 years in prison in 1994 at the age of 13. 

The Rundown

5:00: What was life like for Jimerson at Maple Lane Juvenile Detention Center. What is it like for children in juvenile detention?

10:00: Adolescent brains aren’t fully formed yet, why do we prosecute them as adults? Who does this serve? How much time is “enough?” Is race a contributing factor in sentencing? (spoiler, yes)

16:00: Day to day life in lockup…

“We send more foster children to prison than to college.”

29:00: Seattle as the second most important character in Claudia’s book, how has it changed?

36:00: Real numbers about OUR children who are in the system.

40:00: Claudia’s current projects

The Wind Down

48:00 Who should we listen to?

Going Further

Time Out (Missing Collection) by Claudia Rowe

Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett by Jennifer Gonnerman 

The Socials

@RoweReport (Twitter)  

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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Joy Turner is a podcaster, activist, US Army Veteran, and Louisiana native, who currently works in data for Seattle Public Schools, this interview, however, is in a personal capacity. We had her on the show to share her views about the upcoming 2020 election, reparations, and a pro-black agenda for US politics. 

The Rundown

9:00: What are your priorities for 2020?

17:00: Looking into the Wealth Gap and Black Home Ownership.

21:00: What do we do with a Plurality/Winner-Take-All 2 Party system?

30:00: The Mitch McConnell Question: How do we deal with a political climate in which a senate will never do what’s best for us?

40:00: Thoughts on Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan

45:00: What are the electoral consequences of what we’re talking about here? 

The Wind Down

49:00: Who should we listen to?

This is the image of ADOS co-founder Yvette Carnell, discussed in the Wind Down

Going Further

The Douglas Plan

House Bill 40, a Congressional study on reparations

Nate on Joy’s podcast, Speak Freely

The Socials

@joy_g_turner 

@Spk_Freely 

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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Currently a journalist for Daily Kos, David is an American freelance journalist and blogger. He received the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000 for a domestic terrorism series he produced for MSNBC.com. In a previous episode, we learned that Matt Shea, a veteran member of the Washington statehouse, reportedly participated in acts of Domestic Terrorism by engaging in and helping coordinate several standoffs between federal officials and members of far-right militia and patriot movements in the Northwest. This is the second installment of the Matt Shea interviews. If you haven’t listened to episode 84, we suggest you listen to that first.

The Rundown

5:00 De-wonking “Militia” and ‘Patriot Movement’ and what it means.

7:00 Why Matt Shea and his far-right ideology is so dangerous 

16:00 How have Matt Shea and folks like him infiltrated our government?

20:00 The Three Percenters

The Wind Down

35:00 Who should we be listening to?

The Socials

@DavidNeiwert 

Going Further

Episode 84: On Matt Shea with Melissa Santos 

Matt Shea Piece

The Informant Newsletter by Nick Martin  

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play and is brought to you by Alaska Airlines

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

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