00:04Hey guys, I am sitting here parked in a Toyota RAV4 in Harlem and I'm gonna meet up with Valencia
00:11Clay. She's a teacher and an activist based in Baltimore and she is changing lives. Topic,
00:18sentence, main idea, very good. You got it. Don't question yourself. You know what you're doing.
00:22Valencia is from Harlem and she's gonna show me around her hood a little bit.
00:27Hey. Hey girl. Hey. How are you? It's so good to see you. It's cute, right? The sunroof gets so
00:34much light.
00:35It's crazy. Like it's really dope in here. So, where's the first stop? Where are we headed?
00:40Let's go back to my old school. Okay, to your old school. All right, let's get it poppin'. Okay.
00:45So, tell me a little bit about what made you want to be a teacher. When I was five, my
00:50teacher said,
00:51you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said teacher. When you were five?
00:56So,
00:56how did you develop your teaching style? By becoming who I needed. I needed unconditional love.
01:02Yeah, that's so real. Patience, understanding. What made you start taking video and posting video
01:09of your lessons? We would attend professional development sessions and during the sessions,
01:16we would watch videos to learn how to do, you know, different reading strategies. The feedback from some
01:21of the other teachers was that the students don't look like ours, so our kids can't do that. And so,
01:27I started trying to make my own videos for our students who don't get to see themselves. They may
01:33struggle more with figuring out what they love about themselves. And that's why representation matters
01:40so much. Let's talk about your book. Soundless Cries Don't Lead to Healing. It was about people using
01:45it in order to have their own introspective outlook on what was going on in the world. So many people
01:52of color were being murdered. People were saying so many things. There was a lot of noise. Yeah, but
01:57they weren't teaching. Yeah. You have such a high social media profile and I'm sure your students
02:03know that, you know what I mean? But like, how are you still maintaining, you know, your position as an
02:10educator? I cannot be out here trying to get clout. I have to actually teach. Like, I was never the
02:16one
02:16to hold a bottle of pictures once I became a teacher. Now, if you try to pull up the college
02:21archives,
02:22honey, that's different. So how do you bridge the gap between education and activism? There
02:28shouldn't be a gap between education and activism. It is imperative that we remember that the system
02:33was created to make sure that people stay exactly where they are. One of the things that I really
02:38want to start researching is how do we motivate, intrinsically motivate children who appear to be
02:45totally unmotivated. My whiteboard, my smartboard, used to be chalkboard, but that's my picket time.
02:54Yeah, that's real. You know, like, my classroom is the march.
