Feedback can sneak up on you in the most unlikely of places. For Cornelius Minor, it came from a former student at a laundromat. In our continuing series of conversations with Cornelius Minor we're talking about the importance of feedback and love in the classroom. 



Cornelius is a frequent keynote speaker and Lead Staff Developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in New York where he works with teachers, school leaders, and communities to support literacy reform in cities. In his work, Cornelius not only draws on his years teaching middle school in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but also on time spent skateboarding, shooting hoops, and working with kids. He’s also currently writing his first book for Heinemann.  

On a recent Saturday morning, Cornelius bumped into a former student while doing his laundry. As Cornelius explains, the meeting quickly became a lesson on feedback and love. 

Full transcript below:

Cornelius:    I ran into this kid, Nate, in the laundromat. If you know anything about Brooklyn, none of us have washer/dryer in our apartments. All of Brooklyn goes to the laundromat on Saturday morning, and you're just hanging out.
    Nate comes in, and Nate, he's like, "Yo. It's Minor." He ran over to me, and he said in his excited, Nate way, he was like … by the way, Nate's in his 20s, so it's been a while. He comes in, and he's like, "You know, man … I just want to tell you, man. I love you and I love what you did in the class." 
    I'm thinking to myself … if you can imagine, this kid is tattooed up, he's tough guy, and Nate wasn't the kind of kid then that talked about love, and he certainly didn't look like the kind of kid now that would be in a laundromat talking about love, and so it really struck me when he used the work love.
    I'm like, "Well, thanks. I'm here waiting on my socks, so if you want to hang out, we can hang out, because I got 42 minutes left on the dryer." He's like, "Let me tell you what I loved about your class." He's just like, "What I loved about your class is when I came in, you were teaching something, and you were teaching this way where you would name the things, and you would have us try the things, and when I came in and it didn't work for me, you changed it."
    That got me thinking. I was like, "Woah." Nate, the way he read love wasn't emotional. The way that Nate felt love was … "This guy needed to do a thing for me, and he did it." That just got me thinking, I was like, "So, how am I loving the kids I'm with now? How am I loving the teachers that I'm with now? What does love look like? Especially if I only got 42 minutes."
    I was like, "Well, I don't know the answer to that question, but maybe Nate knows." I asked him to keep talking, and Nate got real specific with the things that I did 10 years ago made him feel loved. Going back to that one thing, he was just like, "Yeah. That you were always willing to change the class if it would help me to learn better."
    He's like, "We saw you doing that, and sometimes it was crazy, and sometimes we didn't know why you changed it, but after a while, I knew that you must have changed it for some kid, or for one of us." I think the first way that we communicate love in any classroom space is that kids need to know that if what I'm doing aint working, that I'm willing to change it.
    That idea of flexibility,