A Principal’s View: Education as Soul-bearing and Soul-shaping

But a decade before Alykhan was a Principal, he was a 23-year-old, fresh out of undergraduate, standing cautiously in front of thirty or so 17-year-olds in his class. In those first years of teaching, he would wake with nightmares of standing at the front of a class with one tiny piece of chalk and a very small handheld chalkboard, struggling to explain math.  

 

Alykhani had just graduated, bounding to return to his home state and continue the work he started as a high schooler.  “In the 90s,” when he completed high school, “California was an intense place,” says Alykhan. He grew up on the periphery of California’s drug wars. His childhood neighborhood and school were relatively sheltered, but the counties just next door were not so. Growing up acutely aware of this divide, he started volunteering in prison reform work in high school. When he packed up to cross the country for college in Rhode Island, he carried those volunteer experiences closely.

 

However, upon returning home, the thought of helping those in the prison system, at the tail end of a systemic problem, was troubling.  “I asked an Ismaili friend who was a public defender if I could shadow her. That was intensely depressing.” So he resolved to place his energies at the source of the problem, and work with students before they ever entered an ill-fated cycle. He embarked on a career in urban, public education. 

 

Alykhan was accepted into a highly selective teaching accelerator called Oakland Teaching Fellows. In a very short time, the program trained novice graduates to be accredited teachers. “It was like a doctor given three months of training then asked to perform surgery,” recalls Alykhan. “Every day felt like a deep, utter failure.” Hence, the many nightmares.

 

So how did a green, young teacher end up a lauded Principal? “Well, I quickly realized it was much bigger than me. I fell in love with the kids,” Alykhan explains.

Alykhani felt charged to give students - who were grade levels behind students in other schools and faced a lifelong deficit due to an economically stratified society - a thoughtful, emotional, and full experience. He stopped giving students rote learning and began curating courses in a way that students could see themselves in their work. 

 

“Show them you aren’t a distributor or leader of knowledge, but a facilitator, and make the work culturally relevant,” he says. This meant, for example, basing notoriously abstract math problems on real, lived experiences. “Growing up in the Bay Area, we’re all obsessed with cars,”he recalls excitedly. “My kids were really into this car called a Scraper…so I would propose we figure out the price per square inch of rims for a Scraper. This led us to conversations about why some were called ‘22s’ versus ‘26s.’”  All the while students were learning necessary geometry formulas.

 

In fact, Alykhan could not go too long as a teacher without remaining cultural relevant and emotionally aware. Once the class was using some dire prison statistics in a math lesson. Alykhan recalls, “a student wrote on his paper, ‘These are things I already know.’  It forced me to reflect on my role here, and the conversations that needed to emerge.”

He started using tools in the class to make the emotional impact of lessons visible. Using the “Mood Meter,” developed out of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, Boolani navigated a history lesson that touched on slavery in the US. Teaching is a human experience. Students can use the Mood Meter to better articulate their emotional states.  It is an honesty that is lost in traditional methods, which disconnect the subject material from the self. 

 

After ten years in the classroom, Alykhan has crafted math classes with such creative titles as “Algebra through Art,” and World History classes with highly critical lenses. His professional journey continued to build community much bigger than himself, and included travel to Kenya, Mozambique and Pakistan, to learn about world history  and classrooms around the globe.   

Alykhan stepped into the role of Principal with the same curatorial eye, and he now builds the skills of his teachers with the same patience and context that he once did in the classroom. 

 

If there’s one piece of advice Alykhan would give to aspiring educators, it is this:  “Education is soul-bearing and soul-shaping. You’re privy to so much of what shapes a young person, so you have to be interested in giving your whole self.” 

 

“But,” he adds, a wide grin almost audible over the phone, “it is a beautiful place to be.”