America's Song

last tuesday i made everyone with hispanic, latino, native american, and african american blood wait outside the classroom. i told them that they wouldn't be able to attend classes that day.

i had two students left.

this was the only way i could think of to really show students what segregation must have felt like and still feels like today. they were shocked. we read and then watched dr. martin luther king jr,'s i have a dream speech, followed by the inauguration of our 44th president.

i wanted the students to understand that the people who have gone before paved the way for them and that they are paving the way for the people who come after them.

almost all of them had never seen an inauguration, seen pictures of washington d.c., or understood the civil rights movement. we sat in the back of the room with linked arms and listened to two different versions of we shall overcome, closed our eyes, and imagined being in the streets of selma, alabama.

i live and breathe diversity every day in my classroom because of my students and it makes an inexplicable energy course through my veins when i have the honor of teaching these children of the ways of people who have believed in something greater than the individual and made a difference in this world- people who stayed in a system of corruption, greed, and hatred and fought with peace and grace.

it's why i stay in public education.

i love the song above because it is one of the first songs about the u.s. that i have heard for a long time that didn't say we are better than everybody else. it is simple and reflects the hope that so many of us feel and need in this time.