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In order to teach tolerance, a teacher must proactively bring in those who are typically left out of the mainstream. With the 2010 release of the HBO movie about her life, Temple Grandin may be going mainstream. But autism remains an enigma to most people. So I was thrilled when my student teacher, Eva Oliver, prepared a lesson about Temple Grandin and her work as a livestock equipment designer at the beginning of National Autism Awareness Month.

Imani walked down the hall with a paper cup in her hands. She stopped and held up the cup to me. Inside of its paper walls were soil, water, and seeds—all those humble and elemental things that build a third-grader's scientific knowledge. Imani was growing cabbage.

While working on a project for class, a student of mine casually mentioned the names of some of my relatives. When I looked up in horror, he rattled off all of the towns in which I had ever lived. I was shaken. How did he get all this information about me? Simple. He had an app for that.

Leslie, a 38-year-old social worker who counsels children with stressful life situations, found her 4-year-old daughter, Sophia, engaged in animated play with her dolls. She watched incredulously as Sophia invited the four white dolls with blonde hair to a tea party while the dark-skinned doll with black hair lay alone across the room.

Each spring, at the start of baseball season, fourth-graders at my school connect with Shorty, a character from Ken Mochizuki’s book Baseball Saved Us. Shorty’s a Japanese-American child who plays baseball on a makeshift field in an internment camp during World War II. Mochizuki’s consummate read-aloud story encourages a fired-up discussion in the library. Students talk about the inequities and intolerances foisted on kids and adults alike. It’s the kind of lesson that I thoroughly enjoy teaching, year after year.

B loves bugs. I met him during the first week of school as I conducted the standard assessment of how many words he could read per minute from a second-grade story. After the assessment, I gave him the customary caterpillar sticker to put on his shirt to show everyone that he was going to emerge as a great reader during his second-grade year.

Today is the kickoff of Farmworker Awareness Week. It is a time to honor the backbreaking work that goes into harvesting our food.

In today’s anti-government, anti-union environment, it’s important to illustrate what happens when the powerful hold all the cards. The Triangle shirtwaist fire presents an opportunity to do just that.

The O’Brien boys were a handful. Apathetic overstates how disinterested in school they were. They wandered in and out of my class, and when I wasn’t teaching, I’d see them aimlessly strolling the halls as if they had no place to be. They were mischievous yet charming, belligerent at some times and cooperative at others. They were also smart, funny and irreverent. But no matter what I or anyone else did, they wouldn’t engage in school.

Consider the humble lunch as one of your most powerful teaching tools. From the first day of school, Ricky was one of my most difficult students. Defensive, angry, and sensitive, this 7-year-old was constantly putting up walls and “testing” the adults in charge to see if we would respond to his needs. With the lack of a guidance counselor or a full-time school psychologist in the school, I knew that I had to find a way to connect with him, or we were going to have a disastrous school year.