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My third-grade daughter has no idea what it’s like to have a brother with autism. Neither do I. So we are lounging on this Sunday afternoon in February, munching on Teddy Grahams, attempting to understand Catherine’s life. Catherine, 12, is David’s sister and his teacher; David has autism. Mostly, Catherine teaches her brother about life’s rules, over and over again. He forgets. She reminds him.

Recently my family stopped at the Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg, Miss., to take a walk and soak in some history. Near the monument to Louisiana’s troops stood a young boy, about 8 or 9, with his mom and dad. The boy was dressed up as a gray-clad Confederate soldier. The combination of the outfit and the Confederate flag sticker on his family’s car told me something important about this boy. It told me that he was a lot like me at that age.

Ricky was a big ball of anger. In all fairness, he had plenty to be angry about. The first years of his life were pretty rough. Now, at age 7, home life was starting to normalize. But sometimes just getting through the day without throwing a chair was enough for him to handle, let alone any sort of academic rigor. He had a hard time seeing others’ points of view. He was definitely my most challenging student and constantly in need of my attention.

There are three questions students of history should always ask: What’s the context?What’s the context?What’s the context? Yes, I know, it’s a play on the old real estate joke (location, location, location), but the importance of understanding how a quote or an event sits in terms of what’s happening around it cannot be overstated.

Last Saturday, on one of North Carolina’s sunniest, warmest days this winter, thousands of people gathered in front of Shaw University in Raleigh to participate in the NAACP’s annual march for justice, workers’ rights and educational equality. The march has been dubbed the “HK on J,” or “historic thousands on Jones Street.” By mid-day, that’s exactly what it was: Too many people to count snaking through downtown Raleigh toward the state legislative building.

The Southern Poverty Law Center held a Health Fair yesterday at which employees could get their blood pressure checked, visit with fitness experts and determine their fat-to-muscle ratio. Our screening began with a familiar ritual of childhood physicals: We each stepped onto a platform, stood much straighter than usual and had our height measured. And then something very interesting happened. Each and every person, upon hearing the result, insisted they were taller, questioned the accuracy of the device (a steel measure) and reacted as if they’d been denied a birthright.

I love to receive letters. When I was a little boy, I lived on a straight street where I could see the mail truck coming from a long way off. After the mailman stopped in front of our house, I ran with hope in my heart down our front walkway, between our two giant maple trees and across the street to our mailbox. Would there be a letter for me? Was someone in the world thinking of me?

When you say the word “bully” most people tend to think of the caricature of a bully. One of my students described the thinking of this stereotype perfectly. “They probably got on my nerves or I really just don’t like them, so I’ll try my best to make their life as miserable as possible.” But bullying takes many guises and is sometimes hard to identify. That is worth thinking about today as the Safe Schools Action Network observes 100 Days of School/100 Days of Bullying. If we really want to stop bullying, we need to see it clearly in its various forms.

When I was in fifth grade and new to suburbia, my teacher introduced the concepts of racism, civil rights and fairness. And she began the task of helping 10-years olds—all of us white—learn how to talk about race in constructive ways. I’d moved from a gritty urban neighborhood where whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans lived together rather warily. My parents maintained a chilly silence on the issue of race, although they forbade racial epithets; on the street I heard plenty. In this place, the black kids came mostly from the projects, the Puerto Ricans lived in apartments and the better-off among the white families might have an entire house. I knew that race divided.

Today, I got a laptop. Not for me. For Aeesha. Let me flash back to about six weeks ago. A team meeting took place around a table in the science classroom, completing the annual discussion about Aeesha’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP). In eighth grade, Aeesha still struggles with basic mathematics, with written expression skills and with decoding text. In many ways, she is an elementary school student trapped in a middle school student’s adolescent body.