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How to turn “I’m not good at this” into “I’m not good at this—yet!”

Every now and again, a student will say something that leaves me speechless and desperate for the correct response. I can feel in my bones that the moment is about to become pivotal. One of these moments came while we were reading Katherine Paterson’s novel The Great Gilly Hopkins, in which the main character deals with her racism. We were in the process of analyzing her character, her motivations and her racist attitudes, and I could tell that my sixth-graders didn’t really understand the theme of racism, so I needed to step away from the novel for a moment and put the history in context for them.

There’s growing momentum to take down Confederate flags, but our work to denounce systemic racism cannot stop at symbolic markers.

Representations of black people as animals is both a past and present manifestation of the United States’ complicated history with race.

Sometimes teaching at my magnet arts school in Alabama, I can imagine the worst days of racism and intolerance are behind us. Most of the roughly 500 students have genuine, deep friendships across racial lines and very rarely do the old racist memes and tropes raise their ugly heads.

Sometimes the “T” in LGBTQ gets overlooked.