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I walked down the newly plowed row with my grandpa, feeling the warm, red clay on the soles of my bare feet and listened to his stories and words of advice. I held a tomato plant in my hands, the rich, black potting soil falling off of the small, vulnerable roots, as he knelt and dug a place for it in the garden. “Hey,” he’d often start, “here's something my daddy told me when I was little. ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to listen twice as much as you speak. If you do that, you'll learn something. If you don't, you won't.’”

The TT audience weighed in on a school dilemma ripped from the headlines: ‘Students petition to display Confederate flag at school, turn in 300 signatures.’

For 20 nights, Kate has collapsed onto a different air mattress in a new space, a strange place—none of them home. The 15-year-old, her parents and two younger brothers cart themselves and their meager possessions from shelter to shelter.

This spring, my principal asked who would be interested in teaching a two-week summer session for our own students. I found myself saying, “I’ll do it.” I had previously sworn off summer school as something I would never teach no matter how much I needed the money. But then “summer school” was something I’d only seen in the movies: large groups of unmotivated kids who had even less desire in the summer than they had during the school year. I imagined sweltering classrooms, hours of endless instruction and failure for all—myself included.

Mix It Up at Lunch Day is all about diversity. It celebrates the diversity of America’s classrooms. And it shows the diverse ways teachers can tackle cliquishness in schools. We were inspired by some of the great stories the day has generated. We thought we’d share three of them with you here.

I really should be practicing Aura Lee right now—or Merrily We Roll Along.I will soon be marching on stage, balancing my sheet music on the stand, wetting my reed, and playing the clarinet in front of parents, school board members, students, even the superintendent.How exactly did I get myself into this mess?It all started with a simple email.Pull out your instruments, Teachers, and join our Beginning Band students in their October concert….

How does a school community deal with the violent loss of a student? Unfortunately, this is a question my school has had to answer too often. Still, no matter how many times I’ve been through it, trying to understand my own pain while holding space for my students to feel theirs is something that pushes me beyond my capacity as a teacher.