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Like many, if not most, I had a rough first year as a teacher. I was 21 years old and full of passion and desire but little else. I had survived student teaching on the Navajo Reservation for six months, but arrived on the other side of that experience with much to learn. I was teaching two-hour blocks of seventh-grade history and English. I was struggling on almost every level in almost every area.

This activity is to accompany the Teaching Tolerance article "Identity."

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." I was sitting outside on the playground bench wiping the tears of a child when this proverb came to mind. It isn’t true, of course. Nancy was a second-grader going through an evaluation process to help us understand why she couldn't read. Kayla was one of her classmates. As they were climbing the ladder of the slide, Kayla yelled out, "Nancy is retarded!" Ouch. Words can break our hearts.

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.

"Mr. Barton, I have some homework for you," said Alandra. "But I left it at home on the table." "No problem," I answered. “Just bring it whenever you can." I can say that now because I'm a reading interventionist. Homework isn't expected from me like it is from classroom teachers.

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.