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It was a brisk New England day as I walked out of the community center with a group of Somali Muslim women from my adult English as a Second Language class. My students were laughing and joking, their hijabs blowing in the breeze. We had finished our unit on the New World, drawing connections between Europeans immigrating to America and Somalis immigrating to Lewiston and southern Maine. Suddenly, a local woman shouted, "Terrorists!"

Our history is sometimes painful; focusing on the “best version” of that history to make it more palatable to young readers denies them the education they deserve.

My middle school students had started to use words like “bum,” “creeper,” and “hobo” to describe people who are homeless in our city. To my eighth-graders, it was comic relief.

The emancipation story remains largely incomplete, over 150 years later.

I was excited by my lesson plan about the presidential elections. I planned to help students research issues and form opinions by guiding them through a variety of perspectives. Then my student teacher asked a question that surprised me. “Do you ever have parents complain about elections being discussed in school?” he wanted to know. “Why would they?” I asked.

One recent November, a discussion about plants as a food source led Cowley's first-grade class to talk about hunger. The class decided to bake pies and cookies to deliver to a local church's Thanksgiving dinner for

I don’t have an answer to the question, “How should I talk to my students about Garissa?” But I have some real fears about the dangers of not contextualizing this incident.

The language that educators use to address students can maintain and reinforce class structures and classist attitudes. The antidote? Anti-classist language.