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On the rare occasion that I spend time with people who are not educators, it’s inevitable that someone will drop the word “retarded.” The “R-word” has been used colloquially for decades to describe and degrade anyone or anything out of the ordinary, inferior, or somehow slow. I can still hear the snickers from my own classmates back in 10th-grade health class when we read the words “fire retardant” in our textbook.

When the start of Mix It Up at Lunch Day was announced at Seth Johnson Elementary in Montgomery, Ala., cheers rose up in the halls. At lunch, the fifth-grade class – leaders of this year’s activities – proudly displayed the banner they created for the event.

As the final Space Shuttle mission touched down last month, ending NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program, I wondered what would come next for women in aerospace. Without a clear, defined mission from NASA, I questioned where that leaves girls and young women who dream of becoming astronauts.

This semester at Roger Williams University I asked my freshmen interdisciplinary students to reflect upon three important questions: Who am I? What can I know? What should I do?

Each spring, at the start of baseball season, fourth-graders at my school connect with Shorty, a character from Ken Mochizuki’s book Baseball Saved Us. Shorty’s a Japanese-American child who plays baseball on a makeshift field in an internment camp during World War II. Mochizuki’s consummate read-aloud story encourages a fired-up discussion in the library. Students talk about the inequities and intolerances foisted on kids and adults alike. It’s the kind of lesson that I thoroughly enjoy teaching, year after year.

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..." I heard these words for the first time in a song when I was a kid. I was pouring a glass of orange juice in the kitchen when I heard it. Bugs Bunny had ended. I was waiting for Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids to begin. There was the familiar refrain of Schoolhouse Rock in between those cartoons. "As your body grows bigger, your mind grows flowered, it's great to learn 'cause knowledge is power!" And there it was—the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (or at least a paraphrase of it) in song. I learned it and never forgot it.

At the start of my career as an eighth-grade language arts teacher, it never bothered me when students were described by teachers as “low,” “middle,” or “high” as a way to label their abilities. No disrespect was meant toward our learners; it was just a fast and easy way to describe our kids and get to know them when we had so little time with them.

Recently, after reading a story about a bike messenger in a big city to my kindergarteners, I asked the students if being a bike messenger was a job they might like. I also asked them to clarify why it would or would not be.