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Slavery never went away, and students need to know how it affects today’s world.

It is not easy for my students in suburban St. Louis to connect with the characters in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The novel is packed with gruff men. Middle aged, mostly friendless, they are all struggling to eke out an income on a ranch somewhere in California. The one glimmer of hope in Steinbeck’s classic emerges through the relationship between two men—George and Lennie. They are not relatives. Yet in a society where individualism is paramount, George does far more than merely put up with Lennie. He cares for this mentally challenged man, blankets him with a protective shield. Other characters turn from, threaten, and even belittle Lennie. Most are astounded by George’s choice to attend to someone who seems like such a burden.

Two truths and one lie. That’s how Mix It Up at Lunch Day began at Fordson High School in Dearborn, Mich. Students sat down to lunch with people who were not in their usual social circle. As an icebreaker, students played a game in which one person told two truths and one lie: the rest of the group had to guess which statement was false.

I wiggle in my desk chair, softly swiveling it ever so gently back and forth, and fidget with my pen. I am a student in my own classroom. At the front of the room stands a teacher in my place. To outside observers the girl dressed in flip flops and jeans pointing at things projected to the white board could not possibly be in charge—if anything they might mistake her as an unruly student who escaped from the confines of her desk.

Today somebody vomited in fourth-period study hall. Before the period had ended, kids in my study hall already knew about it. On my way to fifth-period class, every kid I passed in the crowded hallway was talking about it. Webster’s dictionary defines gossip as “a report about the behavior of other people.” In my school, gossip is the pipeline through which all sorts of misinformation, lies, and occasional truths get exchanged.

Have you ever been the only (fill in category) person in the room? Race, class, gender, age, body type, marital status—any number of identifiers can place us outside the norm, depending on the room. Otherness is a specific experience, especially for those who don’t live it every day. A couple of my students unwittingly placed themselves squarely into the role of “other” in an assignment outside our classroom, and I suspect learned a more powerful lesson than I ever could have taught them in class. The assignment was to find, attend and write an article covering an event. When two students proposed attending a senior citizen fundraising fashion show on the other side of town, I immediately approved the idea.

What "little" things do you do that might marginalize your students in poverty?

This year is the 50th anniversary of Roald Dahl's classic children's book James and the Giant Peach. In the story, 7-year-old orphan James Henry Trotter escapes his two rotten, abusive aunts by crawling into a giant peach, which rolls, floats and flies him to a new life of wonder and love.

This week as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I plan to gather my third-, fourth- and fifth-graders around me. I will tell them, "Our country is a beautiful place." I’ll keep this in mind as I think of the moments when we were clearly afraid.

When I was studying to be a teacher, I had to write a philosophy of education. This essay was to explain what I believed about kids and the role teachers and education played in their lives. I wrote that all kids could learn, that they all deserved equal access to inspired teaching and that my role was to meet them wherever they were and serve them in the way that best met their needs.Although I still believe those things are true, I've come to realize that my teaching is driven more by a different philosophy than the one I wrote about.