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This year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly a disaster for the environment. But it has also been a disaster for people, and it did not affect everyone equally.

Gender, sexuality and religion are common themes in challenged books of 2015. Rather than effectively ban these topics from the classroom, TT recommends teaching about them and offers student texts to do so.

What you do after Mix It Up at Lunch Day allows Mix to have a deeper impact on your school.

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.

When I teach lessons about Martin Luther King Jr., I always wonder exactly how students will connect with the events and themes. My adult students are refugees and immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Some of them were cultural minorities in their countries. Others are experiencing racial discrimination for the first time in the United States.

Last year thousands of schools participated in Mix It Up at Lunch Day—and this year is going to be even better. Start planning now to make your Mix It Up even the best it can be.