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“Man that boy booty sweaty!” The comment rang out in a room that was supposed to be silent. Although the student whose “booty” was being discussed was out of the room and seemingly unscathed by his classmate’s remarks, I knew I had to address this like any other incident of disrespect. Since there are some students (most, I’d wager), who would be made uncomfortable by this type of remark, everyone needs to know that it’s not okay to say such a thing. It’s an opportunity for me to help a teenager hone empathy into a habit.

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.

While working on a project for class, a student of mine casually mentioned the names of some of my relatives. When I looked up in horror, he rattled off all of the towns in which I had ever lived. I was shaken. How did he get all this information about me? Simple. He had an app for that.

As schools warm up to the idea of including a child's BMI (Body Mass Index) on his or her report card, perhaps we should evaluate the way we address the issue of childhood obesity. Yes, a high BMI can be dangerous. But as we've seen, the BMI can also be incredibly misleading.

I broke a toe recently. Woke from a deep sleep, ambled around my apartment for just a few moments and then thump! I hit my foot on a piece of furniture. As I hobbled around in the days that followed, lost in the effort of just getting about, I thought “this is what it must feel like to be old.” And then—“this is what it feels like to have a disability.”

The question above was posed to me in the comments section of a blog post I wrote recently. The post was entitled "Imani and the Cabbage Seeds." In it, I wondered about “isms”—racism, sexism and other things that either separate people or give one group power over another.

“Dad, what is the Clue Clux Clan,” asked my 10-year-old son Bakary as we sat under a shade tree on Saturday in Montgomery, Ala. We were waiting to register for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 40th anniversary celebration.“Well, it’s the Ku Klux Klan,” I told him. “Do you remember the old song that goes, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight?" Well, the KKK thinks only white people are precious and they try to hurt people who think differently.” “Oh, I’m glad it’s not the ‘Clue Clux Clan’ because they don’t have a clue,” he said.

I remember the times when I gave up and fought/ When I succumbed to the jokes and taunts/ Reverting to the man I once was, violent and stupid,/ But I won’t let these people manipulate me/ I will become the man I want to be

The undercurrent affects my classroom. I can feel its tug and see its effects but can rarely locate the source or the exact flow. Cruel taunts and gossip are the culprits behind my students’ tears, stony faces—their anger and their fear. The ferociousness of the few vicious communications I have been privy to as a high school teacher caught me off guard. High school can be a shark tank and the blood flows with every passing class period, thanks in part to the popularity of online social media. I feel helpless to save the victims because I don’t even know who they are half the time.

Inspired by an article about cyberbullying, I asked my fifth-graders to write podcast scripts. They wrote about teasing, cyberbullying, gossip, intention vs. consequence, advertising, digital footprints and the lack of facial cues in electronic communication. Working mostly in collaborative groups, my students recorded complete “'casts” on our informal laptop studio.