Search

What are the important textual touchstones in your life?

As a kid, I remember listening wide-eyed to my grandmother tell me about the “Dummy Room.” The Dummy Room was one of her first assignments as a young teacher in small-town Iowa in the 1930s. Like other Dummy Rooms across the country, it was the dumping ground for the school district’s hard cases.

We know little about the motives of the gunman who opened fire yesterday in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Many of us will monitor the news during the day, hoping to learn more about what the shooter thought he was doing, sure to hear more about the heroism and horror inside the building.

Every year around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the news media start quoting his “I Have A Dream” speech. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great speech – certainly one of the best ever given in the cause of civil rights.

The sixth-graders at Roxboro Middle School tumbled through the doors and into the lunchroom, looking around for places at the tables. The security officer didn’t need a bullhorn; his voice carried.

This piece accompanies the Teaching Tolerance article "Opening Doors on the Border."

Whether close to home or far away, hands-on experience brings history to life.

Use first-graders’ commitment to fairness to help them connect with the modern civil rights movement.