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Today I saw it first hand, that discrimination and inequality exist in our classrooms. There have been days when my efforts and those of my peers have won to swat off the barriers to justice. We climb the fences and swim the moats that prevent our students from achieving their academic dreams. At times, we as teachers work to clear a path through forests of poverty, hate and domestic violence . To create a space that recognizes histories of oppression, not as stories of the past, but as living stories walking into the room. Today was not that day for me. My heart sank and my mind caught fire when I listened to a white man tell a class of South-Asian, Black, and Latina students that laws are called "man-made" laws because only men make laws, that only men study science, and only one white man could discover gravity. I held my tongue when he so boldly described astronomy as studying the heavens in a public school. Then he ignored a student who wanted to explain that he doesn't believe in heaven... but I don't know what he wanted to say because he never got to finish.
On days like this I worry about equipping my students to be thoughtful, caring, confident people. People who love who they are, who love others and who want to do good in this world.