Yo, Miss! (No. 32)
Team Humanity
I hope you are all doing okay. This is a short newsletter to tell you I wrote a piece about how I am talking about the Israel-Gaza Conflict with my students that will soon be published on Chalkbeat.org this week. However, here is a preview of what my general thoughts are on everything. Full Disclosure: This might look familiar if you follow me on social media because I shared these exact thoughts on Threads over the weekend and I want you to read my Chalkbeat article. I will post it everywhere when it is live.
Kids are walking around the school asking: are you Team Israeli or Team Palestinian. I addressed it when kids asked me by saying I’m Team Humanity. Then I let them share what they know and think and then let them ask questions. My Muslim students are scared. My Jewish students are scared. They are seeing what happened last weekend. On Friday, they were seeing that 1.1 million Palestinians were being told to evacuate with nowhere to go. They are all seeing all the images in real time too. I don’t have a solution but our kids are watching and we need to do better as a world.
These are the moments that remind me why it’s so important that we keep fighting against the laws and bans that make it difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to allow their classrooms to be a safe and empowering place for kids to learn and process current events. Kids need historical context and critical thinking skills to cut through all the online noise and clickbait as well as oversimplification of complex as well as sometimes polarizing topics. They also need to share their ideas and listen to their peers. If we want to create a world free of white supremacy, hate and greed, education is our best antidote.
What is happening and has been happening in that region is horrendous.
As we brace ourselves for more headlines about death and destruction, I hope it’s possible for us to still simultaneously express outage over what’s happening to the Palestinian people AND also express outage over the Hamas attack on the people in Israel last weekend.
I hope you are all doing okay and I am sending love to all who have been affected and continue to be affected by this.
P.S. I was excited to be a guest on this awesome podcast hosted by my friend Gerardo Munoz. You can also listen to it on Spotify