Dear Team MNPS,
I wish we could be together to help comfort each other in this moment of tumult. I care about you, and yet again you are forced into talking with students about events far beyond what you can control in your virtual classrooms. Many of us were comforted by the changing of the calendar from one year to the next, and I caught myself thinking that we could wash away 12 challenging months with the changing of our calendar – but that isn’t how life always works.
And that means we still have a lot of work to do to help build a better society.
The events of today have shaken many of us to our core. I firmly believe that as educators we should be unbiased and leave our politics at the door when we walk into work, and I still do. However, what transpired at the U.S. Capitol with the attempted violent overthrow of our democratic process goes far beyond normal partisan differences, and it strikes at the heart of what we’ve been taught and have taught our students about American democracy and the constitutional republic I have always been proud to call my home.
I don’t know what the news will be today, tomorrow, or for the weeks and months to come, but we can find some solace and peace in focusing on the work of educating our youngest generation to be able to tell right from wrong and truth from fiction. We can find great purpose in continuing to teach our students about the flawed yet still beautiful system of government we call democracy – a system in which public education has always played a profoundly important part.
We don’t have and won’t have all the answers right away, as teachers and probably as a country. But we’ll continue to push for them.
As a fellow colleague, I have to believe our best days are still yet to come and that we must do everything in our power to make sure children can have even better opportunities than we did as they grow older. That has always been a key to our calling as educators: our drive to help young people grow into a world that they can then shape through their own wisdom and values, ultimately leaving it better than they found it.
In moments like this, I think about what I might do when I was in the classroom. I encourage you to take time to reconnect with your students, hear their voices and support their needs as you embark upon the start of the second semester. Please do not hesitate to leverage your talents, skills, schedules, etc. to support the social emotional learning needs of your students. As I’ve said more than once in the past year, we are all in this together, and I appreciate everything you do for your students. I am still processing what’s happening, and I imagine you are as well. This won’t be a typical first day, and you shouldn’t treat it like one.
In closing, I wanted to share some resources that may help you to process these difficult times with your students, should you need them.
Sincerely,
Adrienne Battle