"I am a teacher in a school where a large percentage of our students are immigrants, and my students come from all over the globe, including India, Egypt, Morocco, and Mexico. I knew the night of the election that I would have to prepare myself for some hard conversations.
Unfortunately, the morning after the election I was met with a class of very scared and angry 7-year-olds. One of my students whose family is from Mexico came in first thing this morning and announced her family would have to go back to Mexico.
So here's what we did. . . . We started our day with the Pledge of Allegiance. We talked about how proud we were to live in a country where no one person has control over our lives. We talked about how being different is awesome and one reason America is so great is because it is filled people who are different.
I gave them a chance to talk about why the election made them mad. I reminded them that Trump was a human and that humans make mistakes. I told them that we can hope that because he has been given this great responsibility, that he will step up to the challenge. I gave them a chance to write their hopes for the country, and they turned in letters to Donald Trump.
In true 7-year-old form, they put their hatred aside and wrote of hope. They wrote to him with respect and genuine belief that he will change. They wrote words of encouragement and affirmation, about things that were important. 'I hope you will treat all people with respect even if their skin is not white or they were born in another country.' 'I hope you will know that being different is awesome.' Then we put them in the mailbox and mailed them off to Trump and they were able to go on with their day feeling like they had voiced their concerns.
It's hard for me as a teacher to explain to kids that the things that I drill into them every day — being respectful, responsible, caring, kind, compassionate, and different — are the same things that our new president does not practice himself. But this is just another lesson, a lesson on how things happen all the time that are out of our control. But we are always responsible for our actions and can't control those of others. That's why we instill morals. So they can be OK, even in the wake of something that initially felt like a tragedy."
