We received a pen pal letter today in fourth grade from my sister’s kindergarten class, where they responded to our letters about how we celebrate culture at school. Coming from a more diverse area, her students introduced my students into new holidays that they had never even imagined existed. Festivals of light, nine days of Christmas parties… It was riveting and exciting, but, on pajama day and the Friday before our Spring Break, my voice was completely lost among the excitement of seeing how kindergarteners spelled “Dear” as “Der.”

My principal made his rounds, and conveniently stopped by as my students were exploring what we learned about the school culture of our pen pal class. My mentor teacher encourage our principal into the conversation, as he has had experience in schools from inner city Washington D.C. to Mexico.

His voice was absolute magic to my children.

He wove tales of the Day of Dead and how the traditions of the holiday have evolved over time to not only honor ancestors, but also to help feed the hungry. He discussed why Halloween masks were banned in a school he taught in laden with refugee children who had been so used to masked villains terrorizing their communities and their families.

The students were enraptured in his stories, and I could see as their brains began to place themselves in scenarios they could never imagine being in, just as they did when we read historical fiction novels that seemed so far removed from their generation. But they were thinking of real children existing today, celebrating things they had never heard of and fearing things my students had never even encountered in nightmares.

“Culture” was suddenly not just a word I introduced earlier in the month.

It was now a word growing roots in my children’s minds and prying open their thoughts to look more deeply into a world that is more complex they ever imagined. As a class that embraces challenges and rises to the occasion when learning schema-altering information, this was the perfect seed to plant in their brains right before Spring Break. They are not a class to simply accept things as they are. They want to know the “why,” and they want to make sure the “why” is always designed in fairness and equality. Because of this, I am extremely excited to see how their brains seek out problems they had not seen before and delve into solutions that will one day, perhaps, come true.

March 1st is the beginning of my first journey with the Slice of Life challenge… A student in 2019, and a teacher in 2020.

Welcome to my first blog post. It is not quite March yet, but I wanted to jump start on introducing myself. I am a full-year, full-time student teacher in Pennsylvania in a fourth grade classroom. While I will not be participating with my students this year, I hope to find this valuable so I can incorporate it as I grow as an educator.

I greatly value writing with my students.

As a self-published author, I enjoy teaching me students the intricacies of the writing process. While I feel I can bring much to the table, I do not do much writing outside of my books that I intend to publish. While this still includes a lot of writing, I do not do much writing that I can actually share with my students. In an effort to continuing to cultivate relationships within my classroom, I hope that sharing the writing I do through this challenge will allow me to connect even deeper with my students. If I show them how hard I work, they are a class that will, in turn, exert the same effort.

I look forward to this upcoming month and sharing the simply things in my life that sometimes get washed away in the tide.