Curriculum

This spring, my principal asked who would be interested in teaching a two-week summer session for our own students. I found myself saying, “I’ll do it.” I had previously sworn off summer school as something I would never teach no matter how much I needed the money. But then “summer school” was something I’d only seen in the movies: large groups of unmotivated kids who had even less desire in the summer than they had during the school year. I imagined sweltering classrooms, hours of endless instruction and failure for all—myself included.

Walking into class that September morning, I had no idea that one of my students would come out about her sexuality during the course of a class discussion. Neither did she. After previous class work with White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh, the conversation on that day was designed merely to explore heterosexual privileges.

Last night, two children, Max and Sarah, vacationing at their grandparents’ home in Boca Raton, Florida, traveled far, far away from there. They landed in Piwniczna, a town small enough to be summed up in a single sentence on Wikipedia:

“Piwniczna-Zdrój [pivˈnit​͡ʂna ˈzdrui̯] (until 1999 Piwniczna) is a town in Nowy Sacz County, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, near the border with Slovakia, with 5,744 inhabitants (2004).”

See if this educational goal for first-graders offends you:

“Understand human beings can love people of the same gender & people of another gender.”

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s work is so powerful and popular that it has never been out of print, selling more than 30 million copies.