When I first began contributing to a newsletter for my local school district, I explored heritage months: Black, Women’s, Arab American, Asian American & Pacific Islander, Jewish, LGBTQ+ Pride, Disability Pride, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous Peoples, and more.  Of course, one month each is not enough to celebrate the history and complexity of each group, so these pieces were teasers, meant to inspire life-long learning.

In a recent post I commented on a line from the poem “Belief in Magic” by Dean Young. “The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.” Imagine. A document that holds dreams and powers we still hold dear was crafted with a feather. It is astonishing to think about.

Classrooms are wonderful places to learn to cherish the rights and values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.  Last week at an elementary school, members of their Humanity and Justice group created a learning opportunity about the history of  Memorial Day. Everyone was welcome, as students learned about the Race Course, a Civil War prisoner of war camp in Charleston, South Carolina,  notorious for its horrific conditions, and abandoned after the end of the war.  Students learned about a group of formerly enslaved people who reburied Union Soldiers found in a mass grave there, and in honor of those they buried, declared that day Memorial Day.

The students read A Day For Rememberin’ (you can listen to it  here) which  tells the story of ten-year-old Eli who helped prepare the fencing that surrounded the graveyard  at the former prison, ahead of the ceremony that took place there on May 1, 1865. 

In his 1963 speech, A Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin spoke of troubling times, and said “those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people must be prepared to “go for broke.” 

I read a few 2025 commencement addresses, and found words like these repeated: “stay human,” “make yourself indispensable,” “don’t follow the rules—create better rules,” and “Ignore other people’s blueprints—they depict a world we no longer live in.”  

And this from sociologist Ruha Benjamin, “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” 

There are awe-inspiring opportunities in our schools to imagine new worlds.  That Memorial Day lesson was that kind of opportunity. Our young people need us to be willing to make those opportunities happen to revise models, imagine possibilities, open-heartedly risk and ‘go for broke.’

I’m grateful to ‘go for broke’ with all of you.