To prepare for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day assembly, I’ve been teaching my students “We Shall Overcome.” I showed this performance by Mahalia Jackson, one of my favorite performances of all time.
I unapologetically talked about how much I loved this performance, especially the ending. It’s a fantastic moment. Jackson walks away from the microphone, still singing, and then turns around and waves to the audience, singing, “everything is going to be alright.” I made my students watch the end part three or four times so that we could all revel in the power of Mahalia Jackson.
I told my students that Jackson was friends with Dr. King. I got some puzzled looks from my fourth graders. Finally, one student commented, "boys and girls can't be friends."
“Yes, they can,” I replied.
I told them that my best friend is my wife and that I also have other friends who are women. I explained that in the same way we can be friends with people who are not the same race as us, we could and should be friends with people of a different gender than us.
I taught my 6th graders that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II was an incredible human tragedy.
In our study of rap, we watched the music video “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys.
To understand this video's reference to Japanese Kaiju monster movies, I showed them a silly clip from a 1970s Godzilla film and a more serious clip from the original movie Gojira from 1954.
We talked about how people deal with tragedy and challenging emotions by creating art. For example, the original Gojira film was a way that Japanese people processed the unimaginable trauma of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We discussed the debate around the use of the atom bomb, and I made it clear that is no debate that this was a moment in our history of incredible sadness and that the people who died were human beings. We discussed what it meant for President Obama to be the first president to visit the site of the bombing in Hiroshima.
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