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Sarah had a strange way about her. She would focus so completely on whatever she was reading that she seemed oblivious to the world around her. However, when the volume in the room reached a certain level, she would burst out with a screaming plea at her classmates to be quiet. “I can’t take anymore of this noise,” she’d yell. At other times, she made loud exclamations to no one in particular. “My mom makes great cinnamon rolls,” she announced one day while unpacking her materials.

I overheard two students talking in class one day about their after-school plans. One said she would be volunteering at the local women’s shelter. I hurried over, excited to congratulate her on this great thing she was doing—being part of her community and supporting marginalized groups. Lesson plans were already beginning to form in my head: writing prompts about social awareness, student interviews with our populations of homeless, hungry, mentally and intellectually disabled and those in poverty. I imagined students writing editorials to the local newspaper about the needs of our community.

Most students have heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They also know of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus. Unfortunately for many students, knowledge of the civil rights movement stops there.

I held up the front page of our college newspaper and asked my first-year journalism students if any questions came to mind as they looked at the photographs of candidates running for president and vice president of our student government. It’s a multimedia storytelling class and the assignments for the week were about analyzing and taking photographs.

Every prospective parent hopes for a healthy baby. But when it comes to hearing and Deaf cultures, “healthy” is defined differently. Four out of 5 deaf children are born to hearing parents. When told this prognosis, hearing parents often experience what psychiatrist and grief expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross characterized as the Five Stages of Grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).

After the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel eloquently stated “never again.” Since he first uttered this compelling sentiment, genocides have erupted across the world—from Guatemala to Cambodia. April was chosen as Genocide Prevention Month since the Holocaust, Rwandan, Bosnian, Armenian and Cambodian genocides are commemorated during this time. The commemoration began in April 2009 and combined genocide remembrance with prevention.

Poet Adrienne Rich once asked: How can we connect the process of learning to write well with [a] student’s own reality, and not simply teach her/him how to write acceptable lies in standard English? The question appeared in her 1979 essay, “Taking Women Students Seriously.” Last week, Adrienne Rich passed away, leaving today’s educators to ponder alone a question that remains as pertinent as ever.

What do you do with a teacher who provides students with authentic learning opportunities? A teacher who invests her own resources to support students? A teacher who was voted Teacher of the Year two of the last three years? If you’re Superintendent Jacqueline Cassell at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School in Pontiac, Mich., you fire her.

When I teach lessons about Martin Luther King Jr., I always wonder exactly how students will connect with the events and themes. My adult students are refugees and immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Some of them were cultural minorities in their countries. Others are experiencing racial discrimination for the first time in the United States.

Over dinner recently, I learned of my niece’s concern about her high school administrators removing the Kony 2012 posters that had been plastered all over the school. Kony 2012, a global campaign and viral video released by the nonprofit Invisible Children earlier this month, had fired her up and inspired her. My sister was thrilled to see her daughter so taken with a cause and so committed to having impact.