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In Oakland, Calif., there are a lot of homicides especially for a fairly small city of about 400,000 people. Last July, there were seven homicides in seven days. Victims ranged in age from 15 to 84. Six of them occurred near the school where I taught. One was a friend of many of my former students and a cousin of a little girl I mentor.

It was a brisk New England day as I walked out of the community center with a group of Somali Muslim women from my adult English as a Second Language class. My students were laughing and joking, their hijabs blowing in the breeze. We had finished our unit on the New World, drawing connections between Europeans immigrating to America and Somalis immigrating to Lewiston and southern Maine. Suddenly, a local woman shouted, "Terrorists!"

In order to enhance my sixth-graders’ ability to connect personally with topics we read about in class, I assigned a writing assignment. I ask students to make real connections to demonstrate their understanding of the topic. There are three areas of connection. First there’s the connection to their lives, then to another piece of literature and finally—the most sophisticated connection—to the world.

“I hate Jews.” That was the sentence, uttered coldly and dripping with vile undertones, from the mouth of a sixth-grader that nearly caused me to let a very powerful teachable moment slip through my fingers. Almost.

“Dad, what is the Clue Clux Clan,” asked my 10-year-old son Bakary as we sat under a shade tree on Saturday in Montgomery, Ala. We were waiting to register for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 40th anniversary celebration.“Well, it’s the Ku Klux Klan,” I told him. “Do you remember the old song that goes, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight?" Well, the KKK thinks only white people are precious and they try to hurt people who think differently.” “Oh, I’m glad it’s not the ‘Clue Clux Clan’ because they don’t have a clue,” he said.

Deaf and hearing students learn together at Kinzie School.

There are some new labels kids have created for one another since I was in school. When I grew up, there were no skaters or noobs. No one was goth or emo. In my day, kids who wore collared shirts and madras were preppy. Kids who smoked cigarettes and listened to Led Zeppelin were burnouts. Jocks were still jocks, although the jocks of my youth were all-inclusive. Today, they separate themselves by sport.