No matter your location, your school district, your pitfalls, setbacks, or mountains ahead to climb you are the next life changing influence in a room full of desirable minds who need your best that you can give on your worst day at work and vice versa.

If you are anything alike me and most of my friends that are teachers, and or educators of any type you don’t do it for the money!  They could not pay us enough to deal with what we have to go through some of the time on a day to day basis.  So with that said I would like to share some thoughts.

We as black teachers or I prefer to say, culturally diverse educators have a great job to do in opening minds to approach the world as global learners.  We have to attempt to get the minds of the students outside of their, area code, neighborhood, city, state, or region.  You can use various methods to achieve this, but tools such as prezi.com and google earth are great starts.

If you have a Interactive Smart Board and a laptop you should be bringing Japan, Nigeria,  Toronto, Trinidad & Tobago, and Brazil and all of the rich customs of these places to your classroom.  Try to allow your children to leave you knowing that when they go back to their block, or their building that when they return the next day they can possibly go to a new place in the world they may never be able to go.

So many of my students have never left their city, or borough, or state and are in an abundance of joy to learn about people who look like them 17,000 miles away.  As a conscious black teacher do your best to integrate culture into as many content areas as possible.  Some of the best teachers that I know can always teach art, social studies or global studies, or history and math all during their literacy block.  Or can integrate math, language arts, and global studies all into a morning meeting.

Do not bend your thinking away from the fact that if you don’t teach cultural studies and global studies they will not get it at all or who is to say when they will get it, because many teachers are not thinking to integrate cultural studies when working on a math or language arts common core standard.

It is all about being resourceful, using the parents if they are willing and exhausting your administrators to get additional resources, technology, curriculum and always being pro-active but never waiting for anything to get done for you.  Most especially if you teach in the states of Montana, or Virginia, or Maine, or anywhere that prohibits you from being overly creative with your instructional time.  I would encourage you to teach Black History January through December and use February for project based learning black history studies and assignments.  Your students should know the names of Marcus Garvey, Shirley Chisholm, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, Dorothy I. Height, Muhammad Ali,  Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Arthur Ashe and other prolific figures in world history.

Additionally, if you are a early childhood or an elementary school teacher please try to find resources to use to have some type of social and emotional instruction integrated into your instructional time a few times a week.  Studies are showing that black children are being suspended even from the age of pre-school more than other children.  This is most important because if you build a socially cohesive environment for the children to demonstrate empathy, to have a way to express their frustrations without harming themselves or another and to be rewarded for communicating their feelings and asking for help if needed you have done the work of a caregiver to the 12th degree.

We are allowing our children to grow up suffering and lacking the development of social skills and also uncertain on how, when, why, and with who to address their emotions.  Often parents are not able to listen or to support a child who is struggling emotionally and you have to help them express, address, and release those emotions so that they know that it is alright to have them and to verbally express them.

The learning environments that I have seen this being conducted are a delight to witness and be in, and the children that come from such learning environments learn in a more comfortable and a greater capacity as well as are more reassured with themselves as a person who is accepted and able to deal with challenges as an individual.  The primary content areas are important but building a socially comforting environment and being approachable and empathetic pays dividends by the ten fold.  After all we are planting seeds that will grow forever!

Lastly please stop allowing these school systems, and LCSW’s and Behavioral Interventionists and School Psychologists and other Student Support Staff label these children with learning disabilities that can be overcome with individualized instruction.  Adequate IEP’s and small groups instruction as well as utilizing support staff and diversified instruction.  A good friend of mine in new york state mentioned to me that in her school system they now are trying to get individualized learning plans for each student in her class.

If this can happen this will decrease learning problems by a tremendous amount, no matter what the problems could be.  It’s just a little bit of extra work to be done to not have a child labeled (SPED) special-ed for the rest of their days in primary school which can be traumatic to a persons self esteem.  The American education system has tried to do several things to label blacks and latino’s  less than able to perform on their standardized tests as the white children and we cannot help them.  These things lead to life traumatizing conditions.