So we’re studying Ancient Greece, in our first grade classroom, and yesterday we started a segment on daily life in Athens, specifically, the birthplace of democracy and processes of citizenship. Smart kids that they are, they picked up on some interesting aspects of ancient life, no matter how blandly I tried to present it.
Keep in mind, the demographic of my class is at least 75% black, with a smattering of hispanic kids – as is the neighborhood in which I’m teaching. So, you can imagine, the parts of our lesson that mentioned slavery were hotly discussed by my seven-year-olds. I mean, kids will be kids, right? Most of my kids think New Jersey is another country; they have that elastic sense of place and time that every kid has. But these kids sure knew their history when it came to talking about slaves.
Krissa: So, it says here that only free men could vote. What does that mean, free men? What’s the opposite of free people?
Sally*: Black people.
I was almost shocked into laughing, which rivals a certain mispelling of the word “house” as the hardest moment of forced maturity or composure I’ve faced. I went on to explain, as best I could, that although here in the U.S., black people were the predominant ethnicity forced into slavery, ancient Greece would have had slaves of different skin types, and that not all black people were slaves. And I was proud of her, of all my students – quoting Martin Luther King at me about freedom and knowing as much as they did about their own history. When I so often find huge gaps in their knowledge, here was an unexpected mine of information that our schools are doing well to drive home.
But MAN. This must be what they mean when they say out of the mouths of babes.
* name changed, OBVS.

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