A Lil' Insight + New Project

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

If there's anything that I would want more of for black boys and girls, it's imagination. Obviously I'd wish it for all kids, and here, I'm just speaking on what I know: When you are young and black and you have the vague sense that the world is not as it should be, you need to be able to imagine other ways of being. You need to understand that somewhere there are people who pay their bills by, not shrinking themselves for the streets, but by becoming bigger, by seeing more in the world. It's a damn shame that the very people who need imagination the most, are the ones who get it drummed out of them the quickest.

I think Ta-Nehisi's words are right on, direct, and powerfully written (I'm still trying to find away to incorporate parts of The Beautiful Struggle into a unit) and when I read this, I immediately knew they needed to be in my classroom. I'm big on collages and creating my own posters for my classroom. My instruction is sometimes questionable but the collages have made my classroom a regular walk-through stop, and definitely sets me apart from the chart paper catastrophes that I see all around me.