What It Means to Be an Educator in a Fractured World
To be an educator and a writer is to live inside a rollercoaster world of hope. Some days, the classroom feels electric — full of possibility, laughter, and the kind of eye contact that tells you a student has just understood something for the first time. Other days, you carry the weight of everything that threatens to unravel the very fabric of community, safety, and shared humanity. For many teachers today, the pendulum swings harder and faster than ever before.
This is the lived reality for countless educators across the United States — and increasingly, around the world. They are not just teaching subjects. They are trying to teach people how to be human with one another at a time when that skill feels dangerously close to extinction. They are trying to pass on something ancient and essential before it disappears entirely.
Freedom Dreaming as a Teaching Philosophy
The concept of "freedom dreaming" has become a north star for educators who refuse to accept the classroom as a neutral or purely academic space. Rooted in the work of scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, freedom dreaming is the radical act of imagining a world beyond current limitations — and then working backward to build it, one lesson plan at a time.
For educators who have engaged with fellowships and writing communities centered on voices of change, this philosophy is not abstract. It is daily practice. It means designing curriculum that centers joy alongside rigor. It means asking students not only what happened in history, but how it feels, who was left out, and what we might do differently. It means embedding equity into every decision, from which texts are assigned to whose stories are told on the classroom walls.
One powerful expression of this philosophy is the simple act of placing student photos on a classroom door alongside a quote by poet Gwendolyn Brooks: "We are each other's magnitude and bond." That single gesture communicates volumes — that students are seen, that they belong, and that their presence matters beyond a grade book or a standardized test score.
Revolutionizing How History Is Taught
World history, as traditionally taught in American schools, has often centered the experiences of a narrow slice of humanity — primarily Western, primarily male, primarily victorious. For educators committed to telling a fuller story, this approach is not just incomplete. It is harmful. It teaches students, by omission, that certain lives and cultures are more historically significant than others.
Organizations like Facing History and Ourselves and the Remedial Herstory Project have become vital resources for teachers seeking to disrupt this pattern. Facing History and Ourselves provides educators with frameworks for connecting historical injustice to present-day questions of identity, ethics, and civic responsibility. The Remedial Herstory Project centers women and marginalized communities whose contributions have been systematically erased from mainstream historical narratives.
Together, these resources help teachers find their voice — not just as instructors, but as advocates for a more honest and inclusive version of the past. Teaching history this way is energizing precisely because it is meaningful. Students stop memorizing dates and start wrestling with ideas. They start seeing themselves in the story of humanity, which is exactly where they belong.
The Emotional Cost of Teaching in Crisis
Despite the joy that comes from purposeful, humanity-centered teaching, this work does not exist in a vacuum. The 2025–26 school year has already handed educators some of the heaviest emotional burdens in recent memory. In cities like Minneapolis, teachers and students have had to process community trauma — including gun violence near schools — while still showing up every morning to teach fractions, metaphors, and the causes of World War I.
This emotional exhaustion is real and it is widespread. Teachers are asked to be instructors, counselors, community builders, and trauma-informed caregivers — often without adequate support, compensation, or recognition. The gap between what educators are called to do and what systems actually support them in doing has never felt wider.
And yet, they stay. They decorate their doors. They learn new subjects. They write. They dream. They keep showing up because the alternative — a classroom stripped of humanity, of relationship, of joy — is simply not something they are willing to accept.
Building Authentic Relationships as an Act of Resistance
In an era of high-stakes testing, data dashboards, and algorithmic assessments, choosing to prioritize authentic human connection in the classroom is itself a form of resistance. When a teacher calls their students "family," they are pushing back against a system that increasingly treats education as a transaction and students as metrics.
Research consistently supports what intuitive educators have long known: students learn better when they feel safe, seen, and connected. The quality of the teacher-student relationship is one of the strongest predictors of academic engagement and long-term wellbeing. Investing in that relationship is not a soft extra — it is the core of effective teaching.
Why Teaching Humanity Cannot Wait
We are living through a period of profound social fracture. Political polarization, digital disconnection, and rising rates of loneliness — particularly among young people — have created a generation that is simultaneously more informed and more isolated than any before it. Schools may be among the last remaining spaces where genuine, face-to-face human connection is still structurally possible.
That makes the work of educators like this one not just admirable — it makes it urgent. Teaching empathy, context, and shared humanity is not a luxury reserved for well-resourced schools or progressive districts. It is a necessity for every classroom, in every community, at every grade level.
The Work Continues
Teaching humanity before it disappears is not a single lesson or a semester-long unit. It is a commitment renewed every day, in every interaction, in every choice about whose story gets told and whose voice gets heard. It is exhausting. It is joyful. It is, for the educators who answer this call, the only work worth doing.
The banner on the door, the photos of students, the freedom dreaming, the honest history — these are not small things. They are the building blocks of a more humane world, assembled one classroom at a time, by teachers who refuse to let humanity slip quietly away.