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  • Conducting Research Like a Boss
  • The Three Types of Irony
  • The Cost of Conformity
  • Women's History Month
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  • Home
  • First Quarter
    • Welcome Back - Rhythm, But Not Blues
    • This I Believe
    • Manage Your STRESS
    • It's All About Having a Growth Mindset
    • The Cost of Conformity
    • The Giver
    • The Reading Mindset
  • Second Quarter
    • Themes in the novel THE GIVER
    • For Everyone by Jason Reynolds
    • Fig Lang (Figurative Language)
    • What do we do with a difference?
    • Amanda Gorman, Poet Laureate
  • Third Quarter
    • Argument Reading
    • Argument Writing
    • In-text Citations
    • What do we do with a difference?
    • I heard it through the grapevine...
    • Literary Allusions
  • Fourth Quarter
    • P o E t R y
    • The Scorpio Races
    • Writing & Performing a MONOLOGUE
    • Me, Myself, and My Gender
    • Themes in Literature
    • Innovating to Solve Real-World Problems
    • The Design Thinking Process
  • Book Club & Socratic Seminar
  • One Community; Six Words
    • Check Out Our Project!
    • North Olmsted's African American History
    • North Olmsted's First Settlers from CT and VT
    • North Olmsted's Geologic & Natural History
    • North Olmsted's Native People
    • North Olmsted's Veterans
    • North Olmsted's Women
  • Conducting Research Like a Boss
  • The Three Types of Irony
  • The Cost of Conformity
  • Women's History Month
  • Black History Month

Check out our project!

Of History and Hope
BY MILLER WILLIAMS

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row--
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.


Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become--
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet--
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.
Photo used under Creative Commons from MIKI Yoshihito. (#mikiyoshihito)