I teach at the Millennium School, a new independent middle school located in the heart of San Francisco. Mindfulness and compassion are essential parts of our curriculum.
Yet on November 9th—the day after the presidential election—the sixth-grade classroom I walked into was anything but calm or kind.
What I noticed that morning was more troubling than understandable shock, anger, or confusion. In chorus with half the nation, our students voiced sentiments that had been reverberating across the U.S. for months, albeit from different political vantage points. In their attempts to make sense of the election, I heard enmity, callousness, even what struck me as the blithe onset of not-quite-innocent hatred. Taking this in, I felt immense sadness. The room appeared to be a splintered microcosm of the country as a whole. In progressive circles, it is common to decry the hatred, bigotry, and intolerance underlying much of Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Here was the opposite side of that same coin.
[For more of this story, written by Michael Fisher, go to http://greatergood.berkeley.ed...y_after_the_election]
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