ABSTRACT
I's m thinking about the first time you suggested that we go beyond the school's walls to get to know children better. I thought, “Yeah, right! How could that ever work? Why would we need to do that anyway?” I think the real reason I reacted that way was that the idea put me in an uncomfortable place—the unknown. Fear, plain and simple. Fear of the unexplored, fear of finding the bigot inside of me that I tried so hard to ignore and deny all these years—the part of me that says, “I's m okay and if you are not like me then you's re not okay.” By embracing difference, it's like saying that there is no one way to be right or normal and that's something a lot of people have never really thought about before. Before this, I really thought I held no biases and that I was quite forward thinking and open to celebrating diversity but, as I sat down to write my assumptions about a child and his family, I realized that I might not be as culturally sensitive as I believed myself to be.
