It is my hope that you have and will develop commitments to working to close the "opportunity gap". This requires that you have some social justice sensibilities and a disposition to embrace diversity in your work as practitioner. Strong empathy begins with knowledge of others' experience: you cannot feel what you do not know. Any effective elementary teacher is disposed to not only see things from children's point of view, but to feel it. What children bring to school includes their cultural history, even though they cannot articulate it (can you articulate your own?). It is your professional and moral obligation know about school, society, history and your students' cultural inheritance. I hope you can join Coates when he says: "When the final tally comes up, I would like to say I was on the side of the people who were trying to not live in a world with subjugation." As a teacher you have special opportunity to actually do things to be on that side of you commit yourself to being on that side.
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