Need Some Evidence That Opportunity is Worth Creating? Steal This Assignment!
•To succeed, I think we all have to find mountains of evidence that millions of people in the U.S. today are worth the opportunities we will create.
Every day teaching and working at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston I work with students who have so much intellect, so much motivation and so little opportunity. I teach plain-vanilla expository writing to show students how to use words to create their own opportunities. Doesn’t a successful job letter require an argument supported by evidence, the same as any college essay?
So, Steal What Assignment? Ask every teacher and professor you know to invite students everywhere to write their own version of Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” Have the students mail the poems to the White House and to their two U.S. Senators.
The Nation just published some results of this assignment from my classroom. Please send the link to all teachers and professors you know and tell them that Opportunity Nation is making the same request of it’s network of partners, including their coalition members, Opportunity Nation Leader and Scholars, Leadership Council members, and thousand of online supporters around the nation.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the impact that Opportunity Nation’s Summit on September 19 had on me. It was inspiring. I met so many people as committed to creating opportunity as everyone is at Bunker Hill Community College, and they are doing so in extremely creative ways. The first people I met at the Summit were a graffiti artist from Los Angeles and a woman working to improve adult literacy in Detroit. With passions like theirs, I believe we will create great opportunities for these poets and millions more.
