For many Wisconsin students, November will mark the first time they cast a ballot in a presidential election. In just a few weeks, students will be lined up outside the Memorial Union or maybe the Red Gym to pull a lever that will determine the course of our nation—no pressure for you first-time voters.
As a recent UW-Madison grad and current middle school science teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this election and how it will be retold in my students’ history books. Fifty years from now, we will look back on this time—the segregation, the racism, the xenophobia, the inequity—and we will tell our children, and our children’s children, that we lived it.
What we say to them next is up to us. And that is why I decided to become a teacher with Teach For America. As a senior at Wisconsin, I worked as a House Fellow and participated with The Navigators, a religious outreach group that helped me discover the impact I wanted to make in the lives of others after graduation.
Now that I’m a teacher, I realize that the future of our country lies squarely in my classroom. Every day that I teach, I grow more convinced of my students’ potential. Most recently, I have been humbled and inspired by my students’ activism in stalling of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Seeing them passionately advocate for an issue that is directly affecting our community inspires me to work harder on their behalf every day. Together, my native and non-native students now recognize that organized, peaceful protest can make change happen on a large scale. It’s these moments that turn my previous hope into my current conviction.
As we get closer to Election Day, I plan to host multiple political discussions in my classroom to give my students as many platforms as possible to debate the issues that they’re most passionate about. I strive to present my students with every opportunity to engage in our democratic process, so that one day soon they’ll be ready to take their voices to the voting booth. I absolutely believe there will be a day when my students are the ones running for president.
This November, we must ensure our country’s moral arc continues bending toward justice for all. We can do that by showing our students real-world examples of leaders who look and sound like them. And secondly, we must empower our children to become the next generation of leaders.
So when we think about how this election will go down in history, we have two choices: We can tell the next generation that we lived it, and we couldn’t find the answers; we lived it, and we didn’t take up the challenge. Or we can tell them that we lived it, and we changed our country for the better.
Jacob is a 2015 graduate. He currently teaches science for Teach for America in South Dakota. Please let us know your thoughts at opinion@dailycardinal.com.
