Related Data

• The average American who buys Christmas gifts spent $718 this year. (statista.com)
• White household wealth in the US is 13 times greater than for Blacks. Ten times more than for Hispanics. (www. Globalresearch.org; Christmas in America: Growing Poverty, Unemployment and Homelessness in the World’s Richest Country, Stephen Lendman, December 25, 2014)
• Fifty-nine per cent of students in SFUSD qualify for free or reduced lunch. (www.sfusd.edu)
• To qualify for free/reduced lunch in San Francisco, a family of four lives on less than $36,000 per year. (SF Gate, September 30, 2013)

Possible Frame

It’s so nice to see everyone after our two-week break. I hope you got to rest amidst the other holiday activities. Our students need you at your most rejuvenated and refreshed.

I wanted to talk for a minute before we get back into our work about how some of our students might be coming back to school after the break. I think that there’s a national story about what happens for people during the winter holidays. This story includes warmth, abundance, harmony, generosity, and gratitude—usually related to the celebration of Christmas. We are not crazy for conceiving of this story—anytime we turn on the television, we are presented with it: a lovely family, cozy in their home with a fireplace, a Christmas tree with many gifts underneath, a table full of food, people shopping, wrapping, cooking, eating, and relaxing. The average American family, after all, spent about $720 on Christmas gifts. It’s important to note here that while the majority of our students celebrate Christmas in one way or another, there are many students who do not—they have other or different cultural and religious celebrations now or at other times in the year.

The story is not entirely fictional; holidays do play out this way for some of our families or for some families in San Francisco. But let’s remember that 59% of students in our city qualify for free or reduced lunch—meaning that their families of four subsist on less than $36,000 a year. It may not be the case that a family in this situation had a Christmas tree with abundance underneath or a holiday table with abundant food or leisure time to relax. MANY of our students will not have experienced this story of Christmas. As someone who spends time in the cafeteria, I can tell you that we have many students who want two or three lunches because lunch is going to be their most significant meal of the day. That doesn’t change when kids are on vacation. While some of our students were full from Christmas dinner, many more of our students were hungry on Christmas night.

Here at school, while we are trying to give our kids the skill and knowledge they need to be successful in achieving their dreams and thereby somehow reducing the gaping divide between the rich and everyone else in our country, we must counter the popular narrative about Christmas that can leave kids feeling ashamed of not having lived the storybook Christmas. What happens when we ask our students, “what did you get for Christmas?” or “what did you do over the winter break?” Some of our students can answer these questions as we might hope, “I got a new board game” or “I got a new art set.” They might say, “I went ice skating” or “My family went to the snow.” But what happens when other kids who didn’t receive gifts or received a gift or a meal from a charity hear those answers? What we most definitely don’t want them to believe is that they didn’t receive gifts or have interesting experiences because they don’t deserve them. Every single one of our students matters equally and deserves love equally. That is the counter-narrative to the Christmas underbelly of consumerism and socioeconomic stratification. Shame and anger can emerge from feeling undeserving or inferior—we don’t want our students to feel shameful for many reasons, one of which is because it doesn’t set them up for learning.

On the other hand, since many of our students did in fact celebrate Christmas, and since many of our families may have stretched financially (and possibly very stressfully) in order to provide a storybook Christmas, and since this is for many families a very significant cultural and religious tradition, it’s important that there is space for kids to share about those experiences. School is a place for them to bring the wholeness of themselves and their experiences. Herein lies our artful and thoughtful handling of the post-winter holidays week.

Let’s be careful in how we engage our students in talking about their breaks. How about questions like, “Who is a person you love that you saw during the break? Why do you love this person?” or “When was a time when you felt happy during the break? When was a time when you felt sad?” (adjust questions to grade level of students) Sometimes it can be challenging to think of questions about breaks that don’t reinforce class divisions—please help each other with this! Seek out a colleague to bounce a question or an idea—this is why we are always working to build relational trust, so that we can ask and contribute help to each other particularly around issues of equity. I’m happy to help anyone think about these questions myself.

This is part of our work—to always be building our consciousness about how the world impacts our students in ways that it may not impact us personally. We become more conscious and then we are careful and thoughtful and strategic about our actions in the classroom and with our students. Here’s a celebration for engaging in this work with me—it’s not always easy or comfortable, but it’s our work as educators committed to building a more equitable and just world.