Blog Your Blessings: A Perfect Essay

It's a perfect essay, I told my students. And we're going to read it to see how a perfect essay is written, and how you can learn to read for answers in one and then to write one.

The perfect essay was President Obama's letter to his daughters, which ran in the Parade section of our January 19 newspaper. In it, Obama explains to his daughters--and to all American children--why he chose to run for the presidency. He begins with a clear introduction in a paragraph that ends with a thesis statement. Each of the next seven paragraphs identifies a reason he chose to run for office. The conclusion summarizes the essay and includes a restatement of the thesis.

The structure is textbook perfection. The content is a story of love for his daughters and the belief that if you love your family you do everything you can to make their lives as good as they can be. The bottom line: running for office was a gesture of love. In the words of another brilliant writer--Elie Wiesel--the theme is this: "Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world."

Students who have gone as far as bringing their parents to me to deliver the baggage they have invented to justify not reading in class, not participating in any way, not working at all ever asked to read. Students who had yet to connect learning with the quality of their lives wanted to read. Kids who never gave a thought to behaving and respecting their peers wanted to read. It was a miracle that had everything to do with the author and content of the reading material at hand and my students' identification with him.

I have sought to teach these kids to look deeper into President Obama. Enough with the "he's the first black President" stuff. Who is he? With that question in mind, I found a piece on the ABC News website that discussed his early life and brought that to my seventh graders. They read for themselves that first his father and then his mother left the household and Obama grew up in the care of his maternal grandparents--who struggled to get by. This scenario is not unfamiliar to a lot of my kids. Here they were reading about a man who faced challenges similar to their own but made an impressive life for himself and for his family as well as others.

My little ruffians read with rapt attention. Another miracle. When I stopped one child so another could begin, the first child said, "Miss, I wasn't done." I wouldn't argue with that; I let him read on. And on. And on.

At the street level a week after the inauguration of President Obama, I saw an amazing transformation. A random good week in the ghetto? I've had those before. They weren't like this one. This was a miracle. Kids are seeing for themselves through a man they see as one of their own who happens to lead our nation that it really is possible to hitch your wagon something greater than yourself and realize your potential.

Obama: "And so what I told [Middle East envoy George Mitchell'] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen."

Blog Your Blessings