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"America" Neil Diamond

“America the Beautiful”

“American Progress” image

Declaration of Independence

“God Bless America”

“God Bless the USA” Lee Greenwood

“I Hear America Singing” Walt Whitman

"Pledge of Allegiance" Francis Bellamy

“Star Spangled Banner”

Statue of Liberty

"The New Colossus" Emma Lazarus & Trump Era Revision

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"A Litany for Survival" Audre Lorde

"America" Richard Blanco

"America" Claude McKay

"America Is a Gun" Brian Bilston

"America, Say My Name" Viet Thanh Nguyen

"American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" Terrance Hayes

"Black Statue of Liberty" Jessica Care Moore

"Chameleon" Trevor Noah

"Heritage" Linda Hogan

"I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies" June Jordan

"I Walk in the History of My People" Chrystos

“I, Too Sing America” Langston Hughes

"Let America Be America Again" Langston Hughes

"Mother Tongue" Amy Tan

"Native Tongue" Micah Bournes

"Pity the Nation" Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Still I Rise" Maya Angelou

"Stupid America" by Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado

"The Hill We Climb" Amanda Gorman

"The Other America" Dr. Martin Luther King

"The Song of the Feet" Nikki Giovanni

"The Trail of Tears: Our Removal" Linda Hogan

"Together We Will Rise" Yolanda King

"Walking Down Park" Nikki Giovanni

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"Alien" Gil Scott-Heron

**“Alright" Kendrick Lamar

"America” Simon & Garfunkel

"America" from West Side Story (1961)

"America" from West Side Story (2021)

“American Idiot” by Green Day

“American Land” Bruce Springsteen

** “Americans” Janelle Monáe

"Another Wasted Life" Rhiannon Giddens

"Born in the USA" Bruce Springsteen

** “Change” - RM and Wale

** ”Don’t Shoot" Shea Diamond

** "Fight the Power" Public Enemy

“For What It's Worth” Buffalo Springfield

“Fortunate Son” Creedence Clearwater Revival

"Freedom" Beyoncé ft. Kendrick Lamar

“Get Up, Stand Up” Bob Marley and the Wailers

"Give Us Justice" Three Sacred Souls

“Glory” John Legend & Common

**"Hind's Hall" Macklemore

"I Can't Breathe" H.E.R.

"I Want Something" Evan Greer

“Keep on Rocking’ in the Free World” Neil Young

"Lost in the World + Who Will Survive in America" Kanye West

“Mississippi Goddamn” Nina Simone

"My People" Cha Wa

“Nina Cried Power” Hozier and Mavis Staples

"None of Us Are Free" Solomon Burke

"Perfect Way to Die" Alicia Keys

“Pink Houses” John Cougar Mellencamp

“Pumped Up Kicks” Foster the People

"The People" - Common

"The Revolution Will Be Televised" SMOOVE

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Gil Scott-Heron

"This is My Country" Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions

"Sacrifice" Robbie Robertson

“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” James Brown

“Strange Fruit” Billie Holiday

"Talkin about a Revolution" Tracy Chapman

"The American Dream is Killing Me" Green Day

** “The Message” Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five

"The Wolf" The Brat

** “This Is America” Childish Gambino

**"This Land" Gary Clark Jr.

“This Land, Our Land” (arr.) Christopher O’Riley

“This Land Is Your Land” by Woodie Guthrie

"This Land Is Your Land" by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

** “We The People" A Tribe Called Quest

"Welcome 2 America" Prince

“What’s Goin On” Marvin Gaye

“Whitey on the Moon” Gil Scott Heron

**Mature Language

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Art

Afrocosmologies

Amistad Center

Banksy

Bisa Butler

Carl Joe Williams

Isaac Bloodworth

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Joonbug

Kadir Nelson

Kehinde Wiley

Mario Moore

Nettrice Gaskins

Nick Cave

Outsider Art

Pt2Gallery

RISE UP for Arts

Street/Graffiti Art

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Titus Kaphar

Winfred Rembert

Links

1619 Project

Civics in the Elementary Classroom

Developing Student Voice, Character & Civic Agency

#DisruptTexts (Dr. Kimberly Parker)

#DisruptTexts Guides

Equity Literacy Institute

Everyday Advocacy

Freedom Reads

How Artists Explore Identity

Lesson on CRT

National Portrait Gallery

Native Land

Providence Black Studies Syllabus

The American Canon Reimagined (PBS Learning Lab)

TED Talk: Can Art Amend History? (Titus Kaphar)

"Where to Invade Next"

Podcasts

Civics 101

Code Switch

Dolly Parton’s America

Getting In and Getting Out

How to Citizen

Humans of New York

NPR Student Podcast Challenge

PBS American Portrait

Radiolab

Storycorps

This American Life

This Land

This Teenage Life

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Consider the different identities represented in Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes's "I, Too Sing America"

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In large graven letters on the wall of the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall is a quote from poet Langston Hughes: "I, too, am America."

The line comes from the Hughes's poem "I, too," first published in 1926.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed-

I, too, am America.

From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. By permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated

The poem is a singularly significant affirmation of the museum's mission to tell the history of United States through the lens of the African-American experience. It embodies that history at a particular point in the early 20th century when Jim Crow laws throughout the South enforced racial segregation; and argues against those who would deny that importance-and that presence.

Its mere 18 lines capture a series of intertwined themes about the relationship of African-Americans to the majority culture and society, themes that show Hughes' recognition of the painful complexity of that relationship.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

There is a multi-dimensional pun in the title, "I, too" in the lines that open and close the poem. If you hear the word as the number two, it suddenly shifts the terrain to someone who is secondary, subordinate, even, inferior.

Hughes powerfully speaks for the second-class, those excluded. The full-throated drama of the poem portrays African-Americans moving from out of sight, eating in the kitchen, and taking their place at the dining room table co-equal with the "company" that is dining.

Intriguingly, Langston doesn't amplify on who owns the kitchen. The house, of course, is the United States and the owners of the house and the kitchen are never specified or seen because they cannot be embodied. Hughes' sly wink is to the African-Americans who worked in the plantation houses as slaves and servants. He honors those who lived below stairs or in the cabins. Even excluded, the presence of African-Americans was made palpable by the smooth running of the house, the appearance of meals on the table, and the continuity of material life. Enduring the unendurable, their spirit lives now in these galleries and among the scores of relic artifacts in the museum's underground history galleries and in the soaring arts and culture galleries at the top of the bronze corona-shaped building.

The other reference if you hear that "too" as "two" is not subservience, but dividedness.

Hughes' pays homage to his contemporary, the intellectual leader and founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois whose speeches and essays about the dividedness of African-American identity and consciousness would rivet audiences; and motivate and compel the determined activism that empowered the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century.

The African-American, according to DuBois in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folks, existed always in two 'places" at once:

"One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

DuBois makes the body of the African-American-the body that endured so much work and which is beautifully rendered in Hughes' second stanza "I am the darker brother"-as the vessel for the divided consciousness of his people.

DuBois writes of the continual desire to end this suffering in the merging of this "double self into a better and truer self." Yet in doing so, DuBois argued, paradoxically, that neither "of the older selves to be lost."

The sense of being divided in two was not just the root of the problem not just for the African-American, but for the United States. As Lincoln had spoken about the coexistence of slavery with freedom: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Hughes ties together this sense of the unity of the separate and diverse parts of the American democracy by beginning his poem with a near direct reference to Walt Whitman.

Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric" and went on to associate the power of that body with all the virtues of American democracy in which power was vested in each individual acting in concert with their fellows. Whitman believed that the "electricity" of the body formed a kind of adhesion that would bind people together in companionship and love: "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear. . ."

Hughes makes Whitman-his literary hero-more explicitly political with his assertion "I, too, sing America."

The verb here is important because it suggests the implicit if unrecognized creative work that African-Americans provided to make America. African-Americans helped sing America into existence and for that work deserve a seat at the table, dining as coequals with their fellows and in the company of the world.

At the end of the poem, the line is changed because the transformation has occurred.

"I, too, am America."

Presence has been established and recognized. The house divided is reconciled into a whole in which the various parts sing sweetly in their separate harmonies. The problem for the politics of all this, if not for the poem itself, is that the simple assertion of presence-"They'll see how beautiful I am. . ." -may not be enough.

The new African American Museum on the National Mall is a powerful assertion of presence and the legitimacy of a story that is unique, tragic and inextricably linked to the totality of American history. "I, too" is Hughes at his most optimistic, reveling in the bodies and souls of his people and the power of that presence in transcendent change. But he fully realized the obstacles to true African-American emancipation and acceptance in the house of American democracy. He was the poet, remember, who also wrote "What will happen to a dream deferred?"

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What Langston Hughes' Powerful Poem "I, Too" Tells Us About America's Past and Present

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Smithsonian historian David Ward reflects on the work of Langston Hughes

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Examine the history of America through some of its most iconic symbols, objects and places, and how their meanings have changed over time. What do they say about American identity?

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ICONIC AMERICA: OUR SYMBOLS AND STORIES with David Rubenstein is an eight-episode series that examines the history of America through some of its most iconic objects, symbols and artifacts, diving deep into their story and using them as a gateway to the past.

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Consider what Dr. Martin Luther King says in his essay, "The Other America," and apply it to this tweet.

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Explore the controversy around how the "Pledge of Allegiance" came to be

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I first struggled with "under God" in my fourth-grade class in Westport, Connecticut. It was the spring of 1954, and Congress had voted, after some controversy, to insert the phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance, partly as a cold war rejoinder to "godless" communism. We kept stumbling on the words-it's not easy to un learn something as ingrained and metrical as the Pledge of Allegiance-while we rehearsed for Flag Day, June 14, when the revision would take effect.

Now, nearly five decades later, "under God" is at the center of a legal wrangle that has stirred passions and landed at the door of the U.S. Supreme Court. The case follows a U.S. appeals court ruling in June 2002 that "under God" turns the pledge into an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion when recited in public schools. Outraged by the ruling, Washington, D.C. lawmakers of both parties recited the pledge on the Capitol steps.

Amid the furor, the judge who wrote the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court, based in San Francisco, stayed it from being put into effect. In April 2003, after the Ninth Circuit declined to review its decision, the federal government petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn it. ( Editor's Note: In June 2004, the Court ruled unanimously to keep "under God" in the Pledge.) At the core of the issue, scholars say, is a debate over the separation of church and state.

I wonder what the man who composed the original pledge 111 years ago would make of the hubbub.

Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister's son from upstate New York. Educated in public schools, he distinguished himself in oratory at the University of Rochester before following his father to the pulpit, preaching at churches in New York and Boston. But he was restive in the ministry and, in 1891, accepted a job from one of his Boston congregants, Daniel S. Ford, principal owner and editor of the Youth's Companion, a family magazine with half a million subscribers.

Assigned to the magazine's promotions department, the 37-year-old Bellamy set to work arranging a patriotic program for schools around the country to coincide with opening ceremonies for the Columbian Exposition in October 1892, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World. Bellamy successfully lobbied Congress for a resolution endorsing the school ceremony, and he helped convince President Benjamin Harrison to issue a proclamation declaring a Columbus Day holiday.

A key element of the commemorative program was to be a new salute to the flag for schoolchildren to recite in unison. But as the deadline for writing the salute approached, it remained undone. "You write it," Bellamy recalled his boss saying. "You have a knack at words." In Bellamy's later accounts of the sultry August evening he composed the pledge, he said that he believed all along it should invoke allegiance. The idea was in part a response to the Civil War, a crisis of loyalty still fresh in the national memory. As Bellamy sat down at his desk, the opening words-"I pledge allegiance to my flag"-tumbled onto paper. Then, after two hours of "arduous mental labor," as he described it, he produced a succinct and rhythmic tribute very close to the one we know today: I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands-one Nation indivisible-with liberty and justice for all. (Bellamy later added the "to" before "the Republic" for better cadence.)

Millions of schoolchildren nationwide took part in the 1892 Columbus Day ceremony, according to the Youth's Companion. Bellamy said he heard the pledge for the first time that day, October 21, when "4,000 high school boys in Boston roared it out together."

But no sooner had the pledge taken root in schools than the fiddling with it began. In 1923, a National Flag Conference, presided over by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, ordained that "my flag" should be changed to "the flag of the United States," lest immigrant children be unclear just which flag they were saluting. The following year, the Flag Conference refined the phrase further, adding "of America."

In 1942, the pledge's 50th anniversary, Congress adopted it as part of a national flag code. By then, the salute had already acquired a powerful institutional role, with some state legislatures obligating public school students to recite it each school day. But individuals and groups challenged the laws. Notably, Jehovah's Witnesses maintained that reciting the pledge violated their prohibition against venerating a graven image. In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled in the Witnesses' favor, undergirding the free-speech principle that no schoolchild should be compelled to recite the pledge.

A decade later, following a lobbying campaign by the Knights of Columbus-a Catholic fraternal organization-and others, Congress approved the addition of the words "under God" within the phrase "one nation indivisible." On June 14, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill into law.

The bill's sponsors, anticipating that the reference to God would be challenged as a breach of the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, had argued that the new language wasn't really religious. "A distinction must be made between the existence of a religion as an institution and a belief in the sovereignty of God," they wrote. "The phrase 'under God' recognizes only the guidance of God in our national affairs." The disclaimer did not deter a succession of litigants in several state courts from contesting the new wording over the years, but complainants never got very far-until last year's ruling by the Ninth Circuit.

The case originated when Michael Newdow, an atheist, claimed that his daughter (a minor whose name has not been released) was harmed by reciting the pledge at her public school in Elk Grove, California. If she refused to join in because of the "under God" phrase, the suit argued, she was liable to be branded an outsider and thereby harmed. The appellate court agreed. Complicating the picture, the girl's mother, who has custody of the child, has said she does not oppose her daughter's reciting the pledge; the youngster does so every school day along with her classmates, according to the superintendent of the school district where the child is enrolled.

Proponents of the idea that the pledge's mention of God reflects historical tradition and not religious doctrine include Supreme Court justices past and present. "They see that kind of language-'under God' and 'in God we trust'-with no special religious significance," says political scientist Gary Jacobsohn, who teaches Constitutional law at WilliamsCollege.

Atheists are not the only ones to take issue with that line of thought. Advocates of religious tolerance point out that the reference to a single deity might not sit well with followers of some established religions. After all, Buddhists don't conceive of God as a single discrete entity, Zoroastrians believe in two deities and Hindus believe in many. Both the Ninth Circuit ruling and a number of Supreme Court decisions acknowledge this. But Jacobsohn predicts that a majority of the justices will hold that government may support religion in general as long as public policy does not pursue an obviously sectarian, specific religious purpose.

Bellamy, who went on to become an advertising executive, wrote extensively about the pledge in later years. I haven't found any evidence in the historical record-including Bellamy's papers at the University of Rochester-to indicate whether he ever considered adding a divine reference to the pledge. So we can't know where he would stand in today's dispute. But it's ironic that the debate centers on a reference to God that an ordained minister left out. And we can be sure that Bellamy, if he was like most writers, would have balked at anyone tinkering with his prose.

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The Man Who Wrote the Pledge of Allegiance

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The schoolroom staple didn't originally include "under God," even though it was created by an ordained minister

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Explore the question of counterstory in creating art.

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Titus Kaphar: Can art amend history? | TED Talk

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Artist Titus Kaphar makes paintings and sculptures that wrestle with the struggles of the past while speaking to the diversity and advances of the present. In an unforgettable live workshop, Kaphar takes a brush full of white paint to a replica of a 17th-century Frans Hals painting, obscuring parts of the composition and bringing its hidden story into view. There’s a narrative coded in art like this, Kaphar says. What happens when we shift our focus and confront unspoken truths?

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Compare the three Englishes Dr. Jamila Lyiscott discusses in this TED Talk.

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

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Jamila Lyiscott is a "tri-tongued orator;" in her powerful spoken-word essay "Broken English," she celebrates - and challenges - the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be "articulate."

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Consider the different identities represented in two versions of "The New Colossus." Compare these two versions to the poem "Black Statue of Liberty" by poet Jessica Care Moore.

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Part 1 in a four-part series on reading in the Common Core era.
The Common Core State Standards are changing what many kids read in school. They're standards, sure - not curriculum. Teachers and districts still have great latitude when it comes to the "how" of reading instruction, but...

The Core standards explicitly require students to read "complex" material, and the fact is, many kids simply weren't doing that before the Core. What were they doing?

Teachers in Washoe County Schools (in and around Reno, Nev.) - and many districts nationwide - once used what they call a "skills and strategies" approach to teach reading. It was particularly common among poor schools where lots of kids struggled.

The idea was this: To learn how to be a good reader, kids needed to learn the skills and strategies that good readers use. Those include knowing how to find the main idea of a text, identifying key details, being able to draw conclusions, etc.

Teachers in Reno would begin each lesson by telling students the skill they'd be learning that day, says Cathy Schmidt, who taught elementary school.

"Like, today we're going to read to make inferences. Or, today we're going to predict. Or, today we're going to draw conclusions," says Schmidt.

After going over the skill of the day, teachers would typically give kids a quick summary of the story they were about to read. Then they would define the words that might be difficult for kids, says Aaron Grossman, a teacher trainer for the district who used to teach elementary and middle school.

"I would do this huge gin-up," Grossman says, revealing the story before kids could read it, with the belief that doing so would help struggling readers get through it more easily.

Next, teachers would ask students about their personal experiences with the topic of the text. If the story was about a family taking a train trip, Schmidt would ask her class: "Have you ever been on a train? Tell me about the time you've been on a train."

The goal was to engage students by connecting what they were reading with their personal experiences. Some kids would always raise their hands, eager to talk about their train trips and family vacations, says Schmidt. But others had nothing to say. Many had never been on a train or even a vacation.
Keep Kids Out Of Frustration
When kids did finally get down to reading, they wouldn't necessarily all read the same text, says Torrey Palmer, who was a literacy coordinator for the Washoe County Schools.

Teachers used a technique called "leveled instruction." Palmer describes it as "an approach to literacy in which students spend the vast majority of their time in a text that is at their reading level. So if a student is in fifth grade and they're reading at a third-grade level, they spend most of their day reading texts at a third-grade level."

Even in the upper grades, students might get different texts depending on their reading level, says Angela Orr, who was a high school history teacher.

"I was told if I wanted students to understand a primary source, I should excerpt it for the 'highest' kids," she says, "give all of the definitions of hard words for what were called the 'medium' kids. And then actually change the words to something really comprehensible for the kids that were struggling readers."

Some textbooks included multiple versions of the same text, Orr says. She remembers a particular example that bothered her:

"In one level, students were learning about the founders of our nation," she says. "In another level, the word 'founders' was taken out as if it were too difficult, and a student would read a sentence that says 'Ben Franklin started the nation.' "

The idea of all this leveling was to "keep kids out of frustration," says Aaron Grossman. This was the message from the school district, from publishers, from all kinds of experts. The goal was to make sure "you don't create a classroom environment where kids feel defeated."
The Common Core Shifts
When Nevada adopted the Common Core State Standards in 2010, Grossman recently had started a job as a teacher trainer for the school district. The message from above was that Common Core wasn't going to be a big change from the old Nevada state standards. It would mostly be a matter of adding a few things and moving material around, officials said.

"At that point, I was out," says Angela Orr, rolling her eyes. To her, Common Core sounded like one big, bureaucratic nightmare. No one was talking about why the standards were changing or what the new standards actually said.

Since it was Aaron Grossman's job to teach teachers the new standards, he decided to do some of his own research. And what he found surprised him.

The Common Core English Language Arts Standards call for three major shifts in instruction. The first is: "Regular practice with complex texts."

The idea, as Grossman learned, is to move away from focusing so much on reading skills and strategies and instead to think more about what kids read and, in particular, to make sure all students are reading text that is at their grade level. In other words, less leveled instruction.

The second Common Core shift in instruction is: "Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts."

Instead of using a text as a springboard into kids' personal experiences, this Common Core shift demands that students stick to the material, reading it carefully and citing evidence for all that they say or write.

One reason for this shift is that the "text to self" technique often puts kids from lower-income families at a disadvantage, says David Liben of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit set up by the authors of the Common Core.

Liben says that if assignments and class discussion are about personal experience, "that privileges those children who have that experience," but when students have to cite evidence from a text, they all can find something to say.

The third Common Core shift in instruction is "building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction."

In Washoe County and many other school districts, students typically read stories, especially in the early grades; there was very little nonfiction, says Grossman.

"Social studies and science just weren't being taught," he says. "In the effort to teach kids reading skills, we had kind of forgotten about the importance of a lot of other stuff."
"The New Colossus"
Grossman shared what he'd learned with his colleague, Torrey Palmer. Her reaction? "This is big, this is different!"

I believe you should know your enemy.

They asked their boss if they could bring a small group of teachers together to share what they'd learned about the Common Core and to hear what the teachers thought.

One of those teachers was Linnea Wolters, then teaching fifth grade at a low-income school in Reno.

"Oh, I'll go," she thought to herself when she got the invitation. "Because I believe you should know your enemy."

Like Angela Orr and a lot of other teachers in Washoe County, Wolters was suspicious of the Common Core. It seemed like just another education reform in a long line of reforms that, in her opinion, weren't improving schools.

Wolters agreed to try a Common Core sample lesson with her students, a "close reading" of a text. Close reading is not a new idea, but it has gained currency as a technique to teach the Common Core.

She was shocked when she realized the sample lesson focused on "The New Colossus," a sonnet by Emma Lazarus that's engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"You gotta be freaking kidding me," she said to herself, assuming the poem would be much too difficult for her fifth-graders.

Wolters' students began by reading the sonnet on their own. Next, Wolters read the sonnet out loud, in part to help students who may have had trouble reading on their own.

After everyone had read the sonnet at least twice, Wolters guided the class through a series of "text-dependent questions and tasks." The first asked students to figure out the poem's rhyme scheme and to assign a different letter to each set of rhyming words.

"We were highlighting things and writing A's and B's and C's and D's," Wolters says. It was kind of chaos, and she wasn't sure the kids were catching on. Then a student called out, "It's a pattern!"

The voice belonged to a girl who was receiving special education services for a learning disability. She had been the first to figure out the rhyme scheme.

If Wolters had been teaching this sonnet without the Common Core-aligned lesson plan, she says she would have started by telling the students it was a poem that compares the Colossus of Rhodes, an ancient Greek statue, and the Statue of Liberty. But the new lesson plan said not to do that. The idea was to see what kids could come up with on their own, just by reading the text.

They weren't coming up with much though. At one point, the room was silent except for the sound of crickets coming from the classroom lizard cage. Then two boys who were working together raised their hands.

"Yes?" Wolters asked.

She was surprised to see the boys with their hands up. They didn't speak English at home, and they struggled to keep up in class, especially with reading.

"It's about the Statue of Liberty," they said.

The class responded with a collective "What?" They weren't buying it.

Wolters asked the boys if they had any evidence to support their idea. They pointed to the sonnet and said, "It says it's a woman with a torch."

"What do you think of Ezekial and Salvadore's ideas?" Wolters asked the class. The other students weren't sure. "Why don't you see if you can find more evidence?" she asked them.

And that got the class going.

"All of a sudden I've got kids popping off with, 'She's in a harbor!' and 'There's two cities!' " Wolters says. "They're giving me all this information, and we're highlighting. And everybody's updating their notes."

Wolters was amazed. She'd rarely seen her kids so excited about learning. And she had no idea they could succeed with such a challenging text. She couldn't wait to tell her colleagues about what had happened.
This story originally appeared as part of American RadioWorks' "Greater Expectations: The Challenge of the Common Core."

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The Common Core State Standards have led to big changes in the way many teachers approach reading instruction.