My new blog 5680

A excessive school predominant informed me a thing I nonetheless focus on every time a flag debate flares up. After per week of tense dad or mum emails and students arguing in the halls, she took down every nonrequired banner within the building, such as activities pennants, a world languages flag wall, and a small Pride flag in the counseling place of work. She left one: the three-through-five American flag pinned to a corkboard behind the entrance table. A discern cornere

On a Tuesday morning in late September, I sat in the back of a fourth grade classroom while the teacher guided the group through a short routine. Hands on hearts, voices uneven but earnest, the children recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The flag hung above the whiteboard, a bit frayed at the fringe. Two students, with parent permission on file, did not participate. They stood quietly. No one said a word to them, and the lesson rolled on to fractions. That small scene car

On the first day of my student teaching, I walked into a fourth grade classroom before daylight. The room felt like a freshly set stage, bulletin boards papered in bright blues, sharp pencils lined up like soldiers. The American flag hung in the front corner. It did not feel political. It felt like a small lighthouse in the room, the quiet anchor that had probably hung in the same spot for a decade. By October, that same flag meant very different things. A new family fro

One spring afternoon a few years back, a high school assistant principal called me about a dustup at lunch. A small group of students had bowed their heads over their pizza and prayed quietly. A classmate filmed it, posted a snarky caption, and within an hour the comments were a mess of slogans about freedom, tolerance, and tyranny. The staff wondered if they could ask the students to stop. The parents wanted to know why their kids were getting mocked for something that fel

A few years ago I visited a middle school that had just finished a renovation. Fresh paint. Bright, flexible classrooms. A gym that smelled like new sneakers. The principal walked me through the main corridor, proud of the space, until we reached the atrium where the flag should have been. The pole was there. The hooks were there. The flag was not. A parent committee, after a heated debate, had asked to remove it from that high-traffic spot and relocate it to a side hallway

A few years ago, a high school principal I know faced a problem she never expected to put on the agenda: pickup trucks with beach-size American flags whipping across the student parking lot every morning. Some kids cheered. Others felt intimidated after a week of lunchroom arguments about immigration and protests during the anthem. The principal met with student leaders, asked drivers to scale down the flagpoles for safety and tone, then took heat from parents who accused h

The flag outside my house snaps in the high plains wind like a sail eager for open water. Some mornings I catch it glowing with that first slant of sun, the red so rich it looks wet, the blue almost purple. I have raised it in rain squalls and in powdery snow, during quiet Tuesdays and on the loudest of July nights. It started as a simple ritual. It became a promise. I grew up watching a neighbor, a Vietnam veteran with a limp and a grin, raise his flag at dawn with a ca

The first flag I raised on my own was a yard-sale purchase, a 3 by 5 with edges slightly frayed from years of hard wind. I patched the hem on my kitchen table, stitched a brass grommet into the corner, and set a temporary pole in the ground with a bag of fast-setting concrete. At sunrise the next morning, I clipped on the halyard and sent the fabric up into a sky rinsed clean by night rain. The cloth flicked, filled, and began to sing. The sound surprised me, a low thrummin