For many ASU 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 campus polling locations to pull a leaver that will determine the course of our nation — no pressure for you first-time voters.
As a first-generation college student, recent ASU grad and current high school teacher in Phoenix, 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. One year ago today, I was a completely different person. As a senior at ASU, I studied journalism at the Cronkite School because I believed that a thriving and just America deserves an accurate, transparent wealth of information.
However, I came to understand that accurate information is useless if one is denied the opportunity to analyze, process and act upon that information to affect change. Before we can have a well-informed society, we need to create a well-educated society. For many students growing up in low income communities, means they are denied the opportunity to initiate change in our shared world due to the limitations set upon them by our broken education system. With this notion in mind I decided to start my career at the head of a classroom.
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 and am eager for the day when they’re charting the path of our country. A year ago, I never could have imagined that the sense of responsibility I would feel towards each of my students would bring me to the brink of tears almost daily.
I look into the eyes of my students and see hope, resilience, honesty, pain, motivation, laughter and more than anything, inspiration. Even on days when we stumble and fall together, they inspire me to continue to move forward.
It’s these moments that turn my previous hope into my current conviction.
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 — thanks, Obama. 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; that we didn’t have the courage to disrupt the systems and structures that sustain inequality and injustice; That we lived it, and we didn’t take up the challenge.
Or we can tell them that we lived it, and we changed it.
As you head into your polling place, and as you consider how you’ll make your impact after graduation, I ask you to think beyond yourself. Don’t just be a leader.
Let’s create the next generation of leaders, so that one day, the color of your skin, your parents’ paycheck or where you live will no longer dictate the quality of education you receive. So that one day, the education policies in this country will be reflective of our children's potential.
I look forward to reaching that day. Until then, you can find me in South Mountain High School creating the next generation of leaders, one day at a time.
Salyssa is a 2016 graduate and current high school special education teacher in Phoenix through Teach For America.
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Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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