By 8:30 a.m. the morning after an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol with Confederate flags, Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District teacher Mary Vanasit had prepared a 45-minute lesson on the topic for her third graders.
“What do you notice?” she asked, 15 minutes into the class, as she worked through a slideshow comparing images from the insurrection with those from Black Lives Matter protests this summer.
“The white guy looks pretty happy because he’s taking something,” a student named Ava said of a photo showing a white man grinning and waving as he hoists a lectern emblazoned with the seal of the speaker of the House of Representatives.
“The Black guy feels sort of anxious because he’s getting sprayed with something and turning away so he doesn’t get it in his eyes,” she went on, describing the second photo.
Vanasit closed by thanking her students for opening up. “It’s something hard to talk about,” she said. “But is it important — when things like this happen, should we ignore it and pretend like it didn’t happen? We shouldn’t, huh. Because is anything going to change if we ignore it?”
She posed a final question to the kids: “How can we change the world with each other?”
Throughout her class, Vanasit navigated things smoothly, offering support and empathy. But the discussion shook her. “It was extremely sad and gave me goosebumps,” she said later.
Between the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, the past year has brought plenty of trauma into the lives of students. This week, California educators once again find themselves looking for ways to support kids while managing their own emotions.
In Hayward, seventh grade teacher Donovan Hall woke up anxious about facing his students on Zoom. “I just didn’t trust that I could kind of keep that contained,” he said.
Hall, who teaches a class focused on academic and personal development at Impact Academy, worried about his ability to guide students through this moment. “I’m a Black man and seeing how people are talking about it and kind of connecting it to Black Lives Matter and connecting to Black people in general, it brings up a lot of just hurt and pain,” he said.
He knew one way to support his students was to be honest about his own emotions, “and let them know, ‘This is important to me, but right now I’m not ready to process it. That’s OK.’ ”
Hall and his co-teacher ended up dividing their class into two groups: One talked about the attempted coup, and the other, led by Hall, intentionally did not — they played a game instead.
One of Hall’s eighth grade students, Leandro Galvez, opted to join the group discussion and said it helped him process the events. “I feel frustrated, I feel angry, I feel sad,” he said.
The way law enforcement handled the insurrection by the pro-Trump mob only confirms his belief that white privilege exists, he said, though it doesn’t make it any easier to make sense of the concept. “We all have red blood,” he said. “That means we’re all people. We shouldn’t be fighting with each other.”
This is the kind of reaction principal Blain Watson of Locke College Preparatory Academy in Watts anticipated from his students, whose pain and outrage is still raw in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
“Students of color, communities of color have a lot of doubts about the establishment,” said Watson, “about whether the government supports us or not.” He went on to explain that after seeing Trump supporters able to enter the Capitol and fly a Confederate flag, he worries his students are in danger of losing all faith in government.