Feb 15, 2017 12:00:00 AM
Yes, Jesus love me Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me For the Bible tells me soI was just a toddler in a Sunday School class in a storefront church on the West Side of Chicago. The metal folding chairs our small congregation sat on didn’t match, but they were arranged in perfect rows by solemn, silent, white-haired Deacon Les. We sang about God’s love. We sang about loving one another. We praised and we danced and we sang:
Red and yellow, black and white They are precious in His sight Jesus loves the little children of the worldBack then it was unheard of that 11- and 12-year-old Black girls would be shot in the head while minding their own business in two different Chicago neighborhoods during the 7 o’clock hour of a Saturday night. We played softball in vacant lots, jumped double-dutch rope on the sidewalk and knew to ride our Huffy bikes home when the streetlights came on. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I rarely stopped to think of death. We knew it was coming, but we didn’t worry about it coming too soon. Sadly, things have changed. One of the girls injured last weekend in the Chicago shootings, which occurred within half an hour of each other, is a student at Schmid Elementary School, the same place I got my education. The girl’s mother was about three or four grades below me, and we all bandied about the same neighborhood blocks without fear. Now my nephew, who is in the fourth grade at Schmid, is left to wonder if one of his close friends will be alive in the morning. As the founder and president of Teachers Who Pray, part of my job is to compel educators to be excellent instructors. I encourage teachers to prepare their lessons with the utmost diligence and care, and assess student work with fairness and discernment. But I also urge educators who believe in God to spend a few minutes each day sending up private prayers for their students. For teachers know all too well that the vast majority of a child’s development is impacted by an ecology of circumstances and systems that are beyond a school’s control. When I hear people talk about educating the “whole child,” I wonder if they are thinking what I am thinking. To me, [pullquote]the “whole child” means meeting the needs of his body, mind and spirit.[/pullquote] Somewhere along the way, public schools stopped investing in the souls of children. It’s true that the law prohibits public school teachers from praying with students, and I’m not promoting religious activity with kids during the school day. But feeding a child’s spirit may look like reaching out to support his struggling parent, doing a home visit to get to know the family better or even a teacher sharing a vulnerable story from the past to let an anxious kid know that everything is going to be okay. I believe that in our effort to raise test scores and graduation rates, we inadvertently diminished the greatest teaching tool a school could ever have: Love. [pullquote position="right"]Privately praying for our students is a powerful act of love.[/pullquote] Even if we don’t see direct changes in our students, the prayers will change us. And when the walls of implicit racial bias, job dissatisfaction and stress come tumbling down in a teacher’s life, the quality of instruction in that classroom will soar—and so will the student learning. This Black History Month, I am honoring the role faith and prayer has played in the struggle for Black liberation and in building this nation at large:
Jesus loves me this I know For the Bible tells me so Little ones to Him belong They are weak but He is strong
Marilyn Anderson Rhames is an educator, writer, thought leader and social entrepreneur. She is founder and CEO of Teachers Who Pray, a faith-based nonprofit that has more than 100 chapters nationwide. She is also the author of the upcoming book, “The Master Teacher: 12 Spiritual Lessons That Can Transform Schools and Revolutionize Public Education.” She is currently on the design team for Harvard University's Leaders' Institute for Faith and Education (LIFE). Marilyn has 14 years experience teaching in Chicago Public Schools, but before becoming an educator Marilyn worked as a journalist for People and Time magazines and for newspapers including New York Newsday and The Journal News. She currently writes for Education Post and has published pieces in the Huffington Post, Black Enterprise and RealClearEducation. Marilyn was named 2013 Commentator/Blogger of the Year by the Bammy Awards for her Education Week blog, entitled “Charting My Own Course." She was a 2016 Surge Institute Fellow and a Teach Plus teaching policy fellow from 2010-1012. Through her consulting firm Rhames Consulting, Marilyn offers a full range of services from education content editing to providing professional development on community engagement to public speaking on issues of faith, race, writing, and education. Marilyn has served as an education commentator on 90.1 FM Moody Radio Chicago; the presenter of a 2013 TEDx talk entitled “Finding the Courage to Voice the Taboo”; and a 2017 speaker at the Yale University Education Leadership Conference. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a master’s degree in education from National Louis University. Marilyn is a wife and mother of three. In August 2017, she came together with more than 40 other African-American parents, students and teachers to talk about the Black experience in America's public schools. These conversations were released as a video series in Getting Real About Education: A Conversation With Black Parents, Teachers and Students.
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