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The election of Donald Trump has pushed America into an era of uncertainty. Nowhere is this felt more than in minority communities where people have real reasons to fear the white nationalist agenda being pushed by the president-elect. Although these are adult concerns, our children aren’t immune to the country’s current state of unrest. That’s why an inspirational video of a third-grade teacher in Philadelphia teaching her kids to “push through” has been seen over three million times on Facebook.
In the video, Jasmyn Wright, 27, a third-grade reading teacher at a Philadelphia charter school, has an empowering call-and-response lesson for her students:
“What if it’s too hard?” Wright asked her class
“I’m gonna push through!” the students responded.
“What if you don’t know how to do it?
“That ain’t true!”
“What if you’re too black?”
“That ain’t true!”
“What if you’re just not meant to do it?”
“I can do anything I put my mind to!”
“Barack Obama!”
“If he can do it than I can do it, too!”
Wright taught her children this call-and-response to help them persevere when they feel like giving up. “I know that with my class specifically, sometimes they struggle with believing in themselves or sometimes they struggle with grappling through an assignment or they struggle with interactions with their peers,” the teacher/spoken-word poet told The Root.
After the election of Trump, Wright knew there was no better time to remind her students to push through in the face of uncertainty. “With the election that went on, they were more troubled and they were upset,” Wright said. “[So I thought,] yes, this is true, this has happened, but that doesn’t stop us from pushing through. We still have a calling, we still have a purpose, we still are made to leave an imprint in the world, and we cannot give up because of whatever happened.”
Wright believes we should never underestimate our children’s ability to feel and understand the real-world problems faced by adults. “They live in the same world that we do, they watch the same shows that we do, they listen to the same music, they hear the same news, and they are sponges and they soak things in,” Wright said. “They’re also intelligent, so they can gain their own knowledge on issues.” While Wright may have created the perfect way to help her third graders push through in the face of uncertainty, it’s a lesson that many adults could use these days as well.
