Dear Students, Let's have a discussion.

"Dear Students" is a category of posts written as mini-letters directly addressed to students regardings things I had more time to mention during class.

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Dear Students,

Please speak up in class. Especially since all of you have access to the Internet now, there's a significantly lesser need for me to be the only one contributing information to the class. Did you find something related to our unit* that caught your eye in the news? On Reddit? On YouTube? Share it with the class!

(*I only add that your contribution be related to our unit so tha we can maintain some structure to our class. We should be mindful of the students who require more structure to the lessons to aid in organizing all the information in their own heads.)

Especially as a young person, you won't find a better space - and perhaps even a better time - to be heard than in our classroom.

Remember, you don't have to have all the digital resources at your fingertips in order to contribute to class. Our goal is not "always to look smart", but "always to be learning". Contributing a question may be the most important thing you can do in class -- even if it's not an original question.

Above all, accept mistakes -- your own and others. Now be careful. Acceptance is not just understanding that everyone makes mistakes. It's not even just tolerating everyone's mistakes. It's one step further. Embrace your mistakes as if they were your not-so-politically-correct relatives. They're family just the same, but you don't want to go around repeating what they say. Instead, you should use them as examples of how not to act -- you should learn from them. Luckily, the classroom is like a dinner table frozen in time at those end-of-the-year holidays where and when it is always okay to bring your racist grandma or sexist uncle ... and now I admit my metaphor may have gotten away from me a bit... What I'm trying to say is the mistakes you make today are mistakes you won't make later.

Sincerely yours.

P.S. I'm not sure this character means as much to your generation as it does to mine, but in the words of the beloved Magic School Bus character, Ms. Frizzle: "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!"