Unless you have been living under a rock this weekend, the debate concerning race in America took center stage through numerous protests at sporting events and posts on social media, blogs, and news articles.

One such article was Clint Smith’s “James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil” posted to the New Yorker website on Sept 23.

It is not only a relevant piece of writing that should be shared with our students, but it is also a strong mentor text for their own writing. The reason is because Smith provides a model for how students can use response, analysis, and reflection effectively in their own writing. Bob Probst has suggested that we must help students develop the ability to not only respond to a text, but to also give analysis of that text and reflect on what they are learning from it. This is a move that is difficult for students to make at times. Some students can easily respond/react to a text they are reading with little analysis of how the text generated that response. Some will dive into the analysis, leaving out any connection to their own interactions with that text. Few reflect on either their response or analysis as part of the growth that comes from their reading experience.

Let’s take a look at what Smith does.

He starts with a strong paragraph that sets up the value of Baldwin’s text.

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.” So opens “A Talk to Teachers,” which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the Saturday Review the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. That year, four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were killed when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. That year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas.

We could just stop here. This is a great introductory paragraph! While starting with a quote can be a powerful strategy for writing an opening paragraph, students often default to this strategy without realizing its purpose. It is Smith’s use of anaphora that empowers the use of that particular quote. Most importantly, though, this paragraph (and its structure) serves a purpose. It sets up the reason that a lecture given nearly 55 years ago is relevant today.

Linking our own “difficult times” to that of Baldwin’s, Smith relates several recent conversations he has had that help illustrate the confusion, hurt, anger, and even fear that exists within the context of our times. He then turns to Baldwin’s lecture/essay suggesting that “Baldwin’s talk offers a way to think about this.” Why? It was reading through this lecture that Smith discovered a way to think about his own perspectives when he felt the dissonance of teaching the curriculum and finding it devoid of any relevance in the lives of his students.

Smith was obviously in a place to consider what someone like Baldwin had to share, and his reactions to the text on that first reading still resonates with him. He saw his own students in Baldwin’s text.

“On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the Stars and Stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war,” Baldwin continues. “But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization—that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured.”

By the time he had finished that first reading, Smith admits that while there was an immediate response to Baldwin’s essay, it had also “rearranged my thinking.” This set the stage for Smith to provide us with his analysis of the text to show us how it brought about this transformation. It is through this analysis, that he desires that we, too, can find Baldwin’s essay to be an important part in our own journey of becoming.

Baldwin understands that learning this history can leave students in a state of cognitive dissonance and frustration. Imagining his own hypothetical students, he writes, “I would try to teach them—I would try to make them know, that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal.” Here, Baldwin, with literary sleight of hand, adopts the terminology used to pathologize black people and applies it to the system in which they operate. What follows is a medley of lessons that is disquieting in its contemporary applicability. “I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him,” he writes, adding, “I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality, that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.”

We’ve all read student essays that would end on this point. They have stated a thesis based on their response to the text, they have referenced the text, and they have provided analysis of the text. But, good readers want more. Smith told us that Baldwin’s essay is an important text to help teachers come to grips with how they can talk with their students about difficult topics. He showed us that it was a transformational text in his own life as a teacher. We, as readers, expect to now see how, and Smith does not disappoint. He reflects on what he learned (and continues to learn) from Baldwin, and he shares with us how it changed his teaching.

I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” did not have to be sacrificed in order to make room for a discussion on community violence. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” did not have to be abandoned in order to tackle immigration. “A Talk to Teachers” showed me that a teacher’s work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students’ lives.

Respond. Analyze. Reflect. These are three important habits of mind we need to help our students develop. Build them into conversations about texts, and provide students with mentor texts like Smith’s to show them how they can use them in their own writing. The importance of doing so is echoed in Smith’s final line of his essay: “A teacher, Baldwin believed, should push students to understand that the world was molded by people who came before, and that it can be remolded into something new.”

Let us not forget that the reading, talking, thinking, and writing we have our students do is part of remolding our world into something new.