I didn't much of a response to my blog on Thanksgiving, though I was told I didn't understand the separation of church and state. Actually, I think I have a fairly nuanced understanding of appropriate separation. My real point was that we need to be teaching and understanding diversity not only in our immediate community, but more broadly in out national community.  You may not have any Africans living next door to you now, but the children you teach may work with Nigerians, may worship with El Salvadorans, may have Vietnamese as clients or patients.

I live on the east coast and work with a great many Liberians. Some are Muslim, and Islam is growing as a religious expression among African Americans in our greater community. How much do you know about Hajj? Ramadan? You may talk about Hanukkah, but did you know it is not a very important holiday in the Jewish calendar? In fact, for those of you who pooh-poohed my assertions about Thanksgiving, did you spend time discussing the most important holiday in Judaism? Yom Kippur? Did you have you children write what they needed to atone for? Certainly, that might make you think about the distinction between understanding the holiday and actual religious practice.

The  Southern Poverty Law Center, which has successfully sued white supremacist groups and pursued justice for minorities, has an excellent online resource, Teaching Tolerance. They lay out a full calendar of holidays from the many religious groups found in the United States.

I am a big believer in practicing what I preach. This year I realized that Eid al Adha, the Muslim festival that falls at the end of the Hajj, falls immediately after Thanksgiving. At this writing my Unit Plan for Teaching the Holidays of Three Faiths is nearing completion, and should be ready on November 24th. I will take a week each for a Muslim, Jewish and Christian holiday that falls between Thanksgiving and the New Year.  I invite you to use all or part of the resource I make available. I also am recommending the wonderful books of Patricia Polacco as part of my unit, but also to teach tolerance in your classrooms. I hope you will check them out.

Page one of Sunday's New York Times featured an article about how teachers are making money by selling their lesson plans.  The suggestion is that since the lesson plans were written while employed by a school, the school owns the lesson plans.

In the interest of full disclosure, About.com is a New York Times company and they indirectly own the contents of this blog.  But then, I signed a contract that made it clear that whatever I wrote that would be put on the web would be property of About.com, and then indirectly to the New York Times Company.

I have some lesson plans online which are free for your use. ( Thanksgiving,  Science )  I am not selling them to you.  But  I am being paid by About.com on the basis of how many of you open my pages and look at my contributions.   As a teacher,  I've been stuck on a Thursday or a Monday needing something to zip up my lesson plans for the week.  I understand the lure of "free lesson plans" on the internet, even if it's only to re-prime my creativity.   I know if I recycle plans that have been successful for me, they'll bring you to my material. You can expect to find lots and lots of free lesson plans here.

I believe that when I write a lesson plan, it belongs to me.  I am hired to teach children, not to write publishable material for the school district.  I am hired to write for About.com, and I am compensated based on how well I do at getting people to read my articles.

I also believe that teachers are professionals.  Schools don't always believe that, and certainly a great many business people, when they are on a school board, think of teachers as so many workers at a MacDonald's.  We are professionals.  Like all professionals, we own much of our own equipment.  We also own our work product, unless we are specifically paid for it.

There certainly are issues with how teachers are compensated.  The "chattering classes" like to take on issues of teacher quality and evaluation.  Job security, in many cases is the only appealing thing about teaching in many school districts.  New York City has chronic problems with finding quality teachers.  New York pays about what I made in another east coast metropolitan school district, and our cost of living is perhaps half of New York's.

Yes, I am happy to share my lesson plans with you.  But I'm also happy I can earn some extra money to supplement my meager salary at a state approved school.

Working in public schools, you quickly become aware of the fact that the separation of church and state has created problems with how we talk about and celebrate some holidays, especially Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter.  We are clearly aware that Christmas and Easter are Christian Holidays, but we aren't so sure about Thanksgiving.

Ironically, Thanksgiving is the one holiday that we tend to treat as a quasi religious holiday.  We ask our kids to make lists of what they are thankful for.  We just don't state to whom or what we are supposed to be thankful.

As an ordained pastor, believe it or not, I find these exercises in mock religiosity rather offensive.  I don't particularly want a Baptist, a Mormon or a Muslim teaching my children how to pray.  They did quite well at my church, thank you.  I do want the Baptist, the Mormon and the Muslim talking about how they celebrate the holiday, and what it means to them.  I also want them to talk about how America welcomes people of different faiths.

There are people in our country who believe that the United States is a "Christian" Nation.  For those of us who are Christian, the fact that some of those people are also white supremacists is kind of scary.  The truth of the matter is that the most important framers of our constitution, Jefferson and Franklin, were Deists and not Christian at all.  They envisioned a country that was not Christian but was full of religious people.  It's probably the reason we still have such an active and vibrant religious life in America.

So, do us cranks a favor.  Teach about the Pilgrims' celebration.  Compare the ways your children celebrate Thanksgiving.  Honor the children whose families may not celebrate Thanksgiving.  But don't try to make your class a Sunday school class.

Some of the kids in the residential school where I teach have incredible behaviors.  They will kick, scream, throw themselves on the floor, bang their heads into the wall or the floor, and rip their clothing off.  Why?  Anger and frustration.

I really believe some of them feel powerless.  They may have little speech or difficulty with speech.  They may have little ability to express what they want.  Daily they are pushed, prodded, poked with needles and have medication shoved into their mouths.

Who wouldn't be frustrated?  Who wouldn't want to just rage?

At the same time I was thinking about the success that one of my students has been experiencing.  I realized that part of his success was he was getting to make some choices.  He was beginning to find the means to communicate what he wanted. I realized that for each of my students, I need to be thinking about how I build some choice into each kid's programs.

It also made me think about the premium that too many schools, especially public schools, put on compliance, quiet, straight lines and following directions.  How many of the behaviors exhibited by special education students are a protest against being, in their own way, pushed, prodded and poked into place without any choice, any sense of power over their own situation.

What kind of choices are you giving your students?  It may be choosing a preferred activity instead of the sticker.  It may be choosing to work on coins before addition.  It may even be to take a break.  After all, we have to start somewhere helping our students make choices for themselves.  Even severely disabled students will need to choose the strawberry shampoo or the lavender shampoo to take back to their group home.  We need to keep in mind that real success for disabled students is not just good data on our data sheets, but helping them realize their potential for independent living in our communities.