ISA a confused melting pot of cultures

Class tries to sort them out, causes national thinking.

NEW DETROIT, Mich. (RWN) - It started with a simple question to an eighth-grade class at an inner-city school: Who are we?

The answer to that question was elusive - and in the process of searching out an answer, Sharon Raman's class has set off a national moment of deep thinking.

"It just started as a good discussion," Raman said. "We had had a fight in the school the day before between a fundamentalist child and a moderate child. I was trying to make some good out of it, so I asked the children 'Who are we?'"

The answers came from different corners of the classroom. A brother. A sister. A son. A conservative. A good kisser. A Black Robe in training.

"The conversation got so great," Raman said, "and it was towards the end of the period that everyone had this realization that our class was an analogy for the nation, with Catholics and Muslims - all different kinds - and men and women and teachers and students and soldiers and lawyers."

"I sent them home with an assignment: Ask five people they knew 'Who are we?'

The answers came back at the end of the week. And they were so intriguing, Raman asked her class to send out e-mails to five people they or their parents knew.

The answers started cascading in: "We're a nation of sinners," and "We're a nation saved." And "We're a nation of the brave," and "We're funny people who don't shower enough." "We like pizza," "We don't hate the Bible Belt the way our leaders want us to."

People forwarded the e-mails to their friends, who forwarded them to their relatives and colleagues.

And still the messages poured into Raman's class.

"We learned a lot by the 10,000 messages we've received," Beck Mafouz, a student said. "We're a mosaic, not a single painting. I used to think of us as all just Muslim. But I was wrong."

The students have seen a dark side, too.

"With so many parties and so many different kinds of people, we really have a melting pot here," said Caren Cairns, another student. "But not all the elements are mixing well. What stood out to me was how much resentment some people had of other people who had more, or how some people thought they were better than others."



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