Along with other volunteers, I spent a week emailing across the political divide. Here’s the exchange that one of those 30,000 emails yielded.

At the end of the year, another parent would thank me and say, “I wish I had learned all this when I was in seventh grade!” And I would think: It’s not too late! It’s not too late for you to get curious about the freedom of press, and the function of executive orders, and the balance of powers, and the biases of media sources. It’s never too late to dig deeply, to learn joyfully, and to be curious about those with whom you disagree. A seventh grader can do it. So can you.

Is it possible to maintain impartiality while also critiquing aspects of the President’s rhetoric or actions? It’s a vexing question, one that I and many other educators have faced, and one that I continue to consider as a member of the bridging community.

For most people, engaging with Charlie Kirk through social media represents just one stop in a journey toward ever more extreme content, with the social media platform’s AI-fueled algorithms serving as conductors. Charlie Kirk does not trouble me. But the experience of engaging with him online feels deeply worrisome.

When I was ten years old, Canada briefly became home. I moved in with a family friend outside of Toronto, where for two months I attended school and sang the Canadian national anthem in English and French. I discovered hockey trading cards, which could be flicked by using the thumb and forefinger to grab the corner or, as most of the cooler kids seemed to do, launching them between forefinger and middle finger. I was lousy at both techniques. It was a fragile time in my life, with my mother having died a couple of years earlier and my father eyeing a transatlantic sailing adventure and time to heal. Our friend Kathy—and Canada—welcomed me.

My hope would be that, as difficult as Trump has made it for any of us to enter into good-faith conversations about topics that he blithely leverages to accrue power, we rise to the challenge. The issue of diversity, equity and inclusion is surely just one of many such topics.

I had plenty of satisfied customers when I taught middle school. A few weren’t so happy, including one or two who fell asleep in class and a parent who once berated me so lustily that a colleague down the hall wondered if someone had been hurt (I guess I had been, a little bit). Mostly, though, things went smoothly. The terrain felt unfamiliar, then, when over the past year I found myself the focus of deep distrust and vehement online condemnation.

This is a generalization. Some students are indeed captivated by this political season, or terrified of it. Some, by virtue of their personal circumstances, may feel that the results of the election could imperil their families or threaten their most cherished values. But lots of kids are not really that focused on politics. The cautionary signal I read, then, is that we should move gently as we plan for the day after, careful not to assume an acute need among a preponderance of students to parse election results or interrupt school routines; “the day after” may in fact call for normalcy.

How do we teach the 2024 presidential election? Consider these classroom tips to tame the divisiveness of the election and help students reach across lines of divide and disagreement.

How to teach the 2024 presidential election? First things first: position the adults to lead the work of reaching across lines of divide and disagreement. Here’s how to get your community ready.