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We the fourth grade students of the Dalton School have learned a very important piece of world history over the winter of 2006-2007.  Our teacher Monica Edinger has chosen to teach us about the topic of her book, forced immigration.  Forced immigration is more widely known as slavery.
Ms. Edinger’s book is still in the making but we have read what has already been done.  We have also had two workshops with poet Natasha Tretheway.  In those workshops we created a group poem and later wrote individual poems about people on the Amistad, for instance Cin-que, Teme and Margru.  The poems were really interesting to write because we had help from a professional poet.  Our classmate brought in artifacts from Mali such as clothes, dolls and jewelry and Ms. Edinger brought some items from Sierra Leone.  Another classmate of mine said, “I thought the things [that were brought in] were really cool,” and I agree with him!
The Amistad has been one of our major focuses of the unit.  The Amistad was a ship that was illegally carrying a group of slaves born in Africa, from Cuba to America (Amistad in Spanish means friendship).  I think it was an important event in American history (1837-1839) and lots of kids should know about it because it was an act that involved both white people and people of color working together.  One of the white people was the former president of the United States of America, John Quincy Adams!  It also helped show the people of the time that slavery was not a good thing at all.
It is a very serious topic but I thought that my class handled it well and that we had a learning experience.  One of the ways we can benefit from this experience is that we know just how unfair and what an injustice slavery was.  Now when we are being unfair for a very insignificant reason, we will remember this study.  No matter what the time, maybe even eighty years from now, we will without delay stop unfairness even if it is not our doing.
I hope everybody in my class benefits from the complex but fascinating unit of forced immigration in the same way I did.  I hope, even if you don’t know much about the topic, if you ever are in the situation I described, you will remember this article and stop the injustice.  If you stop unfairness, then you should feel good about it, because you are making the world a better place to live.