What do I say?

Does the language that we use in our classrooms influence the way our students think about history?  How can we not only influence their minds, but also their hearts?  In my middle school humanities classes at the Sage School, we are studying the 19^th Century in US history, including the antebellum period and the Civil War.  Of course, much of our study is focused on slavery.  While slavery certainly exists in the modern world, it is sometimes difficult for the average middle class, middle school aged student in the early 21^st century to comprehend the humanity of people who lived on plantations picking cotton or even those who were forced to serve in the homes of wealthy, urban Washington, DC politicians.  To some degree, it is a good thing that students are unable to fully understand this misery; thankfully, they live in a different world where there is a promise of equality.  I don’t want my students to be depressed, but I do want them to identify with the people they study, to recognize that these were real people who loved their parents, who wanted the best for their children, who wanted to go to school and to learn new things, and who were not very different from my students or their parents.  So how does this translate into language? I recently prepared a set of reading questions to accompany an excerpt from Stephen Yafa’s book, Big Cotton.  As I was writing the study questions, it occurred to me that the word “slave” or “slaves” doesn’t force people to connect with the people who were subject to bondage at the mercy of a government that enforced that condition and denied them full standing as citizens in a society and country they were helping to build.  The word “slave” seems like some sort of object, rather than a human being.  So when I wrote my questions, I used either “enslaved people” or “enslaved Americans” instead of the word “slave.”  I know it is just a small thing, but I want to change my own way of thinking.  I want to think of real people when I teach, people who were just as American as I am, natural born citizens of the United States.  If I model this way of thinking, perhaps I will also reach the hearts of my students, enabling them to more fully understand our history.