Crazy Enough to Dream: When a Classroom Prompt Becomes Something More

I am a teacher who loves writing just as much as she loves teaching, if not — dare I say it — more.

I share that confession without apology, because I think it matters. It matters for my students to see that their teacher is not just an instructor of writing — she is a writer. And writers write. Not just lesson plans and sub notes and parent emails. Writers write because something inside of them will not stay quiet until the words find their way out.

That is exactly what happened on an otherwise ordinary school day when I sat down and did something I ask my students to do all the time: I answered the prompt myself.

The Assignment

My 8th graders had been tasked with writing a single, well-developed paragraph connecting Colin Kaepernick's motto from Nike's "Dream Crazy" commercial — "Believe in something, even if it means risking everything" — to at least one of two anchor texts we had been studying: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and the film The Great Debaters. They were also asked to close with a personal reflection — to turn the lens on themselves and consider what they believe in deeply enough to risk something for.

Simple enough, right?

Except that nothing about this assignment was simple — and that was entirely by design.

The Bigger Picture

What looks like a quick-write on the surface is actually a culmination of nearly an entire semester's worth of learning, layered and compressed into one paragraph.

Consider what students were being asked to draw from:

During our Harlem Renaissance unit, we spent weeks inside the world of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Maya Angelou. We talked about the audacity it took to write — and publish — protest poetry in an era when Black voices were systematically silenced. We talked about Hughes' dream deferred, his table, his insistence that beauty and humanity and dignity belonged to everyone. Students who were paying attention carried Hughes with them into this assignment whether they realized it or not. I know I did.

From there, we moved into our Rhetoric unit — one of my favorite units to teach because it is everywhere. Rhetoric is not just a classroom concept. It lives in commercials, in speeches, in letters written on scraps of newspaper and tissue from a Birmingham jail cell. We studied SOAPS. We studied ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos. We analyzed advertisements — including Nike's "Dream Crazy" — through the lens of rhetorical appeals. We read King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as both a historical document and a masterclass in persuasion. We watched The Great Debaters and paid attention to the way words, delivered with conviction, can change a room — and change a nation.

And then we watched Kaepernick look into a camera and say seven words that connected all of it:

"Believe in something, even if it means risking everything."

Ethos — he sacrificed his career for the message. Pathos — he made us feel the weight of the choice. Logos — the evidence of injustice was undeniable. Kairos — the moment demanded it.

What Happened When I Sat Down to Write

I did not plan to write the paragraph. I just wanted to see where I could go with it.

Twenty minutes later, I had a draft. It was not perfect. I revised it more than once — because that is what writers do, and because I refuse to ask my students to do something I am not willing to do myself. What emerged surprised me. Not because I found some great truth, but because the truth was already there, woven into the texts we had been sitting with all semester. I just had to be still enough to hear it.

Here is what I wrote:

Does a willingness to risk it all over a strong belief make a person admirable, a hero, inspirational? Perhaps a wild ambition simply fuels one's hope and faith. In the Nike commercial "Dream Crazy," Colin Kaepernick encourages viewers to aspire to wild dreams - even if others think those ambitions are deemed "crazy." This idea is shared in both Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," as well as in the film The Great Debaters. During the Civil Rights Movement, King was "crazy" enough to not just advocate for civil rights amongst all people - regardless of color, nationality, or religion - but he had the audacity to bring his hope and concept of civil disobedience to Birmingham, Alabama - one of the nation's most racist cities in the early 1960s. For some, King's beliefs were considered ill-timed and too extreme. However, he stood firm in his belief that it is very rare, if ever, that the oppressor willingly gives freedom to those they oppress; change must be "demanded" - now - by those seeking it. Sometimes, we must be "crazy" enough to get involved in a bit of "good trouble." Likewise, Samantha Booke voiced these same sentiments in the film The Great Debaters. During Wiley College's debate against the local White Texas college team, Miss Booke challenged the audience to consider this: "...the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always - always - right now." Both Dr. King and Miss Booke openly expressed ideals that many would consider radical, "crazy," in their day. Just as Kaepernick encouraged those who would listen to consider being labeled crazy for having the boldness to dream as a compliment, rather than an insult, both King and Booke considered it an honor to dream, hope, believe in a day when they, too, would have a seat at the table that Hughes wrote about some years prior to. All of these visionaries were crazy enough to dream. Crazy enough to believe. Crazy enough to strive. Crazy enough to hope. And, crazy enough to fight…

When I consider what I believe in enough to risk everything for - I think of my love for God and my love for my family. As a disciple of Christ, I am called to sometimes be a voice of radical thinking - ministering to others, providing my testimony, and professing my love in an entity that cannot be seen, heard, or felt in the concrete sense of the words. Similarly, there is not much that I am not willing to do for my family - even in the face of hardship, struggle, and sacrifice. Does that make me a hero or inspirational? I think not. It simply makes me someone who understands that "hope is the thing with feathers," and sometimes a person must believe in something other than themselves in order for that hope to take flight.

What This Paragraph Is Really Made Of

If you read carefully, you will find the fingerprints of an entire semester pressed into every sentence.

Hughes is there — in the table, in the dream, in the hope that takes flight on Dickinson's borrowed wings. King is there — not just quoted, but inhabited. Booke is there — her words from a debate stage in a 1935 Texas gymnasium still landing like a verdict. Kaepernick is there — not as a football player, but as a rhetor, a man who understood that sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is said without words at all.

And Emily Dickinson is there — because great writing does not stay in its lane. It borrows. It reaches. It finds the connection that was always there, waiting to be named.

This is what I want for my students. Not perfect paragraphs. Not five-point rubric scores. I want them to write something that surprised them. Something they did not k

now they believed until they wrote it down. Something that, when they read it back, makes them sit a little straighter.

A Final Word to My Students

If you are reading this — and I hope you are — I want you to know something. Every text we read this semester, every poem, every speech, every film, every commercial — none of it was accidental. It was all leading somewhere. It was leading here: to the moment when you pick up a pen and realize that you, too, have something worth saying. Something worth risking. Something worth fighting for.

You do not have to be King. You do not have to be Booke. You do not have to be Kaepernick.

You just have to be crazy enough to try.

— Mrs. Hill | Teaching: The Real 💜💚