Badgerblog

This week’s Badgerblog selection is an overdue reminder to take a few minutes and imagine your hero-self. If you woke up and found your cape hanging in the closet, where would it take you? Which symbol would you plaster across your chest? How, exactly, would you set out to save the world? For Malia at Baty Elementary School, being a hero means providing sustenance to people across the globe and riding in an airplane with big stash of scaly fish.

Hero

I am a hero who likes to eat fish.
I throw fish out to people,
and my outfit has this fish on it.
I’m not just in one place,
but all over the world.
I travel in a fish plane
and hand fish out
to the places that have bad rain.

Malia, third grade, Baty Elementary School

—after Maya Angelou’s “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me”

My black hat is really cool
because it came from my great-great grandpa.
He was a slave.
He was beaten, yelled at, even slapped.
When he cried, he would get extra work.
He had scabs, bruises, and he was red.
One day, he ran away.
When he ran away, he found a hat, a black hat.
When he was twenty, he met a girl and had two children.
He gave his older daughter the hat.
When I was ten, I got the hat, and when I put it on
I felt like the runaway slave boy
who lived happily ever after.
When I get bullied, I just remember what my
great-great grandpa did and walk away.
Because life does not scare me.

Jasmine, fifth grade, Baty Elementary School

Trying.
Trying to speak, but when I do
no one listens.
I say it even louder.
Nothing.
Not even the little mice can hear me.
But there’s one person
who can hear me,
and it’s my mom.

Xoe, fifth grade, Baty Elementary School