I don't know how anyone in this country can focus on anything today other than the inauguration. As a historian, and mostly as a former history teacher, I find myself thinking as much about my former students as I do about the President-elect. I wish I was teaching right now so I could enjoy this moment with them; I'd love to know their thoughts and more than anything, their emotions.

You should know that most of my former students were poor and black.

I've mentioned here before that I taught soldiers (and dependents) at Ft Wainwright, AK for five years. It was a very time intensive job as all teaching is but it was by far the most educational job I've ever had. I thought I knew about America when I started teaching (I had spent years studying it after all), but while I had the wars and social movements and laws and inventions all down cold, I was appallingly unprepared to cope with the realities of modern day race relations. Even growing up in Florida, I didn't realize how prevalent separation was between the races in this country and I had not idea - no idea at all - how distant this country's young black citizens felt from the American dream. I didn't know that most of them did not dream at all, or believed the dreams were never going to be for them.

I knew nothing until they taught me everything they knew.

I know that Barack Obama is not perfect and that he will likely make mistakes and that more than once in the future a lot of us will be frustrated with some of his decisions. I am not naive in that regard. However I also know that he is intelligent and thoughtful and acts with supreme care, something his campaign proved to us over and over and that we have been sorely lacking in the White House for a very long time. (Hello George W. and Bill Clinton.) I do not think he is perfect but I do think he is capable of brilliance and that is what makes me so hopeful right now, what makes the historian in me believe that perhaps this time we, as a country, will accomplish great things.

Mostly though, everyday I think of all those men and women in my classes, so many of whom came from schools where they graduated with no idea how to write a paragraph let alone a paper; no knowledge of 20th century wars, no idea of what they wanted to do or who they wanted to be. I think of the sergeant who was stopped more than once for jogging while on base by young white MPs who he outranked but still treated him like a criminal simply because they could. I think of the young man from Louisiana who had never sat in a classroom with a white student and thought this was normal. I think of the young man who looked at me with anger and defiance and demanded to know how I dared to suggest that Rosa Parks had not been mistreated by being forced to sit in the back of the bus. I stood there stuttering in front of him, with all of his 20 years and angrier than hell, as I tried to explain that she was certainly humiliated and disrespected but not physically abused. That was the point I was trying to make. "What is the difference?" he demanded. "And what do you know about it?"

And I was too young and too embarrassed to admit that I didn't know, that I was wrong. It should have been a teachable moment for the white and black students and for me but I worried too much about maintaining control and sticking to the schedule and being the teacher. I thought about me and not about him.

I lost him right then and there - if I ever had him at all. And he was one that needed to learn; he was one that needed to be saved. (Forgive a former teacher for saying that but it's true. There are some that you know need to be taught that there is a place for them in the world and if you don't teach them then they might slip away forever. They might never get beyond their endless frustration.) I have no idea if tomorrow's events will change the world for that young man (now thirty years old) but I have hope that it will; for all of those young men and women who spent hours trying to understand America with me, I have hope.

This day makes us all better, whether you voted for Barack Obama or not. It makes us all better. And if you don't know that or can't see that, then it's okay. You'll be carried along with everyone else as history changes, just like me you will learn whether you want to or not.

[Post pics: "These two boys waited as a long line of adults greeted Senator Obama before a rally on Martin Luther King Day in Columbia, S.C. They never took their eyes off of him. Their grandmother told me, 'Our young men have waited a long time to have someone to look up to, to make them believe Dr. King’s words can be true for them;' Jan. 21, 2008. And on September 8, 2008 in Farmington Hills, Michigan a young man is held while his father takes a picture. In the world these children grow up in their dreams will be limitless.]