In her NY Times "Lesson Plans" blog post entitled 'The Cross-Cultural Classroom', Christina Shunnarah describes the challenges of working as an educator in one of the nation's most diverse communities.

The issues she raises are not for educators alone, however, but for everyone living in America today.

How do we learn to live together when our underlying beliefs about raising children, a work ethic, the role of religion in life, concepts of beauty, perceptions of time and personal space, and approaches to problem solving, for example, differ so drastically among our nation's many cultural groups?

Shunnarah advises us that learning about other cultures is a first step, but ultimately, we cannot possibly learn every detail about every other society on the planet.

Instead, what we can do, and what we should all do, is to keep an open mind. Perhaps, we don't know everything because we know one way of doing it. Perhaps, our way is not the only way to live. Perhaps, there is enough room here for everyone's own perspective, if we are brave enough to treat differing points of view with respect and dignity.

As refugees and immigrants from around the globe continue to seek their futures on our shores, we cannot afford to selfishly and rigidly guard our own culture from any changes. We should instead seek to understand and to engage those around us, no matter what their food smells like or how their words sound.

An engagement of citizens with one another... isn't that, after all, the original American ideal?