I’m starting Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad second semester, and there is so much that students need to know in order to understand this book. I’ve researched the triangular trade and the middle passage, the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, slave narratives, Colson Whitehead interviews, interviews with Bryan Stevenson and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, eugenics literature, forced sterilization, the William Still story, stop and frisk approach, etc, I am going through the process of building a unit. I have a clear idea of how this difficult novel needs to be approached and scaffolded so that everyone in my room 21 community feels successful (me included!) This process is fun, overwhelming, satisfying, scary.