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Welcome to the Daily Article podcast for Thursday, June the 23rd, 2022.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum narrating today's article

written by Dr. Jim Denison. Dan Gill has taught social studies at a middle school in New Jersey

for 30 years. That alone makes him worthy of recognition. But all these years, he has followed

a practice I found especially noteworthy. He keeps an empty chair in the front corner of his classroom.

He explained that it symbolizes that we always have room in the classroom for anyone.

He learned his passion for diversity at a young age.

As a nine-year-old in New York City, Gil went to a friend's birthday party, along with his best friend at the time, a black student named Archie Shaw.

The child's mother told Archie that he had to go home because there are no more chairs.

Gil said, I felt so bad because he had been humiliated.

We gave her the presence, and I said, we're going to because he had been humiliated. We gave her the presence and I said,

we're going to my house where there are plenty of chairs. When he began his teaching career

52 years ago, he started a tradition of telling the story to his students annually on Martin

Luther King Jr.'s birthday. He added an empty chair to his classroom 30 years ago, and it has remained there ever since.

His story struck me on a personal level for reasons I'll explain today.

At this writing, an earthquake that struck Afghanistan yesterday morning has killed more

than 1,000 people with more than 1,500

...