I hadn't spent two weeks teaching at International Middle, a mostly Somali, mostly Muslim charter school in Minneapolis, before I realized someone should make a movie about these kids. It was more than my naive notion that Muslims are a Hollywood coming-of-age flick away from American acceptance. At this school, where teachers keep extra headscarf pins in their desks, the gleeful sorority of girls would give way to snaps in a circle and (until recently) Chris Brown songs, while the boys' courtly manners could accommodate hip-hop slang. A generation was becoming American before my eyes—except "We're not Americans," corrected one eighth-grader in a U.S. history class, a girl who had grown up here with no... More >>>