Ahmed Muyidi introduces a group of seventh-graders to some of the various geographical and cultural distinctions of Saudi Arabia, his home country, during a visit to Laura Grinage's World Language class at Southwest Middle School on Friday, Dec. 16, 2016. During the semester, the class has been hosting various visitors from around the world in an effort to gain an understanding for various cultures and perspectives.

In Saudi Arabia, where Ahmed Muyidi comes from, it’s customary to welcome visitors into one’s home with a plate of coffee and dates.

“This shows how generous we are with our guests,” Muyidi, dressed in a traditional Saudi thawb, explains to the 20-some students (one of whom is his own son) gathered in Laura Grinage’s Southwest Middle School classroom.

The seventh-graders enrolled in Grinage’s World Language class listen intently while Muyidi, a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas who has made a home for himself in the United States over the last few years, speaks about Saudi culture, government and geography.

The kids, their teacher hopes, will walk away from the 45-minute class with a few Arabic phrases, a general understanding of Muyidi’s country and its people and, ideally, a motivation to learn more about the diverse world they inhabit.

“I can see a change in them,” Grinage, who also teaches Spanish, says of her World Language students. Over the last nine weeks, the class has hosted visitors from several countries, among them Indonesia, Germany and South Korea.

“I think I’m not going to get every kid hooked on Chinese because I spend a week with them,” Grinage says. “But if they sample this variety, the fact that in the world people really do speak and think and work and dress differently, if that captures their imagination, then I think the urge to travel and live and learn language may follow.”

The teacher, a self-described softie, says she sometimes gets misty-eyed thinking about the welcome extended by her students to each and every guest who passes through her classroom.

There have been a lot, she says, over the last two and a half years since Grinage, at the time a new hire at Southwest, met Muyidi one day by chance in the school’s main office. Intrigued by his accent, Grinage began asking questions — the kind of genuinely curious, open-minded inquiries, she says, that kids seem to approach more naturally, oftentimes, than adults.

Muyidi (turns out, he had a daughter in Grinage’s class) eventually became her first World Language speaker. The rest, as they say, is history.

“One of the most important things in here is the climate we’re creating so that we can bring visitors into this room and they feel honored and they feel respected,” says Grinage, who usually spends the first few weeks of class introducing students to concepts like ethnocentrism and prejudice, sometimes through social simulation activities, before bringing in speakers.

Grinage has also hosted guests who may have been born here in the United States but whose life experiences may differ from the mostly white, mostly middle-class kids at Southwest.

Many are parents and loved ones of students, including an American military veteran, the mother of a student with autism who spoke to kids about effectively communicating with their special-needs classmate, black and Native American students from local high schools, and a grandmother who shared tales of living in Ireland during the 1960s.

The guest’s stories of old-world Ireland — specifically, purchasing firewood from a young girl hauling her wares around the streets in a wagon — inspired Maxwell Reaves, one of Grinage’s seventh-graders, to learn more about his Irish heritage.

The class, he says, has also expanded his perception of cultures even further removed from his own.

“There’s a lot of free housing that the government offers, and they don’t have to pay for school and stuff, which I thought was really interesting because it’s so much different from what we have here,” Reaves said, referring to Muyidi’s presentation on Saudi Arabia. “It’s really an eye-opener to have these things in the world and see how everything’s different.”

Understanding differences is a key component of Grinage’s class. There’s also a focus on recognizing the common humanity in all people.

Her students have certainly matured and grown throughout the last several weeks, as evidenced by the personalized thank-you notes she has every student write to classroom guests, Grinage says. But kids, more often than not, don’t seem to struggle as much as grownups do with “finding likeness” in others who may appear so very different at first, she theorizes.

“I think kids are looking for, Are you going to like me? Will this person like me? And also, what do we have in common?” Grinage says. “I think kids are less interested in finding reasons to not be friends. They’re very interested in finding ways to connect.”

It’s been a “magical experience” watching students interact with visitors, Grinage says. Especially now, she adds, in the wake of the election, when the country seems to be more divided than ever.

Grinage makes a point of keeping her own beliefs out of the classroom. It’s not her place to act as a spokesperson or offer any definitive answers to her students on the issues that have splintered American society as of late, she says.

“But I think it is critical that we find connections, whatever your politics,” Grinage adds. “We are split down the middle, and we aren’t building any bridges.”

In that way, perhaps grownups can learn a thing or two from the kids in their lives.