Articles

Recently I suspended a seventh-grade boy for publicly calling his former girlfriend a “slut” and a “whore.” Our rules on slurs are clear. But as I learned again, talking about something in class doesn’t always affect student behavior, especially if the unwanted behavior isn’t corrected or condemned outside of the classroom.

A recent issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine addressed two subjects that I see converging in news stories from around the country – intolerant attitudes toward students who are atheist and teachers using their positions to bully students.

Camilla was drawing a doll she was planning to get with her parents over the weekend. She was talking to herself in sing-song tones as she drew the doll, some of her clothes and her own house. Across the table sat Tommy; he heard Camilla talking about the doll she was about to get. He exclaimed, almost as joyfully, “Hey! I’m going to get a doll too!” The two began to chat about the types of dolls they were going to get. Across the room, another boy, busily building with blocks, said in a voice that reached across the room, “You are getting a doll?” A look of confusion spread across his face.

Last spring, our high school performed The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials (also an allegory of the witch hunts of McCarthyism). It’s one of my favorite plays. Watching the performance, I was struck by the character of Reverend Hale.

If you are the kind of educator who builds a safe and open classroom culture and teaches with a compassionate heart, students will come to you. They will share their secrets. The culture you create in the classroom can often serve as an invitation for students to seek solace and advice outside of class. We have all faced the blessings (and burdens) of our students’ trust. A new study out of Northwestern University (where I teach) reminds us that we must be prepared for our students’ stories to come tumbling out.

In my eighth-grade language arts classroom, we use discussion as a vehicle for learning, thinking, writing, posing and defending arguments, questioning and reviewing—just about everything. And as can be expected, we sometimes digress from the topic at hand.

On Monday, LGBT students’ rights were vindicated in a comprehensive settlement with Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District over its policies that hindered teachers from effectively responding to anti-gay bullying—policies that may have contributed to some of the district’s recent suicides. Then on Tuesday, in the afterglow of this historic victory, the Utah Senate passed its own discriminatory bill (HB 363) prohibiting educators from teaching about, or even talking about, homosexuality.

Schools have a responsibility to maintain a safe learning environment for all students—this seems on first examination a simple enough statement. It isn’t. Two words are key—“learning” and “all.” A school that is inclusive of all its students but unable to nurture learning has failed in its responsibility. An academically successful school that only supports its majority students has equally neglected its obligation.

When the Dallas Texas Public Schools District decided to show its fifth-graders Red Tails, an action-adventure film based on the Tuskegee pilots who formed the country’s first black aerial combat unit, it was a tremendous idea. The district felt students would be inspired by the story of these men who fought segregation, integrated the Army and were trained as combat pilots for the United States during WWII.

For two years I taught preschool to a diverse group of energetic children. Every morning one boy would enter the classroom, throw down his stuff, run over to the dress-up corner and slip into a shimmery polyester wedding gown.