Potentially sensitive topics in the classroom
The last entry, in which I expressed concern about a student who did not understand the role of individual human rights in our society got a bit closer to taking a particular political position than I usually like to do in the schools. Of course writing in a forum like this is not the same thing as working in the classroom, and one may well say things here that would never come out in the course of a days work. Also, almost no one ever reads these blogs anyway, and writing here is much more of a personal exploration of my thoughts and feelings than an attempt to make public statements.
Not quite the same in the classroom. The kids may appear to be paying so little attention to the old sub teacher that it can be easy to forget they actually hear most of what we say. They are just choosing to ignore. This becomes all too clear if one has a slip of the tongue and uses inappropriate language, especially if you are being stressed by bad behavior. Suddenly you realize that there is an audience in the room with very good ears. Not only are there twenty five or thirty of them, but several parents also will hear things we say on the job as well, and we never know exactly how it will be reported. In this context, I am very careful to dance around a topic if there is any possibility of controversy.
Notwithstanding the fact that it is rare in the life of a sub teacher for these situations to occur, one can be caught off guard. In a kindergarten class once the project had something to do with dinosaurs, and one little fellow informed me that these creatures never really existed. Biting my often thoughtless tongue before saying, “Oh don’t be silly, they have found the bones.” I remembered my own childhood when our family and small church circle held similar beliefs, which were an important component of our feeling of community. I answered by suggesting that we were doing the project because it was so much fun to cut and color.
In Jr. High science, during the first week of this school year a girl approached me asking about evolution, wondering how much emphasis the regular teacher planed to put on this part of biology. She said that her family didn’t believe in evolution and she didn’t want to waste her time studying something that was not true. Of course I was able to use the typical sub teacher dodge, that I had no idea what her regular teacher would cover in the course. Then, possibly unadvisedly, added that she should question everything she was taught, taking nothing as absolute truth. Learning about something, the logic and evidence or lack there of behind the theories is not the same thing as believing it all to be true. It can’t hurt to know something about what you do not believe in, just as one wants to know something about topics in which you have faith. She probably went home and told her mom that some fat old sub told her all the teachers in the school are bull of bull.
Once in a while I get a fun high school level class where important issues of the day are on the table. One time this year, in a debate class the regular teacher left me with a couple of video selections to show and discuss. One of them, that the class would be using as a debate topic was stem cell research. That time it was very fun to tip toe through the minefield, trying to think of ideas and arguments that would prompt thinking without the kids in the class knowing what my personal opinion was on the topic.
On the day the student disturbed me with his human rights comment the assignment that he and others had blown off was to write a few paragraphs on the theme of the first twelve chapters of Genesis. During an earlier period I had read the text and thought of a couple of prompts to get them going. Luckily, before I opened my mouth a couple of students had a conversation in which one of them expressed disapproval of the other, because she discussed the Bible as if it were any other literature book. He considered it a sacred text, not open to questions and discussion (outside the context of the religious observance.) The girl answered that they were reading it as literature, but I was glad that it was not me who had discussed the text in that context. Parents sometimes complain when a teacher lets other students question their children’s faith, a sub teacher certainly does not want complaints from home in a sensitive area like that. I tried to use it as an opening to the student who had the issue, for him to write about his beliefs in the text, but he turned away and chatted with the girl with white ear buds buzzing into her brain and ignored me for the rest of the period.
Not quite the same in the classroom. The kids may appear to be paying so little attention to the old sub teacher that it can be easy to forget they actually hear most of what we say. They are just choosing to ignore. This becomes all too clear if one has a slip of the tongue and uses inappropriate language, especially if you are being stressed by bad behavior. Suddenly you realize that there is an audience in the room with very good ears. Not only are there twenty five or thirty of them, but several parents also will hear things we say on the job as well, and we never know exactly how it will be reported. In this context, I am very careful to dance around a topic if there is any possibility of controversy.
Notwithstanding the fact that it is rare in the life of a sub teacher for these situations to occur, one can be caught off guard. In a kindergarten class once the project had something to do with dinosaurs, and one little fellow informed me that these creatures never really existed. Biting my often thoughtless tongue before saying, “Oh don’t be silly, they have found the bones.” I remembered my own childhood when our family and small church circle held similar beliefs, which were an important component of our feeling of community. I answered by suggesting that we were doing the project because it was so much fun to cut and color.
In Jr. High science, during the first week of this school year a girl approached me asking about evolution, wondering how much emphasis the regular teacher planed to put on this part of biology. She said that her family didn’t believe in evolution and she didn’t want to waste her time studying something that was not true. Of course I was able to use the typical sub teacher dodge, that I had no idea what her regular teacher would cover in the course. Then, possibly unadvisedly, added that she should question everything she was taught, taking nothing as absolute truth. Learning about something, the logic and evidence or lack there of behind the theories is not the same thing as believing it all to be true. It can’t hurt to know something about what you do not believe in, just as one wants to know something about topics in which you have faith. She probably went home and told her mom that some fat old sub told her all the teachers in the school are bull of bull.
Once in a while I get a fun high school level class where important issues of the day are on the table. One time this year, in a debate class the regular teacher left me with a couple of video selections to show and discuss. One of them, that the class would be using as a debate topic was stem cell research. That time it was very fun to tip toe through the minefield, trying to think of ideas and arguments that would prompt thinking without the kids in the class knowing what my personal opinion was on the topic.
On the day the student disturbed me with his human rights comment the assignment that he and others had blown off was to write a few paragraphs on the theme of the first twelve chapters of Genesis. During an earlier period I had read the text and thought of a couple of prompts to get them going. Luckily, before I opened my mouth a couple of students had a conversation in which one of them expressed disapproval of the other, because she discussed the Bible as if it were any other literature book. He considered it a sacred text, not open to questions and discussion (outside the context of the religious observance.) The girl answered that they were reading it as literature, but I was glad that it was not me who had discussed the text in that context. Parents sometimes complain when a teacher lets other students question their children’s faith, a sub teacher certainly does not want complaints from home in a sensitive area like that. I tried to use it as an opening to the student who had the issue, for him to write about his beliefs in the text, but he turned away and chatted with the girl with white ear buds buzzing into her brain and ignored me for the rest of the period.
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