A Teachable Moment

One of my students wrote an essay about a personal struggle in which he used the phrase, “It was like a retard convention.” 

I wrote a note in the margin of his paper: “I find this statement to be offensive.”

Today, he looked over his essay and asked me what was offensive about that statement.  His reasoning was this: There are no retards in this class, so who would be offended?

I replied, “Well, whether or not there is a developmentally disabled person in class, it is still offensive.  If you use the term in a derogatory way, it’s offensive.  You can’t call someone ‘gay’ in a derogatory way because it is offensive to gay people.”

He still wasn’t getting it, because there are no openly gay students in our class, either.

So I thought about it, and I put it like this:

“Let’s say there’s a room full of white people, and one of them uses the n-word.  Is it still wrong?”

He said yes.

I said, “Well, it’s like that.  There may not be any ‘retards’ or gay people in the room, but that doesn’t mean you can use those words.  It’s still offensive.”

I don’t think he fully agrees with me, but he did revise his paper.  Now it says, “…as if I was [sic] at a break down convention.”

Whatever that is.

What do you do?

Five years of working in what my family and friends would refer to as the “ghetto” of Chicago.  Five years of working with truants, dropouts, gang members, drug dealers.  Five years of hard work and hard situations.

Never a death until today.

Today, one of our students died.  He was shot accidentally by one of his friends, also one of our students.  His friends watched him bleed, talk through it, head off in the ambulance, and did not know of his death until they came to school today.  The shooter, who I have had a student and like, is in custody; we don’t know what will happen to him.  He owned a gun and was playing with it while his friends were at his house.  It went off.

One life is gone.  I didn’t get a chance to know him.  Another life will be incarcerated, for who knows how long?  The dead student’s girlfriend, who I have known personally, is beside herself.

What do you do?

And when will it stop?