Are You Kinder Than a Fifth Grader?

This topic was suggested to me by a friend who is currently working with teenagers.  Now I will concede that original audience is off my normal teaching radar by about ten years, but I think the issue should span every age range.

Here's the story...

As part of an assignment the students were asked to write down a list of ten interests.  Some boys in the class chose to use this opportunity to tease another student by commenting that his first five interests should be being gay.  The TEACHER then proceeded to laugh and say "number one could say guys, two could say guys, three could say guys...".

This serves as an extreme example of something that I'm sure happens far too often.  What happens when it isn't only the children that require the emotional education?  How do we, as teachers, deal with these kinds of situations when we see them happening?  We might consider it our job to step in when it comes to students, but what about the adults around us?  Not all situations are this clear cut, where I would probably just say go to a supervisor.  But whether we like it or not, as teachers, our opinions will find their ways into our classrooms.  And like it or not, the opinions of all the teachers around us won't always match our own.  Often times teachers can sound as ignorant as the students they are meant to be mentoring.

Through my own journey from student to teacher I hate to say that I've all too often felt small pieces of my soul lost in similar moments of helplessness.  It's not our place, not our class, not our student, not our problem.  I could probably go on for hours about how far this problem can stretch.  Love is a battlefield and so is teaching.  For every child we fight to teach emotional awareness, there are a thousand factors working against us, and to find those oppositional forces on what we thought was our own side can be heartbreaking.  I have no solution, I don't believe anyone does.  Just faith to fight the good fight.  By promoting emotional education we can only hope that we are in some small way preventing our students from someday causing the heartbreak.

Teach on