Yesterday a substutute teacher wanting a full time job as a language teacher strolled into my classroom at the beginning of one of my classes and asked to see a story. I obliged, and the class and I decided to be a little slack with the rules, since it was kind of a demo class.
I shouldn’t have done that. There were a few, not many, breaks to explain things (what is PQA?, etc.) and so that allowed the English in. A very socially inept boy, who tends to blurt out in class anyway, provided a perfect example to embellish the point that John Piazza made in the first of these two articles on bullying.
Lest there be any confusion about this, John’s point (go read the article again if need be, it will be worth the effort) is in my opinion the key to everything – absolutely everything – that we will ever do in our classrooms.
If we don’t get what John is saying, which is to admonish us to deal with behaviors such as these and not ever let them be ignored, it would be best if we leave our classrooms tomorrow on the fast train – we will fail as teachers.
So this kid, the only one of all my students who still doesn’t understand what I mean about blurting and with whom I’ve had blurting problems for two years now, got to be the actor in a Matava story – I don’t know how that happened. Great. Mistake #1. This kid now had a soapbox for comments.
One detail – there are two kids in the class with his name – David. At one point there was confusion over which David we were talking about – David #1 or David #2 – since I had brought David #2 into the story too. David #1 blurted in English when we realized it was the other David who we were talking, “Oh, the dark one!” (Both kids are Latino but Bully David has much lighter skin.)
When this happened, the second David, sitting not ten feet in front of me and looking directly at me, appeared, in the invisible world, as if he had been hit with a bullet. It was too late. A kind of act of mental terrorism had happened right under my nose.
Everybody knew it, in the strange way that that happens when bullies are at work. David #2’s skin color had suddenly become the full subject of attention in my class, the story having been totally forgotten in that moment of bullying. This kid had been pinned down. I don’t need to know about racism based on skin color in the Latino world – all I needed to do was look in Victim David’s eyes, which could barely hold their suffering.
It was horrible and as I write this I am unable to sleep because of the level of emotional pain I saw in that poor, kind, scared kid in front of me. I chose to ignore it in that moment, with our guest there (I am tired of people observing my class – they change things), and Bully David had successfully dismantled the class for a moment that seemed like an hour. This mean kid had planted a perfect bomb in my class and it went off perfectly to his great delight.
Thanks to John’s article I now know that I must act now on this – I cannot let it go into the weekend, but how? My tendency is to want to bring it up to start class. Should I start with a public apology (everybody felt the sting of that insult) by me to David for my failure to protect him? And then require one from Bully David? Or would choosing that course of action in front of Victim David be too much for him?
Maybe I should send Victim David out on some pretense to talk about the bullying, maybe with a a counselor to acknowledge that it happened, so that I can have the time to confront Bully David about this in class. I need help on this – so help me before 11:42 a.m. today.
I will, of course, bring up with the class the new addition about blurting on the jPG. For me a kid who blurts is stuck at the 2 level no matter how good the student is because the caution about blurting is only mentioned in that category and not in the others, below or above). I won’t call the parent because I have before and he is a father with no spine. I will write the behavior up in the IC Conference Atom in the gradebook.
And I will now address this blurting behavior with Bully David every single time it happens by sending him out to a colleague (there are three teachers in our language lab during this class and we have a departmental agreement to send kids out to each other when we need to).
As I write this, I feel that my reaction is over the top – I’m making this into something greater than it is. But that is exactly John’s point. When I feel inside that I am overeacting to this situation of bullying, somewhere on a deeper level I know that I am not being honest with myself. It is what Sabrina said yesterday, also a lie to herself, in my opinion:
… I have such dichotomous feelings towards him, on the one hand I get mad at him (an ADD kid) and on the other I can’t help but think to myself that he is not a bad person and that it is NOT his fault. I guess I have to accept some things are just outside of my sphere of influence. No matter what, the idea I can reach all kids is just an illusion in my opinion….
Sabrina, I don’t think that we can overeact with bullies – we have to step in and act. We must read and re-read John’s article here. Bullying behavior must be stopped. Stopping such behaviors with a hard response should describe 90% of what we do, and the entire comprehensible input drama – so big in our minds but so unimportant in the light of the Davids of this world – should be the focus of about 10% of what we do, if I am reading John correctly.
But we have to know that it is happening first. The failure of teachers to address the anti-social behaviors that John describes in the previous post is the cause of teacher burnout, possible suicide in teens, much sadness and the general feeling of despair that characterizes the American classroom of today.
This phenomenon of directly insulting someone else in the classroom in front of others (whether it is done consciously or unconsciously matters little) is the single most critical factor destroying the fabric of our society in millions of forms in tens of thousands of school buildings each day. If every little insult that we heard in a typical day in our nation’s schools were to be brought together as a single unit of sound, it would be the sound of the death wail of our society.
As John says, we must address these behaviors directly and in a timely way. We can’t let them go. If we let them go, we may as well quit teaching. Disciplining these comments is the key to our success in our comprehension based classrooms.