Teaching

There is no greater blow to a society than when its children are harmed. Today, we are reeling.

Every teacher has that gem of an activity that's been perfected over the years—the one that always engages students and shows them a new perspective. Since you're part of the Teaching Tolerance community, there's a good chance that special activity might be about fighting bias in your classroom.

Given the beating that public school teachers have taken in recent months, the results of the 43rd annual PDK/Gallup poll were kind of surprising. The headline for it could have read “Americans love teachers!”

I'm a middle school English teacher. If any of my former teachers are reading this, they will (a) be shocked I'm entrusted with our future generation, (b) question what happened to the character-education movement, or (c) ask how I made it past high school.

When I was a student in middle school, life seemed to be an endless maze of getting to class on time, getting homework done on time or trying to fit in somewhere. There was the added problem of not wanting to wear my Coke bottle-thick glasses. It didn't help my self-image knowing every night I had to attach my braces to a medieval torture device known as headgear. To this day I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy those awkward middle school years of being laughed at, picked on, and socially lost.

Last June, eight students at Susquenita High School near Harrisburg, Pa., got a nasty surprise. The students, who ranged in age from 13 to 17, got caught with nude photos of each other on their cell phones. School officials brought in the police, and each teen was slapped with a felony pornography charge.

Forty percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago, according to a Gallup poll released late last week. In other words, they subscribe to creationism. 

Today, I opened my classroom door to a surprise. Diego was back! He put his arm around my shoulder and said, “It’s good to see you again.”

One of the best things about being a teacher is when students come back. Some of those homecomings are more significant than others. Just a 10^th-grader, Diego wasn’t back to tell me about his college life, his career or kids. He was back to tell me that in juvenile hall, where he’d spent the last three weeks, he had found out he loved to write.

Thirty years ago, I heard the news that John Lennon had been shot. Every year since, the morning news on NPR reminds me again of that day. 

I was a young, second-year teacher then, with four sections of grade nine “World Cultures” and one section of A.P. United States history. Mine was a Catholic school, and we’d had Monday, December 8 off because it was a holy day, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. 

Abel Barrera Hernández has worked tirelessly to bring justice to some of Mexico’s most marginalized communities. For his work as founder and director of the Tlachinollan Center in southern Mexico, Hernández received an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights last month.

That, coupled with the fact that Friday is Human Rights Day, got me thinking how I, as a teacher, must also fight for human rights.