LogFAQs > #986219231

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I have to say, this is the sort of thing no teacher should ever do. It's pretty much guaranteed to blow up in your face no matter what happens.

It also risks that kid going home, telling his parents, and they show up demanding you be fired for shaming their child in front of all his peers. Or the other kids go home, tell their parents, and then you've got parents showing up demanding the first kid be removed from class because he's a danger to their precious darlings.

Or you get the fun option, which is that a student says something the others latch onto, and now you've just helped facilitate that kid getting bullied for the next 12 years of his life. And once he's old enough to really understand what happened (assuming he doesn't wind up killing himself at some point), he's going to spend the rest of his life hating you and praying that you die of painful rectal cancer for putting him in that position in the first place.

It's like show-and-tell for sociopaths. You're basically asking them to hand you the ammunition they're going to be shot with.

Add in missing context that would have made my post longer but would also make it clear that students knew they're supposed to share something silly and not actually incriminating (like the girl who confessed to sneaking into an apartment complex swimming pool without the card key or the girl who admitted she stole a "take one" bowl of candy on Halloween).

Some kids just can't be protected from themselves despite whatever warnings, disclaimers, and filters I integrate into the class. They will find an opportunity to share their weird sense of humor and fringe opinions. Tiptoeing around having fun because of some paranoid obsession (heh) that it might somehow end in a kid's suicide is pretty absurd.

There are SO many opportunities in a discussion-based literature class to look stupid, weird, and fucked up. Teenagers are figuring out how to navigate everything while forming their worldview, morality, ethics, etc. Because of this, your concerns *are* valid, but you're also missing the (imo uninteresting) context of how I establish my classroom as a safe, supportive, respectful place to be vulnerable and grow that *also* makes room for humor and sarcasm to break the tension of all the dark shit we necessarily study.

Anyway, I have a strong union to protect me from whiny parents. If I were somewhere else, I might censor myself more.