Articles

Every prospective parent hopes for a healthy baby. But when it comes to hearing and Deaf cultures, “healthy” is defined differently. Four out of 5 deaf children are born to hearing parents. When told this prognosis, hearing parents often experience what psychiatrist and grief expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross characterized as the Five Stages of Grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).

Name-calling is pervasive in our culture. According to advocacy organization Mental Health America, teens hear anti-gay slurs approximately 26 times a day. Other anti-bullying websites such as Bullying Statistics.org cite name-calling as the most common type of harassment in schools.

My third-period students rushed in at the start of class, wide-eyed and excited. Something had happened. “Quentin hit Ms. Combs!” Helen Combs was my friend. She taught language arts. “He knocked her down,” one student reported. “They took her to the hospital, and the police took him away in handcuffs!”

I don’t remember exactly what instigated it, but something had made Cashanda mad. She positioned herself—and her desk—right smack in front of the board. She was defiant. Her physical placement made it impossible to continue my lesson.

After the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel eloquently stated “never again.” Since he first uttered this compelling sentiment, genocides have erupted across the world—from Guatemala to Cambodia. April was chosen as Genocide Prevention Month since the Holocaust, Rwandan, Bosnian, Armenian and Cambodian genocides are commemorated during this time. The commemoration began in April 2009 and combined genocide remembrance with prevention.

I hear it now and then. It invariably comes after a long day in an elementary school classroom, a day that seems like a year. "If I didn't have [student’s name], I could teach my class!" You know the children who fill in the blank. They're the ones who stand when you ask them to sit, talk when you ask for silence and play when you need them to work. Marvin is one of those children. He is 9 years old.

Poet Adrienne Rich once asked: How can we connect the process of learning to write well with [a] student’s own reality, and not simply teach her/him how to write acceptable lies in standard English? The question appeared in her 1979 essay, “Taking Women Students Seriously.” Last week, Adrienne Rich passed away, leaving today’s educators to ponder alone a question that remains as pertinent as ever.

The whine of the projector subsides. Someone clicks on the lights. As the professor asks for commentary, the rapid raising of hands signifies an eagerness to respond. I remain still. Listening to my peer’s criticism of the Appalachian people featured in the made-for-TV special, I am humiliated.

Recently I suspended a seventh-grade boy for publicly calling his former girlfriend a “slut” and a “whore.” Our rules on slurs are clear. But as I learned again, talking about something in class doesn’t always affect student behavior, especially if the unwanted behavior isn’t corrected or condemned outside of the classroom.

What do you do with a teacher who provides students with authentic learning opportunities? A teacher who invests her own resources to support students? A teacher who was voted Teacher of the Year two of the last three years? If you’re Superintendent Jacqueline Cassell at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School in Pontiac, Mich., you fire her.