respect
When Words Are Worse Than Sticks & Stones
Words will never hurt me, huh?
Sometimes that can be true. If someone calls me a geek, I’ll just agree with them. If someone tells me something I know is untrue, big deal. It’s all well and good to say we should know who we are and be confident enough that name-calling doesn’t hurt us. But words hold a particular danger. They have a tendency to become more than just words.
I’ve talked about it before, how words have power and saying you’re teasing doesn’t make it okay. It’s continued to be an issue in varying ways in my classroom.
On a regular basis, a student will tell me something like, “Guess what—Girl X (sitting right there) made out with Boy Y last weekend.” First, I don’t care. Second, I’m pretty sure it isn’t true. And what does the girl do? Smack his arm playfully, act shocked, and say, “I did not! Stop it!” … with a smile.
In other words, encourage him to keep saying such things.
After years of getting the attention he wants from “joking” about girls being “easy,” what else is he going to think he can get away with?
I say when a guy (or anyone) is a jerk, call him out on it. Shut him down. Don’t give him what he wants.
On a related note, a student has spent most of this year calling himself and his friends a particular made-up word. “Miss Lewis, I can’t do this—I’m a _____. _____’s don’t do math.”
(Mostly this has had “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” running in my head all year.)
But then some of the friends let it slip that this name for themselves was a portmanteau of two words, one of which is ‘pimp.’
I am not okay with this. I know the word has come to have certain pop-culture meanings (i.e., pimp my ride), but as a noun, in the context of a group of boys calling themselves this, I’m not okay with it.
So I’m calling them out on it. I’m asking them if they know what a pimp actually is. (We’re in a sheltered enough community that some kids actually don’t know.) Then I’m asking if they know how a real pimp views women. Once that’s clear, I ask if they understand now why I don’t want to hear anything more about that made-up word in my classroom.
So far, they’ve understood, but I haven’t really seen the main instigators yet. (Just started having these little talks on Friday.) We’ll see if I actually have any success keeping the word out of my classroom. And better yet, convincing these kids that it’s not such a great thing, whether in my classroom or not.
I suspect the originator will argue with me and say my least favorite sentence: “It’s okay, Miss Lewis.”
I truly worry about someone who so constantly tries to insist something’s okay when I tell him to his face that it’s not.
I’ll keep trying.
Speak up:
2 comments"Teasing Your Friend" Doesn’t Make It Funny or Okay
Warning: A rant is about to ensue.
It’s nothing new. I imagine people have been tossing “joking” insults at their friends since the dawn of time, and especially boys. You’ve probably heard the type:
“Joe, you’re such a girl.” (Having two X chromosomes is an insult?)
“Hey, Larry likes guys.” (Besides it being untrue, what’s your point?)
“You’re so gay, Jeff.” (“Gay” as a vague catch-all synonym for stupid, clumsy, goofy, or whatever would actually fit the situation? … Must not kill the children with my laser-eyes.)
That’s when it’s tame, and I’ll let your imagination fill in when it’s not. I’m sure there’s some psychological/sociological explanation about male posturing, establishing dominance, or some other testosterone-fuelled phenomenon.
It drives me nuts.
What can I do about it? Probably not much. I try to take the extra moment for a stern “None of that in my classroom,” but it’s always met by the same thing:
“I’m just playing. Joe and I are buds. He knows I’m kidding.”
The kidding aspect of it doesn’t make it okay. I try to get that across (and get the class back on track with math, please-oh-please). It’s very trying-to-empty-the-ocean-with-an-eyedropper. When I briefly mentioned it on Twitter the other day, I added the hashtag #CallMeSisyphus.
Super frustrating. I’m not stopping anytime soon, though.
Here’s one reason why, aside from the fact that such “insults” are offensive, annoying, and unintelligent.
I know a guy, former student, now an adult, who’s come out. I imagine him sitting in my classroom years ago. I imagine those stupid comments getting tossed around every single day. Back then, I was a new teacher who barely knew how to keep thirty teenagers from killing each other for forty-five minutes, much less having her ears tuned in to the random banter. So, I really don’t know if it’s gotten worse, or if I was just too stressed about not knowing what the heck I was doing to notice.
But even assuming such comments weren’t lobbed at him directly (best-case scenario), I imagine how hearing it over and over made him feel.
Possibly he would have felt a little like I do when I hear that first type of insult: “You’re such a girl,” etc. Kind of like I feel when someone tells a guy they throw like a girl, and I want to respond with, “Yeah? Let me show you how to kick like a girl.”
The feeling is that even if it’s in so-called teasing, it holds an inherent assumption that being female or being gay or whatever is automatically inferior. Not worthy of respect.
Never mind that we’re human beings. All of us.
And I know I’ve said it before, but I don’t like this “looking-down” attitude on any front. Not Republicans talking trash about Democrats. Not atheists saying the religiously inclined are idiots.
You don’t have to agree with someone to show them respect. And it’s really not that hard.
Now, if only I could convince a few fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds of that.
Any ideas?