Professionalism. Humanitarianism.

Here's a conversation I just heard two colleagues having about the kid that was killed.

One woman comes into the room and says, outraged, "You know that kid that was killed? I had him in my class. He never did any work. He was a dirtbag. I'm sorry for saying it, but it's true."

A male teacher listening replies, "Don't say you're sorry. Now there's one less dirtbag in the world. We should be happy about the elimination of dirtbags."

They continued on for some time in this vein. I wish I'd managed to transcribe it all.

Who on earth reacts to a students' death in this way?

I admit, I have two or three kids whom I look at and think, that kid is going to commit violent crimes someday. And I worry about them. But most of my students are not like that.

Now I didn't know the kid who died that well. He didn't come to school much, and he was barely literate. But I never had any reason to think that he was violent or criminal or bad. From what I heard my colleagues saying, they had no reason to think these things either. The main thing they seemed to have against him was that he wasn't a great student. Well, he was in special ed. (I believe). And hell, if we kill off all the bad students and say good riddance, we're going to lose about 70%-80% of our kids.

Argh. If a kid can't count on their teachers to go to bat for them, to care about them, to try to say nice things about them ten minutes after they hear the kid is dead, what can they count on? Disgusting.

Gmail

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/nyregion/05beating.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Here's a link to an article about the student that died. He was killed about three blocks away from the school I taught at last year, deep in the South Bronx.

I used to love Gmail, but now it's frozen every time I try to use it. Maybe it's just somethign to do wtih the school's servers.

The Bronx

One of my students was murdered on Friday. He was beaten to death early in the afternoon while buying Orange Juice at a store. They aren't sure if it was mistaken identity or if he was picked for a reason. He seemed like a quiet, shy, nice kid to me. Of course, i don't know what else was going on in his life.

What a shame.