I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO GET FIRED!!

My experience thus far at Rock Bridge has been very positive. The students are wonderful, my co-teacher is great, and the school environment is pretty close to ideal. Everything seems to be going my way, until one day it happened. I got the scare of my life. I'll just tell the story the way that it happened.

My co-tecaher and I love what we do and we are determined to make learning interesting for our students. The are doing a Middle East unit right now and we thought we'd spice up the interest level by doing a skit depicting the realities of developing a civilization in ancient Middle Eastern times. With me being the narrator and Greg the "Middle Eastern Man" we thought that the skit would be a sure fire way to help the students understand the material while being entertained at the same time.

Greg should have won an academy award for his performance as The Middle Eastern Man. He came in wearing standard nomadic clothing (graduation gown as a sock, no shoes, and a t-shirt around his head. He praised the God of the light, and the god of teh spiders, the god of water and everything else to show this idea of their polytheistic belief and how it was the people's duty to keep the gods happy. I beat chalk erasers around his head to depict a draught and dust storm and immediaely after drenched him with water to show flooding. This was to illustrate the unpredictabulity of the environmental features. We once again prayed to the gods for giving such fertile land and the opportunity to settle although everything was not perfect.

As expected the skit seemed a success, but after one more scan around the room I found a young man silently crying to himself. Tears falling drop by drop onto his notebook. Rationality came to me. This kid is from the Middle East, what have we done!! Did we make clear that we were talking about ancient Middle Eastern development? Did we do anything stereotypical? They did wear head wraps back then, didn't they? All these questions ran through my mind.I wrote him a note telling him I hope he didn;t think we were being sterotypical and explain to him the purpose. I asked him to meet me outside. He left the classroom at the end of the period without one word spoken to me.

i talked to his counselor and told her the situation. I couldn't believe, me, an individual from a marginalized race, did not take the 5 or 6 seconds to explain the purpose of the activity and that i didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I know what it's like to be laughed at because you practiceisn;t what people "the norm." I figured that the activity was inconsiderate and didn;t think about the feelings of ALL my students all the way through. I was sure to be fired once the principal heard about my inconsiderate actions.

I found in the end that I was having first-year teacher paranoia. The student indeed knew individuals who were stil polytheistic and performed those same practices today and the activity did not hurt his feelings, but the fact that those people he knows are looked down upon because of their practices. He told his counselor that he nderstood the activity and he that we were his favorite teachers. I was quite relieved at finding out this information.

I definitely learned a valuable lesson. Although this situation did not blow up in my face, I need to remain cognizant of the lessons and activities I do in school. It is important to make sure that I do not offend anyone ith any of my instructional techniques.