Every time I bring up the subject of student language usage, I find myself between two camps: the language libertarians who believe that any rules against language usage are unrealistic and unnatural, and the language (cultural) conservatives who believe in restrictions against certain kinds of language. So I know where I'm treading.
Here's the situation: for the Write-a-Book-in-a-Year Club, the students send me a weekly snippet of their Work in Progress. I include these WIPs in a PowerPoint as a part of our meeting. They can be no longer than 200 words. So, one of the club members is working on a hard-boiled horror story, and he sent me a WIP for today's meeting that included the word "f***" four times. Not the REAL word spelled out, but the "f" with three asterisks after. I told him that the language that we use in the WIPs has the same rules that we apply in any other classroom activity, which is that the language must be "classroom safe."
I know, I know, I know the passive aggressive argument that "f***" isn't the real word, so the author didn't actually write it, but, come on, we all would read it the same way, and we're strongly sure of the author's intent of how we're supposed to read it.
I told him that I wouldn't put it in the slide show. I don't consider the word, even with asterisks, to be classroom safe. He rewrote the passage and sent me the new version. I approved it. The new version, however, includes the words "piss," "prick," "damned," "bastard" and it uses "Jesus" as an expletive. Within the context of the piece, however, I found the new version acceptable and "classroom safe" and included it in the slide show.
How in the world did I do that? Here's how: my student defined the edge of "classroom safe" for me.
This whole "classroom safe" standard, though, if fraught with inconsistency. We teach Catcher in the Rye, which uses the f-word (five times, as far as I can tell), and that book is deemed "classroom safe." How come it's okay to read the word in a book in class but not to allow a student to use it in class? I show the movie All The President's Men in my Journalism class, and it also uses the f word once.
I don't fully buy the "Catcher in the Rye is great literature, and your student is not writing great literature" argument.
It doesn't help with my problem that the high school this year has launched a program to clean up students' language in the halls. There are posters that say "No Cursing Allowed," and the teachers are supposed to send students who use bad language to the office for clean-up detention.
I maintain the "classroom safe" standard in my room, and I carry out my role as an authority figure vested in upholding cultural norms, but I'm uneasy about it. I can't just say to the kid, "You can't use that language because it just isn't done here." That's the equivalent of saying, "There's no reason for it. It's company policy."
I want to be more thoughtful than that.
Comments
You are their teacher, and you are also answerable to a governing body of some sort (probably more than one, at various levels). You can make the classroom a safe space for the students to speak as they wish, but it is not a protected space for you. If you were to pepper your lectures/teaching with profanities, it is possible, even likely, that some parental or governing body would object vehemently.
What a student writes and turns in to you is private. When you put sections of that in a presentation for all the students to see, it is now you choosing to expose the class to these words.
Published works containing fuck are challenged in curricula all the time; the standard defense is that they are works of art, approved classics of literature (approved/judged classic by whom is a different level of the debate).
If you put a student's salty language up, you don't have that defense.
Are you protecting the children, who surely know and say fuck, or are you protecting yourself? (Note, I think you should protect yourself in this case, as the cost to the kids is minimal.)
Edited at 2013-01-16 07:58 pm (UTC)