Blog #1 — Tragedy
The question is, what do you do as a teacher when a tragedy strikes your students in some way? I think you do a disservice to your students is you just pooh pooh it away. You cannot sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen. Take for example the recent tragedy in the south with the hurricane. Every child has at least heard of this tragedy, if not seen all the horrible pictures on T.V. So to pretend that it didn’t happen is insulting the children. My way of dealing with things, as I am sure many other’s would agree, is to reach out and offer help. This is a wonderful way of dealing with remote tragedy’s. Teach the children how to help, how to give and reach out to others. Make it personal and talk about the little people, same age as your students. Then they can relate more closely to the victims. I could even take that opportunity to learn more about weather, hurricanes, cause and effect as it is related to this situation, the ocean, and even the southern region could easily make a good situation out of a very bad one. Gotta love those teachable moments. Besides I think we all learn better when we can see that what we are learning directly relates to our lives.
If the tragedy that hits your school is more personal in nature then I might not be so quick to find educational moments. For example, if a students parent or even a student should die within the school year. I think any grief however small it might seem to others is real in that persons eyes. So to not acknowledge the grief or once again sweep it under the fug if wrong. I would not hesitate putting the regular scheduled subjects on the back burner and just sit down with the students and talk openly about the tragedy. Because my background is social work, I guess I would be more touchy feely with situations like this. We would talk and I would answer any question I could. I am also a Christian and would most likely address answers from that perspective. Of course I would be sure to send a letter home informing parents of what and why we were talking about. And of corse I would tailor the conversation to be age appropriate. And after we talked it through then you do your reaching out. It feels good to do something. It makes us feel like we are helping to “fix” the problem. We would give in some way, money, cards, small gifts, and depending where I was teaching, pray for the family. I am unsure I could provide an un-bias opinion with the regards to my faith. However, I do believe I could avoid the political name calling and so on with regards to situations like sep. 11th or the hurricane or other national tragedy that often spill into the political arena.
I will be honest my first thought was not to look for web sights for help. However, it is foolish not to seek help when you are confused yourself. I guess I would seek the guidance of the principal and other co-workers so that we were all on the same page. But I do believe in talking about situations like this. In bad times we need each other and students spend the large part of their day in school. Regardless of what age you are you still need others to help with the day to day stresses and when bigger bad things happen we need those people even more.
