Teachers Need To Ask More Controversial Questions, Not Less.
The type of content kids have access to in 2021 on their parent’s Netflix account would have been rated XXX in 1999 and locked behind a few doors in sketchy VHS stores (what’s a VHS — am I right?)
In a way, kids today might be more desensitized to what their teachers today view as controversial topics like LGBTQ rights, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, crime and basically anything you probably wouldn’t talk about in class in the 90s.
This is why I always find it moderately amusing when you hear teachers speak up in meetings saying “I’m not going anywhere near politics! Cover your you-know-what! You couldn’t pay me enough to talk about pro choice vs. pro life in my class!”
The reality is simple: whether or not these controversial topics are discussed in class your students are likely already being exposed to them via their social media feeds on TikTok, Netflix or SnapChat. At least with a teacher at the helm of a class discussion there is the presence of structure, ground rules for debate and a voice of wisdom in the room (hopefully).
It’s not that their students might find these topics controversial — in fact they usually find them so mundane that apathy is usually students’ first response when a teacher asks a question in class that they think might stir some controversy.
Perhaps it isn’t the students who are the ones teachers are concerned about but rather their parents. Parents have gotten an unfair wrap in the past decade — especially by teachers.
This might be understandable: teachers are expected to solve all of society’s ills and are usually cannon fodder for mediocre politicians looking to score cheap poll points by trashing public servants. In South Korea teachers are called nation-builders. In the US people react to you revealing teaching as your profession as if you’ve just been diagnosed with terminal medical condition.
In Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he surmised that the formerly oppressed ultimately seek to oppress others because it is all they have known. Using this lens, it is perhaps unsurprising that a profession so conditioned to be ridiculed by the public as teachers for all of society’s ills would seek to transfer blame to “those dang parents”.
But, parents aren’t the problem. In fact, they’re crucial to the solution. Parents aren’t crazy. They just care about their kids and want to know what they’re doing, that they’re being supported and that they have a teacher who cares about them. A large part of that as a teacher is being able to explain the why of the content or questions that they ask in class.
And, having a ready why explanation in the chamber to bring out to parents takes time, real reflection and sometimes having difficult conversations when a parent wants to know why their kid is discussing xyz in your classroom.
Here it is on a bumper sticker:
Ask the juicy unasked question you want to ask. Odds are your students are already asking it themselves.
And, if you can tie it into your larger curriculum goals you should have no problem justifying a particular topic to parents/admin.
