{"id":168168,"date":"2025-04-02T11:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T11:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/the-myth-of-a-safe-classroom\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T11:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T11:58:09","slug":"the-myth-of-a-safe-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=168168","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of a Safe Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"


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If students don\u2019t feel safe, they can\u2019t learn.<\/em>\u00a0Even before I became a teacher, I learned this truism while studying child development in my psychology program. I didn\u2019t think twice about it, and later, this core tenet of education became central to my teaching: \u201cHow do I make every student in my classroom feel safe?\u201d\u00a0Make. Feel.<\/em><\/p>\n

After graduating from college, I spent two years teaching in Japan. During my second year, assisting a master teacher, we did an exercise in immersive empathy in our sixth-grade class. We prepared the students, who did not know what was coming, by letting them know they could ask to pause for any reason. In the exercise we taught a very basic English lesson, but added teacher behaviors that research showed were commonly used by ethnic majority teachers toward ethnic minority students: inconsistent punishment, showing favor in calling on students, and stereotyping. The goal was to support students in identifying those behaviors in class and consider how they would respond individually and collectively.<\/p>\n

One student in that class was quiet, a bit bitter, and occasionally brilliant. She shared that during the exercise, she felt deep hatred for us as instructors and for her classmates, because as a member of the\u00a0Burakumin<\/em>, the undercaste in Japanese society, she never felt fully safe\u2014not at school, not out in society, not at home. She knew that as long as she lived, the next indignity was just around the corner. Nonetheless, the student said that she loved the exercise because she felt like her lack of safety was finally something that her classmates understood, and that she didn\u2019t have to experience alone.<\/p>\n\n

The memory of this exercise and this student has stayed with me. When I was a child, my mother\u2014born in the United States to parents with false documents a mere nine days off the boat\u2014would bombard me with old, timeworn sayings she had learned from her parents and from her activism during the civil rights struggle. \u201cWe have to be three times better to make it,\u201d she would say, and \u201cGet your education; it\u2019s the one thing they can\u2019t take away.\u201d<\/p>\n

I remembered how I reacted to my teachers who told me that I should feel safe in the classroom. I mistrusted them. I knew I wasn\u2019t safe and was in no mood to play act as if I was. I knew what it was like to feel marginalized in the classroom and in the streets, and to be targeted by the police as a youth of color. I knew from my grandparents what it was like to have been unjustly excluded from U.S. citizenship and all its protections and provisions, and to have to worry every day whether this would be my last free day in the country.<\/p>\n

I think most of us educators understand this on some level, whether it was from the moment we heard about Columbine in 1999, or one of the more than 400 other school shootings since then. Maybe one of our students was among the nearly 400,000 who have experienced school shootings directly. We understand by now that with the utter lack of political response to protect the students and teachers of the United States, we cannot keep our students safe.<\/p>\n\n

A\u00a0rather stressful day to teach middle school is the day we have to do mandatory \u201clockdown drills.\u201d The week prior, we brief the students on the procedure with a poorly conceived Chicago Public Schools video followed by a brief discussion. One of these times, a student I\u2019ll call J fixated on a particular portion of the training. He pulled me aside after the discussion and said, \u201cThe video said we are to lock the door and sit in silence\u00a0until the police arrive<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what happened\u00a0in Uvalde<\/a>,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe discussed it in class. The police aren\u2019t coming. I\u2019m not sitting around waiting to be shot. If the gunman busts through that door, you would be the first person trying to jump him, wouldn\u2019t you? We would have to take him down. We\u2019d do it together.\u201d<\/p>\n

J was killed in a local shooting this past year. I never got to ask him if he said what he did so that he didn\u2019t feel alone, or so I wouldn\u2019t. Our whole school tried and failed to keep him safe. But I know that when he was at school, he knew he wasn\u2019t alone. He knew that we would fight for him until our last breath.<\/p>\n

When news began to circulate about the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at public schools, we held short discussions with our upper-grade students about their rights and what we would do if ICE arrived at the school. It\u2019s strange, because I realize that some folks will read this and think that we as educators are somehow conspiring against the current President. But the first of these discussions happened when our President was Barack Obama. And then Donald Trump. And then Joe Biden. And now again under Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

After we study the ways that they can resist those who want to hurt them and their families, students often ask what we as teachers will do. \u201cWe will do everything we can to prevent them from entering the building and to disrupt them to protect you from harm,\u201d is what I say. We cannot ensure their safety, but we can promise that we will fight and that they will never be alone.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If students don\u2019t feel safe, they can\u2019t learn.\u00a0Even before I became a teacher, I learned this truism while studying child development in my psychology program. I didn\u2019t think twice about it, and later, this core tenet of education became central to my teaching: \u201cHow do I make every student in my classroom feel safe?\u201d\u00a0Make. Feel. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":168169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[67583,2746,7415,42442,428,2083,18562,2116,13732,67584],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-168168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-april-may-2025","tag-classroom","tag-education","tag-gun-violence","tag-ice","tag-magazine","tag-myth","tag-safe","tag-schools","tag-xian-franzinger-barrett"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Myth of a Safe Classroom - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=168168\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Myth of a Safe Classroom - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If students don\u2019t feel safe, they can\u2019t learn.\u00a0Even before I became a teacher, I learned this truism while studying child development in my psychology program. 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