Evaluating What is Considered "Appropriate"

Mrs. Walsh was once again absent from school during one of my observations, and her husband was filling in for her. Her husband is a county sheriff, and it was very interesting to see how he interacted with the students and the way in which they responded to him. With the boys, he was a bit "rough," but it was easy to see that they respected him. I could see that there was an overall relationship of trust between him and the students, and I think that was due to the fact that they realized that he would not abuse his position of authority - both as their substitute teacher and as a sheriff. It made me think about what kind of persona I naturally give off to students and what kinds of things I may have to work at in order to encourage their respect and cooperation.

I went around the room to see what the students were working on and to offer any help I could give. Most of them were working on math, again. They almost always understood what they were supposed to do; the problem was getting them to actually work diligently at it. One girl said that my sitting beside her made her self-conscious, so I moved over to a table where two boys were working on a report that they were writing about heavy metal music.

Yes. Heavy metal music. That was their topic. I had seen them working on it in previous weeks but had never actually seen any of the content of their report. They kept saying that they wanted to wait until they were finished with it to show it to me, but when I pointed out that I might not still be around by the time they were completely finished, they agreed to let me see what they had so far. They had written a brief summary of the history of the genre of metal music, and they had also listed sub-genres and described what kind of content each sub-genre generally included. I was actually very impressed with how well written the report was, overall. They had included varied sentence structure, and it generally flowed well. The thing that I started to question, though, was the wisdom in allowing students to focus on a topic that may include highly inappropriate material.

The boys showed me some lyrics and album covers for the metal bands they were research, and I was honestly horrified by many of the images and the content of the songs. When I asked the boys why they enjoyed that kind of music, they defended the music and pictures by saying that it was simply "poetry" and that was what made it "beautiful." When I asked them if they thought singing about the things included in the lyrics was appropriate, they concluded, "Whatever makes a person happy is okay." They also told me that they did not think that the lyrics affected their thinking at all. At one point, one of the students told me, "You know, you're pretty cool, but sometimes you can be such a Christian."

Well, yes, being a Christian does influence my opinion and reaction to this kind of thing, but I am also fairly certain that many teachers would discourage the idea that students should be permitted to research anything in their area of interest. The big question is, who gets to determine what is considered "classroom appropriate"? How will I determine that when I teach in my own classroom? I suppose it will be a combination of the school's policies, explicit instructions from my administrators, and my own discretion. And that's the hard one.

There has to be a line, though, between encouraging the students to take initiative in their learning and promoting explicitly violent or sexual content - things that are highly prevalent in many of the lyrics I which was shown by these boys. I believe students should be allowed to study things that are interesting and immediately applicable to their lives, but I certainly do not embrace the idea that they can simply choose a topic they find "relevant" and deem it "academic."

It's another of those hard judgement calls that it seems teachers face in many, many aspects of their teaching.