Sunday, November 16, 2014
Cussing
There are a couple of kids in my class that have the mouths of a sailor, and they usually say a couple words that maybe shouldn't be said during class. Our CT just tells the students to watch their mouths. This is way different from when I was in high school. If we ever said a cuss word there would be some sort of punishment for it. This got Logan and I discussing about how we would handle it in our classroom. We talked about how we would handle it on a case to case basis. If a student just uses one in normal conversation I don't think that they should be punished. If they use it in front of the whole class I think that is a different story and something should be done. One student always asked why cussing is bad in school when it is everywhere else, and my response to that (and the reason I will use in my future classroom) is that it's about respecting your classmates. You never know what the other students think about those words and you don't want to offend them. Another thing I like that my CT said was that there are thousands of words in the English language, there are plenty of other words to use other than those 6 or 7 words that have been deemed bad.
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I completely agree with what you are saying. It was the same way with my school when I was in high school. If I ever cussed it was a much bigger issue then what it seems to be today. My question to you is what do you think we could do about it though? Do we send every kid that cusses to the principals or do you have individual punishment?
ReplyDeleteI think coming up with a way to deal with this is important and being consistent with your consequences, but I think trying to make it a point from the start that the language is not acceptable is important too. I think bring explicit about it not being respectful is good. I think you will need to be very firm about some things early on to help students understand your expectations. I think a warning is good the first time, but then after that something else needs to be done - If you just keep telling students not to do something and nothing else... they will likely continue to do it.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if not hating consequences for offenders who only use the language in private conversations really sends the message that we do not use that type of language in school/ our classrooms. Maybe a student would read it as I can use the language but just to so the teacher hears. I know my CT has had issues in one of her classes with students using the F word. In each case the student had to go and talk to their administrator, but the note that my CT sent with them was slightly different and based on the context/ meaning behind the word. There was one case where a student "lost it" on another and was saying mean things and dropping curse words with the intent to hurt another student, but another day a student was organizing something a differ t student walked by and messed it up. The student then said something like f-ing a. This student cursed out of frustration and not directly at someone, thus their punishment was less, but to the class cursing resulted in a trip to the office.
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