The Media

This fall, in our city, a young man from the suburbs went to his girlfriend’s house and shot her. She didn’t die, but it was touch and go for a while. The media ran many stories about the event – they interviewed peers of the two students, who both attended an affluent school in the south end of the city. The newspaper outlined efforts the local school board was going to in order to ensure that grief counselors were available at the school, to help the students deal with the situation.

While explaining this story to my students, as we worked on our collective, I asked them how many of them lost a family member within the last year. More than half of the students put up their hands. I asked them how many times they or their friends were interviewed about the impact the deaths had on them. I asked them how many days grief counselors were at our school. The answers: never, and none. The news stories about deaths in the neighbourhood I teach in don’t involve interviews – they involve cold hard statistics and gruesome details. It is the expectation that bad things will happen in the inner city – because “bad” people live there. However, in the suburbs, something bad that happens is always an anomaly. It’s about time the media gave as much sympathy to the victims of violence in the inner city as they do to those middle class kids involved in “tragedies” in the suburbs.

Reality Check

Two interactions over the last two days caused me to take a step back from my middle-class world, and appreciate everything I have that I take for granted.

In drama class, we were reading an abridged version of MacBeth. While trying unsuccessfully to help a student understand the idea of “theme” I was caught off guard when he asked me what I knew about welfare. I told him not much, and asked why. He said, “Well, I want to see if they can set me up with an apartment, so that I can keep coming to school.” Then the whole story came out – he is 17, has been kicked out of his house for months and is currently staying with a cousin, but is feeling like a burden, and not wanting to outstay his welcome. He is still in grade 10, with no high school credits, but has a desire to complete school. The significance of theme vanished immediately, and I took him to our Student Services teacher, who referred him to an Elder we have on staff to work it out. He came back to class later that morning, and seemed in better spirits, assuring me that he had a plan. Oh, and he suggested that a possible theme for the play would be that power corrupts.

The other interaction occurred yesterday, when a student tracked me down in the hallway and apologized for missing my class that morning. He explained that he had an appointment with Social Services to see if he would qualify for Social Assistance. He told them that he wants to quit his full-time job, so he can focus on getting through school. However, when he was there, he didn’t have all of the identification required, and so he had to walk back to his house (a 45 minute walk in -30 degree Celsius temperatures) and get it. He stopped in at the school for a minute en route back to the office to tell me why he was absent, and why he had to leave again right away, and would miss the rest of his classes for the day.

Moments like these remind me that teachers at my school are fighting an uphill battle against poverty and its myriad of side effects. So much affects our students that is beyond both our, and their control. I am also reminded of the privilege afforded me through no doing of my own – my white skin color, my middle-class upbringing, my literate family, my supportive parents – I could go on, but you get the point.