Guess Who’s Not Here for Your Nonsense?
First off, I have to credit Shanna Peeples, all-around cool edu-person and 2015 National Teacher of the Year, for the title of this blog, swiped from her Twitter feed. It’s about those marvelous young ladies, high school students in Maryland who confronted the boys who were rating their looks and ranking them on a list with numbers calculated to the hundredth place. And then passing the list around for up-to-the-minute updates.
If you missed the story, it’s well worth a read (here). The blog title should give you a clue: these girls were not having it.
Furthermore, they did something about it. When an administrator limited formal consequences to a single boy and asked the girls not to spread the story around, they organized, confronting their principal, gathering 80 students into an ‘intense’ co-ed meeting where they expressed their anger and discomfort, and putting a series of follow-up responses and conversations into action.
The young women interviewed in the story were powerfully articulate about why they wanted an end to this boys-will-be-boys nonsense.
“Knowing that my closest friends were talking to me and hanging out with me but under that, silently numbering me, it definitely felt like a betrayal. I was their friend, but I guess also a number.”
They also talked clearly about what it felt like to suddenly feel unsafe at school, when they already felt unsafe in the wider world. One boy—the contrite and admittedly ‘privileged’ young man who started the list—says All the Right Stuff. No mention of CONTINUE READING: Guess Who’s Not Here for Your Nonsense? | Teacher in a strange land
