On teaching boys to take sexual assault seriously

A few weeks ago, our school participated in Denim Day, a campaign to spread awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault and to take a stand against it. A few days before, my advisory co-teacher and I shared information about it with our advisory - 28 9th grade boys. Our boys' reaction demonstrated that they really didn't understand what sexual assault is, when or how it happens, or what healthy sexual interactions with women should look like. Our boys tapped their pencils and looked out the window. There was nervous laughter at inappropriate times. One of our boys raised his hand to ask, "Wait, if you're both drunk and you do it, she gets to say it was rape after? That's messed up."

My co-teacher and I knew we wanted to address these behaviors and make the topic real for our boys, but we didn't have much time. Every curriculum is about priorities, and we have a lot of them that need to be addressed in Advisory. So even though health educators plan full units around healthy relationships, we wanted to take a crack at teaching our boys the core importance of consent in one 30-minute class period.

We started by having the boys think of a time that something had been stolen from them.

 

Having them discuss in partners and share out afterward at each step, we then had our boys think of a more personal item that could be stolen. I told them about an item that's really important to me that I would be devastated to lose. Everyone has prized possessions, so this was relatable.

We then asked our boys to think about being deceived, stolen from, and betrayed, all at once. Emotions became real. The debriefs included anger, sadness, and confusion.

And now it was finally time to put our boys in the shoes of someone who was the victim of sexual assault.

You could feel the weight in the room. It was the complete opposite of everything we felt when we talked about sexual assault for Denim Day. Sexual assault is serious and awful business, and our boys finally felt some understanding of that. We closed by offering an important stat, anchoring to the women in our boys' lives, and driving home every person's responsibility for preventing this around us.

This may not be the best way to teach this lesson, but I've shared it here because I really struggled to find good resources for this topic. Every lesson I found was about directly shoving down our students' throats that consent is necessary and important, and none tried to lead them there on their own. I'm sure that there are great health curricula out there that do this, but I didn't find them easily. If anyone has thoughts to improve this for the next time it's necessary to teach it, I'd love to hear them.

On ATP's desired listenership

One of my favorite podcasts, ATP, has spent time recently discussing their desire to increase the number of women listening to the show. It's an interesting question, because achieving this means that you need to either capture a greater proportion of the existing female tech audience or try to convert more women outside of the tech audience to an interest in tech. Trying to tip that interest in tech is one of the many reasons I like teaching science. But the hosts sideswiped another demographic interest of mine and moved right along, and it stung.

ATP is often focused on Apple technologies. The discussion usually isn't hostile toward other platforms (and Casey works in the MS stack), but none of the three hosts has much love for Android. In last week's episode, Marco was talking about the difficulty in pleasing everybody and made a crack about Android users. After a chuckle, he mumbled that that was about choice, unlike gender. Marco doesn't seem to care that the Android users he's talking about are disproportionately working-class. For many of them, a choice of a phone involves major price-sensitivity. So here's my question - is ATP a tech podcast for everyone, or just for people who can afford nice things?

We're lucky enough to have Chromebooks in our classrooms, so my students spend part of every day interacting with Chrome and the web. In our high-need school, Android is definitely the dominant platform for my students' phones. I don't see much Verizon and AT&T; I see a lot of MetroPCS and some T-Mobile. Some of my students have WiFi at home, and others have to get their work done via a hotspot from their parents' phones.

Last week, I noticed a student doing something strange - tweeting photos with the tag "ignore these" to use Twitter as storage so she could free up space on her phone. The ATP guys discussed photo storage at length on the podcast and how Apple should solve it on the devices they use. But they're missing how people outside the world of high-end technology are solving these problems. Many of my students have just an iPad or just phones in their house - technology is a big part of their lives, but it's not the 'MacBook + iPad + iPhone' world that the ATP guys live in. High-end technologies provide plenty to discuss, but if you don't worry about the cheaper technologies that half of the population is using, you're never going to understand the kinds of problems they're trying to solve or the solutions they are finding. While ATP is thinking about increasing the gender diversity of their listenership, they should consider increasing its SES diversity as well. And that might require seeing Android as something more than a punchline.

On using poverty or racism to justify low expectations

My overall reaction to this piece in Oakland Local on the OUSD Quality Schools Development initiative is mixed, but one portion stuck out for me.

4.   Charters, high-stakes tests, merit pay for teachers and closing schools are not the answer; addressing poverty and racism is.

Schools are expected to make up for inequities that are bigger than we are, and shutting a school down because it serves poor kids and kids of color isn’t the answer. I’m a teacher. I can do a lot, and I have high expectations for my students. Homelessness, lack of living wage work, lack of affordable housing, the trauma of deep poverty and being young and preyed upon by adults who abuse their power and position are bigger than my willingness to work harder. I can’t tell a kid, “No excuses!” when the reason she’s been out of school for two weeks is because her boyfriend forced her into doing sex work in another city. Or her family is living out of a car. There are many sad and angering stories like this and the stories are more prevalent in some schools than in others. What makes me livid is the idea that these problems can be fixed by creating a “college-going culture” in schools, or by fining students for disciplinary infractions, as some charters in Chicago have done. The thing is, class and race are still stronger predictors of student success than teachers or schools alone.

These anecdotes are real, and these struggles against poverty really can be roadblocks to our kids' achievement. But what I can't get behind is the attitude that I should allow these roadblocks to dictate my students' future. A student recently came in having missed several days of school because her family needed to suddenly move out of their apartment and into her cousin's house nearby. It's true that this incident puts her behind, and there isn't much that our school could have done to prevent it. And it's true that shouting the words, "No excuses!" in her face will not bring her up to speed. But giving her reading assignments, video resources, and tutoring time will. And establishing a culture that she cannot allow incidents like this to crush her dreams of being an architect or a doctor will as well.

It's true that schools and teachers are not fully (or even mostly) to blame for the achievement gap. But we have the power and potential to meaningfully improve outcomes for our students if we regularly make and test improvements to the way we educate them. We know that there are both district schools and charters that are changing the odds for kids in high-need communities. Some of the practices from those schools can be painful to implement, but failing to implement them is an acceptance that we will allow our schools to plow forward with results that put our students at a drastic disadvantage in life. Not every program works in every circumstance, but a failure due to experimentation is surely better than a failure from maintaining the status quo.

For our students, meeting a high bar is harder when you're pushing against the weight of poverty and institutional racism. But to tell another generation of kids to sit on the sidelines and wait while we sort out the problems of wealth inequality and implicit bias is not acceptable. Creating cultures of high achievement and the expectation that every student can and will attend college is critical to helping our kids take on that challenge. With some of our students, we may fail to motivate those big efforts that are required. But I really hope that I can't use their income or ethnicity to predict which ones.