No Place for Hate

“Hatred paralyzes life. Love releases it. Hatred confuses life. Love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life. Love illuminates it.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recently viewed a news story involving a teacher and a student. 

The virtual learning space is not optimal for all teachers and/or learners.  Monitors and screens can present as a thick medium through which passion and zeal cannot easily pass. Furthermore, while the virtual classroom can be perceived as an uneasy invitation into the homes and lives of our students and families, desktops and smart devices are by far and away not always bridges linking the home and school communities.

Connections are even more important as teachers are relying more and more on inference and reasoning to make instructional decisions as they are unable to directly observe their students.

The shift in learning has brought access and contact and frustration and exasperation in equal measure.  Teachers are not immune- their humanness is directly observed in the choices and mistakes that they make. 

There is room for human error in every classroom.

There is no room for hate.

The teacher in the news story spoke- maybe, out of frustration, maybe out of impatience, maybe out of exhaustion, in a scornfully, belittling, and disparaging manner about a student and their family and culture.  

The remedy for the vexation that teachers are feeling surely is not hate.  It is important more now, than ever that those bearing the mantle of teacher respond with wisdom and rationality to the challenges and trials brought on by the unfamiliar territory of the virtual classroom.