NY: If the child goes home in tears, your lesson has failed

December 8, 2008
http://lohud.com/article/20081208/NEWS01/812080333/0/NEWS02

See Related: http://tcfpbis.blogspot.com/2008/12/ny-teacher-sorry-for-binding-girls-in.html

It's the sort of story that makes you cringe: A white teacher binds the hands and feet of two black girls and has them crawl under a desk to simulate traveling in the holds of slave ships.

Ouch, you think, when you read it, especially when the mother of one child says she later burst into tears.

This history lesson went too far.

The class took place last month at Haverstraw Middle School. The teacher, Eileen Bernstein, was discussing how Africans were transported to America in slave ships when she had the two girls demonstrate. One had volunteered. The other, 13-year-old Gabrielle Shand, had not.

Now, her mother said, the teenager is embarrassed.

The teacher, who was not available for interviews, is reportedly regretful. It was not her intention to make the child uncomfortable, the principal said, and why would it have been? It must be difficult to keep classes fresh and interesting, to keep your students engaged. Anyone can sympathize with a teacher trying to challenge her classroom.

But binding the hands and feet of anyone is a bad idea. The whole lesson went astray right there.
Crawling under the desk by itself might have been fine if the children wanted to do it, but not just black children. Black and white children.

No one wants to feel they have been singled out, especially at that age and especially not over such a serious issue as slavery.

You would not want Jewish children demonstrating the Nazi concentration camps, Irish-American children pretending to starve, those of Armenian or Rwandan heritage facing extermination.

Haverstraw school officials said they did not know whether the exercise had been done before but promised it would not be repeated. That's a good decision. If the child was upset, the lesson failed.

Schools are always trying to get the attention of students. And Haverstraw has no monopoly on bad judgment.

During the summer, officials in Southern California landed in the news when they tried to shock students out of drinking and driving.

They had the best of goals, but that was no excuse.

Highway patrol officers visited classrooms at El Camino High School in Oceanside to announce that several students had been killed in a drunken-driving accident over the weekend.

Classmates wept, The Associated Press reported. Some became hysterical.

And later angry when they learned the whole thing was a hoax.

School officials defended themselves.

"They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized," a guidance counselor, Lori Tauber, told the AP. "That's how they get the message."

Others were less forgiving. One parent, in an interview with ABC News, called the deception outrageous.

At school assemblies, the AP reported, some students held up posters that read: "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

They showed more maturity than the adults. Lying to students was a terrible idea, terrible and insensitive. Drunken driving is a problem, but this was a horrible way to try to counter it.

No one lied in Haverstraw. The teacher did not orchestrate a hoax. She just went too far in trying to teach.

As Gabrielle's mother, Christine Shand, said: "If you're going to demonstrate slavery, or what black people experienced ... there's other ways to do it than to grab two black kids."

Or as the students in California said: Don't play with emotions.

Noreen O'Donnell

Journal News columnist

Reach Noreen O'Donnell at nodonnel@lohud.com or 914-694-5017. Read her at www.lohud.com/odonnell.