A Lesson, Hijacked

Osama bin Laden’s death has posed an interesting challenge for my classes. It’s all anyone wants to talk about in my Civics classes. Many of my gun-wielding, hunter-students have celebrated the death as if the wanted terrorist leader were a prized duck. Others mistakenly told me on Monday, “Mr. Pepper! Obama bin Laden is dead!” And still others were confused on the event’s significance. After all, my students were only in kindergarten when the Twin Towers fell.

But these conversations have a surprisingly different tone than they had at the beginning of the year, when I began most of my classes with crash-course lessons in Islam and the Middle East. Trying to debunk common misconceptions about a quarter of the world’s population is no easy task; “Muslim” is often equated with “terrorist” in my small Arkansas town. So my initial lessons covered minarets, the Five Pillars of Islam, and the percentage of extremists within the Muslim world. It didn’t seem to do much, but at least it introduced new ideas.

Students started to understand that Islam, like every other major religion, has sects. After covering the First Amendment in my class, we read about the protests in Tennessee and New York over proposed construction of mosques. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most students — not all, obviously — argued in favor of the construction. They became angered that mayors and other politicians would act so vehemently against a group simply because of their religion. “Mr. Pepper!” one particularly passionate girl exclaimed that day. “I mean, we here in America cause we wanted some freedom of religion. Why can’t they?!” It felt good.

It’s amazing how so much effort on my part can yield such miniscule results in my classes, and how quickly those results can be ripped away from you.

This week, I began a lesson on government influences and public opinion. One day was devoted to interest groups, my favorite example being the National Rifle Association (it’s an issue all of my students can relate to, from hunting to gang shootings). This day also happened to the be the one day my principal came in to observe me. Mr. Carson is an overbearing man with Coke-bottle glasses and bald head, towering 6’5″ and threatening “licks” with his stare. He sat in the back of my room and listened as I explained the NRA’s unofficial slogan, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

My students chuckled at this idea. I went on to describe how the NRA wanted to frame gun rights in a new way after the shootings at Columbine. “The shootings at WHAT?!” one student interrupted. Feeling old, I told my class how two students in Colorado came to school with assault rifles and pistols and killed many people before killing themselves. My principal sat and watched.

“Why did they shoot those people?” another student asked.

I hesitated. “Uh…I think they felt alienated at their school. Bullied. And they thought the only way to solve their problems was through violence. They were disturbed young men.” I looked at my principal feeling a little helpless. I should have had more confidence.

“Well, you see,” he began in his thick, Southern drawl. “Some people, like those young men, don’t value life. Many people in this world,” standing up, rising to his massive height, “especially those people in the Mid East, don’t value life. They think that, you know, strapping bombs to their chests will get them to heaven, but it won’t, as we all know. They just don’t value life like we do.”

My lesson was just hijacked by a partisan principal, flying my (relatively) unbiased lesson into the ground. We had gone from school shootings to Islamist extremists in a split second. The kids nodded in agreement.

It’s hard to get a point across to any of my classes. It’s even harder when the adults around you seem to be doing everything in their power to undo what you have done.