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Why I Lost it at the Teacher P.D. Day
After thirty years of teaching, I was sick of edu-babble.
This past school year, my last before retirement, there was a Friday in October that was designated as a professional development day at my board of education. I was a high school English and drama teacher who was trying to hold it together in my last year of teaching.
At my school, a high school in a mostly upper-middle class neighborhood in Toronto, the day started off promisingly. We listened to a speaker, a young black journalist, radio show host and author, Desmond Cole (author of the recently published book, The Skin I’m In), talk about anti-black racism in schools in our city and what he thinks we should do about it. He told a shocking story about a police officer who was assigned to our school several years ago. This man, who was on street patrol duty, encountered some young black students in front of a store near the school. These boys were students at my school who were enrolled in the deaf and hard-of hearing program. The officer started questioning them and demanded to see their identification. One of the group, who could lip read, informed the officer that the boys he was talking to were deaf. The officer responded by assaulting that student.
Later, that same officer was assigned to the school as an SRO, or school…
