Teaching Hope: Challenges

This chapter dealt with situations and issues that made me pretty nervous, because I know that there must be a high frequency of these kind of confrontations and confessions going on in every school--I know I'll have to face it eventually, but the chapter seemed merely testimonial to me, and I'm not sure if it really gave that many answers. I guess that is a good enough quality, that these teachers are talking about some of their more harrowing and desperate moments, but aside from giving the reader a range of things that might happen to you depending on where you are teaching, I don't feel like I took that much away from it.

I do think that I learned a great deal about what constitutes appropriate student/teacher physical contact. There was an awful lot of hugging and throwing of arms around students, and it made me cringe every time, because all I've ever been told in my teacher education is that it is really never okay to touch any of your students. I thought about this for a while, and I decided that I can't really judge the actions of these teachers because I haven't been teaching a group of kids for an extended period of time, I haven't had to deal with a student confiding in me or attempting to kill himself in my class, so there's really nothing I can say at this point about what is the appropriate reaction. Unfortunately, this chapter doesn't really shed light on an answer to what is appropriate action, but I think it might be another one of the many paradoxical teacher issues that is so hard to come to a definite moral solution.