Student’s Violent Outburst, Part Four

[barclay_barrios]

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.) In thinking about a student's recent outburst  outburst at my school, I've considered what it says about students’ digital literacy, what it says about race, and what I would do in that situation. For this last post, I'd like to consider the student herself. There’s still a lot we don’t know. However, there are some things we do know. We know, for example, from the local CBC coverage:

Just 24 hours earlier, a calm Carr was captured on CBS 4 helping to organize a bus trip to central Florida for a rally to support the family of Trayvon Martin the unarmed teenager who was shot to death allegedly by the head of the neighborhood Crime Watch.

With this information, I am left thinking about students today. I think about the things they have to deal with that I never did, for example, privacy issues, violence, social pressures magnified through social media. I often say that each year I’m one year older but students are always eighteen. I usually feel it when I realize deflatedly that my cultural references fall flat in the classroom. Today I am realizing it on another, more disturbing, level. How do we build relations and connections to students today? How do I make my classroom the kind of place where a student can constructively relieve pressure? Any suggestions?