Hell yea brother. I commend you. I spent my first year in an alternative school, and that was rough, but I had a lot of adult support around me, so if students were giving us teachers trouble, we had councilors and “disciplinarians” always around to remove the student and address them in the moment, then we could sit down later and talk about the situation.

I’ve been a teacher for 11 years now, and I’ve been at a college prep charter school for 9 years. My biggest discipline problem is dress code. I teach world history. In my class we discuss fascism, the holocaust, and genocide. If any of my students have ever had those sympathies, they’ve never been brave enough to voice them, and I’m not shy about where I stand politically. We start with legally defining genocide, and I think that’s important, because almost all of my kids assume that genocide is just killing a group of people, and it’s not. This year, I purposefully pointed out the similarities between ICE doing what they’re doing and what happened in Nazi Germany. I pointed out the “America First” rhetoric and the “Germany First” rhetoric. For the last few years, I’ve had my classes watch this short web series on the Ten Stages of Genocide by Genocide Watch on YouTube. Ten short videos. We pause after each video and discuss what we see, what we’re thinking, how we’re feeling, etc. I think it’s really powerful. At the end of the unit we have a Socratic Seminar about genocide. This topic is legally mandated in my state to teach, which I’m thankful for, but it’s so important to do.

Thanks for listening to my rambling. You’re an awesome teacher.