I yelled at my class today

[xiphias]

And then lectured them about lashon ha-ra.

I feel vaguely guilty about yelling and lecturing, but I'd feel a lot worse if I hadn't taken some action about students hurting each other's feelings.

I just don't know if I handled it right. One student wrote something that could be construed as hurtful about another student in zir notebook. A second student looked over zir shoulder, read it, and called the student about which it was about over to also see it, who saw it, grabbed the page of the notebook, and crumpled it up. Only the last part of this was obvious, so I yelled at the third student. Who was more upset by this than zie usually is when I yell at zir, so I knew that something else was up, and found out the rest of the story.

I told them that all three of them had done things wrong, but that they weren't of the same magnitude. I said that writing hurtful things in one's own notebook is bad, but that, as it wasn't intended to be seen by anyone, and therefore wasn't intended to hurt anyone, that is mitigating. So it's bad, but not SO bad. I said that grabbing someone else's notebook and crumpling the page was absolutely unacceptable. But that the person who had done the worst thing was the second student. Because that was lashon ha-ra.

And I lectured them about that. And how we, in the classroom, are a community, and lashon ha-ra damages communities. You don't have to LIKE everyone in your community, but you ARE a community. And avoiding lashon ha-ra is one of the ways you preserve communities.

The three students looked abashed and ashamed at their actions, and the rest of the class looked intent and somewhat worried. And at the end of the lecture, I asked if we were all willing to, in a sense, pretend that this whole situation hadn't happened. That, to repair our community, we had to forgive each other, which, in this case, would mean trying to remember the lessons, but forgetting the incident as much as we could.

They all agreed that they would like to move past the whole thing and pretend it never happened. I did try to be certain that all of them knew that, if they DIDN'T feel comfortable moving on, we could still work on it, but they were all embarrassed by it and wanted to just have it over and gone, so we did.

I still don't know if I did the right thing. I think I did an okay thing, but I don't know if I was right.

It's hard to know if one was fair. It's hard to know if one was correct.

Was I right that crumpling up the page was more wrong that writing the page? Was I right that calling attention to the page was more wrong than either writing it, or destroying it? I don't really know. I THINK I was at least close enough to right, but I'm not certain, and am still feeling guilty and unsettled. But I would feel MORE guilty and unsettled if I HADN'T done something like that. I'm responsible, in part, for my kids' moral and ethical development, and for their emotional health.

Comments

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

I don't like the comparison to whistle-blowing because it takes us into a much more complicated realm of hilchot loshon hara. Whistle-blowing has a clear implication of a grievance against the larger community. It is equally clear that running between two individuals saying "Plony called you a poopy-head" does nothing but sew further sinat chinam (senseless hatred) between the kid who wrote it and the kid bout whom it was written. Even if this is already known to both parties, the involvement of the third party almost always will make the situation worse by antagonizing someone. Thus, the Chofetz Chaim was pretty emphatic about tale-bearing being worse than writing something impolite in one's private notebook (as long as there is reason to believe that the notebook was meant to be private). It really doesn't matter how nasty it was at that point.

BTW, please remember that this is an explicitly Jewish environment we're talking about, and that the Chofetz Chaim (R' Yisroel Meir haKohen Kagan zt''l) spent decades thinking hard about these very issues, and concluded that there are different levels of severity. You're welcome to disagree with him, but in a Jewish context you'll almost certainly be incorrect.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

After we agreed to drop the whole thing, various students started asking me about other, more complex situations involving lashon ha-ra, and I could answer a couple of them, but did have to say, for other ones, "I don't know -- lashon ha-ra is a really complex issue and important, and I'd have to look it up."