Eternal sigh of the grumpy student

Within the past month or so a string of tragic events have hit this country (not to mention the rest of the world), but mainstream media haven’t been reporting on it broadly because of the events in Boston. What is truly surprising, however, is the lack of empathy people have toward tragedies and events of this nature.

Two of these events garnered a lot of attention. The first involved a Florida police officer who, during a gun training activity, brought an image of Trayvon Martin to a shooting range for officers in training to use in practice target shooting.

If that doesn’t make you ill, just wait.

An English teacher in Albany, N.Y., gave an essay assignment to students that asked them to “argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

So. What we have here is a cop making light of a case that’s still under investigation and a teacher wanting his/her students to think like Nazis. You really have to wonder how these individuals woke up in the morning and thought to themselves, “This is a great idea, and I won’t lose my job over it!”

There’s a miniscule chance the teacher thought he/she was doing students a favor by having them examine the opposing side of the argument, but asking students to defend an act of genocide is just bad teaching. There are much better and more effective ways to teach both sides of a story that don’t thrust 10th-graders into the mind of Adolf Hitler.

Albany School District Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard stated that the still-unidentified teacher did not have “malicious intent” in giving out the assignment. Despite this lack of maliciousness, a third of the students refused to do the assignment, according to The Washington Post.

As messed up as this whole scenario is, there is some logic to the assignment. The teacher was trying to encourage students to think outside the prescribed box of “independent thought” that we’re given when our public schooling starts. As a follow-up to reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, the assignment makes a little more sense.

Nazis are often considered synonymous with evil, but it’s doubtful that the teacher in question was trying to raise a new generation of Hitler Youth. Rather, he/she was probably just trying to help students understand that we’re humans, and sometimes humans act like monsters.

However, I’m not really sure where an appropriate place to teach this would be. It sure as heck wasn’t a 10th-grade English class, though. This was a bad lapse in educational and ethical judgment, and the teacher in question will more than likely lose his/her job over this.

Then again, teaching isn’t for everyone. When you take on the role of teacher, you also become a target for as much public scrutiny as a community—or country—can muster. Even well-intentioned educators make mistakes, but that’s no excuse for a lack of empathy and basic humanity.

As for the cop with the Trayvon Martin targets—really, are you serious? Sgt. Ron King said that the targets were “meant to be used as training aids for ‘no-shoot’ situations.” It doesn’t matter—King had no reason to use Martin’s likeness.

In an interview with CNN King defended himself, saying, “The only stupid act I performed was to believe that some of my coworkers would be mature enough and care enough to use a bad situation as a learning tool.” Maturity has nothing to do with it. What King did was, as Martin family attorney Ben Crump called it, “absolutely reprehensible.”

Even if King’s intentions weren’t to make some kind of personal statement, he failed to recognize that his actions could offend and harm others. For a police officer, that seems like an important thing to be aware of.

Educators need to realize that students come from all walks of life and have varying experiences that must be recognized. Cops need to not act based on racial profiling and racist humor—I mean, come on!

It’s impossible to be 100 percent politically correct, and acknowledging that is moving in the right direction. But we—especially we students who are getting ready to go into our chosen careers—need to be conscientious of who our audience is. Empathy for others is one of the most important skills we can develop, as is recognizing varying experiences and knowing when to say no to a bad idea.

Despite whatever noble intentions this teacher and King may have had, they now have to face the consequences. I don’t pity them, but let their mistakes serve as lessons for the rest of us. Like the professor on Futurama, sometimes it’s hard not to think, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”