Community/School/Fear

"But there is a deeper reason for our blindness to our students' fears, and it is more daunting: we cannot see the fear in our students until we see the fear in ourselves" (Palmer 47).
As student teachers I feel like we almost have twice the fears, we still have our fears as students and we have our fears as teachers. Although mostly now it revolves around graduating, not looking stupid, and growing in a productive way our fears really do rule who we are. Surprisingly many of the students in my school when I asked what they were afriad of in the classroom did not mention being made fun of for the wrong answer first, but rather death. This kind of scares me, because here we are in America a wonderful country...but they are afraid of being blown up, or of being killed by a shooter. Perhaps this will be more prominent at my school which has had many bomb threats this year. "We were all afraid that this one might be the one, or that there would be a shooter on the roof. You never really know, we just have to trust each other, which is near impossible considering how much fear lies between all of us. This is an education defect in the community, some parents encourage this behavior, and the rest of the community could not care less. I think that the only way to stop this is to make it not cool. Tell the community the problem; educate the parents and townspeople that if they see this type of behavior it is not okay, just like on Halloween it is not okay to egg another person’s house. There are sick people out there that encourage this. They scare me as well, but maybe if we educated them they could be reformed, changed" (Anderson).
But the later reasons were the ones I was expecting. Any time that they have to express themselves, they all lack confidence...except for those few students who I think have more going on behind the scene. They also have so much more going on in their lives. I cannot begin to tell you all the stories I hear about drinking parents and such. If we were to educate the community maybe we could bring up these students qualities of life. Maybe get the community more involved in the school, let everyone feel comfortable. But then, maybe this is just too idealistic, to solve all the problems of the world...but perhaps maybe the dream of world peace is not too rediculous just not planned out well enough. I turn back to my own fear as I click the publish post button for this blog, because truely we are all afraid of what we think and of what we say.
"In unguarded moments with close friends, we who teach will acknowledge a variety of ears: having our work go unappreciated, being iadequately rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we chose the wrong profession, spending our lies on trivia, ending up feeling like frauds" (Palmer 48).