Icon or Symbol: A Teachers Moral Dilemma :: Education Teaching Papers

Icon or Symbol A Teachers Moral quandaryWorks Cited MissingIt all happened so quickly. One moment I was at my blackboard, the next moment I was between two teenaged manfuls who were trying to prove a pride meridian with their fists. I had, without a conscious thought about it, drawn a crown on the board. Next I heard chairs hitting the floor and screams of profanity. I was called a not-so-nice name by one of my students, followed by his strange comment We love who your favorites in this class are. An other(a) student from across the room overturn his chair and, breath coming fast, managed to nark out the words Dont get on her, man. And dont you never mess with the crown Dont mess with my blood, man thus they were at each others throats and I was between them, not knowing what had happened.I work at a juvenile prison for all male offenders. Quite honestly, I feel as if my students and I speak opposite languages sometimes. After talking to students and counselors after this inc ident, I discovered that the crown I had drawn to represent Prince Hamlet of Denmark was interpreted as a crime syndicate symbol by the members of my class. By drawing the crown, I had somehow affiliated myself with the Ghetto Boys of Indianapolis. This angered my students who consider themselves members of a rival gang. What would Shakespeare think of such a situation?I guess the real question is what do I think about such a situation and how do I define my role in the schoolroom? Peirces theory of signs and his classification from the point of view of the object of the sign (representant) is helpful in understanding this classroom incident. Peirce defined a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant (Houser 257). In this view, educators use signs all of the time, to interact with students. In fact, in his article Toward a Peircean Theory, Nathan Houser relates Peir ces belief that signs are the matter, or the substance of thought (257). Peirce goes even except to say that life itself is a train of thought (Houser 256). In other words, life and signs are fundamentally related and unseparable for all humans (Houser 257). As a teacher, I present my students with signs (representants) in hopes of helping them to understand information.