In the class I am TAing for this semester, there are something like a hundred and twenty students. The professor wishes to keep attendance, but I refuse to call roll for a class larger than thirty people. Instead, I pass sign-in sheets across the row, and count the number of students in each row so that no one can sign in their friends. (Can you tell I was the student in college whose friends asked her to sign them in?)
Today the last row in the classroom handed me a sheet with an extra person recorded. I skimmed down the list and found that the extra person was number eight, “Fag.”
This created a conundrum for me. Should I mention the misbehavior, or do I roll my eyes and ignore it? It might be worse to draw attention to this kind of behavior. They think they made a funny, of course. I suppose that it is funny, in an ‘inveterate mouthbreather’ sort of way. The sort of eleven year-old that would find this quasi-joke funny would, no doubt, find it amusing when their humorless TA scolded them for it. Furthermore, to make a fuss about a non-joke like this is to draw attention to it. If I draw attention to it, am I simply propagating the frathouse ethos that makes it so funny to the ill-bred yahoo? What if there is a young queermo in the back row, though, who would have to deal with — yet again — his sexual proclivities being turned to puerile purposes? Am I just being a cranky hippy-dippy weathergirl about this?
I sat in the front row for a while, entering attendance, trying to convince myself to leave well enough alone. During the mid-class discussion period, however, I stood up. Without really thinking about it — other than the timeliness of the moment, when I would not be disturbing the flow of lecture — I marched up to the last row. “Hello last row,” I said. “Please try to avoid using slurs.” They all stared at me. I bent down and answered a student’s question, and marched back down to the front of the class again.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I can dither all I want, but it annoys the everliving hell out of me when people use that word (and others). And by god, if there’s any benefit to being a teacher, it is communicating your annoyance to your students whenever you damn well please.
