A Misunderstanding

So my sixth graders are working on writing their own Choose Your Own Adventure stories; as a kind of warm-up activity to this project, I gave them the story of Little Red Riding Hood and asked them to write two different endings to it.  The first ending had one rule: they could only use characters or objects that had already appeared in the story.  I put this rule in place because I knew that if I didn't I would get quiet a few stories in which Little Red Riding Hood was spontaneously rescued by a gang of unicorn who shot jellybeans out of their ears--or asses. 

The second ending had no rules, except that I encouraged them to make their endings as logical or reasonable as possible.  They kind of chuckled at me when I said that. 

In one student's version of the story, the wolf gobbles Granny up, but LRRH witnesses the devouring and paints a bomb red to look like an apple.  When she arrives at the house later (?), she feeds the apple to the wolf, who explodes after a 10-second delay. She and the woodcutters and Granny (who mysteriously survives the blast) eat barbecued wolf-guts all afternoon.

In another student's version of the story, LRRH falls through the floor and into the basement, where she hops onto the back of a squirrel.  She rides the squirrel out of the house and then across an ocean to Japan.  In Japan the squirrel is bitten by a zombie squirrel, who bites LRRH, who becomes Zombie Red Riding Hood; ZRRH then rides the squirrel to China, where they convert the entire population of China into Zombies.  The Chinese zombies then come to Granny's house and eat the wolf.

Does my rule for version 1 make sense yet?

In another student's story LRRH witnesses the consumption of her Granny.  She then seeks revenge on the wolf by tormenting the wolf, taunting the wolf viciously and calling the wolf a series of horrible names.  During the child's reading of the story, I heard him say that LRRH called the wolf "fag", among other horrible names.  By the end of the story, the wolf was so distraught by her verbal torment that he hanged himself.  Wracked with guilt over seeing the wolf (and her granny) dead, LRRH puts a desert eagle .45 caliber pistol under her chin and blows her brains out.

I waited for the noise in the room to die down.  Then I said: "I had a really strong negative reaction to one word in the story, Martin.  Do you know which word it was?"

He looked at me, confused.  "Suicide?"

"No."

"Uh...noose?"

"No."

Really confused he said: "I have no idea."

"Fag.  LRRH calls the wolf 'fag' in your story."

Martin looked down at his paper to confirm what he already knew, but needed to see for himself: I had misheard him.  "Fat," Martin said.  "She calls him fat."

The whole room, myself included, let out a kind of nervous half-laugh half-sigh.

I smiled at Martin, who I could tell was worried that he was in trouble with me.  "Do you know what we just had, Martin?"

He smiled, sensing he was out of the metaphorical woods: "A misunderstanding."

When I "heard" him read that word, a whole host of things ran through my head.  My first impulse, which, thankfully, I didn't act upon, was to stop the reading and smack him down righteously for being a hateful, horrible bigot.  Then as the story went on I realized that, looked at one way, this story is a kind of inverted bully story, in which LRRH torments her tormentor, and then finds herself racked with guilt after doing it.  It could have been a powerful parable about cruelty, and maybe the word "fag" was even appropriate in that context, given the realities of homo-phobic bullying.

And then, when it became clear that we had a misunderstanding, I was really glad that I had waited and listened and then calmly shared my reaction--because in doing so I was able to send the same message (that those words are really problematic and probably not for use in school) without damaging the relationship with the child.  I was also able to model humility and mutual respect.

Of course later on in class I had to metaphorically body-slam a few kids for tossing around the word "asian"--but I think the earlier misunderstanding, and the understanding that it created, actually helped me to address the stereotypes several of my (white) students were trafficking in.

It was a real Monday in the trenches.