Students at a school in Wales were asked to write imaginary (we hope!) suicide notes in class. But wait, there's more: the school is very close to a town where several teenagers hanged themselves.
The town of Bridgend, in South Wales, had had seventeen suicides since January of 2007. Police are investigating the possibility that some of the deaths were linked in some way.
Back to the school: the "Year Nine" class (the UK equivalent of Ninth Grade) was reading Checkmate, a novel form the Noughts & Crosses Trilogy by Malorie Blackman. In the book, the main character apparently finds a suicide note from his sister. The students were asked to write their own version of the note.
Local parents freaked out, of course. A statement by the school that the teacher didn't "connect" the assignment to local events didn't exactly do much to calm everybody down.
This reminds me of 8th grade, when we read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Great book, kind of depressing. If you're not familiar with the story, part of it includes Angelou being sexually abused as a child, an event that is described in excruciating (and very well-written) detail. Did we talk about it in class? Sure. But we didn't have to write monologues imagining that we were abused like Angelou was. You know Method Acting, where actors adopt the behaviors of their characters? This is almost Method Teaching: "the character wrote a suicide note, so we're going to do the same thing." If the kids had written a play about suicide and performed it, or talked to a suicide counselor, it might have been better. Parents still would have freaked, but at least the activity would have been less isolating for the participants.
I do have to give credit to local school officials for standing by the
teacher. They issued their statement, acknowledging that maybe this wasn't the best classroom activity. But at least they didn't go overboard the way we sometimes do in this country, such as when Joseph A. Fernandez was fired from his post as New York City Schools Chancellor, largely for recommending a curriculum that included the book Heather Has Two Mommies. Still, the Wales teacher must be a tad clueless (at best), since
the school is located about 12 miles from what the article calls a
"suicide hotspot."
image: Amazon.com
