TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE/SEXUAL ASSAULT. (And no, this isn’t going to be about Mr. C raping anyone!!!)
Okay, I have to preface this by saying that I thought Mr. C was overall a good teacher, and I am really happy that there are openly feminist men working at Rosedale.
I also have to preface this by saying that my memories about the event I’m about to recount might not be entirely accurate because it’s been a few years (this happened in 2010) but I will do my best to recall things as they happened. If anyone who was in my Writer’s Craft class would like to correct or amend something I write, they should do so.
So. My most vivid memory of Mr. C was a class late in the year when he got very, very angry about a piece one of the students had written. The piece was an interview with a male friend of the writer’s, in which he described his first sexual experience, a not-entirely-consensual encounter with a drunk-ish girl at a party. I can’t recall if the word “rape” was used, but the boy said that he hadn’t consented and that he regretted the whole event, which, to me, suggests that it was rape.
Mr. C made photocopies of this piece and distributed them to the whole class, without getting the writer’s permission. He then had us read it and launched into a speech about why he hated it.
Honestly, I can’t remember exactly what his rationale was, but basically I think he was saying that it was unfeminist because it reinforced the virgin-versus-whore dichotomy and made the girl in the story look bad… or something. This part is fuzzy in my memory; I’m sorry I can’t be more specific here. But I remember thinking that I really really disagreed with his criticisms.
Then the class started discussing what he was saying – but most of the discussion revolved around the fact that he had distributed this girl’s work without her permission, without even giving her a heads-up. He agreed that maybe he should have checked with her first, but he also said that he thought of it as a “teaching moment” that he couldn’t pass up. This discussion eventually got so heated that the writer of the piece got up and left the room. She never came back to Writer’s Craft after that (there was maybe two months of school left at that point).
While I can’t really comment on his specific criticisms of the piece because I don’t actually remember them super clearly, I can say that the way he went about it was wrong. It is wrong to tear apart someone’s work in front of the class without getting their permission first. It is wrong to invalidate the firsthand testimony of a rape victim if you weren’t there and don’t know what actually happened. And it is wrong to refuse to accept what you’ve done wrong even in the face of ample and valid criticism.
That class has stuck with me for years because it was such a shocking example of wrongness in Rosedale’s otherwise amazingly progressive and wonderful academic environment. There were only maybe one or two other times when I seriously questioned a teacher’s academic conduct, but none as severely as that day.