Swearing

Over the summer, my English department colleague and friend Ann Moller sent us all an e-mail. She was part of a group of teachers who devoted part of their summers to coming up with ways to make the halls of ConVal a more respectful environment. As part of the effort, she was asking teachers to send her stories that illustrated the problems. This is the story I sent her.
      It happened last spring, during passing time between Blocks One and Two. I was in 215B getting ready for Journalism, but there was a loud, profane discussion going on in the hallway. It was so loud and so profane that I went out to see if I could stop it. It was emanating from four or five guys standing outside the door to 216. I didn’t know any of them by name, but they were familiar figures, the guys one sees wandering the halls during classes.
     I asked them to a) lower the volume, b) clean up the language, and c) get to class. I achieved a), but one of them chose to debate me about b). He hadn’t been swearing, he said belligerently. Somebody in this group was swearing, I replied. They started joking with each other about swearing, ignoring c). The bell rang. They drifted off, doing the ConVal Shuffle, a pace calibrated to use every second of the five-minute passing time to get to the next class.
     I went back to my journalists, steaming. They were curious. ‘Why do you care about kids who aren’t in your class, Mr. Clark?’ one of them asked.
    I told them I cared because the school is my workplace, and I don’t like listening to filthy language where I work.  They were astonished. They told me -- in a friendly, respectful way -- that I was foolish to care about such things, because a) the swearing students were not my responsibility, b) all kids swear, and c) there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.
     So I tried to explain. I reminded them that I’d spent my entire career focused on the precise and even elegant use of words. They matter to me. The constant, numbingly repetitive use of coarse language makes me feel sick, I told them, and I don’t like to work in a place that makes me feel sick.
     My students still didn’t get it. One of them shook his head and told me, ‘Mr. Clark, you can’t change the way kids act.’
     That’s the most discouraging thing that happened all last year. The foul language and the disrespectful behavior in the halls are bad enough, but the way the good students  accept it as a given is truly alarming. By ‘good students,’ I don’t mean the academically adept, but just those decent, ordinary, well-behaved teenagers who make up the vast majority of the school community. We need to think of a way to a) make them realize it’s a serious problem, b) convince them that we can change the way people behave, and c) enlist them in the effort to do it.
     That’s what I wrote to Ann last summer. This fall, we’ve made a start. As a first step, the teachers and administrators all agreed that when we hear students swear in the halls, we will pause in our rush to the next class to speak to them. We won’t threaten or confront them; we’ll just ask them -- respectfully -- to stop.
     It’s a modest initiative, but in the first three weeks of school,  I’ve only had to stop once to speak to a student about her language. She looked startled, but she didn’t object or talk back. She apologized.
 So far, so good. But we still need to get the students on board.