My students reactions to the Chauvin Guilty verdict

 

I teach Black and Brown boys in one of the poorest congressional districts in New York. This week has been full of emotion and hope. On Tuesday night, I found myself  up late scouring YouTube for the perfect speeches to relevantly tie the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict to our text, Ghost Boys. It was the kind of day that teachers dream of in terms of teachable moments colliding with topics you were going to teach anyway-- not having to force a connection to the real world. The moment I saw the verdict was guilty on Instagram, I started spamming my students with the information; any student that uses our Google Hangout chat got a message from me with a link to the post I had just read. They responded and we chatted about our shock.

The day after the verdict, I saw about 53 of my students that actually came to class and engaged in this conversation that day; usually, if I have 53 students, I  only really hear from maybe 18 throughout the day, but not this day.  One of the best things about this remote teaching life is the transcript that I get from our Meet and that I do not have to remember, write down, or try to paraphrase the real words and emotions of my boys at the end of the day; I go to the transcript and find the students I knew said something real and relevant, then reading through I often find more than I had caught in class since sometimes they excitedly speak over each other. I take these quotes and put them on a Google Slide to share in the next class so that the scholars can "hear" from one another regardless of class section, also so they know I'm listening to them and I care about what they say and how they feel. We've had a lot of important conversations that are bound to happen when reading historical fiction about events that really happened (and continue to happen) in life, especially tragedies. Just the day before, we read the judge's decision in the preliminary hearing in Ghost Boys. Like so many cases that came before George Floyd's killing, the decision was not to go forth with any charges. In the book, the officer kills the 12-year-old main character (who narrates as a ghost) in the first pages.  The boy had been playing with a toy gun in a park (not Tamir Rice, but certainly a nod to that tragedy). It is clear that protocol wasn't followed as the officer did not announce himself, give any directives, fired from the moving police vehicle, and administers no aid after realizing it is a child, that perhaps justice is ill-defined in our society when no one is held responsible for this boys death.  So when this character is not charged, we talked about our emotions and about how it mimics real life when officers have not been charged or found guilty in the past such as former officer Yanez for killing Philando Castile or the more than 200 cases of fatal police shootings in three decades in Minnesota before even 1 officer was charged, let alone found guilty.

 

 What you see below are pull quotes from my students. The first set are some reactions to the judge's decision in Ghost Boys. The second are reactions to learning of the actual conviction of Derek Chauvin. You can see the change in the boys' tones; a feeling of hope springs from the ashes of a horrific death that ignited our nation.  So, yes, we celebrated this step towards justice and change. Someone was held responsible! We talked about the future, accountability, qualified immunity; we talked about change. I only had one student of the 53 that figured this decision, this verdict was just the government conceding one time to keep the peace, he called it "agreeing to take a hit". His classmates pointed out why he might say and believe something like that but also reminded him that in our justice system once things go to trial, the jurors, not the judge nor the government are tasked with deciding the verdict, real people doing their civic duty to uphold justice which may set the precedence that sparks the flame to end the brutality.

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