The teacher who swapped the word “gay”with “bright” so that her class wouldn’t giggle during their rendition of “Deck the Halls” was always going to draw the ire of at least one parents. As much as she may have made the change with the best of intentions, I am sure if she had her time over, she wouldn’t have fiddled with the lyrics:
A Michigan teacher chose to censor the word ‘gay’ from the festive holiday tune ‘Deck the Halls’ and was met by a frosty response from parents.
Parents thought the Cherry Knoll teacher had been naughty and not so nice when the elementary instructor replaced ‘gay’ with ‘bright’ after her students wouldn’t stop laughing when they sang the word.
They took to the school’s Facebook page ranting about the teacher’s decision to change that word in the traditional holiday carol.
Cherry Knoll principal Chris Parker told 7&4 News in Traverse City that he was disappointed the music teacher decided to change the lyrics, saying she could have used the moment for a learning opportunity on tolerance.
‘This would have been a great opportunity to teach that “gay” has more than one meaning and is not a bad word,’ he said.
Enraged parents took to the school’s Facebook page, which has since been disabled, to voice their complaints over the word-swap.
A teacher’s poor choice is not the real story here. The real story is the way the parents handled the situation. Instead of confronting the school or teacher with their displeasure, they did what many parents are now choosing to do, and turned their disapproval into a large-scale Facebook campaign.
I have no doubt that a few quiet phone calls from concerned parents would have been sufficient to provoke this teacher to revert back to the original lyrics and make a profuse apology to all offended. Instead, this teacher had to contend with a barrage of negative comments on Facebook, and now, worldwide media coverage.
This sends a shocking message. It says that whenever parents are upset over the actions of a classroom teacher they can turn to Facebook for a fully fledged smear campaign. This amounts to bullying of the worse kind.
Teachers make mistakes. Some small, some huge. But no well-meaning teacher deserves to be pillaged on Facebook – ever!
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