I don’t think high school teachers have to do this. Why should college professors? A “trigger” the way people seem to be discussing it isn’t something that would upset anyone, it’s just that a few people are overly sensitive-- we seem to be talking about things that are very specific to certain people because of their own backgrounds, and they might not be fun-- like a bee attack-- but they aren’t necessarily so revolting that someone might have to leave the room absent a personal experience.
Things like that can come up in high school classrooms as well.
I think college profs do warn, and have for a long time, when something is so shocking or revolting that it might overly affect just anyone. Concentration camp footage, for example. I remember being warned about that once when I was watching a film about making documentaries, and there was some brief Holocaust footage. It was along the lines of “If you’ve never seen Holocaust footage before, it’s as bad as you imagined. But it’s short here, so sit tight.”
High school teachers generally don’t teach highly sensitive subjects. The most controversial high school topics I can think of nearly all fall within sex education, which “sensitive” students tend to be exempted from (by parental waiver) anyway.
Exactly. Parental waivers are usually respected in high school. And most of the public school teachers I know shy away from sensitive subjects because local school boards are not known to be bastions of support for academic rigor.
Academic freedom is a hallmark of American universities, and while I am personally aware of abuses of it (and done my best to curtail them at my institution), I think the alternative is significantly worse.
In our High School, we were introduced to the Greek Tragedies (which include scenes of rape and incest: for example, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles), the plays of Shakespeare (including scenes of murder and extreme anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice).
The most memorable I think was being made to read Timothy Findley’s The Wars, which includes a scene of homosexual rape by a bunch of young soldiers - particularly uncomfortable reading for the boys in the class. Which, in fact, was part of the point addressed by the teacher.
People are talking about bee attacks. That didn’t sound like a “sensitive” subject. I can see a bee attack being discussed in a high school. My point was that we’re either talking about very controversial things that could potentially upset anyone, or we’re talking about unduly sensitive people.
We do include a lot of bureaucratic ass-covering in syllabuses. Plagiarism in particular I see a good purpose for reminding students of the policy.
I really don’t understand why students can’t be told that if they are worried about how they might respond to some given topic, that it is their responsibility to investigate the works on the syllabus and prepare themselves/ drop the class/ work something out with the prof. To bring up Things Fall Apart again, since it was mentioned in one of the main articles about this, it contains scenes of domestic violence, racism, suicide, colonialism. This is deducible from, basically, reading the back cover if the book or a Wiki page. The fact that it is hardly discussing these things in a graphic or exploitative manner might also be obvious with a tiny amount of research or thought.
Doing that thinking, tho, is kind of what you want your students to do. If you do it for them, a significant point of teaching the book is eliminated.
I was very happy when I read Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe twenty years ago, that before a particular suspenseful passage Douglas kindly warned and ensured me that ultimately nothing bad would happen in the next chapter. My first trigger warning. Very helpful.
My first suggestion was that the professor pass out a list of books and movies, and that individual students be responsible for looking them up. Very few will be obscure enough not to have a web presence, and if this was the policy then lists of triggers would soon appear. (From the Times articles on this subject I’m led to believe they already exist.)
If we don’t do that, then self-identification is a fallback position. Much more likely to “trigger” the memory of a scene in the professor than him or her trying to recollect all possible triggers in a book.
Personally I’m in the John Mace camp on this. It reminds me way too much of some Christians objecting to gay couples holding hands because it would trigger a bout of tolerance in their young.
And you get set up for getting a face full of triggers later, when you’re out of school and can’t just look at a syllabus.
In school should be a good time for people to experiment with their own comfort, to try to figure out ways to cope, because they’ll need to cope eventually. It’s a good time to be able to say, “I don’t know if I can read this, but I’m going to try. Can I come to you and work out something else if I can’t do it?” or the like.
We have to push our limitations in some ways to see what their borders are.
I mean, if it’s just bees, you can probably get through the rest of your life without really having to confront your bee issue. But racism? You have to learn to deal with it or you’ll be incapacitated. And college/university is a great place to test it.
In the George of the Jungle movie after a guide is pushed off a bridge, the announcer notes that in this movie no one dies, they just get big boo-boos.
Perhaps we need to rewrite the classics. In the end of Hamlet everyone gets up and says “Fooled ya, didn’t we?”
I didn’t get the colonialism trigger at all. Almost no one reading this book was alive during the days of colonialism. Hell, I lived in the Congo less than two years after independence, and I doubt anyone would have gotten triggered. And the Belgians were about the worst there were.
Sure a lot of people don’t think of it that way, but my undergrad now charges 40k/yr and pays its President 2 M/yr. That’s a business. Fortunately, I went there before all this tuition inflation, but if I’m paying $40K/yr for something, then yeah, I might decide to ask for better version. If the school doesn’t think it makes business sense to accommodate, then they don’t have to, and maybe I take my tuition elsewhere. Or maybe, I just deal with it, because there’s other stuff about the school I like. But I think it’s completely reasonable to ask that a service I’m paying for be a better service.
On another note, a lot of people in this thread are asserting that college is for expanding horizons. Well, some people don’t view school that way. I was an EE major for my undergrad, and there was a fairly sizable liberal arts requirement. Now, I didn’t mind, but I can certainly imagine an EE or Physics are Business Major not caring about many liberal arts topics, and not finding them useful to their future career. For some people, college is about getting a degree in a specific field that will get you a job.
Yeah, I’m not sure how a colonialism trigger is even supposed to work. But, as has been pointed out in this thread, the trigger warning brigade is not concerned with the actual notion of PTSD triggers anyway.
And of course we come around to what precisely is “better” in so far as education is concerned, and whether you are qualified, at the time you purchase the “product,” to evaluate its merit. From a student point of view, getting your ticket punched in the shortest time possible and getting a well paying job may be the top priority. As a former student, I share this view. As an educator, providing a rigorous course of study that produces the most knowledgeable graduates might be my foremost concern. Best case, these ends serve each other. Sometimes, these come into conflict, and then you have a race to the bottom, because that’s where the money is.
I can see why traditional academic faculty would have problems with it, and oppose short term solutions that create long-term issues, such as a lowering of the overall knowledge base.
Good point. I could see a prof trying to rack their brain to say, “Please be warned that this book, which you are expected to start reading by Week 3, contains the following potentially triggering content: Boy Scouts, grizzled old sea captains, LA street gangs, sorority girls, and Bermuda.” Then, it turns out that one student has PTSD related to having been raped while on board a Boeing 737 plane but the prof assumed that in chapter 5, when the heroine travels to Bermuda with her sorority sisters and a grizzled old sea captain in order to escape LA street gangs that have already kidnapped several Boy Scouts, the fact that the airliner they were on was a 737 was an irrelevant detail and that the other stuff was more likely to be triggering.