Lessons Learned…
Please Leave Your Sarcasm At The Door
Sarcasm,
like bullying, is about power, which is really about weakness covered up, which
is really about insecurity. The response it draws, however, is fear; fear to
speak up, fear to suggest, fear to offer, because sarcasm chooses to cut and
splay rather than to hold gently and encourage. Sarcasm laughs at, points at,
and mocks with its words cunningly crafted and delivered as a wolf in sheep’s
clothing. Sarcasm scoffs at trust and faith and hopefulness and promise because
perhaps somewhere deep down, sarcasm comes from a place of distrust,
disillusionment, and maybe a pinch of anger and resentment; most probably a
very sad soul. Sarcasm seeks to evoke laughter and a false levity at the
expense of genuine-ness and pure delight. Sarcasm is not a friend of creativity
in children, for instead of liberating the wonder-filled spirit of free and
imaginative play, its ridiculing and overbearing nature crushes creativity and buries
it under a pile of shame and embarrassment. We nervously laugh along with the
sarcastic comment so that we can avoid being the wounded spirit laughed at. The
target. The brunt. The loser. I have seen sarcastic teachers at work in their
classrooms methodically dismantling student self-esteems with their well-chosen
knife-like words all under the guise, the pathetic guise, of some sort of demented
humor. It nauseates me to observe this insidious possibility thrasher which
drives the creative spirit to retreat. It’s
not intelligent, and it’s not clever regardless of what the world may say. It
is demeaning, however, and needs to be recognized as the menacing bully that it
is. If we truly long to establish classrooms where creativity and imagination
are welcome and thriving, we must sweep out from every corner every trace of
sarcasm’s poison.
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