LAKEWOOD, Colo. Several parents are excited about a Black History Month lesson that they say has been handled incorrectly.
The lesson, in a gifted and talented 8th grade Social Studies class at Creighton Middle School, focused on slavery.
“It made me nauseous,” said one student. “There was a lump in my stomach.”
The student, who asked to be named Kaye, said the instructor told her class that the lesson was a serious matter. But Kaye said some students do not take it seriously.
“One joked that slaves could not get up to go to the bathroom and had to urinate on themselves,” during their forced voyage across the Atlantic, Kaye explained.
“He said it was cool and was then corrected in the chat,” she said, adding that the student went on to say, “give them a TV and they’ll be fine.”
“It was very inappropriate,” Kaye said.
Kaye said the instructor allowed students to joke about it and sometimes laughed at her.
“In no situation is it okay to make jokes or laugh when you talk about slavery,” Kaye said.
Kaye and a classmate, both students of color, wrote a note to the teacher in which they expressed their concern.
They described how she made students lie on the floor to simulate the Atlantic crossing and then had them do clean cotton so that they could empathize with what slaves went through.
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“The ‘sugar-coated’ is a very serious and horrific event in American history,” Kaye said.
“She used the phrase ‘my little cotton pickers’, it’s time to stop what you’re doing and move on with the lesson,” Kaye added.
“The lesson was handled tactlessly,” Kaye’s mother, Amanda, said. “My daughter said it was disgusting.”
Amanda said there is a lot of diversity at Creighton Middle School, “but the talented and talented program is less diverse.”
She shared her daughter’s letter with a good friend, Rebecca Dutcher, who’s like Kaye’s aunt.
“I was horrified, but I did not know what to do about it,” Dutcher said.
She believes the instructor should have treated slavery just as seriously as one dealing with the Holocaust.
“I can not see a teacher doing a simulation of the train carriages or saying ‘my little campers’ in reference to a concentration camp,” she said.
Dutcher shared Kaye’s note with an African-American friend who posted it on Facebook, where it drew reactions across district boundaries.
“It makes me wonder if she learned the lesson through a colored person,” said friend Danette Hollowell. ‘The more I thought about it, the more upset I became, because the [two girls] was more mature than the teacher. ‘
The teacher responded to Kaye and her friend’s remark, saying that she ‘was deeply sorry that it hurt your feelings because it was NEVER my intention.’
She added her reading of Stamped from the beginning and White fragility to try to build on her empathy as a white person to use her privilege to help those of color.
She also said she corrected the abusive behavior of students, saying ‘it was not meant to be funny’, and repeatedly asked if the girls had not heard her.
“Sometimes we only hear what we want to hear, but if I have offended you, I am deeply sorry,” she wrote.
Kaye said the instructor “picked cherries” to which he must respond.
She said the teacher did not address the comments about “my little cotton pickers”.
“She apologized for how she made us feel and not for her behavior,” Kaye said.
Denver7 contacted Jeffco Public Schools for comment on the student’s concerns, but has not yet received a response.
Kaye said she wants the teacher to change the way she presents the lesson so that other students do not have to experience what she and her friend did.
Dutcher said, “If someone brought it to your attention, I think the right response would be … let’s figure out how to fix it.”