What on Earth are the teachers to do?

[blue_bird]

Why do Arabs hate Americans, Miss?
By Julie Henry
www.tes.co.uk(in What's New section)

What do you do when an 11-year-old pupil is told by a relative to be nasty to Asian classmates to "teach them a lesson"?

Teacher training and even years of experience are unlikely to have prepared schools for the events of the past few weeks. They are struggling to cope with questions pupils are posing following the terrorist attacks on America.

Muslim pupils, some of whom see military retaliation as as an attack on their faith, have their own concerns.

At a London secondary school with a large Muslim roll, one student refused to observe the three-minute silence for the victims, arguing that it was pro-American. The silence went ahead after a class discussion agreed that the gesture was for the innocent people killed in the Gulf war, Bosnia and the Palestine-Israeli conflict as well.

A teacher at another school was worried about the effect on pupils of American flags and headlines calling for war cut out from a newspaper and displayed on school kitchen windows.

This week police in Manchester, Birmingham and West Yorkshire stepped up patrols around schools and mosques in Muslim areas.

RE teachers have been bombarded with questions, according to Lat Blaylock, of the Professional Council for RE. He said: "Big philosophical and theological questions are part of RE's everyday currency, only they have been coming from the children themselves in the past two weeks."