Lessons from the classroom

Thanks to the pandemic, most of the new movies are available to watch at home through streaming platforms like HBOMax, Netflix, Prime, Etc.

With all of these new shows and movies at my fingertips, what have I been watching?

The 1986-1991 sitcom, “Head of the Class,” of course!

The show popped up on HBOMax and I remembered watching it as a kid. I pressed play just to delight in the nostalgia and found that I still really enjoy the story of an ex-hippie lucking into the teaching position of a gifted and talented class at an inner-city school in New York.

As old as the show is, the series highlights one of the problems that is troubling modern America: open dialogue.

In one episode, a character finds out that she is an ancestor of Sally Hemings and, according to most scholars, Thomas Jefferson.

Hemings was a slave at Jefferson’s Monticello estate who was also present to attend to his daughter when the family was in Paris.

Critics of Jefferson during his life accused him of an improper relationship with Hemings, and DNA testing in the late 1990’s indicate common links between Jefferson’s lineage and Hemings’.

In addressing the issue, several characters of different backgrounds spoke up, highlighting Jefferson’s importance to the founding of this country, the problems of a relationship between a slave and their owner and the fact that their relationship led to emancipation of Hemings’ children at the age of 21.

It was a delicate issue addressed by different viewpoints and all sides listened to each other and respected the different views.

I was reminded of how my favorite teachers in high school and college encouraged open, respectful debate so that we could have a deeper understanding of the topic at hand and learn to work with each other.

As I watched the fictional ‘80s class converse and remembered my own experiences, I thought about how often I’ve seen posts about shutting out differing opinions and seen people grouped by a certain belief as if that defined them as a human being.

If we shut out other views, we don’t learn from them and they don’t learn from us. Nothing changes.

Paul Gaudette is the managing editor at the Dublin Citizen and can be reached at 445-2515 and publisher@dublincitizen.com.