Moral Dilemmas

In Up to Standard, there are several moral issues facing Maggie, Kyle and Jamey. In the beginning, Maggie observes Jamey in the park several times and eventually discovers that the pink box that Jamey had contained an emaciated kitten that had been obviously abandoned by Jamey. Maggie was faced with her first moral dilemma of responsibility and right and wrong. Knowing the kitten was in distress and unable to locate the boy, she took the cat home and cared for the animal. She continued looking for the kitten’s owner, Jamey, throughout the summer, but she did not see him again until he showed up in her class.

Jamey is a quiet boy who is left alone by his classmates. However, another student in class garnered Maggie’s immediate attention. He is well spoken, but the other students tell Maggie that he can’t read. In order to make Kyle comfortable and demonstrate empathy for the class, she shares that she doesn’t like to wear his glasses providing him an out for his difficulty in reading. Maggie inquires whether or not Kyle could be tested for a learning disability and when she is told that she cannot because he was tested in second grade. Maggie is torn trying to get Kyle the help that he needs while following the school system’s protocol, when she discovers that Jamey has been reading aloud to help Kyle be successful in school
Jamey continues to be a quite child for Maggie and she seeks insight from the counselor and from her fellow teaching team only to be told by a fellow student that she thinks he has the characteristics of a serial killer. She thinks that her colleague’s reaction to Jamey’s quite behavior is overblown and she struggles with this stereotyping of Jamey and continues to reach out and connect with him. She even arr...

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...e and Jamey. Also as a teacher team, the concerns about Jamey should have been documented and brought to a student support team so that he could have additional counseling or a flash pass to use when he felt that he could no longer control his emotions in class.

Maggie and her fellow teachers could help students learn about values through moral dilemmas in an advisory session / mentoring groups or within the classroom setting as applicable (Fischer, 2006). In this teaching situation the teacher can be an objective moderator asking guiding or clarifying questions in order to lead students to understanding various points of view. These activities as well as journaling provide students the “capacity for recognizing [their] own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships." (Goleman, 1995)