"We Don't Say Those Words in Class!"

I have a child in my classroom that has Treacher Collins Syndrome, by looking at him he looks very different than my other students. He is also very hard to understand, most of the time you can't understand anything that he says. One of the first grade classes were walking by us in the hallway and one of the students noticed my student. She yelled out, "He looks funny!" All of the students started to chuckle and my student got very quiet. The other teacher told her students to be quiet and mind their own business. They kept going on to their classroom without stopping to ask or talk about the situation.

The teachers response was that we do not talk about it and we mind out own business. She would have rather not talked about the situation and let the children believe that he was a "funny looking". If she was an anit-bias educator she would have let her class talk to mine, because my students know and understand why he looks different. If she was uncomfortable with that she could have asked me and I could have given her more information to go over with her class. I also could have given her the information without her asking or given her students information as the comment happened in the hallway. Now my students have gotten use to telling people that he is different and way, they are very protective of him and make sure others don't make fun of him.