Would YOU get fired?

I had an interesting experience in a high school class yesterday. We were doing some drama activities to explore theme from a book, The Glass Castle, that the students had seen a stage adaptation of the week before. I asked them to choose a scene or moment in the play that stuck out to them, and then use dramatic techniques to present that scene in a different way than they had seen the actor do it. I encouraged them to use narration, tableaux, and a more abstract style. I gave them a few minutes to work and a copy of the script so that they had the exact words to refer to if they needed it.

Now imagine what it looked like when one group decided to re-enact the following lines with movement and narration:

"Rose Mary, where the goddamn hell are you, you stinking bitch?" yelled Dad....he knocked her to the floor..she grabbed a butcher knife and slashed it through the air in front of him...He picked up a knife, too, and pinned Mom's hands behind her head..."

It was considerably longer, but you get the idea.

My heart was in my throat watching a sixteen year old boy standing above a fourteen year old girl laying on the floor beneath him, pretending to kick her. They did the scene beautiful with a minimum of uncomfortable laughter, but my heart was thumping. The class was being observed by their classroom teacher and two school administrators, and even though I knew they had seen the play, were reading the book, choose the scene themselves and decided on their own how to re-enact it, I was convinced I had gone over the line.

I've worked at several places where those three minutes would have gotten me fired.

I don't like violence, even in drama. I don't like seeing kids fake-hit, fake-slap, fake-shoot, fake-stab, fake-punch, fake-fall. I don't think its safe. And I know for a fact that several kids in that room see scenes like that every day at home, so had this scene stopped being fiction?

Oddly enough, I was the only one who thought a line had been crossed. The general response from the kids was "that was funny" and when I thanked the two kids who had been acting for dealing with such rough material, they looked at me like I was...an unintelligible adult. The administrators came over to me, beaming. "Aren't these kids great?!"

I've been thinking of ways that I could have made that class safer, given them more structure, been watching out for them better. But apparently I was the only one with a problem.