“‘Clementi wrote,“other people have commented on his profile with things like ‘how did you manage to go back in there?’ ‘are you ok.’”The friends were treating “my making out with a guy as the scandal whereas i mean come on . . . he was SPYING ON ME. . . . do they see nothing wrong with this?”'” (Parker 29)

I had such mixed feelings about Dharun Ravi – on one hand, he’s a totally normal teenager. He talks without thinking and makes up grandiose lies to make his life seem cooler and I’ve encountered so many people who are exactly like him. On the other hand, he’s a heartless and malicious being who drove Tyler Clementi to committing suicide. As a future educator, this duality of Dharun as a person was hard to wrap my head around.
How do we track the progression of words that lead into action?

Speaking of words – most of what Dharun said to his friends were all things that typical teenagers would say to each other. Yes their comments are ignorant and uneducated, but that’s their particular vernacular and it’s unfair to make a judgment call based on just that. Therefore, how exactly do we know when this particular language turns into action as was with the first and subsequent webcam violation. How do we track intention?

Of course, I don’t think anyone will have an answer for this because no one can read minds, but I’ve been doing some thinking and I think it’s important to teach our students to be allies. None of Dharun’s twitter followers or his hall mates told him to stop. Did they really not know what was going on? I highly doubt that, and based on the feelings of guilt that rang amongst the hall mates, I think they realized what they did was wrong. But then why did no one stop him? If just one of Dharun’s hall mates attempted to stop Dharun or even if one of them went to comfort Tyler, the outcome of this situation could have been drastically different. We have to teach our students to be allies and step in when one of their classmates are being bullied – and I realize that this isn’t an easy task nor will there be a lesson plan that will give us a step by step guide to doing this, but in the small remarks we make in the classroom to the intentional picking of readings and articles, I think we can teach our students to be allies without explicitly having to teach them.