What Teachers Can Learn from The Body Is Not an Apology
Priya notices a seventh grader named in her attendance roster has started wearing an oversized hoodie every single day, even during a heat wave, and pulling her sleeves over her hands during group work. Priya has seen this pattern before: a student trying to disappear rather than draw attention to a body that has become a source of comment from classmates. She wants to say something reassuring, but she catches herself unsure whether to compliment the student's appearance, ignore the hoodie entirely, or address the classroom culture that made hiding feel necessary in the first place. Priya realizes she has never actually been taught how to talk about bodies with students at all, only how to enforce a dress code.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The lesson plan nobody assigned you
Long before any student enters her classroom, they have already absorbed messages from family, media, and peers about which bodies deserve comment and which deserve silence. This book's central claim, that body shame is manufactured by systems rather than earned by individuals, applies directly to what a classroom teaches without meaning to. Priya's task is not to fix any one student's body image but to notice what her classroom culture is already, silently, teaching about bodies.
Naming the systemic pattern can feel like it lets individual unkind comments go unaddressed in the moment.
This week, notice one unspoken rule your classroom enforces about bodies, and ask whether it serves learning at all.
Beyond "you look great today"
Complimenting a student's appearance, even warmly, keeps their body's appearance as the subject worth commenting on. Radical self-love, as the book frames it, points toward a relationship with one's body that has nothing to do with how it looks on a given day. For a teacher, this means shifting attention toward what a student's body allows them to do, create, or say, rather than how it presents to others.
Students still live in a world that comments on appearance, so ignoring it entirely can feel like avoidance.
Replace one appearance-based comment to a student this week with specific praise about their effort or thinking.
Small repairs, every single day
A classroom offers dozens of small moments daily where shame can either take root or get interrupted, from a snide comment during PE to how group work partners get chosen. Treating this as an ongoing practice, not a single lesson, matches how shame actually operates in a room full of adolescents. Consistency across an ordinary week does more than one dramatic classroom discussion ever could.
Intervening in every small moment is exhausting and not always possible during a packed lesson.
Pick one recurring classroom moment, like partner selection, and change the structure so bodies stop being the deciding factor.
What your classroom teaches about difference
The same dynamics that shame a student's body size also shape how classrooms respond to race, gender presentation, and disability, often through the same unspoken hierarchies of whose body seems "normal." A teacher who does this work personally becomes better able to notice when curriculum, seating, or classroom jokes quietly reinforce which students' bodies belong and which don't.
Priya's real tension is between her duty to enforce school policies like dress codes and PE requirements, and her instinct that those very policies sometimes manufacture the shame she's trying to interrupt. She cannot simply ignore school rules, but she can examine how she enforces them and speak up when a policy targets bodies rather than behavior. Holding both means being honest with students that a rule exists even when she disagrees with its premise, while refusing to add her own shame on top of it.
Name one thing, honestly
- What unspoken rule about bodies does your classroom enforce without meaning to? - When did you last comment on a student's appearance instead of their work? - Which students seem to be disappearing rather than participating, and why?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Pick one recurring classroom moment, like partner selection, and change the structure so bodies stop being the deciding factor.