All teachers must contend with tough cases on occasion: community events in which there are strong emotions that insert themselves so directly into students' consciousness that they must be dealt with. In this article the two authors, a professor and a graduate student co-teaching pre-service teacher candidates, share their journey through the situation at Penn State after the news broke that their school had been the site of a series of incidents of child abuse by a former employee of the football team. These events and the conversations that surrounded them had a strong emotional impact on a group of preservice English teacher candidates, all of whom were working in their first school placements. Anne Elrod Whitney and Nicole Olcese saw a moment to help not only their teacher candidates but also the students they would go on to work with in their own classrooms. What they did with their Methods students served as a model for how they should serve their own students. They decided to take the approach of "How do we teach our students to have tough conversations?" Their aim was not only to have a conversation with their students about what was happening at that moment at Penn State and in the town of State College, but more importantly to help them, as teachers, develop an approach to having these conversations when important, un-ignorable, emotional events happened in their own schools and communities.