My student flung the door open so abruptly and forcefully that it banged against my foot and nearly hit me in the face, and then he stormed into the classroom. Several of the other kids in the hallway jumped back, startled by the abrupt turn the student had made from sullenly uncooperative to physically aggressive. Another teacher who was in on the confrontation, a retired Army colonel who ran the JROTC program, balled his fists and looked at me through narrow eyes.
“I wouldn’t let him get away with that,” he said.
I was teaching in a high school program for kids who had been identified as at-risk for dropping out of school. All of my students had fallen far behind their peers academically, but most were bright kids who had family and other issues that prevented them from focusing on school work. Some of them had developed strategies for coping with the turmoil in their lives that helped them feel more in control of their situations, but which in the end contributed to their problems in school. The student who had just charged through the doorway into our classroom tended to react to criticism with outbursts of anger. I had walked into a situation that was already in full swing.
The classrooms for the drop-out prevention program were located on the same school basement hallway as the JROTC classrooms. That day, on his way back from lunch, my student had somehow drawn the ire of the colonel, and the colonel had followed him down the hall. I didn’t know what exactly had transpired between them, but the older man was clearly expecting my student to show him some sign of respect that my student was unwilling to give. Now he was ready to step back in deference to me, and fully expected me to react forcefully to my student’s rude behavior.
I looked at the colonel, a man I respected for his ability to inspire hard work and disciplined habits among the students in his program, many of whom had track records of poor academic performance and misbehavior in class.
I considered his comment for a moment, and then said, “I’m not sure why he is so upset today, but I don’t think it has anything to do with me. And I don’t think he meant to hit me with the door. It looked like he just wanted to get away quickly enough so that we couldn’t stop him.”
“I am going to let him cool off a bit, then find out what his issue is. He can take responsibility for his mistakes better if he is thinking straight.”
The colonel seemed a little taken aback, cocked his head, and paused a bit before he spoke. “I don’t know how you can keep from taking a thing like that personally,” he said, gesturing towards the door. “I would have dealt with it immediately.”
Then he nodded and left. It was my student, and my problem. The colonel had no need or desire to overreach. Different programs, different expectations, different outcomes. I don’t think the colonel was impressed with my plan for dealing with the student’s behavior, but I believe he was a little impressed with my self-control.
Since that afternoon several years ago, I have told this story many times to make a point – that the people we work with, and maybe especially teenagers, are often in difficult moods. It is natural and quite tempting to react emotionally to rude or uncooperative behavior. This is usually a bad idea. More often than not the offending behavior has its origin somewhere other than with the teacher, supervisor, or coworker who is experiencing it. It may feel like you are under attack, but actually you just have a front row seat for a performance that has little or nothing to do with you. There is really no good reason to volunteer to play a part in someone else’s melodrama.
But as time has gone by, I have come to realize that the most important part of the story is what came later. I did enter the classroom shortly after my student, and within 10 minutes had him telling me what was bothering him. By the end of the period he had agreed to apologize to the colonel the next time he saw him. I was able to have this conversation with my student because he trusted me. He knew that I cared about him being successful in class and also about his success in dealing with the people around him both inside and outside of class. My choice not to be drawn into his bad mood allowed me to approach him without putting my own needs ahead of his. But it was empathy, established over many weeks of working and learning together that allowed us to communicate.
In school, it is very easy to be seduced by the need for rules and structure. It is easy to adopt the roles that we play as surrogates for our identity. In any big institution with lots of individuals doing many different tasks and moving from place to place on a tight schedule it is easy to look for ways to depersonalize the experience, just as a way to get the job done. Recent school reforms have brought the depersonalization of education to new levels. We have online learning that we experience in isolation. We have standards for content and classroom methodology that seem to be constructed to idiot-proof the teaching profession, reducing the creative role of the teacher to little more than a hall monitor – a rule enforcer.
Not that rules and structure are bad, and not to deny the advantages of modern technology, but the focus in improving education always seems to be on the mechanics of the process, not on the quality of the experience.
Whether or not we have schools, human beings will learn from each other. We learn because we want to do things we don’t know how to do. We learn because we need to be something other than what we already are. We learn because we like knowing. But we learn best if the experience is meaningful to us. If we truly desire the advantages that come from acquiring new knowledge, we are enthusiastic learners. If we are indifferent to, or don’t understand the goal of all this effort, we are reluctant conscripts. If we don’t like the person leading the effort or the environment we find ourselves in, we fight back.
The human element is crucial in shaping the experience. A teacher’s ability to connect with students can transform learning from a chore of discrete and unpleasant tasks into an enriching experience that combines intellectual with interpersonal satisfaction. I learned this lesson forcefully in my years as a teacher in the drop-out prevention program. And in spite of the implied criticism in my story of the colonel and his emphasis on rules, I am sure that he knew it too. His success was not due so much to the inherent strengths of his program, but to the fact that his cadets knew that he was interested in their welfare and wanted them to live up to their potential. His expectations of how a student would attain that goal was different from mine, but the belief in the ability of the student to grow and learn from experience was very much the same, and was communicated in every interaction we had with the kids who were entrusted to our care.
Teaching is at its core a human experience. There is no set of rules, no program of instruction, no advance in technology that can match the effectiveness of a teacher who has won his students’ trust.
J. Marcus Patton 