When I taught junior high, it was at a rural “alternative” school — a school for students who had been expelled from other urban schools in the county. “At-risk” kids, if you like: Virtually all had chaotic home lives, or incarcerated parents, or something. There was also abuse, of course — although that issue was more the province of the social workers than the teachers. (This school had two full-time social workers on staff — for a student body of sixty kids in total.) The entire institution was specifically designed to educate this “population” of students: It was situated at some distance from other schools in the district, and was reached via a long ride through the countryside on an actual “short bus.”
As a source of authority and discipline in this environment, I was not an immediate success. With most kids, I could hold their attention well enough that discipline wasn’t a frequent problem. (The kids especially liked to comment on the facts that I drove a Jeep and was single — unlike the other teachers, who tended to be married and drove station wagons.) But a handful of students did act out quite a bit, in my classes especially. I tried as often as possible to meet these kids’ aggressive and self-destructive impulses with compassion and understanding. The designated disciplinarian at this school was the assistant principal; apparently that’s a common practice in “alternative” education. As a Southerner, a Republican, and an honest-to-God National Rifle Association member, Assistant Principal Hoff fit this role like he was born to play it.
But I found that some of my students, when I tried to treat them with compassion, just acted out even more. Baffled, I consulted the school’s social workers for advice. These experienced and wise professionals confirmed for me that yes, this is a thing: Some kids do actually respond poorly to being treated with understanding. And this happens because — well, take your pick: The kids are wary of trusting adults because they’re always being let down (or worse) by them; they believe they’re undeserving of this treatment and think you’re trying to trick them; or they hate having their consciences pricked by the reminder that they’re obliged to behave respectfully toward others as well.
I hadn’t seriously considered this possibility before — that understanding and compassion would aggravate oppositional behavior in kids of this age. I’d dismissed the idea as just a therapeutic cliché. In real life, I imagined, no one actually turns down genuine compassion. Especially kids who are comparatively starved for it.
But my instinct on this issue was precisely wrong. Cliché or not, I was now confronted every day with a handful of kids who, I realized, fit this very pattern.
So what could I do about it? My social-worker confidants had this answer for me as well. (I came to suspect that these social workers spent as much time counseling newbie teachers as they did students.) The answer was simply to keep doing what I was doing, and not get frustrated or try to change my approach. The best thing that we teachers — authority figures — could offer these students was a certain model of behavior: Understanding, steadfast, and always available. And we couldn’t simply impose this model by disciplinary means. I did spend one afternoon requiring another teacher’s class to collectively compose an essay about some behavioral rule they’d all broken — but a stunt like that was only possible under very special circumstances. Mostly you just had to convince the kids that you were going to treat them with understanding no matter what they did to defy you. And I needed to accept that some of these kids were going to test me at great length — to find out if my approach to them was really genuine, or if I was just trying to manipulate them. This was simply how they’d learned to cope with the ups and downs of their lives.
A few kids I never did truly reach; the school year ended before I saw any real progress with them. Such is public education. But the progress you do make is often very memorable — especially when you spend so much time wondering if the model is really working. One example I remember well was a girl named Janelle. Janelle never initiated any real discipline problems in my classes — but she insisted on greeting me each morning with an overtly casual “What up, dog?” And every morning I would respond: “Good morning, Janelle, it’s nice to see you. But please call me Mr. [my last name] at school.” Every single morning I said this to Janelle; it was like a password that started the school day. And to be honest, I almost looked forward to having this daily exchange with Janelle; I always noticed right away when she wasn’t at school. And when a couple of months passed without any sign that Janelle would ever take my hints about how to properly address a teacher, I began to wonder if maybe I was being too lax with her. Maybe Janelle had also gotten comfortable with our little exchanges each day, and concluded that she’d successfully “tamed” me. Nevertheless I stuck to the model: Ritually reminding Janelle every morning that I was glad to see her but that I really wanted her to address me by my actual name while we were at school.
It was only during the very last week of the school year — after about a hundred “What up, dog?” greetings — that Janelle finally dropped the daily game we were playing and addressed me by a proper teacher’s moniker. This is the kind of sunlight-breaking-through-clouds moment that you never really believe is going to happen…until it does. The lesson for me here was: Despite her studiedly casual manner, Janelle really was listening to me all that time. In fact she was testing me, curious to see whether I would truly give her the same exact instruction a hundred times in a row. Why Janelle sought to put me through those paces, I still couldn’t tell you. Was she testing my steadfastness and consistency? Did I finally earn a tiny amount of her trust? Was she simply satisfied to have captured ten seconds of my attention every morning?
Well, you tell me. But what I’ll remember about this experience was that the model did eventually work, in its way: Janelle did get to watch an authority figure — me — direct a firm but compassionate response to her, identically, a hundred days in a row. In my life before teaching, I never would have believed that such an approach could accomplish anything at all. But once you see it succeed in an unexpected way like this, then you’ll never forget it for as long as you live.
Photo by “PMC 1stPix” for Flickr.
