I have a bias that I think most teachers, to some degree, share. My early experiences in school were pretty good. I learned, made friends, played at recess, understood my lessons, got help when I needed it and stayed out of trouble. My home life was stable, strict, safe, and supportive. By default, that’s the mental space I occupy when I think about my what I want for students in my classroom and when I plan my work day. I want my students to feel the way I felt at their age. I filter my expectations through my experiences. Talk about rose-colored glasses.
My students don’t live that life. (A disclaimer here: When I say my students, I obviously don’t mean all of my students. But I do mean many. Too many. It’s of them that I’m thinking.)
My students have jobs (have to have them, in many cases), absent parents, revolving parents, deadbeat parents, drug-addicted parents, step-parents, dead parents, overworked parents, resigned parents, neglected siblings (who they are raising), violence in their neighborhoods, violence in their homes, drugs in their neighborhoods, drugs in their homes, drugs in their veins, a mistrust of authority (often with reason), children of their own. The list of challenges is long, immediate and crushingly real.
My students have very little reliable, caring guidance to light the way down a path away from this chaos.
I has taken me a long time to make peace with the idea that many of my students feel like their lives are spinning out of control. Who am I to assume that they can unload that chaos and turmoil at the door? I used to expect that…sometimes I still do, to be honest. For a long time, my mantra was, “Just leave the chaos at the door and do things my way in here. If you can’t do that, we’re going to have a problem.”
I was partially right, for the record. We did have a problem; we had two in fact, the one my student brought into my classroom and the one that my inflexibility created between the student and myself. This isn’t a great model, by the way.
Sometimes students can’t leave life at the door. They don’t have the capacity and have never been taught the skills. The chaos lives in them. It swirls and tears at their insides and the fact that it’s ever contained is a testament to their effort to work in the system. Some of them have never known anything else and sometimes, the chaos wins.
They know confrontation, they live it, they’re comfortable with it. They can DO confrontation.
They struggle when I meet their chaos with kindness.
Learning kindness has been hard for me, not because I’m a jerk (well, sometimes) but because that’s not the model that lives in my head. I grew up in rural Ohio, my parents were strict(ish), I served in the military…in my head the ideal model of organization is top down, which is pretty easy, when you think about it. The whole framework of life is given to you. Its structure. Its rules. Its authority. How easy it was for me! In contrast, how hard it must be to forge order in the absence of these things.
Here’s a secret; I still believe in those things. I want students to feel the security of structure, the paradoxical freedom that rules give us, the direction that authority can bring to worthy tasks. But I had a lifetime to live those things and to learn to trust them. My kids…too many of my kids, don’t have that trust in our systems.
So I’m trying to build a new mental model that starts with trust and kindness. I now think those are the paths away from the chaos, rather than confrontation.
Confrontation? I’m learning to leave that at the door.