The Forgiving Teacher

Here I am, trying to be a writer.  In my feeble attempts to keep this unread blog alive, I offer some thoughts on forgiveness and teaching.

It’s almost 4pm on the last day of school before Winter Vacation.  I’m sitting alone in my classroom, almost two hours after all of the students paraded out of the building in celebration of a two week break from school.  They know that this respite will only last for a brief moment in time but the possibilities of endless freedom excite their little hearts to no end.  

Only in the presence of peace and silence of deserted hallways can one truly understand the beautifully chaotic reality of school.  So much happens throughout the day both very much within the sphere of influence of my fellow teachers and I and as well as an overwhelming amount that is not.   At this moment, now that all of the students and most of the teachers have left the building, I am thinking about forgiveness.   

The very nature of teaching requires the ability to forgive.  Forgiveness is a choice, conscious or not, that every teacher must make for themselves on a moment by moment basis.  I have experienced such frustration that forgiveness seemed impossible.  Error is, understandably, constant within the walls of a school.  Kids, just like the rest of humanity, make mistakes.  This is how we slowly discover how the world works.  In the same way that young people possess the ability to surprise and amaze, they just as easily do stupid, irrational, unexplainable things.  Often, these actions are described as disrespectful, rude, ridiculous, or approaching an evil that offers no hope for the future.  Some of these mistakes cause teachers to scratch their head with a kind of hopelessness that leaves them unmotivated and cynical about the youth.  Yet, it is because of this content error that teachers must forgive.     

To forgive someone is to understand why he or she acted in the particular manner that harmed the individual, another student or the entire community in the first place.  True forgiveness is to trust that the intent of the wrongdoer was not malicious or, if it was, then they have learned why the act was wrong in the first place.  It is the responsibility of teachers to show students a way of moral rightness; a compass that always points towards goodness towards others; and behavior that promotes the learning for both themselves and their peers.  We must always remember their youth and they likely don’t know the appropriate way to do things especially within a classroom environment.  My mentor, Sarah Durst, shares with me regularly that as a teacher, I have to teach those within my class everything that I want them to be able to do within my space regardless of how trivial it may be.  Though she refers to the daily procedures and routines of classroom, in a very real sense, she might as well be talking about acting within our community and the world at large.  Gentle reminders such as “You shouldn’t run into this classroom, it is safer and more appropriate to walk calmly and with a purpose,” might go a long way to reducing car accidents in the future or at the very least will give me less of a headache at the beginning of every class period.   

When teachers work to understand why their students act the way they do instead of growing angry with them, it makes true forgiveness possible.  For students come with a backpack of experiences so large that it sways their every move.  Some were shown how to do things the right way and others did not have the same guidance.  No matter a student's previous path, it is the responsibility of teachers to work to help them improve, whatever that might mean for the individual.  This holistic approach to human growth is the beauty of being a teacher and it is something that testing companies have yet to be able to accurately measure.          

 

There is nothing easy about forgiveness and understanding.  When experienced teachers advised me to spend as much time as possible “developing relationships” and “establishing mutual trust,” that sounded easy enough when said aloud but incredibly difficult as well as time consuming in practice.  However, knowing who your students are is the first step to forgiving their digressions. We must be responsible for knowing them first and then showing them the right way second.

Ultimately, teachers have little choice if they want to be successful and happy within their chosen career.  Those misfits and management nightmares are coming back to our classroom whether we like it or not.  We can choose to accept them for being imperfect beings with the potential for unimaginable growth or we can write them off forever.  In my second year of teaching, I am not so naive to think that every student can be saved or helped.  Some may be so far along a path of destruction that their eventual demise is only a matter of time.  It is important though that it is not teachers that make this decision.  We are not the judges of who should be given the best education available and who should not.  The forgiving teacher gives every student a chance to succeed regardless of how badly they have erred in the past for they understand that the future is unknowable.

     

A student of mine decided one afternoon that the best action to take when she was upset was to clearly communicate a melody of colorful and vindictive language not often found in school settings.  This in front of an entire class of silent young writers.  She spoke with vigour about how she “didn’t care about [me] or anyone in this school” and she certainly didn’t care what we said or thought.  As she yelled, she stormed out of the classroom with an anger that spoke louder than her words.  

And then when she returned to school, she eventually made her way to my class.  Though I cannot control whether she or students like her came back or not, I possess control over my attitude on how I am going to treat this student as all teachers do.  I welcomed her back into my space after she acted in a way that was completely against every aspect of common decency essential to the safe and supportive classroom environment that I work so hard to create on a daily basis.  

There was no “thank you.”  She showed no obvious appreciation.  Yet, here she was, back in class and I forgave her. 

--AN

Writing Club

Writing Club...writing club…Writing Club….

“Man go fuck your room Mr. Newman.” that is the sound of a once improving but now backtracking relationship. I’m not going to write this kid up.  He gets written up too much and it doesn’t do anything.  Consider this my documentation.    

“I fail at everything Mr. Newman.” That is the sound of a young person with no hope in himself.  

“Is that your version of not giving up Mr. Newman?” That is the sound of a student correctly calling me out on my bullshit.  

“Sit down!” That is the sound of me yelling at a kid who was getting a tissue out of a tissue box.

“...........” That’s the sound of me trying to gain my cool back.  Breathe in, breathe out.  In the through the nose, out through the mouth.”  

“Meeting got cancelled, the parent couldn’t make it in.”  That is the sound of putting off a gathering of a village that might have helped a student succeed.  Maybe not.  

“Sign here please and don’t forget to take your pencils.”  That is the sound of standardized testing.  

“Close those chromebooks while I’m up here talking.”  That is the sound of desperate classroom management.

“This isn’t important for us to know at all.”  This is the sound of a failed delivery of an actually crucial concept or a student that just doesn’t give a shit.  It’s hard to say which is worse.

“Every year, there are only so many students that you can help.”  That is the sound of sage truth.  

“You’re making a difference in that kids life.”  That is the sound of support, friendship, happiness.”  

“That was a great moment for me.”  This is the sound of a retiring teacher realizing the future.  

“How do I get on the soccer team?”  That is the sound of a student that maybe isn’t a lost soul like his grandma said but a soul searching for some meaning.  

Growth Seminar

On a recent post, I attached a link to a video entitled Understanding Talent.  The video is a short animation that describes how people develop talent in a variety of things.  It focused specifically on athletics.  However, the message should be applied to any and all skills that a person wants to develop.  The science shows that talent is something that is developed through hard work and is in no way intrinsic to certain individuals.  Nobody is born to play basketball.  There is no gene for basketball talent.  Those that make it to the top of the basketball world were able to hone their skills through hard work and not some magical stroke of luck that gave them that talent.  

Earlier today, I listened to an episode of This American Life, a WBEZ radio magazine style show hosted by Ira Glass, that focused on a book by Paul Tough called How Children Succeed: Grit, Personality and the Hidden Power of Character.  The theme of the episode entitled Back to School examined the age old question about what students should and should not be learning in school.  Through a series of stories and interviews directly with Tough, one theme was that schools are not focusing enough on teaching students the “noncognitive skills” also known as social skills that truly help people succeed throughout life.

At the beginning of the episode, Glass features a long term study by Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckmen which compared those that simply that dropped out of high school and those that completed high school in the traditional four year manner.  He found that those individuals that achieved high school credit through the GED were not nearly as successful in a variety of ways throughout life including job performance, money earned, college success and quality of marriage when compared with those went through the much longer route of four years of high school.  Heckmen discusses that the GED is established to show that a person who passes this test possesses the same amount of cognitive ability(traditional school skills) that everyone must have to pass high school.  He concludes that the reason for this difference in so many life outcomes is while in school for the thousands of hours over four years required to graduate from high school, students develop a wide variety of other skills that contribute to success throughout their entire life.  These are the qualities that are truly important for someone to learn in high school and not the math or reading skills that we often think are the heart of a child’s education.

After this moment in the show, I was both relieved and troubled.  I was relieved because it gave me a sense of satisfaction that school is in some way important in a person’s life, even if it has little to do with the cognitive skills that they learn.  There was a moment when I thought that Glass was going to reveal that in fact those that took the much less demanding, in terms of hours, GED would do just as well throughout life.  As a teacher, I dedicate my life to the success of children and knowing that there is clear value for students to be in school makes me want to work harder.  However, what troubled me was the fact that nowhere in the curriculum of my school district and I’m guess most others is there a focus on the social skills such as grit, self-control or optimism that are clearly crucial for a person’s ability to succeed both in school but throughout his or her entire life.

When students enter high school in my district, they take a class called “Freshmen Seminar.”  Though I must admit I’ve never seen a syllabus, I’m guessing that it focuses a lot on how incoming freshmen can achieve and gives strategies to reach graduation in four years.  One idea that I know that they talk about is the Growth Mindset.  Students learn what a Growth Mindset is and why it is so important.  They are shown that with grit and determination, they can learn almost anything that they put their mind to.  

My question as a middle school teacher is why are we waiting so long to send this message and what can we do at the younger levels to promote similar ideas?  We spend so much time focusing on traditional curriculums such as Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. At what point are noncognitive abilities developed for all of our students?  There is AVID, a program for students that help them to develop the academic skills necessary to go to college, but this is not something that is offered to all students.  The noncognitive skills, Paul Tough pointed out based on his analysis of current research, are the skills that people have the most potential to improve throughout their life times.  

When listening to the This American Life episode, I found myself thinking about so many of my students that struggle to control themselves, have behavior and emotional problems and cannot find success in the classroom.  Glass interviewed researchers that discussed what early childhood stress does to a person’s capacity to learn and how that impacts their actions within a traditional classroom setting.  Without knowing the details, I am sure that one too many of my students experience the type of hardship every day that would cause their brains to be unable develop naturally.  As a school system, we must do more for all of our students to learn how to learn and how to develop the personality traits that help to overcome those hardships.  What I am advocating for is more of a focus at the younger levels of a child’s education in developing social skills that will be invaluable throughout a lifetime.  Research shows that if a person understands how skill develops and that talent is in no way natural that he or she is more likely to give greater effort because they believe that those skills are indeed possible for them to learn and not some luck of the draw talent distributed at birth.  What if every 6th grader took a Growth Seminar when entering middle school?  This would be more than just a two week introduction but a class that they went to every single day.   What if instead of reading and math intervention classes established to improve scores on standardized tests, we helped students with developing the essential social skills Tough and so many others in the educational research community advocate?

Change is happening in the educational world but like all change, it is slow.  First it takes academics to share their research, followed by policy change and then finally it makes its way to down to the school districts and the schools.  The road is long and is filled with thorny obstacles much of which unfortunately comes in the form of dollars and private interests.  However, sharing this kind of information at the grassroots level is an important part of change.  Those in positions of power within school districts must begin to see the value in helping our students develop as complete human beings and not simply focus on one aspect of their development. Once they do, our curriculums will begin to reflect the type of complete education that will help young people in every aspect of their lives and not just on challenges that require academic knowledge.  Consider this post part of that grassroots change.  Now I just need to gain an audience.