“Who do you all think you are?” I leveled this accusation posed as a question to the first class of 8th graders I ever taught during the first semester of the first year of my teaching career. The recollection of this moment still makes my stomach twist and starts me muttering “what was I thinking?” and “you truly were an idiot, Ian…” What was the sin committed by this hapless group of barely-teenagers to elicit such a withering opening line, delivered with a look of utter contempt, and followed by an equally vitriolic monologue? They had not studied adequately for their test on the US Constitution and half the class failed as a result. My interpretation of their test grades was that our exceptional founding document and the venerable men who crafted it were not important enough to matter to these entitled and unserious brats who had clearly blown off studying out of a lack of respect for such sacred subject matter. Hence my indignant excoriation.
The humiliating truth of this situation was that I had no experience teaching or making assessments, and so the travesty-of-a-test I put in front of my students guaranteed that half of them would fail, regardless of how well they prepared. Through conversations with other, wiser teachers I realized that my poor students were not wholly responsible for the poor performance, so I apologized for my denunciation of them and they did much better on the next test. Recently, I was reflecting on my school’s culture of discipline and teaching and this regrettable memory sprang to mind again. As I reflected it struck me that indignation was a common emotion for me to feel in response to either students’ poor behavior or some (real or perceived) disrespect shown toward the content of my classes. After thinking about this fact, I decided it needed to change.
There are, to be sure, incidents that call for a strength of condemnation which can only be realized through strong emotions, but these are truly rare in my experience. Young or new teachers may be especially prone to a knee-jerk response of indignation, as I was in my early years, because strength of condemnation often substitutes for a lack of relational capital that teachers would otherwise call on in an appeal to students. This topic may, then, be nothing new to most seasoned teachers, and I am only chancing upon this revelation now because I am finally reaching pedagogical maturity, but it doesn’t hurt being reminded of truths like this, especially in the cold months of the year. So, for anyone it would edify, here are a few arguments against indignation.
Responding emotionally, especially with anger, hinders the restoration of relationship between student and teacher after an incident has been handled. It takes shockingly little for a student to come to the idea that a teacher does not like them. A student of mine a few years ago thought I disliked her because she struggled in my class and often failed major assessments. Her mental calculus presumed that because I love teaching and I love my subject matter, I couldn’t possibly love a student who struggled with the content and who did not enjoy it as a result. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but it was instructive in helping me understand the psyche of a young student. It is difficult not to equate a grade on a paper with the affection (or lack thereof) of the grade-giver. How much harder is it to not equate the anger or annoyance expressed at an act with the one who acted?
Obviously the relationship between teacher and student is more than the sum total of their disciplinary conversations, and my experience has been that students are more gracious than I assume, so no relationship is lost over one lapse of emotional control. But if our end goal is to bring students who have broken rules or trust back into right-relationship with their peers and teachers, that will only be hindered by an indignant response to their behavior. Correction delivered with dispassion and love maintains, and even strengthens, the relationship between teacher and student. And the love of and for another person remains the most powerful motive for change and moral improvement in human beings.
Beyond the relational cost, we forget the purpose of rules and policies, and undermine our own authority by allowing our emotions to drive our response to behavior. We have rules and policies in place as an intermediary between us and our students- it is not about whether they upset us, frustrate us, or make us mad, it’s about whether or not a rule was broken. In situations like this, there is (or should be) a prescribed disciplinary action or consequence for the breaking of a given rule. With that being the case, the consequence is already taken care of and we can let go of the idea that we need to additionally “punish” a student through our words in addressing it with them. The rule allows for dispassion without the sacrifice of accountability; for teachers to discipline fairly without damaging the relationship with a student.
Now, of course there are behaviors and ways of acting which do not break a specific rule or policy, but which we still hold to be wrong (disrespect, for example, comes in many modes). Still, our schools are built upon a foundation of virtue and a standard of comportment which the virtues call us to. If a student disrespects me, I do not have to become angry or feel insulted. I merely hold their behavior up to the standard of Courtesy and Charity which we hold our whole community to in their relations with one another. Wherever their behavior fails to meet the high call of virtue, there is room for a conversation about what kind of actions, habits, and modes of thinking they should cultivate in themselves in order to acquire the virtue more fully. When we fail to respond with dispassion and an appeal to an objective standard, we enter an emotional contest in which the criteria for right behavior quickly becomes whatever I want as opposed to what we are all called to by the standard of virtue. When this happens, we alienate our students from us and make it less likely that they will see us as sources of moral authority and instruction, thus defeating the intended purpose of our rules, the virtues, and the conversations we have with our students about them.
As classical educators the work of virtue and character education accounts for at least half of what we are concerned with teaching our students. The weightiness of this responsibility can often lead to an overly serious and solemn tone in how we talk about virtue, right and wrong, and cultivating strong character. To be sure, it is a weighty thing and it is a serious thing. But we should be cautious not to let the seriousness of the work make the practice of it severe to the point of being inhumane. A proper perspective on student culture and virtue education has to begin with a recognition of the basic facts: 1) students who require the most discipline and moral formation often dislike school 2) as a result of that, they will often break the rules and norms of our schools, and 3) like all human beings they will often resist correction and reject the admonishments of their correctors. The work and mission of our schools is so obviously a good thing to us as educators, I think we can sometimes forget that it is not so obvious to our students. To some it is obvious, but most students have to be coached and convinced over time and through engagement with our curriculum and our teachers. Remembering this fact and making it our baseline operating assumption changes the perspective on student behavior and how we respond to it. We know students are going to cut corners, they won’t wear the uniform to our standards perfectly, they’re going to blow off work, they’re going to cheat at times, and they will be disrespectful and sometimes outright defiant. Knowing and acknowledging that this is part of the reality of our work does not mean accepting it as a fact of life to live with- a central tenet of our schools is, after all, that human character requires active formation and that through that activity it can be improved. What it does allow is for us to take these lapses of virtue and flaws of character as part of our educational routine, in the same way we know that some students will grasp concepts quickly and others will not. One is an academic need and the other is character, but both require the same thing: teaching and instruction on how to do better.
If we frame this aspect of our work in this way, our posture toward behavior will allow us to condemn poor behavior with dispassion, correct the student in love, and set the foundation for a stronger teacher-student relationship in the future. I often remark to teachers that the greatest aid we have at our disposal for teaching students anything is their love for us as their teachers. We believe our schools are joyful places defined by humane experience and relationship between teachers and students, so our role as teachers must be one defined by love for our students for the sake of their intellectual and moral improvement. If this kind of love, for people, for curriculum, and for real goodness and virtue, can be the defining characteristic of a school’s culture, the end of the education we hope to give students will be assured.
