You are the Grown-up

During a recent classroom observation, I experience particular annoyance with a group of students who seemed ostentatiously inattentive during instruction.  At very long last, the teacher gently requested that they stop talking while she was talking.  Unsurprisingly, the request was not honored.

In our post-observation conference, I asked her, “Did you notice they were talking before you said anything to them?” 

“A little bit.”

“Why didn’t you say something the first time?”

“I don’t want to be mean!”

I asked her, “If you were a parent, and your three-year old wanted to switch to an all-candy diet, would it be mean to refuse?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not good for them.”

“Right.  And it’s not good for your kids if they don’t listen while you teach.”

She thought about it, nodded, and then admitted, “I guess I’m just afraid of what they might do if I try to make them behave.”

In an attempt to establish some common ground, I shared with her that in the early years of my teaching career, I was often intimidated by the more confident students.  They triggered a lot of old anxieties from my own high school career.  I confessed to Kiley, “I wasn’t very popular in high school.”

“I was bullied in high school.”

And there it was, the source of the problem.  Kiley was regressing in her own classroom, turning back into the shy, frightened 14-year old who was taunted by her classmates. 

Many of us go into the profession without realizing how much adolescent baggage we carry with us.  And if we don’t make ourselves aware of how our past impinges on our present, we can buy ourselves all manner of trouble.   

For myself, teaching was a way to rewrite my teenage experience and cast myself as one of the popular kids.  The high-water mark of my career had to be the day I walked past a few members of the men’s chorus, and they spontaneously broke into a four-part harmony rendition of Oh, Teitelbaum!  If forced to choose, I suppose I’d rather be respected than liked, but I liked being liked.  And that led me to make choices that were very much not in my students’ best interests.

When working with beginning teachers, I counsel that most behavioral problems stem from a single issue: the students' lack of respect for them.  “You are the grown-up now!” I explain.  “Even if you don’t feel like a grown-up—especially if you don’t feel like a grown-up—you need to fake it until you do.  Put your hair in a bun, slip on a pair of high heels, and stand in front of the mirror saying ‘I am the grown-up.  I am the grown-up.  This is what I look like when I say, “I am the grown-up,!”’” Of course, it is difficult to be a successful grown-up if you’re still fighting adolescent wars. 

The first step in any recovery program is to acknowledge you have a problem.  To do that, you have to become aware of the problem. I think it would be good practice for every young middle and high school teacher to write their autobiographies, giving particular attention to those aspects of their educational experiences that were not pleasant, not successful.  In this way, we can begin to identify hot buttons and subjectivities that might otherwise remain shadowed, subverting our best efforts to make school better for those we teach than it was for us.

Remember to breathe in and out, (repeat as necessary)--

Dr. Deb