Where do you direct your displeasure?
Think back to grade school. It doesn’t matter which grade-at least, in my experience, it didn’t.
Recall the unruly student in the classroom that was constantly provoking the teacher, disrupting the class, and so on. If you were at all like me, you would love nothing more than to throw them out of the classroom. Whether the material was boring or not, they weren’t making your life or the lives of your friends any easier by slowing down how fast the class got through it. Maybe they had a psychological issue that caused their behavior, a reason to be sympathetic to their plight if not their behavior. All the same, they were causing trouble.
Now think back to the reaction of your teacher. Do you remember when the teacher would threaten to punish the whole class if the unruly student acted up again? The idea, it seems to me, is to exert the pressure of the unruly student’s peers into cowing the student’s behavior; that the threat of social ostracizing will dispense with the outbursts. In some contexts, this can work. In one recent conversation I had wherein I posed this precise scenario, the person pointed out that the military often uses this sort of threat of punishment to great effect because unit cohesion is central to survival in a combat environment. That was an excellent point. Does it apply to a bunch of children? Probably not - this was both my conclusion and also the independent conclusion of the individual who brought up the military example.
The unruly student, of course, didn’t care. They acted out again and the class as a whole received punishment for the actions of the individual. Perhaps on rare occasion, this threat worked. More likely, it elicited an even larger outburst from the student collective, attempting to shout down the unruly student and tell them to knock it off. The ostensible goal of the teacher, classroom order, was rarely achieved in any case. The punishment occurred. Everyone paid the price for the individual’s actions.
Who were you mad at?
Was it the unruly student, for persisting in a pattern that now had consequences for everyone? Or was it the teacher, for resorting to a punishment that did not actually achieve the desired goal of an orderly classroom nor dissuade the unruly student’s future behavior?
If you were/are at all like me, or the other individual to whom I posed this question, you had a measure of blame for both.
Surely, the unruly student acted in a way to bring about the consequences you now faced. They did not endear themselves to you by doing so and, had they not engaged in the behavior, you would not now be facing whatever punishment the teacher had concocted.
The unruly student needed specific, targeted effort on behalf of someone who could get inside their head and understand where the behavior came from. Maybe they were dealing with a broken home, maybe they had a severe chemical imbalance, maybe they were a drug addict and dealing with side-effects or even symptoms of withdrawal. Any number of explanations, reasons for the behavior. Maybe they just wanted attention. Maybe they had some history of abuse or damage and acting out gave them a feeling of control. In short, they needed someone to understand and help.
So, if you were like me, you also blamed the teacher for resorting to that sort of tactic. It wouldn’t work; they knew it, you knew it, the unruly student knew it. The teacher, in punishing everyone, was failing everyone in their role. Again, sometimes it worked. Usually, at least for me, it engendered a pretty strong bitterness at the teacher. “Why would you punish me for the acts of someone else that I, generally, can’t control or exert influence over? Why would you punish me for someone whose behavior is emphatically not my responsibility? Why would you punish me when I did nothing wrong?” So embittered, I was far less likely to absorb whatever nominal lesson the teacher had planned for the day and, depending on how long the bitterness lasted, that teacher might have even lost me in perpetuity. I say this as someone who found it shocking to not see an “A” on a report card. I liked school. I liked learning stuff from teachers. Something like this could completely shut me off from a teacher, though.
Food for thought.
Mirrored from Ryan McClure.