It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Just as there are students whose brilliance I cannot even hope to attribute to my teaching skill and instead I simply enjoy knowing, there are other students who are - to put it lightly - a challenge.
One student in particular I knew would be of the latter variety after one class. He's got a mouth full of metal (and not from braces; from neglected teeth and an unchecked fondness for gum) and an unkind word for everyone and everything. He picks fights, he answers questions about his future with "I want to be a killer" or "I will go to jail," he flips the bird, slips curse words into class dialogue, often refuses to participate in class activies, and - above all - absolutely revels in his negativity.
He sounds like a nightmare, right?
He's actually one of my favorites, and not because I like dealing with his relentless anger at the world. And certainly not because he likes me. Many days, in fact, he hates me and makes no secret of it.
I like him because he is not a bad kid. He's a kid who is teetering on the brink of becoming a bad kid, but his potential peeks through the clouds like shafts of sunlight, and I know that the clouds are the smokescreen he has created to protect himself. From what, I don't know exactly, but it is clear that his home life is less than nurturing. All of the parental influence, support, love and encouragement that is evident in everything Eric says and does is completely absent from Mike's environment. This angry, hateful demeanor he has developed is his only way of handling the lack of these things... and he is still young enough and impressionable enough to occasionally indulge those natural childish cravings for affection and approval. He reacts to my positive reinforcement and praise like a starving person to food, and it not a small bit heartbreaking to watch.
Mike is part of a class of the most talkative girls I've yet encountered, for whom no subject is taboo and about which I often discuss concepts like fairness and honesty and duty. These discussions are often precipitated by conflicts that they bring into the classroom, and on one occasion we were discussing (indirectly) the idea of free will. I was telling them (for about the 100th time) that if another student says or does something bad to them, they should walk away and/or tell a teacher rather than retaliate, because the person who hurt them did a bad thing, but it would still be a bad thing for them to be hurtful in return. (This fairly simplistic morality applies pretty much without exception to gradeschool conflicts.) I was explaining that every person can make a choice about what they do, and if many people choose to do good things, the school will be mostly happy, but if many people choose to do bad things, we will be unhappy (again, simplified, but it works in our little microcosm). Mike, in typical Mike fashion, raises his little hand to contribute what I was certain would be a snide comment, but when I call on him instead he says with perfect, mournful earnesty in broken English - "Me. Ten years. Age. In ten years, no happy."
I was speechless. I almost cried. The poor damn kid. All I could do was tell him, "Well, I hope this is a happy place for you, Mike."
I wonder sometimes if I am making things more difficult for him, by showing him the way things could be; it confuses him sometimes, and at other times it makes him angrier and more aware of the gulf between most people's reality and his. I wonder if the droplets of good I am able to rain on him are falling into a vast ocean of their opposite; that happiness/fairness/affection/encouragement is the drizzle and negativity is the deluge. But then I think of the old parable of the young boy throwing starfish back into the ocean who declares, when confronted by a cynical adult who tells him he can never make a difference considering the vast number of beached starfish, "Well, I made a difference to that one." In this instance the starfish are not people, but injections of positivity. Does every little bit help? I try to operate as if that's true with Mike, because the childish sweetness I see in fleeting moments is worth preserving and nurturing.
What are theses glimmers of goodness, you might ask? Well they are well disguised, but I'll try to give you some examples. Mike has a driving need to ask "why" about everything, and not in that rhetorical, annoying way of young children. He truly wants to understand why I do things the way I do, either because I'm different from the other authority figures in his life or because no one has ever bothered to answer him when he asks, and I do. Today I was checking his MyWord book (the students have to write a new vocabulary word and its meaning in it every day), which I had made for him because he lost his previous one. I noticed a loose staple on it and remarked about how it was dangerous as I was fixing it. He asked me why I cared if the staple cut him. He seriously asked me why I cared if he got hurt. When I told him that I care because I like him, because he is my student and I want him to be safe and happy and nothing he can do or say will make me stop wanting those things for him, he got a little teary-eyed and wouldn't look at me.
This is a tactic I use a lot with Mike - when he does or says something in full expectation of anger or punishment, I stop, tell him that I feel sad and disappointed when he behaves this way, warn him that if he continues to choose to do this there will be a consequence, and remind him that I like him and I want him to choose to do the right thing. This reaction usually baffles him so completely that he subsides or occasionally, galvanized, steps up his participation, volunteering to answer questions and read.
The challenge that Mike presents forces me to be creative about my discipline. Yelling, telling him I'm angry, and using traditional methods of punishment have a profoundly alienating effect on Mike, thereby compounding the behavior I'm trying to stop. When Mike says or does something negative, rather than punishing him by sending him to be intimidated by the Senior Teacher or the Director, I sit with him during break and make him write nice sentences about everyone in the class. Mike faithfully maintains the pretense of hating this and does not hesitate to tell me that his sentences are not sincere. I tell him that it doesn't matter if he is sincere; he needs to learn that doing a bad thing has consequences and in my class that consequence is that he must practice thinking nice things. Amazingly, this is far more effective in curbing his negative behavior than any number of disapproving looks, trips to Mr. Thompson's office, or breaks spent in corners. In fact, it sometimes encourages his inner sweetheart to surface. Today he delivered a list that included me for the first time: "Ms. Walton is very, very good." And this after he struggled in his limited vocabulary to make it very clear to me that when he had made a punching gesture earlier in class, it was directed at a fellow student and not to me as it had appeared. (Enter the necessity to explain to him that I'm glad he wasn't making punching motions at me, but it's still wrong to make punching motions at anyone...)
What else makes me think this kid isn't just destined for jail? Mike listens so attentively when we discuss ideas like fairness, struggling to understand as if he has never seen such a thing in practice or dared to imagine that he could deserve it. He has, upon realizing that I am not doing to react with anger to his outbursts, contritely come to me after class and apologized for doing whatever it was that he did to disrupt the class.
I know there's about a 0.01% chance that he'll ever trust me enough to depend on me the way he clearly can't depend on anyone in his life, but sometimes all I want to do is just give the poor kid a hug. Just look him in the eye and tell him he's worth something, he's worth loving, and no failures will destroy that and no successes will guarantee it -- and have him really understand. Sometimes I wish hugs could cure everything:
"I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins."
~ Shel Silverstein
But since that's clearly not going to happen in anywhere except my fantasy hippie land, I'll just keep on keepin' on and hope it helps, if even just a little.
One student in particular I knew would be of the latter variety after one class. He's got a mouth full of metal (and not from braces; from neglected teeth and an unchecked fondness for gum) and an unkind word for everyone and everything. He picks fights, he answers questions about his future with "I want to be a killer" or "I will go to jail," he flips the bird, slips curse words into class dialogue, often refuses to participate in class activies, and - above all - absolutely revels in his negativity.
He sounds like a nightmare, right?
He's actually one of my favorites, and not because I like dealing with his relentless anger at the world. And certainly not because he likes me. Many days, in fact, he hates me and makes no secret of it.
I like him because he is not a bad kid. He's a kid who is teetering on the brink of becoming a bad kid, but his potential peeks through the clouds like shafts of sunlight, and I know that the clouds are the smokescreen he has created to protect himself. From what, I don't know exactly, but it is clear that his home life is less than nurturing. All of the parental influence, support, love and encouragement that is evident in everything Eric says and does is completely absent from Mike's environment. This angry, hateful demeanor he has developed is his only way of handling the lack of these things... and he is still young enough and impressionable enough to occasionally indulge those natural childish cravings for affection and approval. He reacts to my positive reinforcement and praise like a starving person to food, and it not a small bit heartbreaking to watch.
Mike is part of a class of the most talkative girls I've yet encountered, for whom no subject is taboo and about which I often discuss concepts like fairness and honesty and duty. These discussions are often precipitated by conflicts that they bring into the classroom, and on one occasion we were discussing (indirectly) the idea of free will. I was telling them (for about the 100th time) that if another student says or does something bad to them, they should walk away and/or tell a teacher rather than retaliate, because the person who hurt them did a bad thing, but it would still be a bad thing for them to be hurtful in return. (This fairly simplistic morality applies pretty much without exception to gradeschool conflicts.) I was explaining that every person can make a choice about what they do, and if many people choose to do good things, the school will be mostly happy, but if many people choose to do bad things, we will be unhappy (again, simplified, but it works in our little microcosm). Mike, in typical Mike fashion, raises his little hand to contribute what I was certain would be a snide comment, but when I call on him instead he says with perfect, mournful earnesty in broken English - "Me. Ten years. Age. In ten years, no happy."
I was speechless. I almost cried. The poor damn kid. All I could do was tell him, "Well, I hope this is a happy place for you, Mike."
I wonder sometimes if I am making things more difficult for him, by showing him the way things could be; it confuses him sometimes, and at other times it makes him angrier and more aware of the gulf between most people's reality and his. I wonder if the droplets of good I am able to rain on him are falling into a vast ocean of their opposite; that happiness/fairness/affection/encouragement is the drizzle and negativity is the deluge. But then I think of the old parable of the young boy throwing starfish back into the ocean who declares, when confronted by a cynical adult who tells him he can never make a difference considering the vast number of beached starfish, "Well, I made a difference to that one." In this instance the starfish are not people, but injections of positivity. Does every little bit help? I try to operate as if that's true with Mike, because the childish sweetness I see in fleeting moments is worth preserving and nurturing.
What are theses glimmers of goodness, you might ask? Well they are well disguised, but I'll try to give you some examples. Mike has a driving need to ask "why" about everything, and not in that rhetorical, annoying way of young children. He truly wants to understand why I do things the way I do, either because I'm different from the other authority figures in his life or because no one has ever bothered to answer him when he asks, and I do. Today I was checking his MyWord book (the students have to write a new vocabulary word and its meaning in it every day), which I had made for him because he lost his previous one. I noticed a loose staple on it and remarked about how it was dangerous as I was fixing it. He asked me why I cared if the staple cut him. He seriously asked me why I cared if he got hurt. When I told him that I care because I like him, because he is my student and I want him to be safe and happy and nothing he can do or say will make me stop wanting those things for him, he got a little teary-eyed and wouldn't look at me.
This is a tactic I use a lot with Mike - when he does or says something in full expectation of anger or punishment, I stop, tell him that I feel sad and disappointed when he behaves this way, warn him that if he continues to choose to do this there will be a consequence, and remind him that I like him and I want him to choose to do the right thing. This reaction usually baffles him so completely that he subsides or occasionally, galvanized, steps up his participation, volunteering to answer questions and read.
The challenge that Mike presents forces me to be creative about my discipline. Yelling, telling him I'm angry, and using traditional methods of punishment have a profoundly alienating effect on Mike, thereby compounding the behavior I'm trying to stop. When Mike says or does something negative, rather than punishing him by sending him to be intimidated by the Senior Teacher or the Director, I sit with him during break and make him write nice sentences about everyone in the class. Mike faithfully maintains the pretense of hating this and does not hesitate to tell me that his sentences are not sincere. I tell him that it doesn't matter if he is sincere; he needs to learn that doing a bad thing has consequences and in my class that consequence is that he must practice thinking nice things. Amazingly, this is far more effective in curbing his negative behavior than any number of disapproving looks, trips to Mr. Thompson's office, or breaks spent in corners. In fact, it sometimes encourages his inner sweetheart to surface. Today he delivered a list that included me for the first time: "Ms. Walton is very, very good." And this after he struggled in his limited vocabulary to make it very clear to me that when he had made a punching gesture earlier in class, it was directed at a fellow student and not to me as it had appeared. (Enter the necessity to explain to him that I'm glad he wasn't making punching motions at me, but it's still wrong to make punching motions at anyone...)
What else makes me think this kid isn't just destined for jail? Mike listens so attentively when we discuss ideas like fairness, struggling to understand as if he has never seen such a thing in practice or dared to imagine that he could deserve it. He has, upon realizing that I am not doing to react with anger to his outbursts, contritely come to me after class and apologized for doing whatever it was that he did to disrupt the class.
I know there's about a 0.01% chance that he'll ever trust me enough to depend on me the way he clearly can't depend on anyone in his life, but sometimes all I want to do is just give the poor kid a hug. Just look him in the eye and tell him he's worth something, he's worth loving, and no failures will destroy that and no successes will guarantee it -- and have him really understand. Sometimes I wish hugs could cure everything:
"I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins."
~ Shel Silverstein
But since that's clearly not going to happen in anywhere except my fantasy hippie land, I'll just keep on keepin' on and hope it helps, if even just a little.