Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.
–Don Quixote
Teaching is a life-long moral quest. You never have it exactly right.
–Nel Noddings
Open Mouth, Insert Foot
My third school in as many years and once again, I found myself confronting a room full of people wondering “who the heck is this guy?”
To make matters worse, I was a last-minute replacement for a highly beloved and effective teacher who had left in the middle of the summer for a more alluring position at one of the area private schools. So I was getting a lot of angry scowls and suspicious glares in addition to the usual expressions of curiosity. These were “her” AP biology students who had signed up simply because “she” taught it, and there was a distinct air of sedition in the room: “where’s Mrs. Sparrow and who the hell does this guy think he is standing there instead?”
It didn’t help that I had these people for the next two hours–and would every day! Nor did it help that I had never taught the course before in my life and had no experience of any kind in urban schools. The whole situation was as foreign to my experience as snow is to the Sahara, and I suspected that I now knew how the wildebeest feels when it sees hyenas on the horizon.
The irony was that this made the second year in a row that I had had to fill the shoes of someone who had been an “institution” at her institution; so you would think by now I’d be used to walking into the proverbial lions’ den. But since I had just quit the Archdiocesan school under exactly the same circumstances that my current predecessor had left here, I was feeling a little guilty and wondering whether this particular “den” wasn’t my karmic payback. But with my student loan situation, I could not turn down the additional $11,000 in salary of a public school.
Looking out at all the resentment in the room, all I could think was “Scheiße!”
“Good afternoon everyone.” I finally said. “My name is Mr. Brock, and while I know I’m not who you expected to see, I will be your AP biology teacher this year.”
There was a general rustling and some murmuring as they stirred at the finality of my announcement. But everyone stayed seated, and I thought, “well, no rioting yet.”
I picked up the attendance sheet and made a decision.
“Because I am new to all of you and you are new to all of me,” I began, “I would like to ask you to please stand up when I call your name, rather than simply raising you hand. It will allow me to remember who you are sooner.”
Several of them deliberately slumped lower in their seats in preparation for rebellion.
“In return,” I continued. “You are free to ask me any question about myself–any question–and I will promise to answer it, no matter what you would like to know about me.”
There was again a general rustling, and a more experienced teacher would have sensed that I’d just made things worse, not better with that announcement. But I had successfully used this question-answer process to start building positive working relationships with every other class during my first two years of teaching, and it simply didn’t occur to me that the culture of Southern civility or the religious character of a parochial school might have inhibited what my previous students had felt comfortable asking. In this environment, though, I had just effectively given a room full of angry teens carte blanche to vent their resentment any way they wanted, and I was about to pay for my hubris.
“Oh, please also know,” I said, finishing my instructions. “That I assure you that I did not wake up this morning asking myself how I could mispronounce your name; so if I do, I apologize in advance. Please simply tell me how to say it correctly–or if you prefer I call you something else, tell me that, and I will gladly do so from here on out.”
I paused and then started to take roll.
“Aaron?”
“Here.” A gangly boy with brown hair said, raising his hand.
I frowned a little at him and gave the universal gesture for “stand up.”
He remained rooted for a defiant moment and then shrugged his shoulders.
“Fine.” He muttered as he stood up.
“Thank you, Aaron.” I said. I studied him intently for a few seconds and silently mouthed his name to myself. Then I nodded at him. “So, what would you like to ask?”
He gave me a look that said “okay, sure, I’ll play your silly game” and said “where did you go to school?”
“I went to Washington University here in St. Louis.” I answered.
He sat down, disinterested, and I looked at the next name.
“Andrea?”
“It’s An-dray-uh,” replied a young African-American woman sullenly. “But I go by ‘Andi’.”
“Thank you, Andi.” I made a note on my sheet. “What’s your question?”
“I don’t know….” She responded with mild exasperation. “Um…do you have a pet?”
“Yes.” I replied. “I have two dogs, Pepper and Bailey.”
She sat down in a disinterested huff as well, and it went on like that for quite a few more students before I came to the name of a particularly angry looking young woman at the back of the room. I would discover later that she had been especially close to Mrs. Sparrow and felt extremely betrayed by her decision to leave. But at the moment, I was the only adult target available, and I was about to pull the pin on a grenade.
“Michelle?” I asked, looking around for her.
“Here.” She answered, standing dramatically, hands on hips. “And my question is this: how old were you when you lost your virginity?”
There were a few brief snickers, but they disappeared rapidly in the ensuing absolute silence. Thirty pairs of eyes studied me closely, and I knew the tenor of this class for the entire rest of the year depended on what I chose to do in the next thirty seconds.
Michelle sneered. “Well? You did say any question.” She challenged.
Yes, I thought; yes, I did, and I plunged into the abyss.
The Razor’s Edge
In spite of the fact that our society looks upon teachers as its “professional adults,” the people who “model for our children the values and norms that we ordinary adults rarely enact consistently in our own lives,”1 everyone who has ever taught has participated in the kind of toxic encounter I had with Michelle all those years ago. Even now, whenever I recall it–or any of the humiliating others like it–I find myself wanting to apologize to every student I ever taught for my pathetic inadequacy as a human being, let alone as an educator. To this day, I still don’t know which was worse: that I sanctioned totally inexcusable behavior by responding, that I answered such an inappropriate question at all, or that I lied while doing so–something I suspect the students knew even then.
Yet as lamentable as my encounter with Michelle was, I share it because it is a marvelous example of the challenge that can come from living out our full humanity with our students. The authentically engaged teacher must walk a very narrow ridge to generate appropriately intimate rapport with his or her students, and whenever he or she stumbles off to one side or the other–even a little–his or her effectiveness as an educator falters. On the side of familiarity, it can be as innocuous a few steps as acting “cool” so the students will like you, or it can be as extreme a tumble as devouring children through sexual predation. On the side of aloofness, it can again be an inoffensive couple of paces such as failing to put a gold star on a child’s paper to say “good job!” or it can be the severe crash of a teacher I once knew who did nothing but sit at his desk reading his newspaper in every class while his students silently completed vocabulary worksheets. Either way, even a little loss of the “ecological” balance in the relationship between teacher and student sabotages the learning environment and invites the kind of “toxic waste” I created in my AP class that first day and which I spent the rest of the year (ultimately successfully) cleaning up.
What good teaching demands, then, is that we walk a razor thin line between constructing the connections with our students we need to engage them in meaningful dialogue and erecting the necessary barriers to force them to take responsibility for their share of that dialogue. We must seek an almost yin/yang balance–what the Buddhists would term “the middle way”–between appropriate intimacy and authoritarian indifference if we really want to engage students effectively in our classrooms. Furthermore, only if we employ this notion of the “authoritative centrist” who can and does “emphasize both caring and responsibility”2 can we maintain the equilibrium we seek and achieve the necessary balance of “nurture, structure, and latitude”3 that are the heart of good teaching and learning. Only then can we correctly handle the inherent challenges that come with being fully human with our students.
For example, if we now look back on what happened between me and Michelle, we can see that in my efforts to nurture the trust in me those students needed to cope with their woundedness, I provided too much latitude in my openness to potential rapport between us. When Michelle then took advantage of that, I failed to provide the necessary structure to disengage and re-establish appropriate boundaries and to make her responsible for a poor choice. What needed to happen was that as I opened up the opportunity for my students to begin to know me, I needed in my language and tone to set the parameters for what sorts of questions were acceptable, and when they pushed back to test the limits of that freedom, I needed to gently but firmly demand that my students meet my expectations about the character of the conversation. In the case of Michelle, that could have been as simple as asking her whether she thought that the information she sought was something a teacher should share with a student–particularly a male teacher with a female student. But regardless of how I did it, I should have redefined the acceptable latitude in that situation by reasserting the necessary structure needed to nurture successfully the new positive relationships I was trying to establish in the first place.
Of course, what I have just described is probably one of the single most incredibly challenging and difficult courses of action to accomplish that humans attempt. In fact, what took sixteen years in the classroom for me to analyze properly and over an hour for me to write about accurately is a balancing act every teacher must do in fractions of seconds almost every moment for several hours a day for 180+ days a year. Only emergency room physicians, I have heard it said, make more judgment calls in a work day than the average teacher does. Thus, to do it well, with conscious deliberation and self-awareness, borders on the insurmountable. It is why I believe even mediocre teachers who make a career of it deserve beatification and the good ones deserve permanent installation in the pantheon.
Short of armed combat, policing, and fire-fighting, I do not think there is anything as demanding, exhausting, and potentially risky as good teaching. In our imperfect humanity, we will regularly fall off to one side or the other the razors edge we must walk in this profession. But what distinguishes good teaching is the commitment to risk cutting one’s self time and again for the sake of genuine learning in the classroom. As Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot reminds us, “the terrain [in teaching] is difficult because the signposts are not always clear and because productive encounters require the balancing and embracing of stark conditions.”4
What characterizes the authentically engaged teacher is how successfully he or she navigates these conditions.
Light a Candle 