During my prep period after lunch today, I noticed three students talking in the hallway, not showing any urgency to get to class, for which they were now definitely late. I approached them and asked them to go to class. I was completely ignored, and they continued their conversation.
The issue for me here is not a personal one: I’m not offended or even angry at the students, but I need to make sure they get to class. The fact that they are choosing to ignore me is a frustration in the sense of being a hindrance keeping me from my goal of getting them to class, but I am not feeling frustrated. Nevertheless, I found myself raising my voice to get the students’ attention.
Maybe I was a little annoyed. It would be a lie to say that I don’t have some kind of feeling about any given part of my day, but I’ve become pretty good (I think) at controlling my own emotions and approaching each situation rationally. Sometimes showing anger or disapproval is important for a student to understand that what they’ve done is wrong, but unless this is the case, I keep expression of negative emotions in check as best I can.
The tactic of raising my voice to get the students’ attention worked, but not entirely, of course, as one might wish simply yelling would work. (Wouldn’t life be so much easier if yelling loud enough was all we needed to do to get people to listen?) One student immediately broke off the conversation and went to her class, which was close by. One of the others, Jeffrey (not his real name), took issue with me raising my voice.
“You can’t yell at me like you’re my father,” he told me.
My internal response was to wonder why the student so quickly equates being yelled at to assertion of a paternal role. I thought I might know the reason. I also recognized immediately that raising my voice at a student is never something that I want to do, and tried to think how I could have better gotten their attention; maybe a gentle tap on the shoulder, in hindsight, would have been more effective.
My external response was, with my voice already back at a normal speaking tone, to explain to him that I had tried speaking to them without yelling, but that they had ignored me, so I had to raise my voice. Again, I recognize this is not really the case, but it was the solution I came up with at the time.
“I was talking to somebody,” he said. “You need to wait.”
I was actually impressed with how calmly he said this. Although in my view he was transgressing by being late to class and then disregarding a teacher who was telling him to go to said class, in his own view my interruption was simply rude. I don’t think he was just trying to put me on the defensive; I think he was genuinely upset that I had interrupted their conversation, and felt wronged.
I tried explaining my perspective, that he was late and that the conversation needed to be interrupted if it was preventing him from getting to class. “You’re late for class now, Jeffrey.”
“So the fuck what?” was his response.
Teachers I know, when trying to explain their jobs, often ask other people how they would feel if part of their job involved being sworn at and told to go fuck themselves, possibly on a daily basis, depending on the student population. Probably as a result of the exceptional work that my colleagues do to build relationships with our students, I actually don’t get sworn at often, though students might swear when talking to me. So being told “So the fuck what?” caught me a little off-guard.
“So,” I said, “don’t swear at me, and you need to go to that class.”
“So the fuck what?” he repeated. “There, I said it again.”
I thought it would be a good idea to have a more in-depth conversation than we could have standing in the hallway with one of his friends still standing next to him. I told him we needed to go to the office so we could talk more.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he swore at me again, but when I started walking toward the office, he started following me.
At least, it appeared that he was following me. The student (his girlfriend) who had, a minute ago, gone into her nearby class, had come back out with the rest of the class to go to the library with their teacher. The walk down toward the office was also a time to talk to her more. When we got to the office door and I asked him to come inside with me, he shook his head and continued walking down the hall. I found out later that he did, at least, go to the class he was late for.
I told one of our building leaders about the exchange and wrote up a referral. In the process, I learned that things were a little crazy that day in the office, so I stuck around to help manage things, leaving the matter with Jeffrey unresolved for the time being, but still in the back of my mind. At one point, I saw Jeffrey walking around the office, clearly looking for someone.
It turns out that he had come to the office of his own accord to talk to someone about what had happened in the hallway between the two of us. He found one of my colleagues, and told him in private that he felt bad about swearing at me in the hall, but still felt I shouldn’t have yelled at him. When my colleague told me about this conversation, I was impressed, but I was also worried that Jeffrey might still have hard feelings about it. I asked my colleague if we could call him back down to bury the hatchet, and he agreed.
When Jeffrey showed up, I commended him for taking the initiative and coming to talk to my colleague. I explained again to him why it was that I yelled at him, that it wasn’t because I was mad at him, and that I wasn’t trying to take on the role of his father, nor to assert any undue authority. He listened, nodded quietly, and waited for me to finish.
When I had said my peace, and I felt he had heard me, I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to hear. What he said caught me completely off guard, much more than when he swore at me earlier.
“My uncle died recently, and he was really close to me,” he said. “When we were in the hall earlier, I still had those feelings in my body. I wasn’t really upset at you.”
An hour earlier, I was yelling at this student, telling him to get to class, and now I was watching him explain with a self-awareness and an honesty that most adults do not possess how the death of his uncle made him angry at a teacher.
I felt humbled.
“I’m so sorry for you loss,” I told Jeffrey. “And I’m really proud of you for having the self-awareness to acknowledge how it’s affecting you.”
The conversation continued a bit further, and my colleague spoke to Jeffrey as well, praising him for being honest and true to himself. He told Jeffrey that he knew what he was going through. He alluded to Jeffrey suffering another loss recently, and that it was unfair that he had to endure both of these.
Tears silently rolled down Jeffrey’s cheeks. I knew that yelling at him hadn’t caused those tears, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. I did feel better though that now Jeffrey had seen that it was safe to talk to me, or to my colleague, about something personal that has affected him, and that we’ll be there to listen.
Sometimes the job of a teacher is to teach. Other times, maybe most of the time, it’s more important just to listen.
The author of this article failed to obtain permission from school brass to write a regular classroom diary for the Independent. Following are some samples of a public school classroom diary that ran in the independent in the 2005-06 school year, with the teacher’s name and school published (and students’ identities protected). More than 50 installments of the diary were published, prompting extensive discussion among readers. Administrators OK’d that regular diary; that was before the district launched a “reform” initiative that promised increased “transparency” and “accountability” about what happens in New Haven schools:
• Brinn’s Bracelets
• A Hand Across Generations
• “I Rep The Ville”
• PTO Whoa
• Good Vibrations
• “Miss” Gets Mad