Teachers vs. Students Part I

The other day in class, I was sitting in the back as the students were muddling through an open mic session, reading their pieces, commenting on others’ and sitting very still, hoping I wouldn’t notice the fact that they were not taking a risk and getting up in front of the class to read a poem or essay they wrote and hope is good enough for others to hear. On this day, as the class period was winding down and those slouching, hoping-to-be-invisible students were feeling better by telling themselves there wasn’t enough time for them to read, a student strode up to the front and prefaced her piece with, “no offense, Trovato.” I figured she had improvised a story with me as a character and an absurd plot making me out to be either the villain or the foolish hero. Instead she read a rant. Against me.

As a sophomore struggling through a geometry class, I remember my teacher, though I can’t remember his name. He was a short, red-haired, green-eyed leprechaun of a man. Even his voice was a bit high pitched. He thought himself a comedian and spent much of the class time gently poking the students with his wit. I remember one day he took out a baseball and tossed it to each student as a signal for them to answer his query. It was a unique move to me at the time and I thought it was clever, and since I liked baseball, I enjoyed that day, even though I was a disaster at geometry. And I wasn’t the only one, lots of students were struggling in the class. One day I remember we were reviewing for a test later in the week and a student asked the teacher a question which the teacher did not answer but made a joke. I don’t remember if the joke was on the student or about the material, but I would guess it was a about the student not knowing the answer, because after the joke, the student gathered his books, got up from his desk and walked towards the door. Talk about cognitive dissonance! I watched in complete disbelief, not sure of how to make sense of what was happening. And to add to my shock, as the student walked out of the room in the middle of class, he said to the teacher, “you’re a real jerk, you know that?” I was shocked, and I’m pretty confident the whole class was. None of us were ready to believe that a student could talk like that to a teacher, let alone walk out and not be sent to the dean. I have to believe that even the teacher was shocked and as I watched his face when the boy told him that, I could see a brief moment of pain, as if he didn’t mean to hurt the boy and felt bad that he did. My sophomore self was in silent shock and I didn’t know how to respond or what to think, but I did feel bad for the student, and bad for the teacher, who I didn’t think meant to offend him. But I was also introduced to righteous anger—he had every right to be angry, and though he didn’t have to walk out or call the teacher a jerk, there was a justification to those things and a respect I felt for his courage in doing both.

Now that I’m a teacher, I’ve had my share of dealing with angry students. There are those that have had a bad time throughout their school career and just don’t buy in to the game of school. These are difficult to deal with because it’s almost impossible to get them to buy into it and there is no way to change their behavior unless they do buy into it. The one way I’ve been partially successful with these students is to get them to buy into me as a person, and then into the class. But that can be a long process and it’s not always successful and rarely lasting. The other type of angry student I’ve encountered is the one that does buy into the idea of education and schooling but not into my idea of it. While this is difficult, it’s also the most rewarding because it forces me to reconsider my assumptions about what teaching means. In the past 10 years, I’ve been called an asshole, a bitch, I’ve been told students learn more when I don’t talk, I’ve been told that my class sucked, that it was too easy, too hard, too boring, too laid back, too planned out. Over the years, I’ve learned to take these criticism in stride, I’ve learned not to take too personally what students say about me or my class, because the relationship between teacher and student is naturally adversarial. I mean teachers are judgers, and while we purport to only evaluate what the student produces, and not the student, the student, caught in the grips of adolescence ,feels judged and will inevitably strike back. And most often they strike the soft spot. It’s amazing just how perceptive teenagers can be. For as much as they seem so wrapped up in their own insecurities that they notice nothing about the world around them, they are pros at sniffing out the insecurities of others and attacking them with pinpoint accuracy. And no one is spared, not even teachers.