Behavior Is Information

We teachers engage in bravado around our abilities to control the behavior of our students. Teachers in conversation with other teachers will brag about how well they control their classes. They have rules such as "show respect".  I have that rule. I also have been a teacher long enough to know that things sometimes break down in ways that puzzle and trouble us and make us feel disrespected.

Most teachers, whatever the outcome of their lessons, are doing the best they can in any moment. The alternative is akin to turning your back on the ocean. Criticism on the art of surfing the big waves is rarely useful unless it comes from veterans who have been rolled once or twice.

From one who has banged her head on the reef too many times: The behavior of your students is not a matter of your pride or even that overused word “respect”. The behavior of your students is information. What a teacher does with that information is what is important.

Over a year ago, I ruled over a group of eleventh graders taking a California Standards Test. The school was a charter with an emphasis on academics. The students were “chronically under-served” in the education lexicon. This means poor and hailing from backgrounds that make Charles Dickens look like a guy who might write for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In the middle of the test, Gabe started fidgeting and making noise. Mary yelled at him to knock it off, and she and Gabe engaged in a brief but highly escalated and profanity-strewn argument that Gabe cut off by storming out of the classroom. “You better control your class,” Mary said to me.

My immediate reaction was to feel slighted by Mary and ashamed in front of the other kids. I  wanted to go outside and shout at Gabe to go to the Deans for a punishment that would involve suspension. I would not stand for this kind of disrespect in my classroom. I was a professional, after all. I had better control my class.

But instead, I took a breath. Then another. On the second exhale, I looked at the information. Gabe couldn’t be still. Mary was tense and unhappy.

The kids were two hours into a test that made some of their teachers nervous enough to lie to them that the score would have bearing on their college transcripts (it would not). Their daily schedules were disrupted, including school meal times that for some of the students were their only meal times.

The surface information was helpful but I knew even more. Mary’s family put enormous stress on her for high achievement. She was anxious and angry most of the time.

Gabe had divots in his head from gunshot wounds incurred during his past life as a criminal.  He was a successful, high achieving drug dealer back in the day, but for the past eight months since his release from incarceration he was trying to be a student. This with gaps in his math education, post traumatic stress, an ADHD problem (a true one) the likes of which I have rarely seen in twenty years, and his belly filled most of the time only with what he could get at school.

In other words, none of it had to do with me.

For the next two days of testing I arranged for Gabe to take his test in the library with the special ed teacher.  In a private conversation I told Mary that her comment was unhelpful given the circumstances and hurt my feelings. (No swelling violins in the background, she really didn’t care but at least she was “respectful” about it.) After two days I took Gabe aside for a long talk where he did all the talking about the solutions he had been thinking about for his anger and his old ways of behaving. We agreed that in the future when that happened, he had my permission to go outside and remove himself from the situation. I complimented him for doing this in the first place, but maybe next time he could do it before all of the naughty words and yelling. We finished the final days of testing together as a group without incident. We ended the year without incident.

Most students will be their best selves in your presence if you get to know them as much as you can. I use journals as a built-in cheat to their inner lives, but I also engage in conversations and ask them questions and pay attention to what goes on in the hallways and in the rows.  I ask questions and listen more than I talk in conversations with students. I don’t know everything, but I know enough to understand some of the bigger picture when something goes wrong. 

In a best-case scenario, I use the information pro-actively. When I think back on the Gabe and Mary fight, I realize that the time I was weak was not afterwards, but long before. Gabe and I should have had a trouble shooting chat beforehand. I should have passed Mary the secret that nobody in college admissions gives a fig about the CST, and she with her proficient and advanced scores on everything, her high GPA and her decent ACT numbers had little to fear from Gabe being a fussbudget.

Student behavior is information. No more and no less. Use the information to make decisions that solve or prevent problems.  Turn off the criticizing voices in your head, because those voices aren’t the ones facing the big waves, you are.

Hang ten.

The waters are sometimes not this calm and peaceful.