When I think of failure this year, one student’s name comes to mind immediately. I’ll give him the pseudonym of Ross. Ross was a popular boy. He made girls giggle and held leadership within his guy-group (not quite a gang, but some similar form of association). He had failed 10th grade once already. He wasn’t slow. He would sporadically snap into “don’t-bother-me-I’m-doing-my-work” mode in class, but this resolve was too rare to get him close to passing. He demanded a lot of attention in-class, but probably because I entertained it. On a regular basis, I felt like the weaker party in our interactions. And my softness in disciplining him is what did him in in my class. With six or seven referrals, almost all of them punctuated with him leaving class in an outraged, profane, physically unrestrained huff, we had a bad history. Our relationship was on the rocks constantly, and any concord between us was strained and temporary. Whereas he was always on the cusp of explosion (and other teachers agreed), I was always on the verge of breakdown with him.
Why did I feel so powerless with Ross? First, I let him have his way. I attempted to shut-down his speaking out of turn and his under-the-breath profanities and his routine insubordination, but just as often averted conflict by not addressing these infractions. Second, I was ineffective in my communication with his parent. He had a single mother and an involved grandmother. The mother always said, “I can’t get him to detention,” so I would compromise and be spineless with her. But Ross never did show up when I gave extensions on the detention. Oh, I felt so helpless and powerless! There was a period of time where his grandmother stepped in and was responsive to calls and detentions. But for some reason, that didn’t set Ross on a new track to redemption in my classroom. I also fizzled out, having to constantly be calling and arranging and apologizing for his behavior. As a young teacher, I didn’t realize that that stress isn’t on me. I have still not fully outgrown my need to stress out for my students’ willful misbehavior.
Finally, my powerlessness and failure with Ross sprang from the fact that I didn’t want to interact with him. It was too volatile and difficult. Disciplining is demanding; it’s easier in the present moment to just fill out a referral form and send the source of conflict out and away. His was the name I looked for right away on the suspension and absentee lists, and sighed with relief when it appeared. The salve to our mutual woes (he wasn’t successful in my class, and I was effectively making him the scapegoat to all my classroom management frustrations) was to mete out the punishment to him that would not enable him to reform. This was not restorative justice by any means. With each suspension he earned himself with me, he inched nearer and nearer to failure, hopelessness, and dropping out.
Ross confided in his biology teacher. She relayed to me information that her mother’s boyfriend was involved in a shooting at Ross’s house one week. She also told me his father was killed when he was young. At a parent-teacher-administrator conference in spring, his mother exhibited the inattention and carelessness that accounted for Ross’s own detachment from seeing himself succeed. As the assistant principal and I talked to her, she excused herself for a cell phone call. She was utterly absent, even in our presence. I can only assume she’s the same with Ross: there, but also terribly not there.
In some ways, Ross ended up paying for her non-cooperation (or low level of concern to cooperate) with me. The child was paying for the parent’s unconscious mistakes. And I did virtually nothing to siphon off that damage from Ross. Maybe with more time, I’ll be able to be a more effective mediator of discipline for students like Ross. To be neither spinelessly soft and shamelessly accommodating and anxiously apologetic, nor emotionless as I watch the troublemaking students’ performance and chances for success diminish to a squeak on account of my unwillingness to discipline him.
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