Dare to Teach, Chapter 5: Justice/ Hope

To speak of great teaching is to speak of issues of equity... fairness, and it’s easy to assume that this is what I’m speaking of when I talk about justice.  To some degree I am.  But I am really speaking about so much more.

The way I say this is to first point out the ways that we are, in important ways, our thoughts.  The Bible teaches that as a person thinks in his heart, so is he, and the Buddha taught that everything we are is a product of what we have thought.

If you want to do a powerful exercise, spend a day in the classroom studying your thoughts.  Before you speak, or while you are listening to a student, just pay attention to what you are actually thinking.  Such a study impressed me early on with the ways I spent much of my time speaking harsh words both to others and myself.

I want to be gentler with my students and with myself, so I need to spend more time really studying how I think about my students and about myself.  But why is this really important?  Because I must practice hope in my room if I am going to be an effective... an integral teacher.  Hope happens when I learn to accept my own and other’s choices without condemnation of the spirit.

This is actually a very difficult concept for some teachers so I’ll try to explain it.  We can’t allow our students to be Nazis!  We can’t say that all behaviors are relative and therefore accepted in our classroom.  We must fight to protect the weak and the defenseless... because in the end we are ALL weak and defenseless at certain points in our biography.

But while I condemn the action of a student who is bullying another student, I must work very hard to not condemn the spirit of that student who I am disciplining.  I must still have that capacity to love the very student who I am disciplining.  If I can do this then I can say that I am practicing hope in my classroom.  I am honoring the student’s potentiality as a human being, but at the same time I am condemning the behavior of the student.

Another way I say this is “I deeply respect a student’s right to fail!”  I know that sounds like a very hard line and maybe it needs unpacking.  I know that we teach in a culture where we are told that students should not be left behind and I totally accept that goal.  But I also believe in freedom and that means that a student has the right to choose to not learn in my classroom.  I want to celebrate that right of freedom as well!

I however do NOT have the right to be nasty to a student... to bully a student or shame a student if a student chooses to fail.  I must treat the student with respect even if the student is not showing me or another student respect.  This kind of attitude or recognition of the spiritual core of all students is what I call justice.

When I say that the effective... the integral teacher practices justice I don’t just mean that every student gets what he or she deserves.  I don’t just mean that I seek to be fair in my assessment of each student.  These of course matter and they are a cornerstone of the well-run classroom.  But I can be fair with a student and still not be just with that student if I don’t show that student respect... if I don’t think justly about that student.

This is a hard teaching for me to practice.  I am not really a just teacher if, while I’m disciplining the student, I seem to get some kind of satisfaction about my application of power towards the student.  In the moment that I start to think about how ‘nice’ it is that I can jack this student who has been a thorn in my side... wow... the minute I’m thinking this way... I am not acting justly... even though I might be acting fairly... acting by the rules.

I was in room 303 for a while before I realized just how much I was being observed... studied closely.  I don’t mean watched by the principal.  Of course the administrator would enter my room and in those moments my students and I both knew I was being observed.  But that’s not the kind of observation I am speaking of now.  I’m talking about the ways that students are always watching.  And what I want to say now is that I never really understood the way that students watch with their hearts as well as with their eyes!

Wow... what do I mean by that?  Well... take the situation with the student I was speaking of above who entered 303 and shouted her explicative.  When I was a young teacher I never realized how much I was being watched by the other students in the room to see not only HOW I would respond... but also how I would FEEL about my response!  In other words students wanted to see my keep the rules... to be fair in my room, but they were even more interested in how I would feel about doing that.  If they saw, for example, that I seemed to enjoy the chance to use my power over the student, this fact would be logged in their psyche and sooner or later they would test me again, to see if they could get under my skin.

As I say, I never knew this going into room 303.  It would only be years later while talking to one of my ‘at risk’ students who confided that he had watched me for a long time to decide if I was the ‘real deal’ before trusting me.  As I started to think about this comment it made sense.  In this young man’s life all the adults had either let him down, or probably soon would.  So it only made sense that to protect himself from further pain he would just assume that I was one more adult who was doing to enjoy using my power against helpless students.  When he saw that I was fair in my room but I also tried to be just (as I have defined that concept) he HAD to respect me, and in turn I could be successful with helping him learn.

This quest to be just is one of the most difficult in the classroom because the situations are always changing.  What worked this week might fail next week.  This is why I also say that to be a great teacher you must be a great listener.  We must learn to listen not only with our ears... but also with our eyes and with our hearts.  And when we grow tired and our energy levels get low, it’s very easy to stop listening to our own thoughts and the words and behaviors of our students and then we go on autopilot.  I have found that when this happens a major accident is just waiting to happen.

I guess another way to say this is, to be a great teacher... an effective teacher... an integral teacher requires courage of a kind imaginable to the new teacher!

Justice/Hope: