Category Archives: Everything I’ve Written That Was Inspired By Students

“You’re Irritating:” Reflections on Anger and Patience

by

I remember an instance freshman year of high school where a peer was asking me a question. I don’t remember the question or why it caught me in the way it did. But I distinctly remember turning around and snapping at him, my face turning red. I can remember the heat on my face and the way the anger kind of bubbled up from my stomach and seemed to wrap itself around my heart like a tiny, evil, hate-filled dragon.

High school for me was characterized by sporadic instances of these outbursts. To do this day, I’m not entirely sure where they came from. But it was almost always a result of impatience.

I can count on one hand, though, my run-ins with anger in college. I thought this was because I am mostly an easy-going person–I am someone who is easy to get along with, I thought. I am someone that can see other view points with ease, I thought. I am someone who understands others’ problems, I thought.

And then I began to teach.

What I thought was the result of a good character was actually the result of a lack of conflict. For four years, I worked hard at a place where very little was demanded of me, where (even when I was in leadership roles) I managed very few people. I lived and studied in an environment where often my biggest conflict on any given day was if I was going to ask a girl on a date that weekend. And so when people talked to me about patience and humility and optimism, I thought well yeah, I have those.

What I’m learning now is that I was wrong about basically everything I once thought about myself. I am not naturally patient. I am not naturally optimistic. I am not naturally humble.

A student complained to me today about how I’m always angry. And I have been angry a lot lately. That tiny dragon is taking up permanent roots in my chest. I can feel him breathing fire into all the other parts of my life.

And the more I reflect on that, the more I recognize it as a problem. I don’t think I would listen to someone who was always angry. In fact, I don’t. Even if a person has interests and opinions similar to mine, it’s hard for me to take something valuable from him or her if s/he is angry. For my students, I’m some strange angry man whom they barely know who is teaching a subject matter with which they are frustrated. Of course they don’t want to listen. Of course they start tuning me out. Of course.

I’ve been waiting for my students. “I would be less angry,” I tell myself, “if my students were better behaved.”

But, my students argue, they would be better behaved if I was less angry.

—

My students sometimes hit each other (playfully) in the halls. It’s something I don’t get. I don’t remember so much physical contact in high school. The other day, I was talking with my class with which I have the best relationship, and a girl was complaining about how someone had playfully hit her and how she should seek retribution, and I drew a diagram on the board showing how this process was necessarily infinitely cyclical. My students thought about it carefully, and considered how always wanting revenge leads to more and more of the playful hitting, which none of them seem to really appreciate (unless they are doing the hitting).

I’m glad I could share this moment with my students, but I don’t follow this in my own daily life.  I am angry far too often. And my anger leads my students to want to be frustrated with me. And their frustration leads me to want to be frustrated and so on. If their frustration and discontent was always met with love and peacefulness and patience and humility, I think they might start thinking twice of their disruptions. Why be so mean to a person who is so nice?

—

Some days I think I need to teach my students how to be kind. But really, they are the ones teaching me. Their hearts are big; their memories small. I can kick a student out of class and by the end of the day, that student is able to have a productive, loving conversation with me. That’s a testament to the student, not to me. My heart is too small; my memories too big. MY memories, MY experiences, MY ego: I spend so much time thinking about these things. I never really understood how Jesus says you need to die to yourself to follow Him. I am starting to understand.

What Assistant Coaching Has Taught Me About Teaching

by

I’ve become the Assistant Coach for my school’s Debate Team, which basically means I let the team practice in my room after school and drive them to their meets on the weekends. Every once in a while, I supplement one of their arguments with some piece of the ol’ college learning. It’s a good arrangement. I enjoy being around a group of intellectual students who enjoy discussing black feminism and highly theoretical concepts like “the view from nowhere.” And they teach me things.

Students and teachers are at their best when students have something specific that they know they want to learn.

I don’t interrupt my team’s practices or post-meet discussions often, but when I do, all six members of my team will stop whatever they are doing and listen. I don’t have to call for attention. I don’t have to lecture them about being quiet. They know that if I’m opening my mouth it’s for something important and they respect me enough to know that I actually know what I’m talking about when it comes to theory. There have been several instances where I’ve been shocked by this power. It’s so contrary to what I experience in the classroom.

As I’ve contemplated on my debaters willingness to listen, I’ve thought about what makes this relationship different than the one that I have with most of my students. I think there are three differences. First, my debaters are great kids. They are all great students, many of whom are staring down scholarship offers to go debate at the college level. Some of their ability to learn from other people is probably a natural or learned talent that has nothing to do with me.

Second, my debaters know that I have knowledge that they want. Whether that knowledge is about theory or about college applications, my input is seen as important. In my classroom, when I’m standing in front of twenty ninth graders to whom I’m trying to teach algebraic equations, that desire for my knowledge is basically nonexistent. This is a place I need to improve for sure. It’s not about making algebra fun (although fun can be important sometimes), nor about making sure every single one of my concepts has a problem with money in it (although money is a great way to make concepts relevant). It’s about getting students hooked on algebra in a way that they get hooked on sports or music or technology.  It’s about getting them to a place where they demand my knowledge about how to solve equations with variables on both sides from me, where they are anticipating my next-day’s lessons with their questions.

I’m beginning to attempt strategies for creating this effect. I’ve noticed that students are much more curious when studying material that is just above their current ability level. I’m going to start designating a day every week where students can work on whatever that one thing right above their ability level is. This is going to require an elaborate system and tight organization but as I’ve started planning it I’m positive I can pull it off.

The last half this problem is orienting the math around something more than “here are a bunch of numbers.” I’m not sure yet how I’m going to do that. I’d like to orient each week, or unit, around a specific real-world problem that that unit can solve. But this is still something that requires more research and planning. Not something that I can implement immediately.

Third, my debaters get to see me as something more than just a teacher. They get to see me as a flawed human being who often has questions of his own, but who knows more than just math. One-hour-and-a-half van rides is plenty of time to sing along to popular songs on the radio, to contribute to conversations surrounding social lives, and to discover that we have interests that overlap. To add to these experiences, they are part of rather than in contrast to my goal with them. These conversations about interests happen naturally as we discuss debate topics.

For my algebra students, they sometimes see me outside of the classroom (in the hallway, at a school-wide carnival, at football games), but they don’t necessarily connect my behaviors at those places to my persona in the classroom. My algebra students, then, see two Mr. Smith’s. The one that is trying to teach them math and the one that has fun. They are not the same. And this affects their willingness to learn from me.

The Trouble with Gaps

by

There was a moment this summer, while I was teaching a room full of high-achieving, and in my mind, at-risk students, where I faltered. I don’t remember the lesson or what made me privately freak out in my mind, but I remember the feeling… the American dream is a lie, “at-risk” is a stupid term, students are students are students, and teaching students so they can live up to a white, wealthy ideal is pointless.

But I didn’t let the feeling take hold of me. I pushed it away. It got lost in the stress of lesson plans and grading papers.

Several weeks later I returned to Ohio University, where my main extracurricular commitment revolved around education reform, a nebulous term that means many things to many different people. And because I am someone who enjoys a good discussion, I made sure I was immersed in the literature of people who are critical of the reform movement.

It is within this literature, that I first read Dr. Camika Royal’s argument against the use of the term “achievement gap.” A term I had used countless times myself, achievement gap had become, for me and many of my peers, a shorthand way of articulating the problem we saw in education. Upon my first reading of Dr. Royal’s piece, I thought this was the problem with the term–that achievement gap did not accurately portray the complexity of the problem.

And organizations I am a part of changed; instead of using achievement gap, both Students for Education Reform and Teach for America have adopted “opportunity gap” as part of their lexicons. Dr. Royal suggested the term in her first piece about the achievement gap on Good.

Several days ago, however, Dr. Royal began suggesting that this simple substitution of the terms is insufficient.

Image

At first, I was taken aback by this. It seemed like organizations were listening to Dr. Royal. Why was she still frustrated?

And then I thought about her piece, again. This time, though, I thought about my summer experience, specifically the feeling I had had one day in class and ignored, and then some things clicked.

Dr. Royal is not frustrated about the term with a linguistic concern. She is frustrated with the power struggle that gets buried in language.

I asked my friend the other day how I can avoid a white savior complex. And he told me I had already fallen prey to it just by believing there was a group of people, categorically different than me, who needed my help. By dividing the world into white and black, I had already named difference, and by naming difference, I had already committed oppression.

This, I think, is what we do when we talk about gaps. Because when we acknowledge a gap, we set up a situation where things are better. And it’s not necessarily racial. Like we assume that wealth is better than poverty, that a Princeton degree is better than a GED, or that scoring in the 99th percentile is better than scoring in the 61st.

But here’s the rub. Oppressors have always chosen the grading stick. Oppressors have always been the ones who get to decide what we test, how we test it, and what background knowledge we test. Oppressors have always been the ones who decide what is better. And that is the issue.

If we ignore this problem, we risk, at the very least, pretension–the kind that claims you are not allowed to talk about a problem because you aren’t well-informed enough.

I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to talk abut the issues we need to talk about. But I know that lumping entire of populations of students into one “at-risk” category is trouble. And that’s exactly what gaps do.