[ This is post one of two regarding my views on the role of respect in educational settings. --MCJ ]
Respect is foundational to all of my thinking about the classroom.
This week, three of us from the University of Kent made our way into a secondary school thirty minutes Northeast of Canterbury. The school is not particularly well funded, and not a grammar school (meaning that the students did not “test in” to the school with high marks on exams). They have a wide range of students, a number of whom (we are told) have bad situations at home or behavioral conditions of one sort or another. One teacher, when we were discussing coming in to do volunteer work with the LEGO Mindstorms kit told us that we’d loose everything that wasn’t nailed down to theft, the kids would hate anything we did, and we would most likely be eaten alive.
As I am here, writing this now, we were not eaten alive. Nor was anything stolen that I know of, and I thought the students had an excellent time. These were 8th and 9th year students, roughly 13, 14 years old. If I had to guess, I’d say that they enjoyed themselves immensely. They build kinetic art, learned to program (a little bit, with RoboLab), and I introduced them to microworlds, or artificial universes, where we can simulate thousands of little robots, instead of just playing with one.
So what does this have to do with respect?
One of the instructors in the school stayed on to watch the hour-long course we ran, as well as a school tech in case we ran into difficulty with the hardware. The instructor’s tone, after we were done, was one of… condescending surprise? “Well, it looks like you survived…” Yes, I survived, thank you very much. After spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week with disadvantaged kids from South St. Louis at YMCA Camp Lakewood (an incredible, wonderful summer), one hour with some kids from the SE of England can’t possibly be a problem.
Furthermore, he opened his mouth twice to speak to the students during our session. Once to raise his voice and glare at two boys who were fooling around, and once to tell his (apparently) “favorite” student to push in all the chairs. The two boys fooling around were right in front of me, and were jabbing and slapping at each-other; I was just about to put a stop to it with a simple request (they were having fun, and I ended the session 4 minutes early–what do you expect?). Instead, a voice (and The Glare) comes in from across the room, a veritable shout and growl, telling them to cut it out or else. As The Favorite finally was making his way out of the room (he was one of the last out), a commanding tone issued forth: “Stewart, push in all the chairs before you go!” (Names changed to protect the innocent.) There was no request, there was no option. When we were doing a pseduo-debriefing after the session, we commented on a few hiccups we had throughout the period. This inspired the instructor to ask more than once if it was “short haired, short boy” or “was his name ‘Stewart’?” He clearly had singled this boy out, and was not interested in improving his condition, or working with this child–he was interested in controlling and commanding him.
It was stomach-turning. There is no excuse for this. I can do more with a kind word and polite request any day than with a command and a growl. If you feel you absolutely must command in a classroom, students will respect you all the more if it is your last resort, not your modus operandi. None of these students had any kind of genuinely severe behavioral disorder (which I have relatively little experience with in the classroom), and instead seemed like a bunch of 13, 14 year-old children: energetic, confused, excited, disaffected… everything you would normally expect.
If I went to that school, and other teachers had even remotely similar teaching styles, I’d honestly hate my life.
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