ok, back to winnowing

So I was reading Teaching with Love & Logic this morning, which I always find helpful.

(I'm trying to model my approach to classroom management on three books -- that one, The Essential 55, and Teaching Children to Care: Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth--and yes, I've read Alfie Kohn's Beyond Discipline, which criticizes these approaches, but I have concluded that I don't feel his approach suits a diverse classroom. Sometime I'll post more about this issue per se).

I have always enjoyed these three books because of the fundamental respect for the children and their choices that is conveyed in them (as well as the strong priority of preparing children to succeed in "the real world," which is absolutely essential to a multicultural approach to education).

Anyway, what struck me forcefully this morning was that I did not seem to have that respect anymore, myself! I am really shocked and concerned at this change.

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For example, the book told of a teacher working with a female high schooler who, when he put a hand on her shoulder, leaped out of her chair, threw the chair across the room, and screamed at him to "get the fuck off me!" The authors' recommended response was a step back, an apology, and a promise to discuss the event when both parties felt calmer, so that the problem could be avoided in the future. Extremely reasonable, yes? As it turned out (this was a true story) the girl had survived many years of physical and sexual abuse from three male relatives; she had just been transferred to a safer home. Naturally it was understandable that she would have a negative reaction to being touched.

But I find that I have now succumbed to a semester of being trained to react with "that's too bad, I don't care what happened to her in the past, she needs to learn to behave, blah blah blah."

Another example: about two months into my student teaching, I was flipping idly through Fires in the Bathroom, a book compiled from high schoolers' discussions of their perceptions of & needs from teachers. The students were talking about how they "sometimes just have a bad day and need some space," and so on, and I found my reaction was unsympathetic-- "Well that's just too bad, they have to learn to cope," whereas just a few months previously, when I'd first bought the book, I had felt that it was excellent, a great way to work toward a good give-and-take relationship with students.

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This is just really scary to me, because this is what I had a problem with when I first entered my student teaching classroom--the teacher seemed overly rigid and not very sympathetic. Really, in a word, punitive.

I'm trying not to over-react to this, but it is upsetting. I think I need to ponder it some more.