During summer school you'll be told to manage your classroom in a way that seems dehumanizing and demeaning. Do it. It won't seem necessary in your summer school class. Ignore that. Your students in your classrooms come from families that are chaotic and tragic beyond your wildest imagination. They see more violence and fear before they come to school some days than you've probably ever seen in your life. What they don't have is structure. They are in free fall in terms of self-regulation. They do not understand nuanced behavior. I know it seems demeaning, but these students need the structure that gives them an anchor.
You'll be tempted to think, "I'll be the one who's different. I'll show them respect and they'll respect me for it. They'll want to please me because I'm the first person who's ever smiled at them and shown I care." You will be fresh meat. It won't happen. Believe us.
my response follows. as this all came out in streams of being really pissed off, i will most likely regret the aggressiveness of the language.
i take serious, serious issue with this (or at least the part that ben has lifted up on his blog). particularly:
"During summer school you'll be told to manage your classroom in a way that seems dehumanizing and demeaning. Do it."
wherein you actually ask people to push aside critical engagement in the identity/power issues that lie beneath the very real notion that applying a grotesquely skinnerian framework for behavioral control may be problematic, and-- yes-- dehumanizing (which it is). this is not to say that one should not attempt to create a humanizing and rigid environment, nor is it to say that being strict or structure-happy is necessarily problematic. it is to say, that i take issue with the (unfortunately common) implication that people will be better off putting their conscience aside for the moment while they learn the rigoramole of punishment-punishment-punishment-reward-punishment-punishment because the "reality" of the "dogs" that they're going to have to "train" is just so (gasp) different from their own that they can't possibly understand it, let alone engage in it on it's own terms and or let it inform/be informed by whatever previous socioethical framework they are fluent in.
"Your students in your classrooms come from families that are chaotic and tragic beyond your wildest imagination."
wherein you blatantly romanticize and make caricature of (and, to qualify my use of these terms, i point to your use of "wildest imagination") the very community that you are serving. once again dehumanization takes the form of hyperbole: that the "reality" of the living conditions outside of the school building (i.e. in the space of homes) is just beyond rational understanding. i contend that it is in fact not that hard to engage in (let alone wrap one's mind around) the wide range of family relationships that one encounters in a community (any community, actually), and perhaps the real issue is that we're letting our "wildest imaginations" get the best of us, instead of doing the difficult work of engaging in the complexities of power, race, identity, community, etc. and, of course, we can all bring out our "life is tough" list of horrible situations that students have to deal with-- but the suggestion of embedding one's response to that list within a framework that replaces rational, supportive engagement with an arm's length just-make-sure-their-shirts-are-tucked-in and use-your-discipline-ladder-so-they-know-there's-structure is far from good advice. furthermore, the most tragic consequence of this caricature is the absence of family lives that are healthy (though, like all, imperfect). dear future teacher: some of your parents give a damn. more importantly, don't for a second let a class, race, or region informed assumption ignite a functional "imagination" to eclipse the reality of your community.
"They do not understand nuanced behavior."
wherein you actually remove the human element from our students. are you kidding me? they don't understand nuanced behavior? this is not only a grossly offensive homogenization of young people (in the same vein of your previous grossly offensive homogenization of mississippi families), but takes the cake in what can only be racialized undertones in these other efforts to help the unconverted yet-to-be-teacher "understand" the sheer uncivilized context in which they are about to have their colonial trial by fire. by actually presupposing that a set of human beings do not (as a whole, mind you) understand nuanced behavior, one opens the door for a vast amount of abuse stemming from the conclusion that they "don't know any better" or i "know what's best for them," a pair of rationales that have some interesting historical precedent (especially in mississippi: if black folk don't understand the nuances of our fine constitution...)
and, for those who may take issue with my taking issue (and want to play the battle wounds game), a little preemption: yes, i was a public high school teacher. yes, i was a public high school teacher in mississippi. yes, i'm still in mississippi. oh, and if you want to really find a reason for me to not having the background necessary to "understand where she's coming from," i did not teach in the delta (which, i may add, does not corner the market on educational failure).
4 comments:
Momo,
1) I don’t think your comments are particularly aggressive, or something to regret later. As long as you’ve known me, you know I love a good debate, so I take no offense at our difference of opinion (and on several of your points we do agree). The only part I think you will regret is that last paragraph. Whether you have taught for two years or twenty or zero, your beliefs are equally valid. Experience, of course, helps to inform beliefs, but it doesn’t alter the validity.
2) The parts of Michelle’s blog that I appreciate are, for the most part, different from the parts you most strongly disagree with.
3) The part of the blog that I was highlighting and that I, of course, agree with, is that you have to be strict to be successful at classroom management as a first-year teacher. I haven’t read Skinner so I have no idea if I subscribe to his philosophy. However, I wholeheartedly believe that people respond to incentives, positive and negative. In a classroom setting this means rewarding behavior that you want and punishing behavior you don’t. It’s going to take one hell of an argument, and a lot of data, to convince me otherwise. Michelle was making the point that some (many?) first-years have trouble with the idea of being strict and implementing rules and consequences. Further, Michelle was making the point that while it may seem harsh (key word is seem) it is not actually harsh. Having a well-ordered, safe, classroom with rules and procedures is a sign of caring about the students. I think she is exactly right about this. The main problem you have, I think, with this notion is that Michelle is asking the first-years to “put aside their conscience.” I don’t think this is accurate and I don’t see this reflected in her post. Again, the key word is “seems.” I don’t think Michelle is saying “put away your conscience.” I think she is saying, “examine the ideas of rules, rewards, and consequences before you dismiss them outright as unnecessarily harsh and/or demeaning.”
4) The stuff about chaotic and tragic lives and seeing more violence before school starts than some of the teachers have ever seen is hyperbole. I believe this is the main part you take issue with. You and Michelle can blog this out.
5) The part that I really like in Michelle’s post, and the point I was highlighting, is this: You'll be tempted to think, "I'll be the one who's different. I'll show them respect and they'll respect me for it. They'll want to please me because I'm the first person who's ever smiled at them and shown I care." You will be fresh meat. It won't happen.
Michelle is exactly right about this. This happens every year with a few first-years…
I wrote a response to this -- naughtily scribbling it in a Moleskine while I was proctoring a state test -- before reading your response to Ben, which is, I think, more precise, more specific, more measured, and which addresses some of what I said in my response. But just as your contention, as you say there, is primarily concerning rhetoric, so was mine (or, rhetoric and tone), so I will post this here anyway, though I am in essential agreement with your later post.
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It seems to me that all of your criticisms are true, but I'm less sure of the thing being criticized. Maybe Sabatier's post manifests a real conceptual mistake (a genuine & human one, too), and if this is so, some questions and some dialog might bring about some reflection (reflection that now must transcend defensive postures or not occur). But it also seems plausible that what's at stake is just inaccurate and insufficiently cautious language. She can very well say, and with all probably sincerity, "Of course I don't literally mean 'wildest dreams,'" and, "Of course I don't mean they simply and generically don't understand nuance," and so on. Conceptual errors or not -- even corrosive, morally corrupt ones -- this is where defensive postures take us.
Our district-approved literature textbook lamely defines metaphor as a comparison between unlike things not using the words 'like' and 'as'; I'm in the habit of telling my kids that metaphors are lies that somehow get at something true ('Juliet is not really the sun, but. . .'). It's clear to me that Sabatier's post is not truly and accurately describing reality-as-it-exists-and-is-intelligible-to-us, but through some philosophically muddy and inaccurate language, it does seem to me to get at something of the subjective experience of being in the classroom. And surely you recognize this too.
In your last paragraph, in your list of reasons to mistrust your understanding or your motives, you left out what to my mind is maybe the only valid one. And I wonder, why aren't you teaching anymore, really? Of course there's no simple answer to this question, and there were opportunity costs and so on, but I do think you came to believe that classroom teaching was not a sustainable choice for you (it's not for me, either), and I wonder why. What was the problem teaching math to the 25 kids in the room? Why couldn't you explain to them the philosophical corruption of the system, the moral corruption of the stimulus-response model of education, the importance of a social morality based on mutual respect and empathy and reason and the toxic effect of one built on a fear of punishment, and make it all better and more sustainable? Obviously there's no simple and true answer to this question either, but Sabatier's simple and untrue one is, These kids (in or with this system or culture or background or whatever) don't understand nuance; don't burn yourself out, but appeal to their (human, if often ugly) sense of self-interest to give them structure, etc.
I know you remember how mutually oppressive, how corrosive, it is to be in this place and governed by its bells every day. I may be sympathetic to a claim that this system is so corrupt and corrupting that one cannot long maintain philosophical and moral purity when acting as one of its central cogs. But replacements are on the horizon, and they're supposed to last two years. What you're not acknowledging in your response is that Sabatier is -- with whatever imprecisions and inaccuracies -- waving toward a way to cope with that constant, stifling hostility without taking it personally or ending up a wretched, tortured heap. You and me, we just "walk out of Calculus."
thank you, robbie. all fair and valuable criticism/perspective. certainly more helpful and participatory than the delightful "dude, WTF?" on sabatier's blog.
i'm glad my second post (which was at the very least more patiently constructed) provided some self-correction.
and, you're right to remind me of the "why aren't you still teaching?" question, which of course i never have a good answer for anyone-- let alone myself. if only i could continue to struggle with ways to approach (which i think i still do, albeit in a less embedded way) "the philosophical corruption of the system, the moral corruption of the stimulus-response model of education, the importance of a social morality based on mutual respect and empathy and reason and the toxic effect of one built on a fear of punishment."
and, as for engaging in a process that helps "make it all better and more sustainable," i can only trust for now that the winter institute is a good a place as any for that sort of work (though, admittedly, flawed, imperfect, and insufficient in its own way).
I put a response over there, too. It looks liked I'm sort of defending you to them and defending her to you, but maybe that's just my way.
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