No teacher can fix a teen who for their entire lives have a history of years of no adults engaging them in communication without an agenda. Most have never really been acknowledged in kindness and so they don’t know how to be kind themselves. They live in big fear every day.
How are our kids supposed to come into our classrooms and let their obvious defenses down at the door every day just because our own perception (not theirs) is that we are “not like other teachers” and we need for them to show up as fully functioning human beings to make our classroom work. I
It is too tall an order, too big. It’s why jGR is not used more. Even with the magic of stories, we have been exhibiting in the TPRS community for three two decades now a lack of awareness of just how deep the inability of our students has been to reach out to us lovingly.
That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but we need to expect less. In my view this is one of, if not the darkest, periods in human history, and yet within it are pockets of light that defy imagination and daily confirm in me that we are in a period of the deepest change ever.
There is a story here in India and I hope I have it right that thousands of years ago Lord Krishna was sitting around under a tree with his gopis when they asked him why there was so much suffering in the world and he just laughed and said to wait, that thousands of years in the future people would really know what suffering was, and it would be more mental then physical but then it would be over.
I have always felt that time is now, and that we are at the end of it, when the suffering is most intense. Again, it is just a story I heard years ago when I was young but I never forgot it as I lived my life but I always kept it near to my heart and thought about in the hard times and that certainly included some in the classroom.
I have had moments of such deep despair that if I didn’t have a family to support I would have just run out of the classroom and taken a minimum wage job. Many of us have actually done that in the past ten years! We have seen many TPRS teachers just walk away, including good ones from Denver Public Schools who received from Diana Noonan the best training in this work on the planet. I won’t mention any names but some readers here would be shocked.
