This is, if not a full on rant, very close to one and far too lengthy to read by teachers who are caught up in the insane month of April’s super spring funkaholicism:
Yesterday the teacher who will replace me, who has no idea what TPRS is, came by to observe. I thought I’d bring out the fine china and rock a story. The kids in that class had rocked one in the previous class in a required formal observation for the principal and I had every confidence in them to impress this slightly skeptical teacher whom they didn’t know would be their teacher next year.
The kids failed to show up in their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, however. The story was bad, not focused. Overconfidence had set in from the great story we had made in the previous class. It was terrible.
The kids got to being too funny. Two gregarious boys got too full of themselves. I didn’t come close to getting to taking them to the grove of trees I wrote about here (Language of the Trees) a few weeks ago. The suggestions were too cute. The lack of restraint by many of the kids unchecked.
I didn’t stop the class. What a fool I was. All I had to do was recognize that the story was not going well. The kids were in a post-good-behavior-for-the-Dali-Lama frenzy. Last class of the day. April energy. The usual weird stuff at this time of year.
Maybe others in the group have been there – not stopped a class when it was getting too rowdy. I am no psychologist but I think that I didn’t stop the class because, in my desire to impress, I momentarily forgot how.
I never learned to know if people were hurting me. My need for people’s approval was too great. I have heard the term personal boundaries and ideas like that and have thought about them a lot in my life but I think that I never really figured out how important it is to set boundaries with others if I sense that something is wrong.
What was going on in that class was a mild form of emotional abuse by the kids and no I’m not over-stating the case. I was being bullied. The fact that these sixth graders were not aware of it, just having a good time making other students laugh, doesn’t matter. I failed to know that their behavior was hurting me. It was my failure. Over 34,000 classes taught (I counted) in 38 years and I still haven’t learned.
I guess I was one of my generation who never could clearly tell if people were harming me. That was what was happening in there in front of that teacher. The lines separating me from the class had blurred because they are my best class.
We had gotten too familiar and about a quarter of the class had crossed way over my boundaries and I didn’t immediately stop it in spite of the look of alarm on the faces of some of the super stars in the class whose presence in my classroom reminds me that that kind of student is God’s best gift to teachers.
Specifically, I forgot to do this:
- Stop teaching.
- Look at the student and smile.
- Turn to the poster and laser point to the rule he just broke.
- Read the rule out.
- Explain in English what the rule means to the class in general, not directly to the student.
- Look back at the student and smile.
I didn’t stop the emotional violation for three reasons:
- I was too eager to impress that teacher (I needed her to be impressed. I wanted her to like me and tell me how impressed she was with TPRS but now that I am journaling on it I can see that what was really going on was that I really wanted her, under that, to tell me that I’m a good teacher. And under that I wanted her to tell me that I’m a good person. And under that I wanted her to shower me with love and approval so that I could feel good about myself. Which is what the the whole TPRS thing is about but I can’t tell anybody that because they think I’m Ben Slavic.
- I haven’t yet learned that if a story is bad it doesn’t mean that I’m bad – just that the story is bad.
- I didn’t recognize in the moment of wanting the approval that the students were harming me. I couldn’t tell that that was happening in the moment. The need to impress overrode the reality of what was going on. I didn’t listen to the little alarms going off in my body that the kids were not respecting me. We’ve talked so much over the years about self-respect here and setting boundaries in our classrooms and not letting kids hurt us and so this time when the kids were bullying me I let them.
After all these years one would think that I would have learned to know that when a story doesn’t feel right all I have to do is a neat bail out move to a dictée of the last story or a free write or some scanned grammar worksheets from the Amsco Deuxième Livre that I taught out of for 24 years and of which I still know exactly what grammar information is provided on what page in the book in some kind of freakish act of stupendous memorization.
Thank heavens that there are angels. They woke me up again just now in the middle of the night to remind me to be able to recognize if things are not working and to set boundaries with those who harm me, to feel that if a class is not working, that I don’t need to keep pushing it.
They also reminded me that I don’t always have to make a perfect story.
And they also said that TPRS doesn’t always work and to stop expecting perfection all the time.
And also they said that sometimes when people without pure professional intentions (smiling but judging TPRS) are near me I don’t need to smile back and fall all over myself trying to show that this way of teaching basically kicks the shit out of their woefully ineffective way of teaching and always will no matter how many damn verbs they force their kids to conjugate. (Ben, do you have something you want to say here?)
Those are things I needed reminding about.
I just needed to say that. Next time if I sense that something is wrong, I will stop the story. Next time if I feel that we are no where even near the forest where the grove of trees is, but on some jagged TPRS mountain like the one in that picture in the Little Prince that greeted him when he arrived on earth after leaving his rose on his own petite planète, all I have to do is stop the story.
I kind of wish I had learned to set boundaries with people when I was a kid better. And also I wished that I had learned that I am o.k. as God made me and don’t need others to approve of me so much. That’s such a hard one to learn for me – it always has been.
It’s hard to learn those things when I’m older. Why was’t I taught them when I was learning how to be a super student and athlete at Culver Military Academy in Indiana so many years ago? Why didn’t my teachers teach me something that counted?
Maybe that is really why I had to teach this long – to learn those lessons that I didn’t learn when I was young, to learn to stop people from hurting me when it is happening and to notice it and act to stop it in the moment, because it’s harming me.
Oh well, there’s more stories later today waiting. Other classes. More kids to teach me what I am really in a school building to learn, which has little to do with teaching, right jen and Angie?
When the morning sun rolls up yet again over India in an hour, I’ll have another chance to learn to set boundaries with children who are sometimes, if I let them, really just ugly little bullies.
I can do it. Setting boundaries in a loving and patient way. Stopping things that are happening to me that are not good for me. Oh me oh my. There is so much more to this profession than meets the eye.