13. F Around and Find Out

Battered by the management boomerang, ripples in the force...

You will never win a public power struggle with a student. 

That was Jackie Goldberg, my grad school advisor at UCLA and current LAUSD Board of Education member. Back in 2010, when she said this to class, I intellectually understood she was likely to be right. Time has tested the point though, cast it in bronze, made it a permanent presence in my brain. This doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten the last word in class. I’ve used a big voice and my inherent authority to compel behavior. I’ve cajoled, teased, distracted, flattered, and spoken bluntly to nudge students towards writing, thinking, reading, speaking, and listening. I also consider myself adept at parrying teenagers’ typically weak attempts at banter or clownage. This is what English class helps you with, I tell them. But those aren’t real power struggles. The students are testing. The fires are brief and easy enough to extinguish. But a real power struggle? When a student takes a loud public stand against some essential part of the classroom dynamic? I’ve rarely fought that battle with reciprocal intensity and never once have I won, not in the way that matters.

Two weeks ago, one of the talented school supervisors lost it with a kid who often compels staff to lose it. He followed the kid into the room and, while he was there, asked a bunch of other students (angrily) to take down their hoods. He yelled. They were silent, kind of scared. I don't care about hoods unless they hide headphones, and I always, gently, check. When he left, I diplomatically let the students know that. I also knew that, if I had cared about hoods, I would have handled that differently.

Of course, last week, despite a recent reminder of why Jackie Goldberg was right back in 2010, I handled a challenging situation the same way! 

An advisee with a long-established phone addiction refused to put away his phone and I got mad. In ninth grade, it was an issue for the student. Last year, I almost never saw him on Zoom. This year, the addiction is more severe. Once he announced he would continue watching football highlights (aside: who even cares about football in May?) and not put away his phone, I got mad, publicly, and then he got madder. I tried to offer off-ramps. Let’s take a quick walk, I said, I don't want to call this in. Nope, he said, I’m watching my game, someone can come up and get me. But then, his friends shaking their heads at him, his teacher glumly reaching for the phone to call it in, he got sad, I could tell, and his voice started cracking when he was calling me a “psycho” and other things. His eyes were red. He put his phone away. He still wouldn't talk. He said some other stuff I don't want to get into because it was clearly personal to his life, but it became pretty obvious, folks, that I had struck a very specific nerve. I’d fucked up. I hadn’t read the kid. I’d thought he wanted an alpha dog, as some kids do. And he most definitely was triggered by that exact character more than anything else I could’ve brought to the table. I composed myself quickly and handled his ongoing outburst calmly but the whole time I knew it was happening in large part because of me, that I had forgotten what I'd learned, that I was now victim to what I like to think of as the class management boomerang. I had long long long ago flung far away angry public disagreement as a strategy. And it had returned and hit me in the head.

When you’re starting out teaching, you don't know how to handle these suddenly explosive situations. You learn. You build relationships. You invest time in kids so you have a foundation for discussing any violations of a social contract. You develop a few Jedi mind tricks for those times when tempers rise to a crescendo. In the moment, I focused on his transgressions, his addiction, his defiance. On a different day, after his abrupt response, I would have said something funny and dismissive about football in May and just let him watch and then, without warning, kept him after class and had the conversation then, avoiding the public eye, which was why he felt humiliated and ended up totally losing control. I could have still written him a referral. The point would have been the same. It might not be my fault for not knowing him well enough, but I still did exactly what I learned not to do in my very first year teaching: you can't make an example of a student. And of course this is what happens in life, as obvious as it is to say. You intellectually know something. You incorporate it into your routine, make it habit. And still, on a given day, under certain circumstances, you do what you’ve learned not to do anyway. 

Why do we fuck up when we know we’re fucking up? I’ve written about this before with students. They make the same mistakes over and over. Don't turn in work, not even when they have ample class time to do it, when I’m sitting right next to them, ready to help. Forget or neglect to read. Leave Chromebook chargers at home. Every. Single. Day. They show up 30 minutes late for most classes and then abandon school for two weeks at a time. They don’t respond to messages. Then they come back. 

I’m sorry, they say, I just felt bad about missing time and maybe getting behind so I stayed home. 

Now you’re definitely behind, I say. 

I know, they say.

It’s okay, I say, I get it, let’s get you back into the flow of things. 

And then they do it again and again and again. And in May, it’s let’s-make-a-deal time. It’s what-might-I-do-to-pass time. It’s if-I-do-x-can-I-get-to-a-D time. Because college is important. Because parents expect better. Some of these same students will write, this year or in another one, a senior speech about procrastination or learning from mistakes and not realize the irony. 

But it’s true. We grown-ups do it too. It takes a second and you forget what you’ve learned. One minute you’re drinking tea and thinking about checking everyone’s grades and helping them get back into the flow of things if they’re slipping and the next you’re slipping. You realize it’s happening when it’s happening and yet you feel powerless to stop yourself. I tell kids it’s like watching a driver go too fast on a curvy road from the back seat — the teacher’s seat. You keep yelling — “Watch out, this is risky!” — but the driver keeps speeding up. And then, you’re floating over the cliff, and everything is grim but weirdly peaceful, and you look down like Wile Y. Coyote and say, “Huh, I reckon that was a curvy road.”

My daughter describes this feeling when asked to reflect on her meltdowns. 

Stop getting upset, it’s no big deal, it’s fine — that’s the kind of stuff I unhelpfully say. 

I can’t stop, I can't stop, I can’t stop — that’s her response, as she’s turning purple, sweating. 

Which is pretty much what was going on with the kid in my Advisory. And with me. I was floating over the cliff the minute my voice rose and I said what I said — “You need to give me your fucking phone,” by the way — and, while I did resolve to return to form (whatever that is) the next day, bounce back, learn from my mistake, I felt like I had to do something. To cast the moment in bronze and feel like I handled it right, better than I would have 12 years ago.

I needed to apologize. To the kid, sure, and he needed to apologize to me too, which he did, sort of, quietly — impressive considering what I heard from staff about his history. I wanted more though. I needed to apologize for my contribution to the public mess, for the way I disrupted the peace and productivity of other students. 

A friend from grad school once did a very memorable bit on Twitter making fun of the faux-humble anecdotes in teacher memoirs. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before. You’ve read them. A kid who doesn't have role models at home resists, resists, and resists but then finally learns from a consistently perfect teacher (who (consistently) never announces his perfection) and comes back years later and thanks him, and the teacher smiles and says, no, young man, that was all you, you took your journey, I just directed traffic. Or something awful like that. 

The truth is, when you try to reach kids, it’s pretty common for nothing to happen. The kid maybe still hates you and only apologizes to end the discomfort. Maybe they end up in your class again and all is forgotten. But when something happens, it’s quite rarely cinematic. Delivered last Friday, the first class after the dispute, my apology wasn’t a dramatic scenery-chewing affair. I did buy doughnuts as a peace offering. I wanted it to feel normal though. The conflict wasn't all my fault, of course, but I wanted to model how to try to restore that, to resolve a problem, to show them what an adult does to repair a shredded social contract. This was more important than anything else. So, I did. They came up and got their doughnuts and a few people voiced casual (normal) appreciation. The kid (his phone most definitely stowed in his backpack) murmured thanks when he walked past me, a sentiment few probably heard, and then everyone went back to their desks, opened their laptops, stuffed their doughnuts, and the day continued, Wednesday just a momentary ripple in the Force.