Many of my students expose their emotional buttons and switches freely and openly. Within a few minutes of meeting some of them, I can tell what their sensitivities are.
“How many administrative referrals did you get last year?” I ask some of them, with a smile that I hope says, “I’m not trying to size you up — I’m just curious.”
“A lot,” a girl — call her Ann — responds.
“Did you notice my question?” I query. “I didn’t ask, ‘Did you receive any referrals?’ but rather ‘How many did you get?’ I’ll bet you got several of those referrals because you simply walked away from a teacher who was saying something you didn’t want to hear.”
I have her attention: she’s curious, and that’s always a good thing.
“How could you tell?” Ann asks.
With their posture, gait, tone and volume of voice, many of these kids speak loads without saying a word. Yet they’re totally unaware of it. Of more concern is that they’re unaware that others are aware of it and can use it against them.
“When you advertise what ‘makes’ you lose control,” I explain, “You provide others with ammunition. The teacher who doesn’t like you at that moment knows: ‘All I have to do is push a little harder and she’ll definitely give me something to write up.’ You let others know your weakness and they might use them against you.” I pause for a moment, deciding to use a bit of vernacular: “Then who got played? Who got owned?”
“Me,” she says meekly.
I have these little conversations after class with the kids that would be labeled “at risk” because they are at risk: they’re in danger of becoming slaves to their own impulses and the people who can pick up on those signals and use them.
Occasionally, there are moments that illustrate that they are indeed beginning to pick up on the signals they give off. They are aware that others can only “make them” mad if they allow it by advertising their sensitivities and reacting predictably.
This afternoon, while students were waiting for their buses, I was joking with a young man that I could probably get him in a state that would end in a disciplinary referral for him. We’d been joking with each other all class about such things, and he stridently denied that I could “push his buttons.”
“How about you,” I ask the boy’s neighbor. “Do you think you have advertised what gets you hot? Do you think I could push your buttons and get you furious in just a few moments in class” He shrugs his shoulders.
I turn to Ann, always one of the last students waiting for her bus. “I’ll bet I could get you.” I know I can: I already have, inadvertently. The question — the hope — appears in my mind: “Will she own up to it?”
“You already have, Mr. S.” Her grin is an odd combination of devilish delight and sheepish vulnerability.
I smile. “Do you think I could do it again if I tried? I won’t ever try, but if I were to try, what do you think?”
She shrugs her shoulders and looks away. For just a moment, though, her eyes say, “I don’t think so. At least I hope not.” A first step — an admission of ownership and of personal responsibility.
“One small step for man…” I think, as the students leave for the bus. I glance down at the roll book and see four more names that need to have such a brief moment of self-confidence in their ability to control their lives.
“I’ll start on him next week,” I mumble.
It’s all part of the growing realization I’m having about working with these “tough” kids. The cliche is spot on: they don’t care what I know until they know that I care. And they’re beginning to know that I care because with me, it’s not business as usual in the discipline department. The etymology of “discipline” includes notions of teaching, not notions of punishing, and I try to put that into practice in the classroom.
Knowing how to read people and how you can be read is a vital survival skill, and I’m glad that someone is actively teaching kids this. I had more independence and less interference from teachers in high school because of it; I was almost never asked for a hall pass, for example, because it was always assumed I was behaving.
It shocks me how so many students think there’s nothing they can do to influence other’s opinions of them. “I don’t care what teachers think about me,” the “Ann” in this post later confessed. I asked her to think overnight about why she didn’t care. When she came in the next afternoon, she told me she’d written it down.
“Good,” I said. “So did I.”
In the minutes before class, I’d written something like, “You don’t care because you don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. You think people will just like you or not like you just like they do with a particular soda or movie.” She read it, and before I read what she wrote, I asked, “Is that what you feel? What you wrote?” She nodded her head affirmatively. “You can control that to some extent, though.”
“How?” she asked.
It left me wondering how I knew how to read people and how I came to the understanding that every single action of mine, no matter how insignificant, communicates something to someone. How did we learn it? Who taught us? I think it’s simply part of that middle class knowledge base that those in generational poverty really have no access to.
So, you know Geoffrey Canada’s work in Harlem? He would agree with you.
I was not familiar with him or his work until now. I’ve looked over the Children’s Zone web site and found this:
This is something that the public education system doesn’t seem to understand, or at least the higher-ups seem to forget during budget discussions. This is a problem of generational poverty, not just low reading and/or math scores. In order for changes in education to be truly effective there needs to be a supportive environment, and that environment itself must be taught/created.
Paul Tough’s book “Whatever It Takes” (on Canada’s work in Harlem) is riveting. Exactly on this topic. Super cool.