Episode 3: Robin

A teacher is angry when her students blow her off.

Transcript

Robin is a young tenure-track professor who is really interested in being an excellent teacher. She spent days this past summer designing a course that makes her a little nervous because it’s on a topic she is not totally 100% expert in – which I told her would make it that much more interesting for her students, as they’ll be partners with her in the learning. She wants very very much to do well by her students. So she works really hard on her classes and on her responses to student work.

She’s also aware of how important it is that her students write glowing evaluations of her because those evaluations will make a difference in her coming tenure decision.

Yeah. She’s feeling pressure. To be a great teacher. To be liked by the students. To succeed in covering up her anxiety about the subject matter she’s teaching, to not be seen as a phony or an imposter. To hold her students (and herself) to high standards. 

OK, we’re at mid-terms in Robin’s class, and the students are freaking out about their mid-term papers. Robin, who prides herself on being responsive to students’ needs, adds some extra office hours to her schedule so she can accommodate as many students as possible. This is not an easy task, by the way, as Robin has a lot of other obligations that pull on her time. It’s kind of amazing, actually, how crazy busy she is.

She’s sitting in her office, churning through student meetings. She’s giving them 20 minutes each, and they’re clipping along. She says good-bye to her fourth student in a row, looks outside her office for the fifth, and sees no one. She sits back down in her office, with her office door open, and waits. And waits. She knows she can’t get started on any substantive work (even though she really needs to be working on a conference paper she’s giving in a week) because she could be interrupted at any minute by the student.

No show.

She looks out her office door for the sixth student and waits some more. Another no show.

She is getting super antsy. Shall I get to work on my paper? she wonders. Shall I do some emails? She does check her email for word from either of the two no shows but sees nothing from either student. There are some urgent emails she needs to attend to, but they require thought, and she knows she can’t concentrate on anything important when she’s feeling on-call and antsy like this. Anything else she might do also requires concentration. And she can’t go home to work in privacy because she’s got one more student signed up. So she waits.

And her last student no shows as well. Three no shows in a row. 

Robin. Is. Pissed.

“What the HECK!!!” she thinks as she throws papers and books into her briefcase and hurls herself out of her office. “Are you kidding me? Do these people understand how much time I’m giving them? What is WRONG with them? How DARE they waste my time?!!! I NEVER would have done this when I was a student. I was RESPONSIBLE. I was GROWN-UP. I wasn’t an entitled little brat who takes people for granted and does whatever they feel like and then asks for an extension and….”

We’ll leave Robin here.

[break]

Not every teacher is a tenure-track professor, of course. But most if not all teachers – and please contact me if you are not one of these, because I’d love to meet you – most teachers have felt frustrated by a student’s thoughtlessness or entitlement or irresponsibility at one time or another. Right? Like the student who just doesn’t hand in homework for two weeks in a row. Or the student who is chronically late to class, just sauntering in like time is yet another adoring fan. Or the student who packs up her backpack well before the bell rings because she has somehow decided that class has ended – when it most decidedly has not. Or the student who asks for a second extension because she’s so tired from extra-curriculars. Or the student who talks to her friends while you’re talking. Or can’t seem to follow even the simplest rules. Or keeps interrupting your lesson. Or asks you to repeat the instructions as soon as you’ve finished giving them.

Or the kid who repeatedly “forgets” to clear his plate after dinner or to pick up her clothes and bath towels and, well, garbage that she’s dropped on her bedroom floor. Or who waits until the absolutely last minute to get homework done – and then asks you for help just as you’re getting into bed. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. 

We’re talking here about buttons. Pushed buttons. We all have them. Turns out Robin and I share one: having our time wasted. I cannot stand it when people waste my time!!! It has something to do with the fact that, because I’ve experienced enough people treating me as though I or my time doesn’t matter as much as they or their time matters, I’ve developed an allergy to any treatment that feels like dismissal or erasure. Do not, I repeat: DO NOT take me for granted.

Just to be clear: Robin’s pushed button could also just be an appropriate response to rude behavior. I mean, no-showing without any contact or explanation definitely qualifies as irresponsible and inconsiderate. (By the way, it also qualifies as informative. As a therapist, I’m interested in why clients don’t show up for their appointments. There’s always a good reason.) Of course, Robin could have welcomed these no shows despite the implied rudeness – I confess I love it when people don’t show up because I have tons I can do in the meantime! – but she didn’t welcome them because she couldn’t make good use of the time she gained.

So here Robin made extra time for her students; some students took those time slots (over other students); and the energy she might have devoted to other tasks was totally usurped by these unusable little time tidbits, so the students who didn’t show up basically let Robin sit around twiddling her thumbs for 20 minutes each. While her anxiety about the stuff she needed to do but couldn’t spiked. Hoo boy!! Recipe for rage.

All this to say: Robin’s situation – her response to her pushed button – should sound familiar.

And it should feel familiar. Those feelings that suddenly flood us when our buttons are pushed: frustration, irritation, disbelief, anger. Outrage. Self-righteousness. Vengefulness.

These are strong emotion words, right? (I love this pat response that I’ve heard all over the place: “Hate is a strong word.” I’m like, “ExACTly. That’s why I’m using it. I FEEL STRONGLY.”) (And by the way: Love is a strong word, too.) There is nothing wrong with strong feelings, whether you’re a teacher or a parent (HA! Talk about a job that’s custom-made for strong feelings!!) or a doctor or a CEO. What can go wrong with strong feelings is our responses to them.

Here’s how Robin could have responded to her strong feelings:

·      She could have gotten home and shot off a snarky email to the students who no-showed. “Thanks for being so considerate.” “Glad I waited for you to not show up.” You know. Taking o so satisfying revenge. Of course, she could take revenge in a much less public way – by holding a grudge and being ungenerous in her evaluation of the students later on, for example. She could be punitive consciously, and she could be punitive unconsciously. Lots of ways to take revenge from the powerful position of teacher.

·      She could have called a friend or cornered her partner and complained about the students. This bitch session would really only satisfy if the friend or partner joined in and shared more negative information about these students or escalated Robin’s outrage, further deepening her disdain and self-righteousness. OK, I’m not trying to be mean here. I’m just trying to paint an honest picture. If you’re someone who can have a ranting bitch session that ends in peaceful compassion for the person who supposedly wronged you – again, contact me. I’d love to meet you.

·      She could have stuffed her feelings and pretended she didn’t have them. Push the rug down in one corner and wait for it to pop up in another. Just sayin’.

·      She could have started worrying. “Wait,” she could have thought. “Why didn’t the students show up? Was it because they decided I couldn’t help them? Why did they even sign up for a meeting if they thought my help wasn’t important? Wait – maybe something terrible happened and I won’t know about it. And I’ll be angry at them when I should be kind to them. And then they’ll be angry at me….” We might call this an Alice in Wonderland response, where Robin suddenly becomes very small and the students become quite large. And Robin loses track of her own reality and becomes lost in her fantasies about her students’ realities.

Of course, there are oodles of other possible responses. I hope you’ve already come up with yours as you listen to Robin’s bad experience. Because we’ve all had these feelings, and we’ve all responded in ways that did not necessarily help. In my work, there’s no blame, just curiosity. And, in the end, compassion.

So let’s just take a moment to acknowledge a couple normal things about Robin’s story. First, she has some strong emotions. Her button was pushed, for heaven’s sake! Second, she might do something foolhardy. At the very least, she might want to do something foolhardy. Hitting back, getting revenge – these are common reflex reactions to having our buttons pushed, to being blindsided by strong feelings.

Let’s let these emotions and possibilities live and breathe. Because they’re important data, right? Can’t gather the data if you won’t let yourself acknowledge and label it. Can’t make use of the data if you don’t gather it.

[break]

How did Robin end up responding to the no shows? The last option: She started worrying. This is what she brought to the Teacher Support Group.

And here’s how the TSG responded.

We started with the emotions Robin said she felt as a result of these no-shows. Of course, she led with anger. But that kind of morphed into disappointment. She was disappointed in the students, disappointed that they did not live up to her expectations.

Uhhh. Disappointment. This is a huge emotion, one I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about (or just plain managing). The way we talked about it in the support group was like this: What are your expectations? What do the students owe you? Like, if you do this thing for them – open up more office hours – and they blow you off, what does that mean to you? Maybe more to the point, what does it mean about you?

Robin was easily able to say that her students actually owe her nothing. For those of you who might disagree, consider: the person a student owes everything to is, fundamentally, herself. If a teacher dangles her power to approve or disapprove or reward or punish students in front of them, she is making their learning about her rather than about them. I know I know: You gotta do what you gotta do. If students just won’t learn, and they have to learn or your school will be taken over by the state, motivations stop mattering so much. Or if your students’ evaluations of you determine whether or not you have a job next year, you might start feeling a little desperate and controlling. Practically speaking, given the lousy realities so many teachers have to live with, these compromises make sense. Ideally speaking, in terms of learning and living and being a healthy human being, not so much.

For now, we’ll go with Robin’s belief: That her students do not owe her anything. Not even to show up at their appointments. Yes, it would have been nice if they hadn’t caused her to lose an hour of time she might have spent on other tasks. But that wasn’t really the issue for Robin – one hour was not going to make or break her conference paper. The issue was her outrage at her students’ behavior, her kind of disproportionate response to what they did – or in this case didn’t – do. These strong emotions that accompany pushed buttons are SUPER VALUABLE data. They are meaningful and deserve examination. Hence my questions: What does students’ blowing you off mean to you? What does it mean about you?

It didn’t take long for Robin to come up with answers. For her, the students’ behavior was evidence of her value as a teacher. If they show up, she thought, she’s a good teacher. If they don’t show up, she’s a bad teacher.

Just to state the obvious: This is a really great realization. It totally takes the wind out of Robin’s anger and disappointment. Our focus in the group got to move from anger – which just begs to be fanned, usually leading to nothing productive – to a really important fact.

That fact being that Robin was taking the no shows personally. She saw her students’ behaviors as direct judgments of her rather than as data about them. Her anger was the clue. By feeling it and bringing it to us in the group, Robin was able to relieve herself of the underlying fear – the emotion that her anger signaled, the emotion that was deeper than the anger and more useful: her fear that her students saw her as a bad teacher. This fear was something we could work with.

I mean, it’s not to say that Robin’s students don’t see her as a bad teacher – students will, you know, and there’s not a whole lot we can do to control their feelings about us. But the key for Robin was to take ownership of what was hers and leave what was the students’ to them. What was hers here was her anger and disappointment at the students’ behavior, which she interpreted in a way that hurt her. She took some data – the students’ not showing up to office hours – and immediately turned it against herself rather than note the behavior and be curious about it. “Hmmmm. What’s going on here?”

Which is what we turned to next in our TSG meeting. As Robin put it, “OK, but how do I make students show up?”

Ah. Making students do something. Here’s the problem with that: We cannot make anybody do anything. The only person we can make do anything is ourselves. With others, we can influence. So how might Robin influence her students to show up?

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you what I told Robin: Ask them. Put it to them with open, genuine interest, no anger or resentment at all: “Some of you didn’t show up to office hours. What’s going on when that happens? What can get you to show up?” 

NOTE: I didn’t recommend that she say, “What can I do to help you show up?” I’m hoping you can guess why, but in a nutshell: If it’s truly the students’ responsibility to show up for appointments, then, well, it’s the students’ responsibility to get themselves to their appointments. If a teacher really wants students to brainstorm about how they can exercise their own responsibilities, she can’t very well include herself in the solution mix from the get-go. It kind of limits the possibilities.

Of course, the students might put it back on Robin. They might, for example, suggest she send them reminders the day before their appointments. This is a legitimate request from needy, anxious students, but it is also one Robin would have every right to veto. “Enh,” she might say. “That suggestion would definitely help you, but it puts the responsibility back on my shoulders. And the whole point here is that I don’t want to take your responsibility from you. I mean, I’m not Siri!” Which might lead to an alternative: “How ‘bout you set your own reminders?”

I also want to say really quickly what you might already have thought of: that posing the problem to the students in this way opens up space for the students who didn’t no show, who actually made it to their appointments; it gives those students a chance to share their tactics. Asking students “How do you do it?” both validates them and benefits others.

Going meta for a minute, what did I recommend Robin do? I recommended that she formulate the problem as one she and the students could look at and solve together. Not as her problem. Not as their problem. But as a problem that affects them and affects her and deserves creative attention from all of them. 

In the group, then, we wondered, “What is the actual problem here? Is it Robin’s anger and disappointment in the students?” 

Answer: Yes, but Robin’s emotions are a problem Robin has to work on herself. They are not the students’ problem. We might all have buttons that we hate getting pushed, but if I push your button, that does not make me responsible for the feelings that flare in you as a result. No, you are responsible for working through those feelings to the bedrock meanings you have attached to them. That work keeps you out of the blame game – that is, the popular game of blaming others for what you feel – and in the growth game – that is, the game of growing into your best well-bounded responsible self.

“Is the problem the fact that three of the students didn’t show up to the appointments they made with Robin?”

Answer: Yes. This is the problem because, in Robin’s estimation, blowing off appointments is a maladaptive behavior that students should be encouraged to change. This is a problem, then, that students should be thinking about.

It’s like a wrong answer on a test: If you the student haven’t learned this thing I’ve said you need to learn, then I as a teacher need to help you become someone who knows this thing. I need to influence you to change. I the teacher need to take what I (Betsy) call “corrective academic action.” When students’ behaviors demonstrate that they haven’t learned a crucial social or relational skill, I as the teacher am in a position to offer what I (Betsy again) call “corrective relational action.”  This, by the way, is what SEL is all about, right? Social-Emotional Learning? Which research shows is central to success in life? Robin’s plan of giving the problem to the students is an SEL lesson – the best kind, because it’s lived, felt, experienced, immediately relevant, and something Robin and the students can easily follow up on.

So what was Robin’s plan? To give the problem back to the students.

Here’s how that worked: At our next meeting, Robin told us, “I did what we suggested about the office hour no-shows. I said, ‘What’s going on? How can we get people to show up for their appointments?’ Some of the students said, ‘People just need to show up for their appointments!’ Like ‘Duh!’ I reiterated the rules that are already in my syllabus, and students have been following them beautifully. Maybe they just needed some tough love.” 

Tough love being describing the disappointing behavior, reminding students of the rules, and holding the line on those rules.

Success story. Nice work, Robin. 

[break]

OK, let’s reiterate what happened here:

·      In our group, we identified anger and disappointment as emotions Robin was feeling and dug a little deeper to discover that these feelings pointed to Robin’s fear that the students’ irresponsible behavior said something about her – specifically, that she was a bad teacher. This is such great work. First, peek underneath your feelings. There’s good stuff down there, even if it’s raw and, you might think, unbecoming. Second, question your assumptions. We tend to scan the world for evidence that confirms our worst beliefs about ourselves. And for that matter, about others. (That our students are lazy blobs, for example.) Then we grab that evidence and pull it in so that – surprise surprise! – it confirms those worst beliefs. And deepens them. And makes us feel terrible.

·      In our group, we noticed that Robin’s immediate assumptions about the meaning of her students’ no-shows kept her from seeing the problem for what it was: an interesting pattern. That’s it. Interesting data. Once she was able to separate that data from her feelings and assumptions about it – that is, once she was able to separate the pattern from the conclusion she drew about herself – she could feel curious about the pattern and ask the students about it. Putting the problem back on the students’ capable shoulders allowed them to become aware of their behaviors and act more responsibly. Of course, the students might – probably will – slip up and behave irresponsibly again. They’re human, after all! But, having had this conversation, Robin can easily bring the problem back up so the students can be like, “Oh yeah. We forgot. Sorry about that” and get back to business. The take-away here is this super-useful tactic of formulating a problem that we can put on the table (as it were) in front of everyone so everyone can look at it from their own perspective and take responsibility for what is theirs.

·      In diving into her anger and disappointment, and in order to formulate an objective problem, Robin had to decide what was her responsibility and what was the students’. This distinction can be so relieving, as it clarifies which stuff you can do something about and which stuff you can’t – that is, which stuff you have to give back to others. As I’ve said: We cannot change anyone but ourselves. This despite the current assumption guiding much of educational policy that teachers should be punished for their students’ failure to learn. As if it were that simple. And a related thought: When we’re tempted to compare people to ourselves – “I wouldn’t have done that when I was a student!” – we are effectively erasing people who are different from us. Applying our standards to others is really common, of course – we’re trapped in our own perceiving bodies, after all – and expecting students to meet our high standards is good instructional practice (as long as scaffolding is there to help students up). But mindlessly expecting others to be like us and getting mad when they’re not – that’s a form of merging, and it isn’t good for anyone. Doing the hard work of distinguishing ourselves from others – owning our stuff, letting others have their stuff, asking questions about what it’s like to be that other – is a really worthwhile discipline.

Oh my goodness. This was a very simple but really rich story! So many axioms I could pull out of it! But the one I choose is this: Don’t take students personally.

Easy to say. Hard to do. Because we all take others personally at least some of the time! And when we do we barely notice that we’ve made a choice we can reverse! How can you not take students personally? You can do what Robin did in her Teacher Support Group: First, gather the data. Notice and describe your students’ behaviors. Notice and describe your feelings about those behaviors. Detach from these experiences. Hold them in front of you and look at them with curiosity. Hmmm! Interesting. What might all this mean? Next, tease apart what is yours and what is theirs. Wonder what your emotions mean about you. Dig into them with interest, courage, and compassion. Wonder what your emotions and the students’ behaviors mean about them. Not in a judgmental way. With the same interest and compassion you brought to yourself. Finally, formulate a problem without rancor or resentment and bring it to the students. See what solutions you all can come up with and make a plan with your students that you and they can hold to. See what happens.