Episode 5: Sally

A teacher faces the truth about a “squirrelly” class.

Transcript

Sally is a veteran high school teacher with a particular love for action. She loves having her students do things: make artifacts, act out skits, engage with the community and environment around them. She recognizes that this experiential approach to teaching often comes with a touch of chaos, but she has a high tolerance for silliness and for a kind of wobbly yet fun path towards her instructional goals.

On this particular day, Sally’s students are practicing group presentations they are going to make to each other in class in a couple days. Her plan for today and tomorrow is to give each group a chance to practice their presentation in front of her so she can give them focused feedback before the final showing. It’s only fair, right? Nothing worse than getting graded on a performance by someone who never told you what they were looking for in the first place.

So Sally is taking each group out into the hallway for about 15 minutes to show her what they’ve got. The remaining groups stay in the classroom, refining their presentations and, if they feel ready for Sally’s feedback, working on the related papers that are due on the same day as the final presentations – in two days.

Oh! Did I mention that this class is “squirrely”? That’s Sally’s word. She’s got a bunch of “squirrely” kids in this class. So you can probably guess what was happening inside the classroom as Sally was working with the groups in the hallway. In a nutshell, the kids were going crazy. As Sally put it, a number of the kids were “acting immature” and “rude.” Someone was actually “shooting staples”! Chaos – not a touch of it, but a full-fledged flood of it – had broken out.

Pretty quickly Sally felt herself to be split into about three different pieces: the piece that was supposed to be focusing on each group in the hallway; the piece that was supposed to tamp down the unacceptable behavior in the classroom; and the piece that was supposed to get the students to do their assigned work. She truly felt fragmented, running in and out of the classroom, trying to do everything right but knowing she was doing nothing well.

And the whole time it was as if a siren only she could hear was going off in her head. It sounded something like this: “This is a disaster! This is unacceptable! What’s wrong with these kids? What’s wrong with me? I don’t know what to do! I am messing this up! I am a total failure!!!!!”

This for about 40 minutes, the mental soundtrack to Sally’s increasingly irritated interactions with her students. “Luke, sit down! Regina, put that stapler back! James, is your group ready to present? Paola, why aren’t you working on your paper?!?” By the time the bell rang, Sally was an exhausted wreck.

And in filed the next class.

[break]

As I said, Sally has a high tolerance for chaos. And she’s been at it for many years, which has made her a pretty accepting and mellow teacher. Her students love her, and she pretty universally loves them.

BUT today was exceptional. Exceptionally awful. Sally couldn’t believe how bad she felt about her students. She couldn’t believe how bad she felt about herself. On her way home, she actually thought about quitting teaching.

I want to talk about this for a second because I think this feeling is pretty common. I know I’ve had it. I mean, I love teaching. I love designing instruction; I love running classes; I love seeing my students grow and change; I love learning from my students and deepening my knowledge of my subject matter. So much fun. But, DAMN. I have never liked the feelings of insecurity that teaching has brought up in me.

I remember a class from many years ago that I HATED. I dreaded every class meeting. No matter how intentional I was about the day’s plan, it was always hijacked and diverted. Students overrode each other during discussions; after a while, one student basically ended up dominating while the others fell silent, only to come see me during office hours to tell me how unhappy they were. The class dynamic was stultifying, and I felt completely responsible for it.

And because I did not see what I could do to make the students change, because I had no idea how to exercise my responsibility to them, I just wanted to quit. Throw in the towel. Give up a job I loved. Anything to escape my inescapable feelings: my dread of this class and, more importantly, an intolerable feeling of horror at my helplessness and ineffectiveness.

BRRR!! Terrible feelings!! I imagine that’s how Sally felt as she drove home from her squirrely, chaotic class. Like the only way to escape her shame was to quit.

It’s interesting to note where Sally went emotionally as a result of this exceptionally awful class. She went to self-blame and shame. “I should have done better! I should know what to do! I should be able to control this class! I’m a terrible teacher! This is all my fault!”

That’s one response. Another – one she didn’t have – could have been anger. Sally could have yelled at her students. She could have sent the trouble-makers out of the room, to the office or the Student Support Center or whatever, where nothing necessarily would have changed, but at least she could have gotten rid of the squirreliest students for a few minutes and given the other students a chance to get something done.

To be honest, Sally kicked herself for not doing this, too. “Why didn’t I just throw Regina out?” (Regina, you may recall, was the student with the improvised staple gun.) “Why did I let Luke move around the classroom so much? Why did I keep going – why didn’t I just shut the whole plan down and make everyone work on their papers silently? How could I have lost control so completely?” This endless second-guessing, the rising wail of self-doubt, the calamitous loss of perspective – this is an all-too-familiar part of the job of teaching. At least, it is for me. And that day, it was for Sally.

And it needs to be addressed. Especially when these bad feelings funnel into shame and burnout.

So let’s address them!

[break]

One of the o-so-great things about being in a Teacher Support Group is that you can bring all these feelings into the room and just dump them on the table. Which is what Sally did.

At first, the group just listened. We asked some questions to get a better picture of what went on in Sally’s classroom. Eventually, the teachers shared, too. “Yeah, I’ve had classes like that,” one said. “But I don’t handle them as well as you did. I just yell! I think I’ve actually scared students!” Another said, “I just send the kid out. Which isn’t a policy I like, because, you know: If they’re not in the room, they’re not learning.” “Yeah, but when they are in the room, no one’s learning!”

Ah. Commiserating with a teacher who is suffering. Joining with her, sharing vulnerabilities, normalizing feelings so as to dilute the shame. Sketching out the dilemma. All good work.

Next: introducing a frame to organize this information, to help Sally make sense of her really difficult experience. The one I chose to drop into the conversation was the frame of holding.

Here’s why this frame seemed appropriate: This class was squirrely but benevolent. Regina might have been shooting staples; Luke might have been wandering around the classroom keeping kids from doing their work; James and Paola might have been chatting and goofing off with their friends. But nothing Sally said in her teacher group suggested that the students were acting out of malice. There was a tiny bit of danger, maybe, with Regina’s staple-shooting, but Sally had to admit the overall atmosphere in the classroom was more that of a party than of a powder keg.

So what was going on? Why were the students going crazy?

My suspicion was that they needed to be held better.

And by “held” I of course don’t mean hugged. (Well, in a way I do. More on that later.) What I mean by “held” is “contained.” When kids go crazy in a classroom, one very obvious way to interpret the data is that either they need firm limits to be set or they need to reminded of the limits already in place. And by “limits” I mean rules and consequences.

That’s the interpretation we worked with in the support group.

Every teacher knows about rules and consequences. Of course! There are rules that govern here! And if you break them, there are consequences! That’s how we maintain order in the classroom! So we can get our good work done! But it’s kind of amazing how easy it is to forget that many students are driven by entirely different rules, or purposes and assumptions, than teachers are.

At the risk of stating the obvious:

Here are some purposes and assumptions that might drive teachers (even if not all teachers like all these purposes and assumptions all the time):

·      We are here to learn.

·      We prefer order to chaos.

·      Now is not the time to socialize.

·      Our goal is high test scores.

Here are some purposes and assumptions that can drive at least some students at least some of the time:

·      I need to discharge some energy.

·      I need to distract myself from being myself (or being in my body, or feeling what I’m feeling).

·      I need to connect with someone – maybe the teacher, usually my friends.

·      I need to do my own thing, not what some adult wants me to do.

Ugh!! These purposes and assumptions clearly do not match up. But there’s good news: Underneath all of the energy and needs and purposes and assumptions is a basic developmental truth: Everyone needs to be held. That is, everyone needs the safety and predictability of limits and the safety and predictability of knowing what happens when those limits are breached.

Kids are not necessarily conscious of this developmental need. In fact, they are pretty much programmed to fight this need. We see it in two-year-olds; we see it in teenagers: the attempt to take over the world, to run it themselves, to be omnipotent! Very normal attempts that must be limited. Why? So we can ruin our children’s lives? No. So we can introduce them to reality and help them develop a healthy, flexible relationship with it.

A word (or more) about reality and one’s relationship with it. The way I view reality is not as a thing that exists outside of us, immutable and objective. In my view (and in others’), reality consists of lots and lots of individuals, each with their own perspectives and realities, who have to work together to co-create shared experience. You probably know how jarring it is to encounter someone with a vastly different account of reality from yours, how crazy-making it can be to try to reconcile their sense of what is true with your sense of what is true. Sometimes it feels like it simply cannot be done. (That’s how polarized politics feels, right?)

As a parent, a teacher, and a psychotherapist, I take it as my job to help people own their reality – their perspectives, their psychic structures, their experiences that color their perceptions and interpretations of the world – and honor others’ realities. So we can work together, or fit together, in ways that allow good work to get done. What this means is we have to be flexible enough to hear things like “NO” or “I disagree!” or “This is what it’s like for me, not you” or “This is the impact you’re having on me.” We have to learn to live with the intense disappointment at not getting what we want or not living in a world that revolves around us. The ability to be resilient, to have a healthy relationship with realities that we co-construct with other people, is a developmental feat. This developmental feat is fostered when others establish limits and let natural consequences fall on us. We will not learn this resilience if we don’t ever experience the need for it.

One last thing: limits and consequences foster healthy development when they happen in a healthy context. Limits that are draconian and consequences that are cruel and unusual are, needless to say, anti-growth, anti-development, anti-health.

So Sally needed to remind her students of the safeguarding limits they all needed in her classroom but were obviously – and naturally – inclined to ignore.

Once we framed the data in this way, Sally was easily able to see herself and her class differently. The exceptionally awful experience actually made sense. The students’ behavior didn’t say anything in particular about Sally; rather, it gave evidence of what the students were needing at that moment: holding, limits, rules and consequences that would make them all feel contained and focused.

In the group, we talked about the value of dropping the expectation Sally held for herself that she should “get” students to do stuff – I don’t know, by holding them down and threatening them? – in favor of the expectation that she would set up a classroom that channeled students’ energy in the direction they needed it to go. Through rules and consequences. Through clearly defined activities, effective supports that helped all students feel they could succeed at those activities, and a lesson design that took into consideration Sally’s reality – that she had only one body, for example, and could not be in two places at one time.

Sally’s a good teacher. This was all she needed: a reminder about her classroom as a healthy holding environment. A plan for engaging her students in a discussion about rules and consequences to remind them of the reality of the classroom. And a reality check for herself: designing a lesson that didn’t ask the impossible of her or her students. Cuz if you want a holding environment to work consistently, you’ve got to be able to hold students accountable if – really, when – they step over the line.

This isn’t punitive. It isn’t “disciplinary.” It’s just holding. It’s giving students what they need and deserve.

And, just to be clear: What Sally’s students needed and deserved was not Sally’s charging into her classroom the next day to read them the riot act. The Teacher Support Group did not advocate that Sally go home, write up her list of rules and consequences, and unveil them to her students the next day. No. The curricular solution to the squirrely student problem was for Sally

·      to start class the next day with a brief, if possible humorous, description of what happened the day before;

·      to assert that such chaotic conditions weren’t conducive to getting good academic work done (“Right, students?” “Right, teacher!” They’re not dumb);

·      to ask the students what conditions are conducive to getting good academic work done (they surely know);

·      to work with the students to encode these conditions in a series of statements or rules or limits that get posted on the classroom wall, if necessary;

·      to ask the students what should happen if or more likely when these rules get broken;

·      to brainstorm acceptable ways to call out the rule breaking so the behavior can stop (without shame) and the group can carry on efficiently.

It goes without saying that the curricular solution rests, of course, on relationships. The teacher has to truly like and trust her students. She needs to trust herself. And the students need to feel and believe that their teacher truly likes and trusts them. If these things are not true, all bets are off.

Fortunately for Sally and her students, these things were true.

This story has a lovely ending. The night of our support group, Sally emailed me to tell me she was really looking forward to getting back into her classroom the next day to have that conversation about rules and consequences. She couldn’t wait to reconnect with her students. “I love this group!” she wrote. I think she meant the support group, which is really great. But I think she meant her students, too.

So much for quitting teaching.

[break]

You might be wondering what happened when Sally went back into her classroom the following day. I actually don’t know. Neither does Sally. At least, not specifically (I checked with her). What she wrote to me ten years after the fact was this: “Looking back, you taught me how to set boundaries, and I did. It worked and was successful.” As I see it, Sally went into that classroom the next day with a plan that she knew she could implement – that is, to set boundaries, as she put it – and with an attitude of love and excitement and optimism, an unshakeable expectation that her students would want to cooperate with her. Over and over again I find that a simple shift in expectation is enough to change relational dynamics.

But a good, informed plan of action really helps, too.

This story was about the kind of day that, for whatever reason, makes you feel so terrible that you just want to quit. There are so many versions of this kind of day! In fact, I’d love to hear about your version. I mean it: Email me the story of your worst day and, if we can talk (and by “talk” I mean email or zoom) about it for a bit, I can try to put it on the podcast. Here’s my email: betsy@teachingthroughemotions.com. That’s my first name – betsy – “at” the name of the work that I do – teaching through emotions, all one word obviously – with dot-com at the end. Do it. I’d love to hear from you.

Back to Sally’s bad day: Bad days are good in my universe because they are so rich with emotional and relational data. In Sally’s case, her self-blame and shame pointed us to the question, “What went wrong?” I mean, yeah: Something went wrong on Sally’s exceptionally awful day. But Sally’s immediate assumption that she was what was wrong – that’s what self-blame and shame mean – was way off. She is an excellent teacher. And things can go wrong even for excellent teachers.

So what went wrong? After some empathic kindness and sharing that normalized Sally’s experience and embraced her terrible feelings, the group got down to it. What went wrong was that Sally had asked too much of her students and herself. She had expected a class she knew was “squirrely” to manage themselves without direct supervision. She had expected herself to be able to hold everything together even though she couldn’t be physically present to do so.

Note, of course, the key word: “hold.” What went wrong was that Sally had not planned her lesson from the perspective of “holding.” She did not think specifically about how to “hold” or contain or limit students’ squirrely behaviors while she was out in the hallway, and she did not think specifically about how to structure the activities that were supposed to go on inside the classroom in such a way that “held” the students tightly enough to keep their attention on the tasks at hand.

And this is not a crime. It is simply a fact. One that is easy enough to address, through rules and consequences going forward, as Sally was looking forward to doing, through appropriate instructional design, and through authentic, caring relationships of the sort Sally already had with her students. Good to know.

A thought about the last criterion here: authentic, caring relationships. Even though I can’t mean “hugging” when I talk about “holding” in the classroom, I really am. I’m talking about the feeling of being hugged – of being safely contained in loving arms – when I say “holding.” People can get this feeling from any number of experiences that have nothing to do with physical contact.

We can get it from being in a consistent, predictable, organized space where someone we know cares about us is in charge. We can get it from being seen and heard accurately by someone who looks us in the eye and describes non-judgmentally what they see and what they have heard us say. We can get it when we’re with someone to whom we can speak the truth knowing that rather than freaking out they’ll help us sort it out. And that they will speak the truth back to us. Because they can handle it, they can hold it with and for us. We can get it from feeling connected to someone – or to many people – who, through their behaviors and actions, have taught us that they are trustworthy.

Lots of ways to feel hug-like held. All of them inexpressibly important. To everyone. The bottom line being authentic, caring relationships.

That’s a good axiom: The bottom line is authentic, caring relationships. But that’s true for every teaching story! Here’s the axiom I choose for Sally’s story:  Classrooms are containers.

Here’s what I mean: Students need to be held. (So do teachers, by the way; that’s what Teacher Support Groups do.) Students need limits: rules and consequences, deadlines, consistent, reassuring routines. They need to be able to hold onto the stuff they’re learning in class, to organize it for themselves, to absorb it in a way that makes sense and doesn’t overwhelm (or barely register). When they walk into a classroom, they need to know they are safe even as they engage in the risky venture of learning. Classrooms must contain all these legitimate needs. And teachers must design the classroom experiences that contain the needs.

This is such a fundamental axiom!!! You will hear me talk more about holding in other podcasts. The key here is that creating a classroom that is a consistently healthy container is a tall order, mostly because other people – namely students – are inevitably involved, and they can so easily mess up even the most thoughtful plans! So you’re going to fail-to-contain sometimes, just as Sally did. Remember: This is not a crime. What is a crime is when good teachers berate themselves for experiencing the normal. Don’t berate. Wonder “what went wrong?” and try an experiment that might make it right.