Mining Emotions
Teachers benefit from examining stories of silence, sarcasm, and resistance -- their students' and their own. It's story time.
I've chosen this story because it is, to me, amazing. And it illustrates a whole bunch of ideas that can help teachers make sense of the emotional and relational data their classrooms are brimful of. I'm going to mine this story for the next couple of weeks because hey! it's a great way to start the school year.
Here's the story:
Once, many years ago, I was facilitating a particular Teacher Support Group. All six of the teachers in the group had checked in with stories from their classrooms that involved, in one way or another, the feeling of impatience. So we decided to talk about that feeling.
I asked for specific examples of times when the teachers felt impatient.
"When I give students instructions for the 17th time and a student asks me to repeat them yet again and then gets offended when I ignore him!" said one teacher.
"When I've planned something poorly and students point that out in one way or another," said another teacher-- let's call her Abigail. At those times, Abigail said, "I can feel sarcasm coming on, and that's dark."
Abigail gave an example: On a recent day, after having combed through a passage from a Shakespeare play and defined all the vocabulary and phrases, she asked the class as a group to translate the passage line by line into modern-day speech. She gave them the first line and asked, "OK. How do we want to translate this?"
Silence.
"Hello?" she prompted.
Silence.
Cue impatience. Cue sarcasm.
"I know they know it," Abigail told us in the TSG, "so I embarrass them when they don't give me the energy." She told us how, in a sing-song voice, she stepped the students through the passage word-for-word, cold-calling and saying condescendingly, "See? That's not so hard."
Making a Guess
The other teachers in the TSG totally sympathized with Abigail. One by one, they offered her advice -- "tools for her toolbox" -- to help her get the students to do what she wanted them to do.
"Have them write the translation down first and then cold-call them."
"Have them work with a partner translating one line per pair then have them write their translations on the board in order."
As the group facilitator, I was less interested in the toolbox than I was in the emotion work (more on that in another post). "What," I asked Abigail, "are the students resisting in your story? What was the sarcasm about? Why did you go there?"
Abigail fell silent, as her students had done in her class. I had no idea what her silence meant, and her colleagues continued to offer pragmatic advice. After a few minutes, Abigail said, "I think I figured something out."
What she figured out was this: Her students' silence when she asked them to do something she-knew-they-already-knew might have been resistance to a "ridiculous, time-wasting" request. "Why should we do what you already know we can do?" the students might have been saying. She strongly felt that, had she described the silence to the students and asked them what it meant, the class would have turned out totally differently.
At this point, another teacher shared a different but similar story: In a recent class, this teacher (let's call him Ravi) was "helping" a student by giving specific instructions on how to do a project. "I wanted to save the student the trouble of making mistakes that I knew how to avoid," Ravi told us. So he went into detail about things the student should do and, lo and behold, when he returned to check on the student's progress, she had done everything Ravi had told her not to do. Ravi, in a flash of brilliance, asked her why. "Because we're kids," the student said. "We're supposed to do it wrong!"
Two stories about student resistance. Two different teachers. All wrapped up in a group dynamic that says a lot about teachers' own resistance. A blogging motherlode! Please stay tuned for the gems that can be extracted!