For all but three years of my life, I attended various private schools in Hawaii, from preschool to high school. I went on to a small private liberal arts college in the American Midwest. By and large, with the exception of my three years in public school (at the time in the top five public schools in the entire state of Hawaii), I had no experience in Hawaii’s Department of Education (DOE).

My educational background, however, stands in stark contrast to the locality in which I grew up. My father moved from his mother’s house in a cushy, predominantly Japanese vicinity to my mother’s childhood house, located on Oahu’s poor (yet quickly gentrifying), predominantly Hawaiian west coast.

Growing up, I saw rural homelessness and hunger, and I saw nothing being done to remedy the structural causes of these social issues. At its pinnacle, the houseless population living along the beaches surpassed 1,000 along a coast of about 20,000. On numerous occasions, my parents looked out to the carport to find a familiar face of a houseless person digging through our municipal trash bin for food. (This practice, when done by white liberal arts college graduates, is called “freeganism”.)

Having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in May, I moved back home, still unsure of what my next step would be professionally. My parents recommended that I pursue substitute teaching—the jobs would pay well (about $150 for an 8-hour day), and I’d be able to give back to the community that I’d largely been sheltered from most of my life. I applied, and was accepted with open arms, being offered a secondary part-time tech position on the side.

I’d had about three years of experience tutoring in my small college town, and I bore witness to pedagogical practices in both elementary and intermediate school. In fact, my research paper for a college course explored pedagogical practices in middle school, paying close attention to teachers’ interactions with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I found that my teacher made a drastic pedagogical change in the late-1990s. A now-late student of hers had astutely told her that it wasn’t necessary to yell at her students like they were dogs. I interpreted the previous dynamic as being analogous to an animal-master dynamic. The animal (student) exists for the sake of being pacified, trained, and punished, if need be. The master (teacher) lays claim to almost infinite power, permanently in control, and to punish the animal should the animal be “out of line”. The hierarchical relationship is fraught with power struggles, meant to keep the low-income student, the student of color, in an acute self-consciousness of criminality.

For the first time, I had read both bell hooks’s and Paulo Freire’s works on radical education, and the theoretical possibilities seemed endless—establish a bidirection “student/teacher—teacher/student” relationship; encourage the conscientização of students to grow, and so on and so forth—but it became increasingly unclear to me how to implement post-structural, social justice-oriented theories in praxis.

Upon arriving to my school, it became increasingly clear to me that the teachers, almost all (it not all) Asian settler outsiders, were just as guilty, if not more so, as the teacher I had worked with prior to her own revelation. It is commonplace for teachers to yell impatiently at their students, ensuring that students be under control, under scrutiny, at all times. My first point of tension with this pedagogy is that classroom management doesn’t necessarily equate to student control. Yelling, as therapeutic as that may be for teachers, gives rise to this animal-master complex, which actually manifests in real life as the students growing up utterly unable to communicate effectively. By the time the students in my district enter high school, almost all of them will have witnessed a fight, in or outside of the classroom.

In and outside of school, the students I engage with on a daily basis are treated as animals. In school, teachers yell at them: “Be quiet! Sit down! What did I say? Throw that thing away! Hands behind your back!” Out of school, their parents, feeling the pressure of poverty and a complete lack of institutional support, ignore their children, fueled by the false belief that giving your child attention is bad parenting. At the supermarket, I often see my children with overworked single mothers who ignore their children, speaking to them only to yell at them for something they’re doing wrong.

A primary take away of mine was: say no without saying “no”. While I was a substitute teacher, I found that, overwhelmingly, the children respected me and my wishes if I told them no indirectly. We played a game, finding books in the library to practice call numbers and the Dewey decimal system. When it was time for me to let them go, I stopped the game without actually saying “no”. To the children who had finished finding their books, I said, “We’re actually coming to an end now, so if I can have your card, that would be wonderful.” Most of the times, children would comply. To those who wouldn’t (“Aww, please, can I do just one more, Mister O? Pleaaaase?”), I responded, “Sorry, I have to let you go though so you can go to computer class. Could I have your card? And if you could sit quietly on the carpet while I collect everyone else’s cards, that would be super helpful.”

Not once did I yell at a student.

It all begins and ends with my mantra: treat others as you’d like to be treated.

Another problematic part of the pedagogical practice of yelling is that it inflates conflict. (It is from this undesirable outcome that the practice of ignoring, which inevitably leads to an implosive deflation, arises.) I wanted to demonstrate to these children that, even as someone who comes from the same geographic locale, I’ve learned to be an effective communicator, and they can too. In fact, it was troubling to me to speak to fourth graders and learn that, if they’re unhappy with someone else, they’ll just start a physical fight and brawl in that moment. It expressed to me the ultimate tragedy—that words had failed these children, and in their place was physical violence. And yet, it’s completely unsurprising, considering the only words they hear from their parents and teachers are words of disappointment, irritation, or punishment.