Classroom Confessions: Why compassion should be considered a best practice.

The week before Thanksgiving, my principal asked me to fill in as the 8th grade ELA teacher until the new teacher arrived. I have always considered myself a team player, so I didn’t think twice about accepting the position, which was scheduled to last until December 20th.

That night I went home and thought about all the creative ways that I was going to engage students and get them reading and writing about short stories–which was the genre they were studying at that point in the curriculum. I found a couple stories that I was sure that they would like. I planned lessons…revised my plan…re-revised my plan. In short, I did what teachers do. I stayed up late. I got up early. I reread my stories, and I prepared for what I hoped was going to be a fruitful classroom experience for all.

And then it happened.

At 8:15am, I taught my first group of the day. Ten minutes into the lesson, I realized what I had planned…all of it…was wrong. The material was wrong. My questions were wrong. My assumptions about what this “fruitful” experience was going to be…were wrong. The students did not care about short stories, or what I had to say, or about all the great planning that I had done for them. It was probably the most frustrating experience that I have had in my fifteen years in education. I was defeated and feeling like it was time to find a new occupation.

In my search for help, I re-read the first chapter of John Hattie and Gregory Yates’s book, Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn (2014), and in it they outline Daniel Willingham’s response to the question: Why don’t students like school? The answer, according to Willingham, isn’t that students don’t like school, but rather that they are, like all of us, evolutionarily programmed to conserve energy. Thinking–particularly higher level thinking–is really hard to do and therefore requires a lot of energy. Thinking is also, he suggests, deeply connected to students’ confidence levels. In other words, students who already feel as if they are “not good at school” are not likely to engage in school work if they also have to expend a great deal of energy just to perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This explanation didn’t solve my problem, but it did help me to have compassion for the students in my room. They weren’t apathetic because they were entitled little cherubs. They were being human. They were being me at a faculty meeting when I was asked to do a jigsaw reading of an article that I didn’t want to read. They were me when, in a former life, I grumbled about having to assemble BOE reports or do a discipline data presentation. If we are honest with ourselves, our students are little reflections of our own behaviors. The difference, however, is that we have found the coping skills to do what we need to do. We have developed an ability to grin and bear it that they haven’t developed yet.

So if you were hoping for a solution to the apathy you witness everyday, I have let you down. What I can offer, and what I experienced, is that compassion for students and the cognitive demands they face every day can help you to keep your cool when that amazing lesson that you planned crumbles at your feet. It still sucks to watch your hard work go down the drain, but you can get back up and try again…maybe in a slightly revised way.