The Ones Who Stay With Me And What I Try To Give Them

It’s the most challenging students I carry with me long after they’ve moved onto the next grade. The student who threw a desk at me, the one who cursed me out every day, the one who experienced schizophrenic hallucinations in the afternoon, the one who punched a hole in my wall, the one who cried and went into hysterics whenever I asked her to complete a task, the one who ripped up every single piece of writing before he could finish, the one who used a laptop as a weapon on another student and made sure I never left the room during my prep period again …

These are the ones who keep me up at night, the ones who often have undergone childhood experiences so unfathomable that even to speak of the students out loud makes tears spring to my eyes and my voice so thick I don’t try to speak, even with loved ones.

Such students drive us teachers nuts while they are in our classrooms (and all too often, in our hallways). They are the ones rarely absent, the ones that disrupt the entire class dynamic and rivet everyone’s attention. They always demand immediate answers, they do not accept authority unless it stands up to their own notions of justice, and they make fun of pretty much everything that crosses their radar, which usually includes students unable to stand up for themselves.

But it is these students who come back to me. These are the students that teach me how to be a better teacher, and a better person. They have been teaching me what they had been put through, from their earliest days. They were sharing — in the only way they knew how to communicate it — something deep, and fundamental, and raw. And as I have grown to recognize those lessons, I have learned how to better love all of my students, and even — at the risk of sounding cheesy — how to better love humanity. Sometimes, anyway.

Children are constantly looking to the adults around them for guidance on how to navigate the constant bombardment of stress, anger, and anxiety that their lives bring, as well how to deal with conflicts with others. The sad thing is that we often are not ready to provide that guidance, whether due to competing demands on our attention, lack of professional therapeutic training, or simple lack of life and soul experience. Yes, I said “soul experience” — that deep, dark place of grit that comes from overcoming life challenges that can not be faked and for a lack of which challenging children will call you out on within a moment in a classroom setting. If you can’t meet their challenge consistently, decisively, and with complete integrity, they will take you down into that wounded place of raw, bereft, acute despair within which they have had their formative experiences.

It takes a whole school to reach the most challenging students. It takes a staff willing to do whatever it takes to address that child’s needs, rather than abandoning them to a teacher already overwhelmed with the only slightly less immediate needs and demands of their other students. It takes a community that supports, nurtures, and cultivates emotional literacy. It takes a school that has the courage to acknowledge that for some students, the rules must be broken, and we can’t just punish our way into compliance, but rather must work carefully to cultivate warm relationships and a supportive, positive environment that slowly coaxes motivation from that student.

Though it was hard to see it at the time, in the midst of all the negative conflicts and stress they put me through, I’ve learned to cherish these challenging students. The students with exceptional learning needs. The students who have lived in shelters. The students abandoned first by their mothers and subsequently by a string of foster parents. The students who challenge us to love them, challenge us to care for them, challenge us to be the kind of educators that can believe in them no matter what —unconditionally — because that’s the kind of educators that they need.

About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.