drama

Come to think of it, bold and audacious moves always backfire for me in the classroom. Maybe I'm just not good at gauging the level of drama I can handle.

My yield from throwing most of my students out of class last week was mainly my own anxiety over one particularly angry student who felt that I had not been fair. It's not that I was afraid of him. It's just that it's not worth the angst -- his or mine. And maybe I wasn't fair. Of course, he was still late to class today. And he handed in his make-up assignment when he got there -- I suppose he was daring me not to take it because he was late. I took it, though. It's just not worth the extra energy. I'm too tired today. I'm too tired most days. I'm not gonna do this again.

This aftermath situation is not an atmosphere that's productive for me, or for him. I hate playing the enforcer, which is one of the reasons I teach college and not high school. (Not that I ever taught high school; the difference may be something I just invented to explain myself to myself.) But I hate having the focus on whether students follow rules. I want the focus to be on what they learn, what they are curious about, what they can write, what they can do -- not what they can't do or won't do or don't do.

Every few years I have to learn this lesson over again. My friend Bob, a beloved fellow teacher at my college, whom I called this morning to whine to, remembers a time when I walked out on a class. I learned far more from that incident than those students did, as well, and I swore I would never do that again either.

I suspect that some dim archetypal image of teachers in the back of my mind tempts me to do these things. Maybe I'm trying out ideas about the kind of grandstanding teacher whose drama at the front of the room impresses everyone so much that we all think, oh, what a great teacher he (he?) is. But where is there gonna be room for the students and their drama if the teacher's drama takes up all that airtime? And aren't the students and their needs supposed to be front and center? I don't wanna be needy in my own classroom. I'm the calm one, the balanced one, the teacher who takes the long view. Patience. Not drama.