Fearful Heart, Silent Voice

 #DearParker

Response to "The Student from Hell"

Quotes from the text:

The way we diagnose our student's condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer. (42)

Our assumption that students are brain-dead leads to pedagogies that deaden their brain. (42)

The silent and seemingly sullen students in our classrooms are not brain-dead: they are full of fear. (45)

Their silence is born not of stupidity or banality but of a desire to protect themselves and survive. (46)

I try to teach their fearful hearts, and when I am able to do so, their minds come along as well. (47)

Behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. (47)

A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken...making space...being aware...paying attention...honoring...not rushing...no coercion...empathy. (47)

Dear Parker,

Here is an aspect that is so real to me, yet has often escaped me in the wake of competing demands.  I'm getting this message from more than one direction -- the idea of the fear a student carries into the classroom experience being paramount in their minds, and how it colors all their actions. My mode of operation has often been to placate the fear -- not necessarily focus on moving them beyond it. If they say they don't want to talk or read out loud,  I say okay. Yet, at the end of last year I started to think I'm not serving them, and began to gently push in some areas. Since then I've found a few ways we can consistently do things to move this process along. Now that I'm embracing the idea of their fear informing everything, this has surged to the forefront of importance. 

 I know fear isn't limited to them. I have my own series of fears that show up. I'll be addressing that as well!

I spent a good part of last year afraid of some of my students and because of that, I was unable to reach the rest. It was painfully awful. I first saw their attitudes as armor, as Brene Brown says, and that was true. But it wasn't easy to figure out how to get past the armor.

Thinking of it as FEAR -- False Evidence Appearing Real--I believe I can get beyond it. It makes it more a common, singular emotion, rather than several different. Young people come in not knowing if they can be successful, if they will have a voice, if they are good enough. They carry with them any failures from the past that brought them down. They internalize the negatives. My job is to gently move them forward, chipping away at fear through the right combination of activities and time. The most productive direction from the Day One. Building a classroom community to support them wherever they are, one of mutual dependence -- the balance of everyone doing their part. I can honestly say, it hasn't been like that the past couple of years.

Time will tell. But in the meantime, I am going to keep this in the upper part of my mind as I enter the next school year.

hms