That last post is an example of how to practice empathy. It recognizes your efforts and encourages you to make better choices. Read it carefully, and you’ll see a teacher trying to accept that many students’ lack of self-control and focus isn’t malicious or intentionally disrespectful. The post is clear about the consequences of bad choices, but it uses the language of invitation. It’s still trying to teach you.
In fact, like every other instructional post, that one is written to help you practice close reading and to model a few strategies along the way, in addition to inviting you into a discussion of your decisions, the metacognition that improves those decisions, and so on. The first section starts two paragraphs with a periodic sentence, for instance, which is one way for you to vary your sentence structure.
This post is a little different, in that it isn’t trying to teach you like that. It just wants to tell you one thing: Do your job.
TL;DR — Do Your Job
All the talk about self-control and respect and assiduousness, through a dozen different posts and lessons and texts, can be reduced to that idea: Do your job. The classroom’s ability to accept any other choice is waning. This requirement, after all, isn’t new:
That handout is all you need to make sense of your current progress. It tells you, like this post, to do your job. Your job is to be a student. You don’t have a choice in this. Here’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist quoting a Hall-of-Fame basketball player on the subject:
[David] Halberstam summed up his approach to work by quoting a basketball player. “There’s a great quote by Julius Erving,” he said, “that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.'”
Do you love to read, write, think, etc? Maybe not. A better version of that quotation, then, is this: Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don’t feel like doing it.
When you come into the classroom, you need to get to work. If you have an assignment, you need to get it done. That’s your job. If there’s a crisis or catastrophe preventing either of those things from happening, talk to me about it, and we’ll work out an alternative path, which is the flexible part of this course that a more patient post might take the time to explore.
If you don’t feel like doing your work, you have to do it, anyway. If you have homework for another class that feels more pressing to you than this class, let’s talk before you sneak that lab or outline into our space, because the odds of that decision working out well are just south of 0%.
Anything but you doing your job is unacceptable from now on. It was unacceptable months ago, too, of course, and equally unacceptable when you were no longer a four-year-old trying to understand cause and effect; the difference is that it is now going to cause you to fail in here.
I hate using the language of failure, by the way. This system was built to be the risk-taking, innovative, student-centered classroom of the future. But you must recognize, even if your eyes have been screwed tightly shut for the last few months, that refusing to change your behavior is disrespectful in any classroom. This is not some bizarre anti-classroom that violates the laws of physics. You have to do the job and follow the rules in every situation.
And you can only shift blame and duck responsibility a few times, even with someone as secretly empathetic and soft-hearted as me1. Then it is failure. It’s a choice to ignore the tools available to you to hack your brain so that it makes better choices.
Whenever you find yourself wondering about your progress and performance, go back to that handout:
Would you say you were focused in class? Would you say that you have been taking feedback, including this post’s message that you need to do your job, and applying it? If not, you failed. If there’s a question about whether or not you’ve been doing your job, you need to ask why there’s any question about it. There shouldn’t be.
So it is simple: Do your job, or fail.
No Accident
Now, the tone of this post is quite different from the one before it. This is on purpose. I’ve juxtaposed two instructional posts that say some of the same things in different ways. This, like everything else, is deliberate. It’s a teaching exercise.
By way of further explanation, and despite how much it will lengthen this post (hence the ironic TL;DR earlier), let me tell you a quick story about this afternoon.
While I was conferencing with a student near my desk during P9, I was also listening to the conversations going on in the rest of the classroom. I had started the period, of course, by reminding everyone of the assignments in front of them and the need to stay focused and productive. I also walked around to answer any initial questions and to get people up and running.
So it might not surprise you that I was frustrated by how many students were ignoring all the work in front of them to gossip, to work on science labs, to send what I can only imagine were critical and time-sensitive Snapchat messages, etc..
I got up and walked to the middle of the room, which caused everyone to fall silent. The students who had been exchanging gossip a moment before went back to their seats. Phones were flipped over, perhaps to protect those critical and time-sensitive Snapchat messages.
Then I said, “My sight is slowly failing, my insides are rapidly decaying, but I have preternatural hearing. Do you know what that word means? Preternatural means extraordinary. So I can hear your conversations, even from across the room.”
I wish I hadn’t said that. It was an expression of frustration, but that part is okay; we all need to express our frustration, and self-deprecating language helps to soften criticism. No, the issue is that I made it about catching students in the act, not the disrespectful actions themselves.
This is the arms race I want to avoid in here. I’ve always thought of it as academic brinksmanship, even when I bought into it completely. Students try to get away with not doing work, so the teacher tries to force them to do work. We scan for plagiarism and watch students take tests by hovering above them. We surprise classes with pop quizzes and give out daily participation grades.
I think this is deeply and reflexively cynical. It relies on the assumption that most students want to (or are forced to) cheat the system. It says that the actual work is not worth doing except when it is forced on you, in defiance of your every instinct, as if most students are toddlers refusing to take their medicine.
Look, it’s obvious that some of you struggle with self-control. Most people do, hence the guillotines. We all struggle with procrastination and distraction. But that doesn’t mean I need to talk about having superhuman hearing to scare you into having the right kind of conversations in class. All that does is reignite the arms race. The first time I don’t hear an off-topic conversation, the threat is gone.
The true threat in our classroom, if there is one, is that you could end up being an uninteresting and shallow and unskilled person. All of your choices concatenate, which literally means that they link together into a chain. All the missing evidence, the lack of preparedness, the poor choices, create the links of that chain.
Here’s the unexpected part, at least for me:
In the end, what you’re up against isn’t my effort to thwart your plan not to do work — it’s the opposite. Once you start making poor decisions and showing disrespect and ignoring the most basic requirements of the class, the only thing stopping you from failing is that I don’t want you to fail.
The system is clear about what it means not to do your work and/or to waste class time. It caps you at a 70 if you don’t meet basic requirements, including constant in-class focus. If you keep making bad choices, the system then treats that as deliberate disengagement and deliberate refusal to follow feedback, which caps you at a 60.
I am not the system, however, and I don’t want you to fail. I want you to succeed. In the end, what you’re up against is my willingness to bend the rules of the system — one I built, importantly — in order to prevent causing you pain. I empathize so much with you that I vacillate between giving you consequences and giving you just one more chance, just in case this time, unlike every other time, you’ll figure out how to do the right thing. Grade abatement allows the idea of growth to outweigh mistakes. It rewards self-awareness and even the willingness to change.
In other words, when you don’t do your job in here, you’re hoping that my heart continues to guide me more than my head. Your hope is that I keep doing exactly the wrong thing as a teacher: not respecting you enough to hold you accountable.
