I’m going to shock you now with a truly stunning bit of
news: Not every child behaves well in
school. There. I’ve said it. I hope I haven’t blown your mind. —
I teach, see. I have
been a teacher for just shy of a decade and I have taught a whole bunch of kids
in that time. Most of them have been
delightful. A handful of them have
not.
There have been students who could not stop talking. There have been students who showed up angry
each and every day and took that anger out on me and their classmates and the
world in general. There have been
students who had absolutely no interest in learning pretty much anything.
As a teacher, you will have kids like this in your
classroom. It’s part of the job and you
just have to try to figure out a way to reach them, which is sometimes an
impossibility.
I’ve met the parents of these kids. Parent/teacher nights and afternoon phone
calls and meetings in the principal’s office. With a few of these kids, you leave a meeting thinking, “Ah, right. I get it. This explains exactly why this kid is that way.” But other times, the parents seem like good
people who are just as baffled as I am as to why their kid threw a dictionary
at another student’s neck.
Which is when I have a minor panic attack. Why is a kid from a stable family of
seemingly well-adjusted people acting out so much in my class? If it’s happening to this family, could it
happen to me? Could my sweet, adorable
three-year-old morph into a kid who freely curses out his teacher or crumples
up a test and throws it on the floor or just generally causes a ruckus day in
and day out?
I hope not.
I suppose there have to be, somewhere beyond my perception,
reasons for the way these kids act. Hopefully, we are raising our son to have enough respect for himself,
for those around him and for the process of learning that he will never have
these sorts of issues. Hopefully.
I can say that he certainly doesn’t seem to have these sorts
of tendencies. Every once in awhile,
though, when he’s missed his nap or he’s refusing to eat or any one of the
hundred minor fits of pique a toddler exhibits during a given week, I have the
occasional moment of dread, when I envision myself on the receiving end of one
of those phone calls I make to parents, when I do my best to express more
concern for the student’s grades than annoyance that they won’t behave.
I’m hoping that teaching my kid to say “please” at an early
age will help to head off such a possibility. At the very least, it’s a start.
Joe Wack currently
teaches science to elementary school children in the Bronx. He lives in Harlem with his wife and 3-year-old son.
For more on Joe, see our contributors list to the right.
