He was in that spot by the end of the first week.

I knew the student she was referring to. In fact, I had taught him before. He had some character, was merely subpar academically if you stayed on him, and somehow always found himself in a situation that would land him in the principal’s office. So, he wasn’t your most ideal student. But children do a lot of growing, both physically and mentally over that two-month summer break. Placing a desk in the corner of a room for a specific child, which I can only assume led to “warning” that student of his eventual residence upon first slip up, takes away a lot more than it adds to student learning. But beyond that, the situation speaks to a deeper issue in the daily interactions between students and teachers. It’s this idea of obligatory obedience.

Positioning a student desk in the corner of a room for a prescribed student who you have not had any contact with in the school year is an extreme example of the obligatory obedience that some teachers feel they automatically acquire. Writing your name on the board on the first day and getting the first words out at the start of the school year does not mean that your students must be obedient to your every last direction. Oh, they’ll call you “Mr.” or “Ms.”, you don’t have to fight over that, trust me. But, in 2017, we do not need any more lambs. We are in need of lions. And fostering this type of mentality does not come from demanding blind respect.

When you demand obligatory obedience, you are fracturing the relationship potential that may exist between you as the teacher and your students. Some may think that it is better to be feared than to be loved, but I will tell you that, in education, the feared leader fosters disengagement. If your goal is to create an environment where your students never challenge you, than I guess this option is more comfortable for you. But if you want to truly establish student buy-in to their own learning, then please don’t assume that your students should obligatorily oblige with you.

Understanding that obligatory obedience is to never be fully created within your classroom is a scary reality to take in. It assumes the fact that your students should always be weary of your instructions, messages, and ideas for the class. But this is the point. We want to establish a classroom dynamic in which our students are critical of their learning and actions. In the right context, challenge becomes uplifting and also a classroom community endeavor; not an impediment to your ability to facilitate order and strong classroom management skills. Too many of our teachers come into schools each day with the mindset of obligatory obedience and all this really does is dumb our students down. We need thinkers, not robots. Thus, we must work to abolish this style of teaching practice and not submit to our comfy efforts of establishing obligatory obedience.

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I know, technically the metaphor that is meant to encapsulate classroom management and student-teacher relationships is not supposed to be taken verbatim. But, even still, if the philosophy behind not smiling holds true, and you navigated the first few months by projecting a standoffish, impersonal, objective and robotic demeanor, I need to know how life in that classroom has been for you. Has firm compliance led to better, more productive, more diligent and engaged students? When veteran educators offered this axiom to me as a new teacher, I always thought that it was somewhat ironic. How can you pull someone into learning by pushing them away from you as the “lead learner”? To me, there is a difference between routinely establishing and re-establishing classroom expectations and “coming on hard” at the beginning of the year simply to make the job easier for you as teacher. When it comes to establishing a balanced student-teacher relationship, ultimately there is a fundamental difference between respect and its simpler form, compliance.

One of the (many) issues with education is that we have somehow slipped into this notion of belief that espouses compliance over relationships and engaged learning. Unfortunately, this compliance trend has affected principals, teachers, and ultimately students in their capacity to lead and to learn. I can’t sit here typing this and lie to you. It is great for me as a teacher when my class sits in complete silence while working through some math questions or a language activity because I explicitly established that expectation in the early weeks of the new school year. Even more troubling, is that I often fail to catch myself when I think that a quiet (the real meaning of compliance in the teacher setting, I guess) is the way that learning ought to be done every day. You know, no communication, every individual for themselves. But real learning cannot happen like this every day of the week. It shouldn’t. Real learning is about banter, spontaneity, challenges and challenging. And yes, real learning even involves breaks that take us back to the reality of acknowledging that we are all tangled in trying to help each other find our best selves. Not smiling sends the opposite message to your students. Real learning ultimately requires inquisitively challenging the norms. And, the “Don’t Smile Until November” mantra is one norm of schooling that must be constantly questioned.

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As a teacher, I am pretty candid with my students. Sometimes, I gather my class of fourth and fifth graders on the carpet and couch in my classroom and we grade assignments together. I hold up a student’s work, we highlight the positive aspects of it and then we talk about where it can use improvement. I wouldn’t recommend this for the first year teacher, but I think I have a pretty good grasp of the mentality of the junior learner and the things that push them towards excellence. And to be brutally honest, it makes my job a whole lot easier when I involve students in the assessment portion of their education. But with an open-style comes the opportunity of students challenging grades.

But being so candid comes with its negatives. Because I am really real with my students, I open myself up to a dialogue and relationship between students and myself that many teachers would feel uncomfortable with. My students constantly challenge their grades. I’m not talking about talking back but these kids don’t sit back and take that B- or C+ without objection. But I am secure in my pedagogy, so I not only expect this from my little 10-year-old students – I appreciate it.

As pertaining to the curriculum of my province in elementary school, I am obliged to teach different “writing styles”. Now, I am teaching my students how to write a procedure or an instruction. Versing my students in the language of fiction versus non-fiction is important. But I am a little confused as to why I have to spend a month teaching a strand of writing that basically consists of showing students how to write rudimentary “how-to” manuals. My students need to learn how to write a dang sentence! Let me refrain.

While I was teaching my students how to write procedural texts, like recipes and directions, and pedagogically implementing my community-based assessment strategies, a few students got upset that I was valuing neatness and organization over content. I am all about the “teachable moments”. These were mainly a few of the boys in the class voicing their complaints. I have no problem with students sharing an equal platform with me and challenging my decisions; whether it is 10-year-olds or undergrads (ironically enough, my 10-year-olds make more authentic and concise arguments than most undergraduate or post graduate students I have been around in recent years, see last post.)

The argument a few of my boys made about organization and “neatness” would be valid – if we were talking about an essay or paragraph response. But we were talking about a procedure. My kids were asked to write a simple recipe! Most wrote about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! This is where open communication between the student and the teacher comes in. I have established an environment that supports constructive criticism. If a student feels that something is wrong and unfair, they know to speak up. I don’t even care if they put their hand up at this point. My class is filled with 10-year-olds that operate and challenge thinking akin to a post-graduate classroom.

But this is where I feel most worthwhile. After a few of my students voiced their complaints of my tendency to validate organization over content, I took the opportunity to speak to them in a way that would educate them. I didn’t talk about content but about context – I explained that in a unit that is simply about writing down directions, the main gist of the learning pertains to format and overall appearance. Everybody knows how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But who took the time to add the things we talked about in the lesson before – who added pictures, headings, an introduction, a diagram, and all that jazz and went the extra mile to actually demonstrate that they listened to my lesson and took what I said and applied it. And that is what they heard in my rant about organization and “neatness”. That is what they so courageously asked about and that is hopefully what I eloquently answered for them.

That is learning, it is not simply about a lesson and regurgitation, it is about a lesson, a product and classroom conversation and then a challenge. Through this experience of teaching, we will build students who actually understand a little better what their purpose for doing things are. I have no doubt that, after today, my boys will hand in their next “recipe” or procedural text with a little bit more neatness than the prior procedures they submitted. And that is all that I want. That is why I teach.

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