Facing Fear

Jean M. Beaulieu

It is now 4 A.M., not time to get up and get ready for work, but my brain says otherwise. There is a voice within me that calmly, but insistently queries, “Are you ready for your day? Will your actions speak as loud as your words? Will your words be powerful and speak to what matters most? Will your plan for the day inspire and challenge? Will you notice what may at first seem hidden, and make it powerful in its revelation? Will you be obvious in your caring of others? Will you be democratic? As Johann Goethe says, will you “treat students as if they were what they ought to be so that they will become what they ought to be and could be?” How can one possibly sleep with the weight of such responsibility? This is how a teacher’s day begins, and as it unfolds, it becomes clear that lessons learned are not just for students, but often for their teachers as well.

Research indicates that with trust, respect, caring, and safety in the classroom comes a willingness, on the part of students, to engage in challenging reading, writing, thinking, and communication tasks. I place the nurturance and care of students, a practice that Nel Noddings has passionately preached for years, at the center of my curriculum, and let all else grow atop that foundation. Therefore, a few weeks ago when one of my students made the declaration that I wasn’t fair, in her opinion, my mouth all but dropped open at the incredulity of it. At the end of the school day, that pronouncement was punctuated by a phone call from her mother telling me that her daughter had complained that I was unfair and that she, the mom, was concerned when her kids complained that a teacher was unfair. “So what’s up?” she asked.

What is up, indeed! I re-wound my mental celluloid of the past week, back to 2nd block and Raven. Me, “unfair,” how could that be? Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my role in helping my students build an understanding of their moral and civic responsibilities, of understanding what it means to be an engaged citizen in our democratic nation. My eyes drifted to my bookshelf. There they were, McCullough’s biography of John Adams, who wrote the constitution for the state of Massachusetts, which declared, as no previous document had before it, that it was the duty of our government to provide for public education to develop an involved citizenry. There was John Dewey’s Democracy in Education, and the volumes of many others whose words have provoked and inspired me as an educator to create challenge, find the balance, teach from the heart, and above all, to be fair. How could I be unfair? Had I been overlooking something important?

Raven was sitting back in her seat, arms folded, waiting for her teacher to notice that she was definitely not engaged in the business of Language Arts. She glared at me with cool brown eyes and waited, no, dared me to respond. I asked her quietly if she would like to step out of the room so that we could speak privately and so that she could explain what was on her mind. She flatly refused and suddenly her eyes began to well with tears. She wouldn’t move and so I took a deep breath, knelt down awkwardly by her side, and dove into a conversation I definitely didn’t want to start, but had to. Soon enough, the facts spilled out of her like tears she refused to shed. Raven had come to class late and all of the seats were taken near the friends where she usually liked to sit. When she came in, she had grabbed a chair and had caused a mild disruption trying to squeeze into a space between two tables, which forced her to awkwardly straddle them to sit down. I had asked her to please move to an empty table nearby, and that was not fair, she declared when I finally prodded the words out of her. I gently urged her to continue, because quite frankly, she had been giving me “a look” the previous day as well. Something I had done had been “unfair” and that had prompted her mother’s call. As it turned out, she felt that I had been unfair because I had allowed some of her friends to work on their research outside the classroom door and had refused her the same privilege when she had asked. Ah yes, I could see how this might seem “unfair” in her eyes. But now, how would I explain that my motives were fueled by the fact that she was failing my class? She rarely stayed on task and I felt the need to redirect her constantly. She never brought books home and homework happened only when it could be done in school. She loved the laptop given to all middle school students in our state, but only occasionally used it to do school work. She loved being with her friends, but constantly interrupted their work to show them the pictures, music files, and other distractions her laptop was happy to provide. For the most part, the girls she called “her friends” tolerated her behavior, but seemed to be relieved when she was not there and they could work without her interruptions.

I spoke honestly with Raven about the modifications I had made in her assignments and the many times I had patiently excused her tardiness to try to make things “fair” for her in my classroom. I knew her home life was extremely unpleasant and I was trying to balance that with patience and understanding. I asked her what more I could do for her. After all, my actions were prompted because I wanted her to succeed in school. Raven looked at me then, and said that I could let her sit with her friends. If I rearranged my tables so that there was room for that to happen, would she please think about her schoolwork, I asked. She nodded and a small smile formed on her lips.

When she came back to my classroom the next time, the tables had all been moved and she sat with her friends without a word about the new arrangement. Later that day as I walked toward the cafeteria, someone came up behind me and I felt an arm grasp mine in a firm hug. It was Raven. Quietly she thanked me and said, “I love you.” Since then, I have not gotten glares from Raven, but I haven’t gotten much work either.

Two days later, she skipped out on twenty minutes of my class after lunch and I noted that Raven had only completed one paragraph of a research paper that was due in two days. I was pretty sure that she was avoiding my class because she did not want her “friends” to see how little work she had done on her writing. I admitted to myself that Raven had just about given up trying to do homework in my class or to engage herself at school for quite some time. Her turbulent home life was the result of a parent’s alcohol abuse and a variety of male figures who entered and just as suddenly left. I learned that Raven had been late to school today because her mother was entertaining one of her male friends and refused to help Raven who then had to walk across town to get here on a 10-degree Maine morning. Her mother, the one who had called me in concern that I wasn’t “fair” to her daughter, did that. How can Raven possibly trust adults, when the ones that she has grown up with have let her down? She wants to go and live with her father, but she can’t. He’s in jail. Right now I knew that I, too, was letting Raven down somehow and was at a total loss to explain how.

Is it fair for me, for any of her teachers to expect Raven to concentrate in school or to bring work home when she must live in such a desperately dysfunctional environment? I have lost more than one night’s sleep trying to think of ways to create engaging assignments or modifications that she might be able to complete during school hours. But something about all of this wasn’t hitting the right chord for either of us. Raven comes to school because she has nowhere else to go, but when she is here, we, her teachers, were all failing at finding ways to help her be successful. Additionally, her relationships with other students were deteriorating because they were becoming the scapegoats of her frustration and inward fury.

The answer continued to elude me for weeks until I discovered a book titled, The Courage to Teach, (1998) by Parker Palmer. In Palmer’s book, he describes the “Student from Hell.” It is important to note that Palmer’s demon is not the famous little Johnny who drives his teacher nuts with his ongoing behavioral buffoonery, but is a quiet student who sits there in the back row, silent, sullen, and scathing in his wordless indictment of classroom banality. His failure to connect with the student from hell is born of fear, states Palmer. Fear?

Here is how the narrative goes:

“We are distanced by a grading system that separates teachers from students, by departments that fragment fields of knowledge, by competition that makes students and teachers alike wary of their peers, and by a bureaucracy that puts faculty and administration at odds… The external structures of education would not have the power to divide us as deeply as they do if they were not rooted in one of the most compelling features of our inner landscape – fear” (Palmer, 1998, p.36).

Palmer says that fear inhibits our ability to seek and speak truth, qualities that would allow us to build connections, and thus, our ability to be effective as teachers. Palmer reminds teachers of what they fear by admitting that after thirty years of teaching, his own fear remains close at hand.

“It is there when I enter a classroom and feel the undertow into which I have jumped. It is there when I ask a question- and my students keep a silence as stony as if I had asked them to betray their friends. It is there whenever it feels as if I have lost control: a mind-boggling question is asked, an irrational conflict emerges, or students get lost in my lecture because I myself am lost. When a class that has gone badly comes to a merciful end, I am fearful long after it is over- fearful that I am not just a bad teacher but a bad person, so closely is my sense of self tied to the work I do” (Palmer, 1994, p. 36).

Additionally, Palmer argues that we fear encounters because we want to avoid what we do not wish to hear. We seek encounters “on our own terms, so that we can control their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of the world and self” (Palmer, 1994, p. 37).

I followed Palmer’s essay, grudgingly admitting its merits, but the real moment of truth came when Palmer reminded his readers that students are also afraid. They are “afraid of failing, of not understanding, of being drawn into issues they would rather avoid, of having their ignorance exposed or their prejudices challenged, of looking foolish in front of their peers…” When student and teacher fears mix, “the fear multiplies geometrically,” says Palmer, “ and education is paralyzed.” (Palmer, 1994, p. 37).

Students, teenagers in particular, are marginalized in our world. They often see adults as critical and dismissive, and they behave as most marginalized people do when living in fear, they are silent. When they speak out, they often experience, criticism, dismissal, or worse, they are ignored. When teenagers are silent, in Palmer’s view, they are demonstrating a desire to protect themselves and to survive. “It is a silence driven by their fear of an adult world in which they feel alien and disempowered.” If that is the case, how will they ever learn to become effective citizens in a democratic society? Are we inviting participation or reinforcing separation from democratic ideals in our public schools?

I still was not seeing Raven’s situation in the right light. Even though I was acknowledging some fear on both sides to get to the root of her detachment with school, I noticed that I was all too relieved after she had smiled and declared her affection for me. She loved me; all was right again. Then I read The Courage to Teach. The very next day, the peace treaty dissolved. The very friends that Raven had demanded to be seated next to had overnight become her enemies. A trail of angry Internet messaging had resulted in a pile of steaming, nasty insults. Suddenly, Raven was afraid to even walk into my classroom, so she did not. And, I didn’t go looking for her right away either. The word was out that she had fired the first volley and sustained the verbal techo-attack with vigor. I looked back to my action and inactions with Raven. Her silence, withdrawal, and cynicism were not manifestations of anger, but fear and anxiety. The longer I avoided acknowledging this problem, the longer I would continue to fail to serve the needs of this student. Raven initiated a pattern of showing up late to my class or not at all. I began intercom requests for her to come to class. She began a litany of excuses. I more discreetly went on search missions for Raven and found her wandering where she thought she could skip class time undetected. Raven looked at me and said, “Why are you so mad at me?” Mad? I hadn’t said a word. I hadn’t reported her skipping class. Why does she think this? “Oh, Raven,” I said with dismay. “I am not mad at you. No, not at all. But I am worried.” She gazed at me with those cool and disbelieving brown eyes. Cutting classes and wandering about are not acceptable student actions. Students who do this are reported to the office. Right now I wasn’t doing the right thing for Raven or meeting my responsibility to uphold school rules. I escorted her back to class, hoping that she at least understood I was patiently cutting her some slack, but nothing had really changed. Before I could begin to understand my course of action with Raven, I needed another lesson in the role of fear in education.

One of the members of my teaching team asked me if I could be available for a conference with one of his advisees and his parents tomorrow morning. My team member indicated that the parents would like to have their son’s Language Arts teacher and Gifted and Talented Math Advisor present. He said that the parents were concerned because they felt that their son was “unmotivated” and that they would like a meeting to discuss the issue. This teacher had barely finished our conversation before the following thoughts assailed me, namely, “ Is this somehow my fault? Have I contributed to a conspiracy to create apathy and boredom in one of my students? What is wrong with him? What is wrong with my class?” There it was again, more fear.

We all gathered on Friday morning. Mark’s advisor thanked him for attending with his parents and explained that we were all concerned because his parents said that he seemed unmotivated this year, and, in particular, that he had refused to compete in the math team as he had in the past. His grades were not suffering. He was maintaining high honors, but his parents were chagrined because he used to be a voracious reader and they had not seen him bring home one book this year. This situation, of course, I immediately assumed responsibility for causing. They were further dismayed because he refused to go to math meets and practices as he had in the past, and he was refusing to participate in school sports or intramurals. Something was amiss and our discussion was aimed at putting a name to it. In my mind, I was still assigning blame. I could see John Dewey’s ghost shaking his head at me in dismay. Is this the best you can do?

Mark sat there quietly wearing an enigmatic smile tinged with embarrassment as his parents enumerated their concerns. When asked directly about the Math team, he said he didn’t want to do it and shrugged his shoulders. “Why?” the GT teacher asked. “You are such a smart, capable, and talented young man. We need you Mark.” There was quiet pleading in her eyes that further fueled his mother’s concerns. Again, he shrugged. When asked about the lack of interest in sports, he looked at his mother and said with surprising force, “I told you I wasn’t interested in that.” His parents listed off each available sport and he shrugged. His embarrassed smile met our equally awkward pauses, which grew and stretched further into the conversation.

‘Well, perhaps some school clubs, yearbook, civil rights team?” suggested his advisor. No, and more shrugs.

Then Mark’s father said that recently they had begun allowing Mark to communicate on IM. “He spends a great deal of time on it and perhaps that was a mistake of mine. He doesn’t do much of anything. He says, when he goes out, that he is just ‘hanging out’ with friends. He used to have a great time in our old neighborhood. What is this ‘hanging out all about?”

The conversation limped on. I found myself growing more impatient with his parents’ frustration and sympathetic toward Mark who looked like he was coping with an abscessed tooth. If I were Mark, I thought, I’d be thinking I’d like to have someone on my side. All of these adults are professing to have his best interests at heart, but it surely feels like they are trying to sooth their own interests. I knew Mark to be a very quiet boy. He was a very capable student, as all agreed, and he did his work without effort, but also without the kind of distinctive outpouring of intellect or creativity everyone at the table adamantly declared he was capable of producing. He expended no effort toward contributing to class discussions, but was very animated in speaking in small collaborative groups and with his small circle of friends outside of class.

Finally, after listening to Mark’s shrugs and deafening silences through much of this exchange, I announced that I was proud to have him in my class, that I had enjoyed his writing, and the creativity of his projects developed in response to the novels that HE HAD READ in my class thus far. I spoke of statistics on the apparent decline or change of reading interests in boys at this age. I spoke of the middle years as a time of introspection and decision about the future and one’s place in it socially and intellectually. I suggested that it was a time for Mark to perhaps begin envisioning the kinds of interests that gave him joy and to consider where future educational and career plans might fit in all of this. Larger future goals, I thought, might help to clear away what Mark might be seeing as the foggy irrelevance of the present. Everyone nodded as if agreeing, but at the moment I felt that Mark needed to feel that he wasn’t a gross disappointment to his parents or his teachers.

After the meeting was over, Mark’s advisor came to me and said, “I’ll tell you what I think this is really about. Mark’s parents aren’t impressed with his circle of friends. They aren’t the caliber of student that Mark is, intellectually (or socially, if we’re being honest about our prejudices). I think he is finding it “uncool” to be smart.”

…And Mark is afraid, I thought to myself. And so, if we are being honest, are his teachers and parents.

If I was to help either Raven or Mark, I had to overcome my own fears. I feared failure to build successful connections with these students. Certainly doing nothing at all would ensure that. It was time for me to move past my own fears and embrace certain other qualities that I knew, in my heart, that I owned as well. Raven and Mark deserved honesty, empathy, comfort, and connectedness with their teachers. Raven was right all along. I wasn’t being fair if I didn’t give her what she and all students deserved.

Honesty means asking tough questions of Mark, his parents and his teachers. If Mark is gifted in math, why “must” he participate on the math team? If Mark does not want to participate in school sports, does that necessarily mean that he does not want to be physically active? If Mark is not voraciously reading novel after novel as he “used to do,” does that mean that he is NOT reading now? Is something wrong with Mark because he has chosen to change his circle of friends?

Concerns about the unique needs of middle level students are the very reason that middle level education exists. There are those who suggest abolishing it, ignoring this transitional phase of student development, and returning to the K-8 grammar school model. There is another camp of thought that accuses middle school teachers of coddling and hand holding middle level adolescents so that they are unprepared for the academic and social rigors of high school. I worry that we have become so focused on addressing standards-based educational initiatives that the heart and soul of the adolescent and his specific needs are being trammeled by parents and educators alike who believe that the brightest and best are only destined for liberal arts “ivy league” educations, Goldman Sachs type career paths, and that the race to the fore has already commenced. Let’s look at those test scores again. Why isn’t a bright boy like Mark on the Math team? Why isn’t he reading classic literature and mentally provocative contemporary tomes? Why isn’t he engaged in year round team sports? And why isn’t he best buddies with the other “best and brightest” of his age group? What Mark’s parents want are what Nel Noddings describes as “the traditional liberal arts curriculum [which is] largely a celebration of the male life.” Noddings has also said that “Liberal arts education, as it is now defined, is not the best education for anyone...It puts too much emphasis on a narrow form of rationality and abstract reasoning as the hallmarks of a fully human life. It neglects feeling, concrete thinking, practical activity, and even moral action” (Noddings, 1992, p. 37).

Are we complicit in this classic liberal arts pre-packaging of the student destined for college because his superior aptitude predicts it? Is this any way to treat a 14 year old? No more fear. Ask the questions.

I cling to a quiet and oft criticized philosophy that the academic enrichment of our students is only a part of what we must offer in order to meet their needs. Both Raven and Mark need mentorships that address values education, career aspirations, goal setting, social needs, extracurricular talents, civic involvement, and self-esteem. Raven and Mark need teachers who are willing to speak out, model their responsibilities as citizens by declaring that good test scores, for example, are not necessarily the recipe for good citizens. Raven and Mark need teachers who are willing to listen to their stories, and not fear what they might reveal.

I admit it. I don’t know Raven or Mark the way I should. Did anyone ask Mark what he would rather be doing than going to math meet practices or what could change about the math meets and practices that would make them more relevant for Mark? Isn’t it time to sit down with Raven and address her fears head-on? Wouldn’t it be better for us all to stop assuming there is something wrong with Mark other than a good dose of healthy adolescent fear, and to start discovering what gives him joy and energy right now? Shouldn’t we also be finding better ways to develop parent communications and connections that support the understanding of the unique changes and developmental needs of the middle level child? Shouldn’t we be defending alternative education programs that are often the first programs to take the cut in tough budget times? Isn’t it time that we all began to view teacher-student-parent relationships through a lens of honesty and open-dialogue rather than a lens of fear? Isn’t it time that we all made the emotional and social health of our students a priority equal to their academic strength?

It takes stamina and courage to examine educational practices and initiate change, and even more nerve when it involves self-examination. We must not shy away from the questions because we might find the results unflattering or engage in more blame than we deserve when things aren’t going as well as they should. If we do not take control of our inner fears, those students who need our courage most will leave us behind with their suspicions further confirmed, which is that their education is not what matters most. Furthermore, we would also be confirming that lessons about civic engagement and the courage to take a moral stand for what is right and fair do not exist in our public schools. This is what we should really fear.

Discussion Questions:

Parker Palmer (1998) says that fears prevent teachers from being as effective as they could be. Identify some of these fears and suggest possible ways teachers and teacher leaders can work to overcome them.
How might certain students be marginalized in your school setting? What measures could be put in place to overcome them?
What could Raven’s teachers do to improve her educational experience?
How can we make our schools safe to be smart for boys? For girls?

References

Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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