The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Doling out compassionate consequences
Imagine that starting tomorrow, policemen wouldn’t be writing any more traffic citations. No speeding tickets, no fines for reckless driving, no suspensions for driving while intoxicated.
Would you expect the roads to improve or get worse? Would you feel safer?
I realize the threat of a ticket doesn’t slow everybody down, but a trooper in the rear view mirror works for lots of us, including me. The roads, while not perilfree, are safer as a result. All penalties are like that. Some of us decide we don’t want another dose of the consequences. Others don’t want what happened to that guy to happen to us.
It works that way for students at school, too.
In a landmark 2004 study, “Teaching Interrupted,” seven in 10 middle and high school teachers reported “serious problems” with disruptive students and classes ravaged by “persistent troublemakers who should be removed.”
Forty percent lamented they “spend more time keeping order” than they do teaching. Parents expressed concern that “the education of the majority suffers because of a misbehaving few,” and surveyed students confirmed their parents’ fears.
Ninetyseven percent of teachers described “good student discipline” as a “prerequisite for a successful school.” Meanwhile, barely a third of the nation’s education professors ranked classroom discipline as an “absolutely essential” teaching skill, which helps explain why many beginning teachers, then and now, are illprepared to maintain order in their classrooms.
The professors, like many consulting experts today, alleged that teachers who face discipline problems just aren’t making their “lessons sufficiently engaging.”
I’d like to invite each of them to try their theory out on a roomful of actual students.
Naturally, conditions vary from classroom to classroom. Based, though, on my experience, my observations, and what other teachers have told me over the intervening years, the problems the study detailed persist.
Louanne Johnson has divided her education career between writing, advocating, and working with “atrisk students.” She’s most famous for her book that became the movie “Dangerous Minds.” Ms. Johnson proposes solving the discipline problem by eliminating detentions.
Suppose, she explains, you got into a shouting match with your boss or a fistfight with a coworker, or you showed up drunk for your shift. What would you think if your employer resorted to something as “inhumane” as making you sit in a conference room for an hour?
She’s got a point. If I behaved like that on the job, I wouldn’t be sentenced to an employee detention. I’d be out the door. So here’s a counterproposal for Ms. Johnson to consider: I’ll stop giving detentions if you let me fire the students who disrupt my workplace and sabotage my other students’ education.
Everybody’s demanding classroom productivity. But show me the assembly line or office that tolerates the daily disruption and misconduct that students and teachers are compelled by law and policy to live with.
Ms. Johnson faults detentions because they don’t “address the reason” for “problem behavior.” For starters, she recommends that instead of giving detentions and suspending chronic offenders, we should give them remedial reading instruction.
Sometimes, it helps to talk about what’s on a disruptive student’s mind, and I’m all for remedial classes for students who can’t read. But I’ve known too many wellbehaved students who couldn’t read well, and too many troublemakers who could read just fine.
Besides, what makes anybody think most students exhibiting “problem behavior” would suddenly behave in a remedial class? It’s wrong to inflict students who can’t read and won’t behave on students who can’t read but do behave.
Ms. Johnson believes that instead of “trying to control children,” we need to “create an environment where children choose to behave.” According to a 2019 PDK survey, most parents and teachers likewise prefer improving school climate and counseling to “punitive” detentions and suspension.
Since I have to be there, too, I try to make my classroom a pleasant place. I talk to children individually, I preach sermons on courtesy and responsibility, and I think I treat my students “decently.” That decency includes maintaining control of my classroom and, where necessary, control of their behavior.
Detention itself isn’t the point. In 30odd years, I doubt I’ve kept 30 students after school. But when I have, more often than not, it’s made a helpful, deterrent impression on participants and spectators alike. Like speeding tickets, negative consequences at school, including detentions, can be useful tools.
Ms. Johnson advocates banning detentions because they’re “absurd.” What’s absurd is banning them even though they often work just because they sometimes don’t. It’s like banning remedial reading because it doesn’t teach everybody to read.
Yes, “choosing to behave is a better option.” And most students choose that option most of the time. But even when you offer the choice, some students, like some adults, don’t choose right. My responsibility then is to shield my other students from the fallout.
I don’t solely mean violence. I mean the routine insolence, interruptions, and indifference that steal too much time and plague too many classes.
Compassion, patience, and mercy are all part of being in charge. But they aren’t a teacher’s only virtues. Giving a disruptive student another chance can make sense if he’s truly willing to change. But it’s wrong to inflict his serial mayhem on children who are willing and trying to learn.
Calling it “caring” doesn’t make it right. Caring isn’t a virtue when it hurts the innocent.