Sunday, March 21, 2010

Being a friend vs. being friendly.

In my first year of teaching, I learned the lesson of being friendly as opposed to trying to be a friend to students.

Armed with a purely academic understanding of classroom management and a bad case of nerves, I had a drink with a colleague one night in August before my first teaching assignment. We discussed our respective “plans”. My friend had decided that given the nature of her assignment, her best bet was to make friends with the kids and win them over.

I was remembering the words of my scariest professor: “Don’t smile until Christmas.” Although I didn’t take that literally, it did resonate with me that starting with firm lines and relaxing later would be much easier than trying to salvage control from a bunch of “buddies” who were genetically coded to take every advantage from adults that they could find.

So we started the year. There were groans and moans from the classes that got me because I wasn’t as much fun as the other teacher and I was “Way Strict”. September was not particularly fun for my students. I was as clear as I could possibly be regarding my expectations about how the classroom would function. And I didn’t budge.

I quietly changed my expectations of them academically. I quietly changed my expectations of support I could expect from other staff and parents. I changed my expectations about the availability of resources in a remote school.

But I did not change my expectations that we would treat each other with respect in my classroom. I did not budge on my model of benevolent dictatorship. They knew I would hear everything they wanted to tell me, in the APPROPRIATE setting. But they also knew that because the responsibility for the classroom lay at my feet, so did the final decision.

By mid October, I spent very little time on routines and structure and more and more on delivering the curriculum with some creativity. By December, we were having fun. That’s not to say, we didn’t need tune-ups from time to time. But it was easy, because the boundaries were always exactly where we’d left them. Just because we weren’t focusing on them daily, didn’t mean they changed. That’s the beauty of clear boundaries and expectations: kids will test them from time to time, to make sure they’re still there - that you are still “on duty” – so they can relax and focus on their stuff. But if you have been consistent, the test is quick and easy and you can all get back to safely living and learning within your invisible structure.

Over the Christmas holidays, my friend and I had a drink. Her confession was no surprise to me: you can’t work down the hallway from a classroom that is out of control and not be aware of it. The first thing she said to me was how much she wished she’d chosen the same route I had. She had a classroom full of buddies who saw any attempt at control on her part as a betrayal of their friendship. They didn’t respect her or her attempts to invoke some structure. It was chaos.

It’s easy to misinterpret the meaning of friendly in adult/child relationships. While we strive to treat children with every single ounce of respect and dignity we wish for ourselves, children are not our equals. They are not equally responsible for what happens within the context of our relationship, whether it be in the classroom, the home, or elsewhere. I, as the adult, am responsible for their safety. I am responsible for their needs, not their wants.

Being friendly with students is great. They need to feel our caring, even our affection for them, in no uncertain terms. This is not the same thing as being their friend.

A friend is an equal, and expecting a student to shoulder that responsibility within the context of a learning relationship is unfair, ineffective, and quite often, detrimental.

By the spring of my first year, my classes were fun. I could be myself, joke with the students, approach things more casually, be more flexible with content. We had a lot of room to explore and grow within those walls.

Each year since, I have improved at setting and maintaining the boundaries with caring and compassion. You might not find any former students who would think of me as a friend, but I believe almost all of them would remember me as fair. Strict, but fair.

And pretty darn friendly.



Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."