Regrets from a No Excuses Teacher

As a high school English teacher in a state turnaround district, I was not particularly sympathetic to issues of trauma within my classroom. I would listen and always try to be kind. But in the end, the rules were the rules. There was little, I thought, that I could do about my students home lives. Trauma was beyond my control. Rules, strictly enforced, were the means of creating a sense of stability for my students and myself. I look back on this beginner teaching philosophy with a feeling of deep regret.

But I did not have the typical excuse of many White male teachers, who often are perceived to have rarely experienced trauma. I was myself treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an adolescent, which led me to teaching in the first place. But I was not able to translate my own experiences into supports for my students. I might have been able to empathize, but at the end of the day, I subscribed to an attitude that I should tightly control what was within my perceived control. Predictability, stability, and a promise of middle-classness were all I had to offer.

I bought into a Puritan work ethic for myself, and I impressed this upon my students. As a teenager with PTSD, school was everything to me. It was the only area within my control, or so I thought. I understood intuitively that the path forward was a scholarship to college. To stop and think was to invite self-doubt, and worse. I taught these same lessons to my students, over and over again. But these are lessons that often only work for the privileged few, for whom the educational system is best set up to support. Students like me.

My failure to attribute part of my success to my already high grades, my Whiteness, and my maleness doomed many of my efforts to reach my Brown students. Because of my demography, in high school I had a social worker, a legal system and very attentive guidance counselors all rooting for me. It did not occur to me that the resources and attention invested in me were a result of who I already was. I struggled to understand why every student did not decide on the same path I did. I knew of no other paths than the one I had taken. It is challenging for novice teachers to move beyond their own lived experiences , and I was certainly no exception.

The school where I taught had few of these resources. In my own high school, I could leave class freely. I would sit in a large, spacious guidance office, collect my thoughts, and work on college or scholarship applications. Or I would just sit and breathe. Or, I could just walk into a counselors office and talk to someone. I had a therapist. I had a well-funded band program that was a second home to me. I belonged to a well-resourced church. I had a vehicle, a fifteen-year-old Honda, which was pretty damn reliable.

My students, on the other hand, had some but not all of these resources. Certainly not the band program and certainly not enough counselors. And yet I expected them to behave as I did, to follow the straight and narrow path. Failure for me was not an option, and I communicated this value to my students. It is only now that I realize the importance of being allowed to fail, the importance of acting in the spirit of compassion. To bend rather than to let a child break. As a young twenty-something teacher, this supposed leniency seemed far too risky. I made decisions in the name of effective classroom management, to create an environment where everyone can learn. No special favors. But really it was about me maintaining a sense of control, a sense of authority, to calm my discomfort with the part that I was being asked to play.

I think back on my few years of teaching, and I see many students who were already wiser than me. One of the privileges of teaching high school is being able to watch your former students quickly transform into compassionate, thoughtful adults.

They are the ones teaching me now.