Broken Hearts and Empty Seats

The following is excerpted from a forthcoming book about teaching.

Or maybe it’s the opposite: Empty Seats and Broken Hearts.
Whatever the order of the phrases, they seem to accompany each other. We believe that we can’t teach unless our students are in the classroom, and for a variety of reasons, sometimes our students are physically absent.

In the words of one student, “After this semester I will no longer be welcome in any public college in this state for two years.” It may be the students’ problems (when we teach at the college level); it may be their parents’ problems (when we teach at the elementary and high school level), but wherever and whenever we teach: brick buildings, day care centers, online or weekend college, the stories and the absences from class continue to break our hearts and theirs.

Why? Wandering into every third class (late), not coming to class, forgetting to submit papers until 8 weeks past their due date, chronic illness, chronic absenteeism, chronic discipline. They’re going to do better in school after they: stop smoking, kick the drug habit, get successful on their diet, put in enough hours at work to pay the month’s rent, care for their ill children, attend the funerals of their grandmother. They have been evicted from their apartments, thrown out of their parents’ homes after weeks of friction, broken up with their fiancé, lost their job and their identities.

Like the dieter (“Just one donut”) or the inveterate channel changer (“One more round, before I turn off the set”), these students acknowledge the effects of their behavior – but they don’t change it. “I know I’m not doing well in this course,” they shrug, “But I gotta ---.” Their arguments are valid: everyone needs to eat, to have a place to live, to be satisfied in love. But their belief systems aren’t conducive to their educational goals – or maybe that’s simply our perception.

We can argue with them, take the hard line, refuse to compromise our philosophical principles. We can bend the course requirements. We can meet with them before and after school, provide boxes of Kleenex and pens to write their in-class work. But we can’t change their universe.

What you want to create, is what you will create. That’s a very hard-line stance, on one hand, because it seems to say that we are refusing to meet our students halfway. But we are not, and that’s not what it means. It means that until our students want to create that essay, that class, that diploma, we cannot force them. We can make learning as interesting, enticing, and fervent as we are able. We can listen and make accommodations as far as our beliefs will allow. We can give the students with difficulties extra time, allow them to forego a required paper with no penalty, allow them to miss more than the maximum number of class sessions. But we cannot force them to succeed in our class. We cannot force their parents to keep the students in school, when those parents are consumed with other worries.

We cannot find identities for these students, but we can assist them as they find their identities on their own. Maybe our class is not the turning point, maybe it’s another in a series that will lead to the turning point. Every one of us has been in that euphoric moment when a student has understood that puzzling concept. Every one of us hopes to be the memorable teacher for many of our students. But there are only one or two memorable teachers in a person’s life, and there are a lot of adequate or forgotten ones.

We send our concern and caring to all our students. We silently commit them to the beneficent care of our belief system, by prayer or thought or devotion. We keep the recriminations out of our mouths and the understanding look on our faces. We listen. Instead of telling them the right way to live their lives, we listen to where they are, who they are. We give them the perfect gift of acknowledging them as worthwhile people. In the end, maybe listening to them is the best gift we offer them. We believe in them as people, and as learners. That’s not such a bad thing to do.