Am I Making It Worse For My Students?
I wanted to pose a question I’ve been thinking about the last few days. I’m not necessarily looking for an answer from you guys, just your thoughts on the matter would be interesting to me. I’m not sure there is a clear answer.
I’m getting a lot of “advice” about disciplining my students from the administration and the Chinese assistants. For the first few days it would just be things like:
- “The students don’t respect you enough.”
- “You are too nice to them.”
- “You let them do whatever they want.”
One even said to me, “The students, they don’t fear you.” To which I responded, “Correct.”
The assistants aren’t saying it to criticize me, they like me and are trying to help me manage the classroom. They are also afraid of the headmaster. She has a reputation of popping into classrooms and being very unhappy if they children are “out of control.” However I run the classroom also affects them and their jobs, which they obviously don’t want to lose.
Most of the time I just nod my head and listen to what they say. Now and then I make comments back that try to explain my position. “They are not military. They are five.” When I say something like that the assistants usually looked defeated, or annoyed, or both.
A few days ago, though, my main assistant actually made a point that gave me pause. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. She told me that Chinese primary schools were very strict and the teachers could be very mean. “If the children don’t learn to sit quietly and listen to the teacher now, they will have many problems in primary school.”
That was an interesting argument to me. What if I was actually going to cause them to be attacked and abused even more?
I’m here teaching English, but one of my main goals is actually just to show these kids that they deserve respect and equal treatment. I want to give them an example of an adult that treats them like they are real people, not the typical slave treatment that most kids — especially in China — get from adults.
The more I’m successful the more these kids will view authority based on power as being illegitimate. They’ll see that just because someone is an “authority figure” doesn’t mean they have the right to bully you or coerce you or treat you badly.
The more that becomes a conscious thought the more you resist bullying, controls, force, and authority.
And what happens when these children go to primary school and are faced with authoritarian teachers? If I have been successful, they’ll have less respect for their new teachers. And what will that result in? The likely outcome is that even more bullying, coercion, and brutalization will be spewed in their direction.
This problem reminds me of an issue that many people from bad families face when they have younger siblings. Should they tell the younger siblings the truth about their parents? Should they explain to them the nature of the conflicts in their family? Giving the younger brother or sister a better awareness of their situation might make their home life absolute hell. Some argue that it is better to let the sibling build up defenses until they are able to leave the home. Others argue that they deserve to know the truth no matter what, and waiting until they are out of the house might be too late.
I don’t think there is a clear answer, but you can see the similarities between that situation and mine.
Is it better for these kids just to build up defenses and get through school? Will becoming aware of how badly they are going to be treated make things any better?
Obviously, me being more strict or authoritarian is not a possible solution. And I refuse to accept that these children would have better lives if they never met me. But I also can’t deny that they may have a harder childhood in school because of me.
So, what does it mean? Is it possible that I’m making it worse for my students?
Like I said, I’m not looking for an answer or a solution. But it’s a question that I’ve been thinking a lot about and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Why I’m Failing At Participative Rule Setting
Yesterday I tried to have a participative rule setting session with my students. Since I’m obviously not a big fan of imposing rules on children or using a system of rewards and punishments I wanted to attempt a group discussion on what classroom rules we should have. Here’s the basic idea behind participative rule setting:
This process can be initiated by teachers at the beginning of the term to establish rules that the whole classroom finds fair and are willing to follow. Students are more likely to keep to their end of the bargain when using No-Lose Conflict Resolution and participative rule setting because of a simple bit of common sense called The Principle of Participation.
Simply stated, the principle holds that people who are invited to participate in making decisions or setting up rules that affect them somehow are more willing to abide by them or keep to their part of an agreement. We all like feeling that our views are being represented.
Sounds great. But it isn’t easy to do. Yesterday’s class didn’t go well. I’ll explain some of the reasons I think I failed.
I Don’t Speak Chinese
This is a pretty obvious one but I think it’s important to understand how hard it is to communicate with children that don’t speak the same language.
There are some native English speakers and a few kids who are semi-fluent. But for most our interactions involve very basic, merely functional English communication. It is simple stuff like hello, how are you, go outside, go to the bathroom, who wants to play and whatever phrases we’re learning that day.
Oh yeah, there is also upside down. (This is a frequent request from the girls who want me to pick them up and carry them around upside down. It’s like some kind of drug; they get high on having blood rush to their brain. Anyway, I love the game too so I’m not complaining.)
The rest of the communication is nonverbal. This shouldn’t be underestimated. I know 100% that the kids can tell from my body language, the way I smile or laugh, how I pick them up, and everything else that I’m different from the Chinese assistants.
But when it comes to communicating an idea it gets much harder. I said to the whole class “I know this classroom has a lot of rules and I know that you guys don’t like some of them. I was hoping that we could spend ten or fifteen minutes and talk about the rules and see if we can come up with some that everybody agrees on.” The English speaking kids understood this sentence (partially at least, more on that later) but the Chinese kids had no clue. And how could they? I tried to simplify what I wanted but it isn’t easy to do. And it just confused them more. This led to the second problem.
The Chinese Translators
In my classroom there are a couple Chinese teachers who are there to help. One of them is my assistant and part of her job is to translate for me.
Usually, this isn’t a problem. She’s the nicest of the Chinese assistants and treats the kids very well. Unfortunately, this whole Principle of Participation thing wasn’t something she was even remotely familiar with. So when I said “I know you guys hate the no-talking-during-lunch rule” she translated it to “no talking during lunch.”
She wasn’t doing it maliciously or anything. When I told her I wanted to talk about the rules, she probably just assumed that it meant we were going to recite the rules. What else could it mean?
Either way, her translations essentially came out the exact opposite of what I wanted. She turned it from a participative rule setting session into a reminder about all the rules currently imposed. Fail.
This Idea Is More Foreign Than A Second Language
This is the issue that even had the English speakers confused.
Children in schools are not used to getting a say in the rules. Even if they have great parents that practice these techniques (and there is probably a 1-in-2-billion chance of that being the case) there are even fewer schools that do. Kids are used to being ordered, prodded, pushed, commanded, controlled, subjected, restrained, adjusted, confined, directed, punished, silenced, and finally questioned. They’re like terror suspects minus the water-boarding (or not).
I’m some foreigner, that they’ve only known for a week, sitting them down and essentially saying “we’re going to do things the exact opposite of every thing you’ve previously experienced.” They had no idea what I was getting at. It was kind of like when I first told them we weren’t going to do rewards and punishments back on day one and they all just looked at me like confused puppies. Only then it was cute and funny. This time it was sad.
So What Do I Do?
I think I’ve laid out the biggest three issues. I can’t speak Chinese, my translators don’t know what the fuck is going on, and my kids aren’t used to this sort of thing at all.
So how can I make this work? I don’t know actually. I’m going to keep trying. But short of learning Chinese myself or hiring my own excellent translator I’m not sure what to do. I can’t go back in time and make their parents start them on this system. And I can’t change the way the entire school works.
This is why I’m writing this post. I want your ideas. I know there are some extremely intelligent people who visit this blog and I’m sure you are one of them. Help me.
Leave a comment or email me. Or, if you have no ideas, maybe you could pass this post on to a friend. Thank you!
