Building and Breaking Bonds

3.21.11 By Rachel Singh

One of the major tenets of our behavior management class is that all students need to feel the three Cs in their classrooms: capable, connected, and contributing.  Behavior management is fundamentally about prevention, and students will not behave disruptively if they feel like valued members of the classroom community.  In the weeks after taking this class, I began to put two and two together and started noticing that the students who were zoning out or disruptive during lessons were also the students who were probably not following the lesson to begin with.  (I suspect that throughout their time in school, students learn all manner of coping mechanisms to evade learning experiences that make them feel stupid or incompetent.  First graders are only just beginning to learn these behaviors, so teaching them this year has been both fascinating and alarming, because I see these behaviors developing over the course of the school year.)  In looking honestly at my class, I also noticed that the students who misbehaved while I was teaching (as opposed to when my mentor taught) were the ones I was constantly telling off and with whom I rarely had positive interactions.  I was forced to ask myself, why would these students think that I liked them, based on the nature of my comments to them?  And why would they like me, if they thought I didn’t like them?  (I still have a lot to learn about putting myself in my students’ shoes and trying to understand how they are experiencing my intentions and actions.)

But now, it is suddenly March and we’ve been in school for more than 100 days.  The school year is more than halfway over, and since February vacation, I’ve noticed that most of the behavior problems I’ve seen have died down.  I don’t really know what’s happened and I can’t point to any one explanation, but I have noticed a change in my relationship with all my students, not just the ones whom I struggle with.  I know that my students get on my nerves sometimes, and I’m sure I get on theirs too.  I know their strengths and challenges, I know how to anticipate what will make them escalate or laugh; they know how to win my praise and how to push my buttons.  And somehow, I’ve never felt closer to them. 

Every day, I have moments of joking and stories and laughter.  I think they know that I care about them, and in these moments of camaraderie and fellowship, I sense that they trust me.  In turn, I feel happier in my daily work and take joy out of spending my days with some curious, marvelous, dear, and hilarious young people.  I finally feel tight with my students, which is funny because I remember at the beginning of the year, I could feel myself making a conscious effort to bond with my students - asking them about themselves, sharing jokes, and telling stories.  I guess I thought that that work was done, forgetting that relationships take maintenance (especially after teachers deliver consequences and tear away at the positive work thus far).  Now I see that not only is the work of building bonds never done, it has to take priority over delivering consequences and responding consistently.  Building relationships is the most effective management strategy I’ve found so far (not that I’m any kind of expert; management is my biggest challenge right now).  It’s also a positive and proactive strategy (as opposed to a negative, reactive one) and just feels better.  Pedagogy and justice were my intellectual, theoretical joys in the work, but relationships are the daily joy, the part that keeps me rooted in the day-to-day work of my unique students and their particular needs, and not what they represent to me. 

But now, I have to ask myself, what does it mean that it’s March and I am feeling so close to my students?  We only have three more months together, and then they will be my former students.  I am so proud of their academic progress, and I have every confidence that they will end the year on target.  I know what my teaching has contributed to that, but what about my relationships with them?  I don’t flatter myself to think that they are going to remember me for very long.  Are our bonds just a means to the end of teaching them everything they need to learn?  Is teaching just a series of building relationships and communities, and then breaking them apart? 

Since Young Achievers is a K-8 school, I get to see eighth graders all the time, which forces me to wonder about the futures of my students.  My mentor has had many of these “big kids” as first graders and they frequently drop by to visit.  These former first-graders are a constant reminder to me that my first graders will one day be big kids too.  I try to imagine them as eighth graders and wonder if they will learn to yell and run in the hallways, make honor roll, run for student government, or leave for an exam school.  And then I wonder, what does my nine months with them mean for those futures?  When I entered this profession, I never imagined myself as the kind of teacher who could really inspire students and remain in their hearts and minds for the rest of their lives.  I didn’t think I was that kind of person, let alone that kind of teacher.  My goal was simply to help them make a year’s worth of progress and pass them along to other capable teachers who would help them do the same.  If I could somehow teach them a little about how to be a good person and a member of the community in the process, I was meeting my expectations for myself. 

And yes, you cannot teach students without relationships and the three Cs.  But that certainly doesn’t mean that the relationships are the means to the ultimate goal of educating.  Positive relationships and learning communities are worthy, ambitious goals in themselves.  And just as I expect my students to build on their knowledge from each previous year in their progress to graduation and college, perhaps the same is true for teachers.  Each community, each relationship, each power struggle, and each successful de-escalation is teaching me how to do a better job building the kind of classroom I dream of, where students can learn how to be free, critical thinkers and democratic citizens.  I am learning alongside my students, how to be the teacher they deserve to have, and just as I teach them in order to prepare them for their future teachers, they teach me for my future students to come.