By Todd Finley, Edutopia
My career got off to a bad start when I was hired to teach in a Minneapolis Ojibwe Survival School. That was the year that Prince’s Sign O the Times dropped — the year most of my lesson plans failed. More terrifying was the fact that I had no backup plan.
Students study with their laptop computers. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
I’m embarrassed now to admit that I sent over 15 kids to in-school suspension in a single morning. A chair was thrown at my head and later a waterfowl-sized stone. At a school event, a masked student threatened me with a hunting knife while I stood at a public urinal.
The attempted assaults weren’t fun, but I classified them as aberrations and moved on. What really unhinged me was that students didn’t like me. And their scorn felt earned. Most of my memories of that year have been erased, but I’ll always remember putting on my headphones, leaning my head against a bus window on the ride home from work, feeling numb, listening to Sign O the Times.
It took a decade for me to figure out what I did wrong — a lot of little things, but one big thing. I didn’t try hard enough to understand my kids — I didn’t understand their religion, their language, their relationships, their home lives, their poverty, their politics, their weekend visits to the rez, their history, or their dreams. And secondarily, I was too occupied with pretending I knew what I was doing to share anything real about myself.
Today we know more strategies for helping all kinds of students succeed. But none of them can work unless we learn to “see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs,” says author John Green. Otherwise, it’s like “looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the like can get in. The like can get out.”
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