Hard People and Easy People

I’m not easy to live with

I know that it’s true

You’re no picnic either, baby

It’s one of the things I loved about you

                        From “All the Love in the World” by Don Henley

A few weeks ago, I heard someone say that her friend has “hard” kids, meaning that they were difficult to deal with on an emotional level.  That made sense to me:  some kids—and grownups—are high maintenance and some are low maintenance.

When I think about the easy and hard people in my life, I see them on a continuum.   Some are easy most of the time, and it is just certain contexts or situations that make them hard to deal with or be around.  Fewer are easy all the time.  And some are just plain hard. 

What makes a person hard?  Looking at my students, it is mostly about anxiety.  The ones who need constant attention and reassurance, and no matter how much I give, it is not enough.  They are perennially disappointed in me as their teacher, no matter how long the emails and nurturing the dialogue.  It has been a journey for me to figure out that it is their problem, not mine.  I will never fill the gap in their lives.

There’s also the unpredictability factor.  I have been in situations where I thought there was mutual understanding and respect, just to find out that no, the other person does not have the same view of the relationship.  A lot of this is about blindness based on a particular view of the self and of the world. 

Then there are those of us who project their fears onto others.  They interpret any dissonance as a personal slight.  Long ago, I had a colleague, whom I will call Amanda, who was hurt if she thought she was not invited to lunch.  I remained friends with her even when I moved a thousand miles away.  Amanda said she valued our friendship, but I always felt as if I was not living up to her expectations.  It was work to be her friend.   And when I told her I could not fly back to attend her daughter’s wedding, which was during the first weeks of school, she refused to talk to me afterward.  I did not live up to her idea of what friends do.  It was her projection, not any misdeed on my part.  It still feels bad, though.    

My principal used to say that all students brought baggage with them to our alternative school.  My colleagues and I brought our own baggage as well.  In secret, I named our school “the Island of Misfit Toys” because teachers and students were just a bit too weird to be in the mainstream.  It is disingenuous to think that we, as grownups, have left our baggage at some proverbial train station, and thus are easy, leaving our hard parts hidden in the dark recesses of our minds, or the privacy of our families and writing journals. 

Unfortunately, though, we take our baggage with us wherever we go, and it is visible to others who know how and where to look. While I did not have the language at the time, I knew Amanda was hard from the first weeks of working with her.  She felt her colleagues were conspiring against her, and her voicing of those perceptions made her anxiety and fears obvious to the rest of us.   

As for myself, I thought I hid things pretty well until I started taking yoga.   I was horrified to realize my baggage had a physical presence that was visible to my yoga instructors who gently and insistently instructed the class to drop our shoulders, soften our expressions, and unclench our jaws.  It felt like one of my dirty secrets was revealed.  Anybody who knew how to look could see the real me:  I sure ain’t easy. 

So what about you?  Where are you on the continuum of easy and hard?

Life's not Fair.

Life’s not fair.

The answer is:  It depends.

These phrases used to frustrate me, and now frustrate my candidates as they ready themselves for student teaching.  They want things to be smooth and clean.  Predictable.  The textbook/lesson plan/mentor/principal/internet has the magical answer. Given that belief, they feel confident in their ability to teach.  They feel ready to leave the nest and head into the wilds.  And yet, and yet.  They are about to be hit hard with the knowledge of how much work it takes to be a good teacher.  How you plan the best lesson ever, and it will bomb.  How some students will not buy what you are selling, and it has nothing to do with you.  How one reading strategy will not transfer from one text to another, one management tactic will not transfer from one class to another, how your relationships with individuals and classes evolve and devolve in seemingly random ways. 

My cooperating teacher, who became my friend, principal, and first mentor, said it simply: Life’s not fair.  There are many promises based on the same premise as the American Dream:  if you work hard, you will achieve your goals.  If you are fair, respectful, and know your stuff, students won’t smoke pot in the neighbor’s yard, or fight on a school trip, or come to school drunk.  Uh-huh.

But then you will have an oppositional student who later becomes an English teacher, she says, because of you.  Or you will have a candidate who did not get along with either of her cooperating teachers and who is now applying for National Board certification.  These balance the kids you had to kick out of school and the candidates you had to kick out of the program and blame you. 

I remember being shocked at the idea of nature being nondiscriminatory.  I somehow had the idea, perhaps because it was called “Mother Nature,” that nature was benevolent and kind, like some kind of divine goddess with flowers woven in her hair.  It’s taken me a long time to reconcile that nature is many opposite things—beautiful and ugly, calm and violent, loving and angry.  There are patterns, but these patterns are not regular and predictable, as was reiterated this year with its tornadoes, hurricanes, and snowstorms. 

Teaching is like that.  There are patterns, but they are not set in concrete.  No student is the same day after day; no lesson is the same from one year to the next; and no routine is eternally effective. 

While I am happy my candidates feel confident and ready in their pedagogical content knowledge, I also know that they are about to find out the secrets of teaching that keep some of us in the profession and drive others away.  Teaching is unpredictable, and the answer to most questions is…It depends.

Musings on Middle School Students

Middle school kids have a bad reputation.  Supposedly, they are ruled by their hormones, and in general, are a little crazy. 

Looking back at my own experience, that never made sense to me.  If I was ruled by my hormones, I sure didn’t know it.   This could have been because my mother explained sex by talking about eggs, at which point I was confused.  “Like a chicken?”  I asked.  The whole conversation was about fertilization, but I never quite got the connection to my body and a boy’s body until I heard the baseball metaphor.  You know the one:  first base is french, second base is feel…and I’ll stop there.  Listen to Meat Loaf if you need more information.   Boys definitely became more interesting, but looking back on it now, it wasn’t a physical thing, but more of an attention thing.  My first sloppy spin-the-bottle kiss at an eighth grade Halloween party did little to make this change. 

This week, as I observed teacher candidates teach in two different middle schools, I saw clear physical, attitudinal, and cognitive differences from 6^th-8^th grade, and even in the same classroom.   Some of the girls looked like they should be in high school, including the 8^th grader who sat down with a heavy sigh and said to her teacher, who was sitting next to me, “I’m ovulating.”  The boys sitting in her group didn’t blink an eye—not a blush or an eye roll.  Did they understand?  Had their fathers given them the same talk my mother gave to me, so they had no idea what that even meant? 

In contrast, I watched a 7^th grade girl in another class use a broken piece of plastic to search around in one nostril, observe what she found, and then stick it in her mouth. 

I worry about the girls.  Some of them are miles ahead in maturity, height and weight.  Being in middle school must feel like poor fitting jeans, when you move from “juniors” to “misses” and realize that your body has outgrown who you have been for so long.  Middle school, with its necessary structures and explicit rules meant to nurture and support children as they move from childhood to adolescence, must feel restrictive and a bad fit.

But boys can also be mature.  At an urban school, I saw that some of the boys had the name “Jose” etched into their haircuts.  I just assumed there were a lot of Joses in the class.  But when I discovered one of the boys’ names was Francisco, I realized that these kids were paying homage to their friend and classmate who had been killed by a gunman who had come to his front door looking for his brothers.  When Jose opened up the door, he was shot multiple times.  His friends paid tribute to him the only way they knew how.  It was beautiful, and it was heartbreaking.  Death is not unusual to these kids.

The most poignant moment came after class, when three of the boys came over to me and shook my hand.  I have observed teacher candidates for over six years now, and this has never happened.  I was touched by these students’ dignity and adult manners.  These were children, and they took the time to come over and talk to me, even as they were in the midst of being at school and grieving for their friend.  As my mother would say, bless their hearts.