I feel the need to weigh in on this.
On last night's Real Time with Bill Maher, I heard about a teacher named Natalie Munroe, who has apparently gotten herself into trouble by writing some rather off-color things about her students on her blog. This has produced some predictable outrage, as well as some you-go-girl support, and she's already gone on record as saying she doesn't think she did anything wrong.
Look, I don't want to take sides here; Ms. Munroe obviously stepped into a mine field, and I'm probably stepping into one as well by bringing it up and offering my own ideas and experiences. But this is a topic that has to be dealt with.
We cannot escape the fact that some teenagers have serious, even grotesque personality disorders; as I've written before, high school is a lot more like a Larry Clark film than people would like to believe or admit. I taught more than my share of adolescent sociopaths over the years, in four different high schools in four very different communities. There is no doubt that the existence of such children makes a teacher's job exponentially more difficult, for all sorts of reasons. What's important, though, is what all four stakeholders (teachers, parents, students, adminstration) do about it.
In Ms. Munroe's case, I think that even if she does have the right idea about the problem (which I don't know, since I don't know her students), she may not have the right idea about the solution. Personally, as I'll discuss more fully below, I think her comments cross the line from legitimate concern and constructive criticism into petty name-calling and unnecessary meanness, unbecoming of an adult in an educational setting. It is not useful to simply cast aspersions on kids in the manner exemplified by Ms. Munroe, but it is no more useful to dismiss the problem as something that the teacher is simply ill-equipped to handle.
Full disclosure: I was Dr. Evil* in my school (at least, in three of them). I had a reputation for being strict, uncompromising, demanding, challenging, efficient, fair, consistent, tenacious, opinionated, and brutally honest, and a track record for eventually winning over recalcitrant students. I was the teacher whom students hoped they wouldn't get, but hoped they would get again.
[* -The best gift I ever got from a student was a toy shark with a laser pointer strapped to its head. I still have it on my desk in my office.]
See, I never got much mileage, in terms of either actual learning outcomes or my personal rapport with students, by showering them with praise and letting them know how much I cared about them personally. I tried that at first, and it didn't work. In the end, I got a lot more mileage, both learning-wise and personal-rapport wise, out of treating them with contempt, but not real contempt; think Don Rickles, not Dick Cheney. What it really was, was not contempt or hatred or disdain or meanness, but intense, uncompromising fairness, objectivity, consistency and honesty (coupled with a rather dark sense of humor). I had standards and expectations and I meant to enforce them, even-handedly but firmly. Granted, this did not always provide the student with the outcome he wanted, and I often had to tell students things they didn't want to hear. But most, admittedly not all, came to understand that this was done in the interests of fairness, honesty and consistency, not meanness or hatred.
In this regard, the example I tried to set was: Your feelings about me personally do not alter your obligations to come to class, behave properly, do your work and learn, but at the same time, my feelings about you personally do not alter my obligation to provide you with the tools you need to succeed, answers to your questions, extra help on request, and a fair, honest, objective assessment of your performance. Basically, I tried very hard to never let my personal feelings about an individual student, or the students as a whole, affect how I did my job. The standards, requirements and expectations were the same for everyone, no matter what my opinion of them was.
(Some of my students used to have a little fun with me; they would ask, "Mr. Zeppelin, I'm your favorite student, right?" I would reply, deadpan, with tongue firmly in cheek, "No. I have no favorites. I have equal contempt for all of you." or "I despise all of you equally." Granted, you have to build up a rapport with kids before you can say something like this, lest they not realize that their legs are being pulled or that you're playing the role of teacher-as-Bond-villain. You learn over time who is and is not in on the joke, and until you do you have to be very, very careful. But the point is, obviously, to not "play favorites," to not give students the impression that your evaluation of their work has anything at all to do with whether you "like" them personally or not.)
Maybe it depends on the population, because as I said I was not able to do this in one of the four high schools in which I taught; the students, parents and administration there couldn't handle it, and I did a terrible job adjusting to their expectations. But I still get emails and Facebook friend requests from former students, who tell me uniformly how much they learned, how they still remember what they learned, and how they've used it to their advantage in the years since, because of that intense, uncompromising approach. I had gained their respect because I didn't shower them with praise unless they had earned it, they knew not to expect it unless they had earned it, and when they did earn it it felt really, really good. Any student who got an A from me, knew he had truly accomplished something special, because they knew I was not easily impressed. They learned that praise is so much more valuable when you've earned it than when you get it by default.
Now, all that being said, what I didn't do, what I never did, was use the kind of denigrating and derogatory language that Ms. Munroe apparently wrote on her blog. It is important to make the distinction between using those sorts of epithets and making a reasonable recognition and assessment of the behavior. Some of the criticism of Ms. Munroe that I'm reading, including that she is "whiny" and just as immature as her students, is not entirely unfair. I also don't necessarily disagree with the idea that if you can't deal with teenage personality disorders, you probably shouldn't be teaching. But then the question still remains: What is a teacher supposed to do in the face of some of that pervasive, solipsistic, antisocial awfulness that undoubtedly exists in today's high school culture?
I'm not sure there's a single answer to that question that will work for everyone. As I mentioned above, my approach that worked so incredibly well in one place was a total disaster in another. Complaining about it, as Ms. Munroe did, probably doesn't help, but neither does denying that it's a legitimate problem and placing the entire burden on the teacher to "just deal with it."
I had a student several years ago who had exhibited some specific behaviors that I found disturbing, to the point where I honestly thought he might be mentally ill. I tried describing the behavior to the parent on Open School night, and suggest as diplomatically as I could that it was cause for concern and that the child might need help. The next thing I knew, I got a call from my Assistant Principal telling me the parent was irate with a word I had used to describe the behavior (i.e., taking an adjective which I had used to characterize the specific behavior I had seen, and claiming I had used it to describe him). In other words, the entire issue became my poor choice of words, not the student's troubling behavior and whatever it might indicate; not How We Can Help This Kid, but What That Teacher Said, and out the window went any opportunity any of us had to actually address the problem and help the student.
It's very hard to function as a teacher when you simply can't tell parents the truth about their kids. I'm not talking about derogatory adjectives of the sort used by Ms. Munroe; I'm not talking about telling parents your opinions. I'm talking about basic intellectual honesty about the student's abilities and performance. I had an 11th grader one year, not a Special Ed student, who was unable to write a coherent English sentence. I told the student's mother that on Open School night, and the mother started to cry. When I apologized for upsetting her, the mother said that no one had ever told her that the child's language skills were so limited, and so she never knew, and she feared that it was now too late to do anything about it. As badly as I felt, I couldn't help but think that this was part of the reason why this student had reached the 11th grade without the capacity to compose a sentence in English; because no one had ever told her, or her mother, the truth.
Ultimately, when it comes to antisocial behavior in high schools, I don't think there is a solution that will eliminate the problem at its root, i.e., that will put an end to adolescent solipsism. That's something that, like it or not, we all have to live with. Acknowledging it helps; complaining about it doesn't. I think the only workable, practical solution, as I've suggested about other things in other contexts, is to make it irrelevant. The teacher should be interested in one thing and one thing only: academic performance. The teacher's job is to provide students with the tools and guidance that they need to succeed, and to be as fair, consistent, honest, objective and non-discriminatory as possible in assessing student performance. The student's job is to learn, to take part in his own learning, to be aware of his requirements and do his best to fulfill them. Students' and teachers' mutual feelings about each other are not incompatible with these obligations, nor should they get in the way of them.
Students who misbehave, and who forego or ignore their scholastic obligations, must do so at their own risk, must understand that they are doing so at their own risk, and must be made to bear that risk.
And yes, the same applies to teachers.