Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Thirty years ago cutting-edge behavior consultants tackled the case of a disruptive, violent student. First they gathered all the other seventh-graders in the class and told them a story. The story was “The Trial” by Franz Kafka, a depressingly existential writer not generally known as a teller of children’s tales. “The Trial’s” main character, an innocent man, is arrested, persecuted and eventually murdered without ever being told what he’s accused of. The experts warned the 12-year-olds that if they didn’t cooperate with their classmate’s behavior plan, they’d be just like the uncaring people who hurt the man in the story.Parents weren’t informed. The principal wasn’t consulted, nor were any of the students’ teachers. Bright ideas like this usually originate in state agencies and superintendents’ offices.
For the next two years this troubled student wreaked nonstop havoc on his classmates and their education. Disruption, obscenity and violence became a routine part of their school day. When his behavior became sufficiently intolerable, his plan permitted his teachers to ask him to leave. Sometimes he left without objection. Other times his classmates got to watch his personal aide haul him bodily from the room.
Behaviorism, that moment’s therapeutic fashion, relied on positive and negative reinforcement. Whenever the boy had to leave a class, he was required to sand an old wooden desk in a closet. If he needed to be removed from only two morning classes out of four, he received a reward. Once he spit on the girl in front of him just before lunch, for which he was removed from his third class. The consultant on duty rewarded him because he’d almost had a good morning.
In case you’re thinking this whole thing sounds crazy, I agree. I thought it was crazy and wrong at the time. It didn’t help the boy, it stole two years from his classmates, and it left their parents deliberately in the dark.
However, at the time zealous experts billed it as effective, sound, innovative and humane. Anyone who opposed it was narrow-minded, inflexible and traditional, which is about the worst charge reformers can level at a teacher.
In short, even though it was crazy, it was touted as sane.
Woe to anyone who spoke against it – until it faded from the scene, and from experts’ memories, and the next expert fashion rose to replace it.
Over the intervening three decades of graduating classes, a well-intentioned procession of equally sane trademarked methods a la mode has visited our schools. The latest bills itself as “trauma-informed education.”
Proponents, not without reason, contend that children who “witness or experience” traumatic events – abuse, homelessness, violent crime or neglect – undergo “structural” changes in their brains and are consequently less able to concentrate, control their own behavior, and learn in school. They then charge, less reasonably, that teachers’ failure to deal appropriately with these students condemns these students to the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
The assertion that trauma-based practitioners are the first to introduce “empathy” and “flexibility” to classrooms is typical of the arrogance that consultants and experts who don’t teach in classrooms bring to public schools.
Instead of “rushing to punish, punish and punish,” experts prescribe that teachers employ a “mixture of empathy, flexibility and brain-based strategies.” Advocates claim this “universal design” for instruction and behavior management creates “cool, calm classrooms” that work for “all of their students.”
I’ve known teachers, including when I was a student, that I found both too permissive and, using an old-fashioned word, too strict. And I’ll concede that some of us, like some doctors and carpenters, aren’t especially good at what we do. But the teachers I know don’t delight in punishing students. We sometimes resort to penalties, and the threat of penalties, to keep order in our classrooms so we can teach our students.
The assertion that trauma-based practitioners are the first to introduce “empathy” and “flexibility” to classrooms is typical of the arrogance that consultants and experts who don’t teach in classrooms bring to public schools. Most “brain-based strategies” are either common sense or based on pseudoscience. And some students, because of their profound needs, can’t be best served in a regular classroom.
I recognize that some of my students, including that boy 30 years ago, come to school bearing unspeakable burdens. I have no simple remedies for organic mental disease, the scars inflicted by harrowing home lives, and the sundry mysteries that constitute evil in the world. Neither do the experts I see and hear.
Advocates insist that traumatized children need time and space to “regulate” themselves and therefore can’t be expected to abide by classroom rules and norms. Advocates also insist, however, that our “ultimate goal” must be “to keep them in the classroom” because they “can’t learn if they’re suspended or sitting in the principal’s office.”
Unfortunately, their repeated disruptions in the classroom mean no one else learn.
I agree that reasonable flexibility in dealing with classroom discipline is essential. Sometimes a look is all it takes, other times someone needs to leave the room, and there’s a broad range of “strategies” teachers employ in the middle. But keeping a particular student in my classroom isn’t my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is teaching my students, as many as I can as effectively as I can.
Experts argue that the “disruptive behavior that teachers often see – and punish – isn’t willful disobedience.” First, I’ve met a lot of gullible experts and watched students manipulate them. Second, tolerating one student’s disruptive behavior tends to lower behavior expectations for everybody. Third, and most important, a student’s intent in disrupting class is irrelevant when it comes to the physical, emotional and long-term educational harm he does to other children in that class.
Intent should affect how we counsel, or punish, a disruptive child, but it doesn’t change how it feels to be hit by him or lose your math lesson because of him.
It’s inexcusable when adults can predict this harm and yet do nothing to prevent it.
You cannot imagine the havoc being visited on schools in the name of trauma-informed education. Children, and staff, are accosted and assaulted. A growing handful of students rampage out of control through the halls, obstruct learning, and defy adults, all with impunity. They daily trample other children’s education and their peace of mind.
Trauma-informed advocates regard school as a venue for therapy. They dismiss any criticism of their priorities and methods as ignorance and callous dispassion. Ironically, in their crusade to address the needs of traumatized students, they’re inflicting trauma on everyone else.
It’s time to plead the case of the other children, too.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Trauma and its victims appeared first on VTDigger.