RELATIONSHIPS WITH STUDENTS: “SEEING KIDS AS HUMANS”
“We'll have some crazy behaviors. I had a kid climb out of my window last year. (…) There have been a few key moments in my career where I'm like, ‘Maybe I should quit’ and that was one of them. But at [this school] we have the same kids again and again, 6th through 12th (…) This year I have that student again and she's a totally different student. She's matured so much. And now we went on this camping trip together and we found things to talk about that had nothing to do with school. Was she doing well in my class? No, but she did a great job on the camping trip. She loves nature and she was climbing trees and she was building fires. And you know, we developed a kind of relationship outside of class. I don't know if it was the camping trip or she had some sort of meaningful experience this summer. I don't know what it was, but she came in this year, and she's not just participating—she's leading other students and just really engaging. And it's those sorts of transformations where you get to see the kid like they're not just the problem-kid and they're static and they've always been that kid who climbed out of my window 4th period. You grow with them and you get to watch them transform (….) We have all sorts of behavior issues, but they're different because we have these relationships. So it's not such a confrontational thing all the time.”
“That seeing kids as humans makes a really big difference and being able to experience them as humans outside of class makes a big difference. So even when they're climbing out of a window you're still like, ‘Oh, but I love you because I know that there's a good person in there despite the fact that you're doing this crazy thing’. So I think that that's part of it—I'm able to really develop those relationships and not let the behaviors get to me as much.”