During my first year as a classroom teacher, one of my supervisors told me that my students should not see me smile until Christmas. This is not new advice: It is an old saw that has been passed on to new teachers for years. The logic is that students will not take a friendly teacher seriously, and thus, in order to start the year off on the right foot, students should know unequivocally who runs the show.
Our cultural preoccupation with punishment has had disastrous implications for our schools, from disparate and racialized discipline outcomes to the funneling of more and more students directly from the classroom into the criminal justice system. When our interactions with students are predicated on maintaining authority and administering punishment, we forfeit the ability to form authentic and meaningful relationships with the very people we are supposed to serve.
I found my supervisor’s advice disheartening. I did not choose to teach because I wanted to be the boss, I chose to teach because I wanted students to realize their own power and influence. As I went through my teacher training program I was far from naive; in the face of institutionalized racism, rampant structural poverty, and an ever-widening opportunity gap, I knew the work I was committing to do was not going to be easy. As part of my teacher training, the bulk of my assigned readings and discussions centered around the topic of classroom management. Classroom management is generally understood to mean “the process by which teachers and schools create and maintain appropriate behavior of students in classroom settings.” Despite being couched in academic terminology, our discussions on classroom management were, ultimately, about asserting power and control over students. The language of liberalism in education is an insidious and Orwellian doublespeak: We are not to “punish” students; we are to give them consequences, although the two are only semantically different.
[For more of this story, written by Jamila Osman, go to https://psmag.com/when-we-crim...4999f7dd4#.mbjokfu34]
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