What My Students Taught Me

The Student Whose Silence Transformed My Teaching by Columbia Journalism School's Teacher Project

In his first year teaching history at Shady Side Academy, a small private school in Pittsburgh, Matt Weiss was determined to be the “fun” teacher. A natural performer, he went off on long tangents, shared stories from the weekend, and sometimes played guitar during class.

Most students encouraged him. But Kate Schelbe, a junior in his U.S. history class, was not impressed with his antics. She sat stone-faced while other students laughed. A reserved and serious student, she made sacrifices to attend the school and wanted every second of class time to count. “I didn’t need the warm-up,” she recalls. “I didn’t need the warm, fuzzy connection. I just was chomping at the bit ready to dive into history.”

Weiss vividly remembers the “censorious and scary” look in Schelbe's eyes when he goofed around or went off topic. Over time, those looks would force him to consider some of his blind spots as a teacher, and contemplate some serious change.

In parts of New Orleans, Michael Ricks is a legendary educator — known for his full girth and even fuller heart. Most people just call him “Big Mike.” For years, Mike’s formal title was academic and behavioral interventionist, although in practice he serves as a combination between disciplinarian, social worker, and friend.

Mike met Cyril, one of his most memorable students, at the middle school where he worked in the years before Hurricane Katrina struck the city. They reunited after the storm at New Orleans’ O. Perry Walker High School, where Cyril’s friendly antics could usually elicit a laugh from the veteran educator.

Over time, Mike worried increasingly about Cyril getting involved in the drug scene near the city’s Calliope Projects, where the student lived. So as leader of the school’s Color Guard team (where Cyril was a member) Mike gave the student more and more tasks and responsibilities — all in an effort to keep him out of trouble and away from the drug scene near his home.

Mike breathed a sigh of relief when Cyril eventually made it through high school and his family moved out of the Calliope Projects. So he was stunned one evening not long afterward, when he heard some devastating news about his former student.

During the first few weeks that Ashley Lamb-Sinclair taught 15-year-old Connor Cummings’ sophomore English class, the two of them had a great rapport.

But their relationship changed dramatically a few months later, when Lamb-Sinclair returned from maternity leave. It was 2012, an election year, and the teacher started getting pushback from some students at North Oldham High School, located in a Louisville, Kentucky suburb, about her liberal leanings.

Connor was a ringleader of the resistance. On one memorable occasion he erupted during a heated class discussion, shouting something along the lines of, “Liberals like you are ruining the country.”

All of Lamb-Sinclair’s efforts to talk through differences with Connor that year proved in vain.

It wasn’t until years had passed that the two of them had a frank discussion about what had transpired in the classroom that spring. And Lamb-Sinclair learned that, for Connor, the outbursts and rage were about far more than politics.

As a young teacher, Ingrid Chung saw herself in 12-year-old Kayshaun Brown.

“What I saw in Kayshaun was the same type of intelligence, rebellious streak, and desire to go against authority that I had as a high-school student,” she says.

Chung first taught Kayshaun, who goes by Kay, in her seventh-grade English classroom at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the South Bronx. That year went smoothly enough. Kay was bright, lively, and charismatic. And because of their instant rapport, Chung could get the boisterous Kay to behave when some of her colleagues could not.

But as Kay grew, so did his capacity for troublemaking. By the time he started the 10th grade at Urban Assembly, the teen often skipped school, disrupted class, and swore at his teachers. Chung grew increasingly concerned that he would drift away, and that she would lose him.

This is the story of her efforts to keep Kay in school.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/the-student-who-almost-got-away/535776/

Chris Zajac’s story epitomizes the mundane heroics of school teaching.

The author Tracy Kidder spent a year following Zajac in the late 1980s, when she was a fifth-grade teacher in an economically depressed section of Holyoke, Massachusetts, known as The Flats. The result was the bestselling Among Schoolchildren, a book that documented in intimate detail the struggles of a teacher who would not give up on her most challenging students.

Those included Clarence, a sweet-faced preteen who wreaked havoc in her classroom on a daily basis: flipping over chairs, interrupting lessons, bullying other students. No amount of scolding and cajoling seemed to make a difference. (Kidder changed the children’s names in the book to protect their identities, so Clarence is not the student’s real name.)

The school year came to a dramatic climax when a team of education specialists had to decide whether to keep Clarence in Zajac’s classroom or send him to an alternative program for troubled students.

Zajac had deeply conflicted feelings about what would be best for Clarence—and for the other 24 students in her class. But the experience taught her lessons, both pragmatic and philosophical, that she carried with her throughout the rest of her long career.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/the-student-who-got-away/532791/