Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, spirit-wrecking truth that we aren’t God.
Wouldn’t it be great to be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient? For many of our students, we imagine small changes we could give them to improve their lives: a better grasp of the English language, a more thorough understanding of the effects of American isolationism in the 1920s, proficiency in systems of equations, a steady hand with the scalpel, time management, a better digestive system on Taco Tuesday.
But then we have those class-clowning, persistent detention-getting, constantly rebelling, quietly suffering students. For sociological purposes, we call them “at-risk.” For many of us, we call them our most painful memories of teaching. What we wouldn’t give to dramatically change their lives. And yet, we often give very little, if anything.
One of the biggest dilemmas that teachers face is whether we should devote more time, effort, and resources into difficult students, especially those seemingly bent on misbehavior during class. I find for my international students especially, I deal with one or two students a year that completely refuse to either stay awake and/or do their work. Do I beg and plead every minute? Do I call, email, text the homestay parents every day? Do I I spend an extra ten hours a week and divert large chunks of my class to accommodate this student, who usually reads and speaks at a Pre-K level, while letting my planning and attention for the remaining students wane? Do I just give up?
Furthermore, since I’m teaching at a Christian school, the tension is even more palpable: we are called to be Christlike. Jesus pursues the lost. Should we not do the same?
Confession 1: I don’t always view my most difficult students with the urgency and compassion that I should.
Side note: Imagine Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount and two people in front of him keep talking over him while another pair trade punches when Jesus isn’t looking and one especially troubled listener is trying to set the nearest tree on fire.
Anyways, the impetus for this post came the other night when I learned a former “at-risk” student of mine was arrested for murder just last week.
It took some time to find the scraggly fourteen-year-old boy I had taught five years ago in the prominent jaw and hollow eyes of the nineteen-year-old man in the picture. The jovial adolescent face had transformed into something of a Greco-Roman statue with an inscription of a horrendous crime chiseled underneath. Prosecutors are seeking life in prison. Part of me believes I had already written that sentence for them.
As a student, he was a squirrelly boy. He fidgeted against grammar lessons and one-page papers. He had a penchant for kleptomania and farting at inopportune times (if there is such a thing as an opportune time for flatulence). He would.not.stop.talking.
Due to his past, which was rife with abandonment and abuse, I knew that he was at-risk of spiraling past being “at-risk.” He needed a strong male mentor, five years of learning to be crammed into one year, weekly therapy sessions, and a school that could shelter him from negative influences.
Confession 2: I put all my faith in the second of those four things.
I had 25-30 students at a time who needed my constant attention. I had a homeroom of 16 boys I was called to pour into. I was already at school from 7am-4pm every day. I was a newly-wed in the process of buying a new home. I had an hour commute in each direction. Due to the neighborhood, I needed to get to the train before it got dark. I barely tried to give him more than my instruction.
I trusted a good education could save him, just like I trusted a good education would uplift the rest of my class.
Confession 3: I wasn’t teaching him (or them) anything
Sure, he grew something like two-grade levels in the one year I taught him. His writing went from a jumbled mess to an organized tangle. I think most days he enjoyed class for forty of the seventy minutes (until his in-the-process-of-being-diagnosed-until-he-dropped-out ADHD and Emotional Disability kicked in).
But I wasn’t teaching him what he needed. I wasn’t teaching him emotional regulation. I wasn’t teaching him how to think. I wasn’t teaching him to find purpose and his place out of the painful existence he had lived to that point. I wasn’t teaching him about Jesus (it was a public school, after all).
I taught him grammar. As if subject-verb agreement could fight the discord that surrounded him…as if participial phrases could modify a life that needed so much more…as if sentence structure could rebuild a life that needed a foundation.
Confession 4: There came a point where I cast him off.
In Matthew 18, we get the ostensible inspiration for Cory Asbury’s “Reckless Love” (which I have in no way referenced during this blog post nor have I hummed throughout the writing of said post), The story of the 1 vs. the 99 is a clear example of this truth: God will search for his people who have gone astray[1]. Unfortunately, humans don’t often do that.
There comes a point for many of us when we are called to leave the 99 and chase down the one. 99% of the time, we either fail to try or give up early, and it’s usually for this reason that we turn to comfort us when the ones perish: we can’t risk hurting the majority to maybe help the strays.
Admittedly, I secretly wish I could be like the teachers portrayed in such films as Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, and Sister Act II, as unrealistic and racially problematic as they are (minus Sister Act II, at least). And yet, I’ve seen fellow teachers work borderline miracles in the very same students I have counted as lost. Talk about convicting.
I gave up on this student by the middle of the third quarter. He was too distracting, too needy. It was easier to kick him out of class after a multitude of misbehavior than to spend class time disciplining him. After all, I had only 70 minutes a day and one calendar year to move a class of “at-risk” students closer to college-readiness. College was, in my mind, their only hope, and my employment was predicated on their end-of-year test. I could not go on a possible career-suicide mission to help my one student at the peril of the others’ learning test scores.
I took the posture that he was either with us or against us, and I wouldn’t humor him if he continued disrupting my class. At one time, I think I even called him a cancer that threatened to spread (shudder).
My student dropped out sometime early his sophomore year. Maybe he was expelled. It didn’t matter. He left our school and, subsequently, my concern. Until yesterday.
Confession 5: I hadn’t thought about him until I saw his story on a former student’s Facebook page.
Even now as I am processing the tragedy of the student’s life, I waiver between remorse at my failure and hardened resolve at my decision to focus on the others. I continue to tell myself that it is better to secure the majority. Aren’t we called to affect as many lives as we can? But if that were the case, then why do I find myself saved after five-six years of complete, debaucherous rebellion?
I don’t know what course to take with our ‘lost’ students.
In this instance, I counted my student lost at that time, and now he is. But at least I still have the 99…98…97…
[1]Ezekiel 34:11, Luke 19:10, Matthew 18:12
