Today, our team discussed hosting a restorative meeting with a student struggling to meet our school’s behavior expectations which got me thinking about disciplinary practices during my school years. How when I was in school there was little to no student due process. How if a teacher accused you of wrongdoing, there was no recourse to plead your case. You simply served your time.
A common disciplinary practice at my elementary school was the nose to the wall consequence. Students were paraded out at the start of recess, like little convicts, and required to stand with their noses pressed against the brick wall. If children tried to turn their heads to take a peek at their classmates playing on the blacktop behind them, a recess monitor was there to yell at them. Something like, “Turn around and put your nose against the wall immediately or you will lose another recess!”
In middle school, students faced another form of this humiliating practice. Instead of standing against a wall, students who were in trouble stood on the stage with their backs to the cafeteria while the rest of us ate. At the end of lunch, the stage curtains would close, concealing the “troublemakers” from the eyes, but not the ears in the cafeteria. We would nervously giggle as each crack of the paddle meant the principal was closer to the climactic end of his public flogging.
As a kid, it never dawned on me that these practices might be wholly inappropriate and cruel. I never stopped to think that teachers and administrators might target students. That staff might hurt kids for reasons other than for inappropriate behavior. That adults I trusted could be racist, homophobic, or simply hated kids because they were different from themselves.
Thankfully, we have come a long way in public education since the days of my youth. Today, many school systems guarantee students due process, provide intervention strategies, implement restorative justice practices, and ban corporal punishment and humiliation tactics. Yet, I am no longer a naive kid from the 1970s. We have much work still ahead of us if we are to ensure all students thrive in a safe and supportive learning environment.
If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m reading Lucy By the Sea and share how the fictionalized story about the early days of the pandemic is like reliving our collective trauma all over again. There are many parallels between Lucy’s early interpretation of the virus and my own. We both thought it would be over in a few weeks, until the images of refrigerated morgue trucks, bizarre presidential briefings, charts and graphs depicting steep rises in cases followed by even steeper rises in deaths on the evening news hit like a slap across the face. The impending isolation and despair is so relatable and easily relivable–it all lands a little too close for comfort. I do remain hopeful though that the ending of Elizabeth Strout’s novel is more cathartic than dread-filled.
If we were having coffee, I’d declare my 2023 summer goals: 1) strengthen my core; 2) improve my mediation practice; 3) schedule more time to read and write; and 4) spend as little time as possible doing school stuff. I’d then explain my reasoning behind my fourth goal, like sticking to the tenets of what contract employment means–teachers are not typically paid for hours worked outside of contract hours. The illusion of teacher-work accomplished between 7:30 and 3:00 pm each day is not reality. Only when teachers stop carrying so much of the workload into their weekends and summers, will the systemic problems associated with teacher pay inequity and burnout be addressed.
If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that my daughter plans to move to New York City this summer to pursue the next chapter of her life. I would tell you how proud I am of her willingness to jump into new experiences with gusto and optimism. And how excited I am to have more reasons to visit NYC.
If we were having coffee, I’d talk about my aging pets and the exorbitantly high bills we pay to keep their systems running. We would laugh about how a simple pet check-up often reveals some new malady that needs long term treatment.
“You can put your cat on an inhaler for that,” I’d repeat to you in the voice of my veterinarian.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-1006624156-2000-ec2b01f155414e9e95af535643caf6f8.jpg)
The Way I See It 