WWMD?

            Today I had a difficult day at school, specifically with one of my students (we’ll call her Kayla).  All day I was frustrated by her behavior, the way it impacted the classroom and routine, and the fact that I felt at a loss to guide her and the other students in my class through what has easily been our (and by our I mean my) most stressful day of the year.  I struggled to use the practices that I know are best and instead gave the students who were behaving cookies at 9 AM, bribed them with homework passes, and encouraged them to ignore Kayla’s behavior (again, I’m not proud).  I ended up writing Kayla up, giving her 0’s for the entire day, and dreading my interaction with her tomorrow in fear that the day will go just as badly or worse! 

Then I returned home to read Nakkula and now am sitting here asking myself WWMD (What Would Mitch Do)?  Mitch seems to be this counselor who has everything together and turns a chance encounter – witnessing Julian creating graffiti in the boys’ bathroom – into a prolonged ‘getting to know you and who you want to be’ experience.  Mitch provides a safe and understanding environment in which Julian can express himself, let out his true feelings, and experiment with his own adolescent identity without being judged by others.  Mitch reaches out to Julian’s teachers and parents to share some of the struggles that Julian is experiencing as he tries to find his own identity in all of the different roles he is challenged by on a daily basis (pg. 37).  Basically, Mitch did the exact opposite of what I did in my classroom today.

While I found parts of the Mitch-Julian story to be contrived, it did make me realize that there were certainly better ways that I could have handled my day with Kayla today.  After reading these chapters from Nakkula and being reminded that I am a co-author in the lives of my students, I want to be better prepared to deal with difficult situations such as the ones that I was presented with today.  As I was reading the chapters it seems clear to me that Kayla currently has a diffuse identity (pg. 32).  She acted in a way today that I have never seen before, which I think is what made the entire day so difficult for me to understand.  Kayla is typically a mature and motivated student, but today acted extremely impulsively and used attention seeking behaviors. 

Tomorrow I will try to be a little more “Mitch-like” with my approach to all students, especially Kayla.  As I have shared before, I strongly believe in routine and high expectations in order for my students to be successful and I don’t want Kayla's behavior to interfere with that.  Today she behaved in ways that were unacceptable in regards to the safety and education of my other students, but I also feel as though I can do a better job of reaching out to Kayla and trying to find out what is going on with her.  Because I know that she doesn’t always act like this, because her behavior today was the exception rather than the norm, and because I have built a relationship with Kayla thus far this school year, I hope that we can both approach tomorrow as a new day and that I can reach out to her and remember my role as “co-author” in her struggle through adolescence.