How to Fail at Teaching, Tip #1: DON’T Love All of Your Students

One of the facts we love to say about learning is that students learn better from teachers they like. This may very well be true. One thing no one says aloud is that teachers teach better when they like their students!

As teachers we are told that students thrive when they know they are loved by their teachers. Nobody told me when I became a teacher that there were going to be students I found annoying or who would blatantly and repeatedly lie to my face or who would bully others and then hypocritically act offended should I ask them to get on task.

See it turns out that kids are people. In Professional Development meetings about connecting with our students, students are painted as these empty little vessels waiting to be filled with a teacher’s knowledge. In reality, kids and teens have their own personalities, their own prejudices, their own likes and dislikes. Kids are not blank canvasses, and some of them, just like some adults, totally suck.

In all my years of teaching, I’ve always had that one class I just adored. The kids were curious, interested in learning, quirky, questioning, eager. They were polite and they knew how to have fun and still learn. Some of my favorite groups of students have been the wiggly kids, the ones who can’t sit still in their seats, who can’t wait to be called on and just must blurt out their thoughts the minute they pop into their head. They’re often the pranksters and the troublemakers. The kids who think outside of the box. Those are my people.

Conversely, on three distinct occasions I’ve had that one class I just didn’t click with. The students were too quiet or they didn’t get my jokes. In each of these classes, I noticed a common strain, in that the students didn’t trust each other. They were afraid to answer questions for fear of what their peers would think. I hated it. The more I tried to encourage them to generate their own thoughts, to be brave and courageous and original, the more they clammed up. For a teacher, this is so dull. Of course, in the case of the class at my all boys’ school, they cracked jokes at one another’s expense all day long, but when it came to being vulnerable enough to give a true response to a question - crickets. 

In my education classes and professional development courses, we are constantly talking about how to build trust and rapport with students. When the class dynamics are off in a group, the only ways to learn about who students really are is to spend time with them away from their classes or to get to know them through their writing. Writing is often a private, confidential act that lets kids truly be themselves without judgement. I love when kids are completely honest with me in their writing, even when it’s in a class evaluation and they tell me when work is too much or too boring. I appreciate the honest feedback and what it tells me about my students. This is why reading my students’ writing is one of my favorite parts of teaching English class and why I can’t stand when a student uses AI or gets answers from someone else. Writing is an opportunity to tell the reader who you really are. When you don’t take that opportunity, you’re hiding yourself from those around you. Writing also lets us see ourselves. I think all kids deserve to be seen. Even the assholes. 

I taught five classes at my last school. At first, I loved all of them differently, but that one class, my period three was the most challenging and most fun - at first. I looked forward to that interaction every day. The kids had these big, distinct personalities and they enjoyed healthy conflict. They were finding themselves, finding their roles in the class. Unfortunately, it all went to hell once a parent came on the scene suggesting his son was being “targeted.” 

Nobody tells you what to do when you, the teacher, don’t trust your students or their parents anymore. Nobody tells you what to do when a parent conspires with another parent to try to set an ambush for you during parent teacher conferences. No wait, yes they do. They expect you to kowtow to the bully parents and treat their kids with white gloves. They expect you to let the kids and parents and tutors get away with cheating. They expect you to let the kid follow their own special set of rules. 

Is it any surprise the kids got on a power trip? They ruled the roost. The administration started taking scrupulous notes. The meetings got out of control. The attention for negative behavior ended up diminishing the students’ classroom strengths and magnifying their personality weaknesses. The class became a game of thrones rather than a place of learning. I knew those kids so well. I knew them better than any of the students in my other classes. I knew when they were struggling, I knew when they were manipulating, I knew when they needed help. I knew when they were avoiding work. I knew them. And I watched them go from being my favorite class to a nightmare. 

Meanwhile I had four other classes, each with their own distinct set of individuals and each their own distinct vibe. As teachers we’re told we set the tone of the class, but that’s not always the case. If it were, every class would have the same dynamic regardless of the students. If teachers were solely responsible for setting the tone of the class, then the addition or subtraction of a single student wouldn’t affect the class vibe. Yet every year my classes have varied in dynamic from group to group. Even one single kid can impact the group dynamics, particularly in a small class. Kids come with their own baggage, their own group interactions, their friendships and social pecking orders. I loved my other four other classes throughout the year. Not every day was perfect. Other students tested me, but overall we had a good time. 

But when I was put on a personal support plan I was told, I had to get that one class, that Period Three class to love me. The problem was I no longer loved all my Period Three class. While most of the students I genuinely liked, even when they were goofing off or complaining, their group dynamic was toxic. They all put on these macho personas for one another. They were all afraid of becoming the targets of their peers. Once alone though, they were nice kids. Unfortunately, there were two kids who insisted on giving me a hard time. The thing was, they didn’t want to like me, and I didn’t need them to like me, and there wasn’t going to be anything I could do to get them to like me. Their whole power dynamic in the class was based on their animosity towards me. If they were to suddenly like me, they would disrupt the entire social order. Their attitude towards me created chaos among their peers and they enjoyed the hell out of it. 

For my part, after my initial efforts to help them and make an extra effort to make learning fun and their continual insistence on defying any effort to get them to learn, I didn’t particularly like them every day. One kid was manipulative, he would come to class unprepared, disturb my class, and then find an excuse to complain about me to the administration to make it look like it was my fault he didn’t get his work done. The other simply refused to learn once his other friend left the class. He wasn’t interested in ME liking HIM and I wasn’t interested in trying to coax him to like me. Kids can see right through your bullshit and I had no intention of being fake and trying to bribe him with candy. He would know I was disingenuous and simply use it to manipulate the situation. A kid who starts chanting “Kill all gays! Kill all gays!” after a teacher tells him she supports LGBTQ+ students is not interested in being liked by the teacher. Why would I like a kid who constantly bullies his other classmates and expresses hatred towards groups of human beings? Why should I like him?

Why do we treat teachers and students like they aren’t real people with real feelings? I don’t know why that student didn’t like me, but frankly, I stand by and defend his right not to like me. I don’t like everyone I meet or interact with or work with, why should he? Why do administrators insist that kids don’t have a right to their own feelings, whether those feelings are justified or not?

I certainly didn’t like the kid’s father who accused me of being racist, and apparently accused all of his son’s teachers of being racist, including the black math teacher who he didn’t know was black. Why would I like someone who completely attacked a central part of my character with no grounds to do so or evidence to support such a claim? I didn’t like the kid’s parent who came to my Parent Teacher Conference and told me multiple times that all of the football players hated me, even though his OWN kid, a talented player, had introduced me to his mother the evening before as his favorite teacher and put it in writing on his evaluation. Why do we insist then that we as teachers need to like and be liked by everyone?

Not every student is going to be my favorite and I’m not going to be every student’s cup of tea. I accept that. In life we have different relationships with different people. I have friends I adore who I hang out with weekly. I have acquaintances I see at our kids’ shared activities. I have people who annoy the hell out of me and I have distanced myself from. This is natural in human relationships. It is not natural to expect every student to love every teacher or every teacher to love every student. Hating me brought my students together as a class. It gave them something to bond over. Even the students in that class that didn’t hate me. It gave them a common enemy. And that’s ok. 

To circle back to the original assertion that students learn better when they like their teachers. We say that as if the teacher has control over their students liking them. They don’t. Do you know how I know this? I took a marketing class at a community college a few years ago. The teacher started off the class by telling us to create a marketing plan for a diet drink. He then told us how diet drinks should be green to represent nature and how skinny young chicks make good models for dieting drinks. In that first project, he represented to me all that was wrong with the media preying on young women’s body images and referring to women business moguls in these diminutive tones. I told him this and let the administration know how I felt about it as well. 

There was nothing that professor could say after that to make me like him. I know he wasn’t a bad guy, he was just out-of-date when it came to body positivity and used to teaching 18-year-olds rather than 40-year-olds. The class was a few short weeks and I was working full-time and I had several other commitments and I didn’t finish my final project on time. In my head, I blamed it on not liking him, but in truth, it wasn’t his fault that I overbooked my schedule and planned poorly. 

In the real world, we all work better with people we like, but we don’t always get to choose our bosses or co-workers or even our families. Thus, we have to learn to not let that be an obstacle to our own success. Shouldn’t that be the message we send to our students and teachers?