How to Fail at Teaching, Tip #2: Get Attached

"Boy, I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts." - Ted Lasso

I was really looking forward to round two of parent-teacher conferences. The afternoon before had gone well. I’d come armed with student reflections, which made the 15-minute sessions with parents go quickly - essentially letting the students speak for themselves. Afterwards I’d gone to the football game and stayed and congratulated the players in my classes after the game. In particular, I took the time to congratulate a student (we’ll call him Dally after the older brother in The Outsiders) who had become one of my favorites. I waited as he was congratulated by his family, his mom and his little sister who was about 4, who ran up to him squealing. I waited as he played with her and carried her and it was clear he adored being a big brother. I quickly said hello and told him I was impressed by his plays during the game. He thanked me and introduced me to his mom as his favorite teacher and I introduced him to my son as one of my favorite students. We then moved on and I began a game of catch with my son and another student from the class.

Dally was one of four football players in a class that had proven my most challenging that year. It was clear that the teammates had a jovial relationship with each other from the beginning and they loved to joke around and prank one another. From the beginning they tested me to see how much rule-breaking and how little work they could get away with, but the past couple of weeks Dally and I had reached an understanding. I’d gotten to know the kids enough that I had learned who he was separately from his group of friends. He wanted to be respected and seen as a leader, he enjoyed engaging with his other classmates, and he was a capable student. When he put his head down and got his work done, he turned in quality work. He was learning and having fun doing it. He’d become one of my favorite students and on his class reflection, he’d written down that one of the good things about the class was “the teacher.” So I was looking forward to meeting his dad at parent-teacher conferences.

And then his dad arrived. He sat down in his matching track suit and introduced himself and the woman with him - Dally’s stepmom - not the mom I’d been introduced to the evening before. I told him that Dally was really improving, but didn’t get far into my review of Dally’s reflection when his dad interrupted. “So I hear all the football players hate you.”

“I’m sorry?” I was taken aback.

“Yeah, I guess the football players don’t like you,” the dad repeated

“That’s interesting, because according to Dally’s reflection, one of the things he likes about the class is the teacher,” I replied, showing him the paper. “I know he struggled a bit at first, but he’s doing really well.”

“Yeah, I hear the football players are giving you a really hard time.”

Wow. Ok, so I had never had a parent come at me like this, it was definitely a first. And definitely not a parent whose kid I genuinely liked and had worked hard to build a good relationship with. How did I respond to this?

“I mean, Dally was definitely better behaved the week his friend wasn’t in class. Anyhow, getting back to Dally’s reflection…”

I went over Dally’s self-evaluation, explained the grade he was getting, Dally’s own assessment of how hard he was working and what he liked and didn’t like in the class, and what he would like to work on.

“Yeah, those football players really don’t like you,” his dad repeated. AGAIN.

Seriously, what was this guy’s deal?

“Are you like one of the football coaches or something?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “They just come over and hang out at my house a lot.”

Huh. Ok.

“And they just talk about how much they don’t like you,” he tells me. I thought about the football players in my class. They were all good kids, silly and disruptive sometimes, but none of them seemed to have any major beef with me personally. They just liked attention. Grasping at straws, I thought of the one kid who’d recently been suspended for getting in a fight.

“Does T.J. (named here for another book character) hang out a lot then?” I asked, inadvertently speaking the name he’d been looking for.

T.J. was one of Dally’s friends. He’d been pulling a C in my class and then when he’d gotten suspended he missed a test and assignment and his grade had dropped. I’d had to track him down to get him to make up the work and he’d brought his grade back up to a C. His dad had been hanging around the parent teacher conference coffee table chatting with some of the other parents, so I had been surprised when he didn’t set up a conference time with me. In fact, I had started to draft an email to him during one of my breaks to discuss his son, but I didn’t have time to send it.

Instead, a few days later I was called into the Dean’s office. “We’ve had a complaint from TJ’s dad that you are targeting him and talking about him with other parents.”

🎶 Dum dum dum DUUUUN… 🎶

Ooooooh, so that was the setup. That was what Dally’s dad had been getting at. Ha.

I spoke to the other teachers and apparently, this was TJ’s dad’s modus operandi. He’d accused his son’s teachers of being racist the year before as well - even apparently his math teacher, who was black, but the parent hadn’t known.

This was the beginning of the end for me. Sigh. I’d have administrators in my class daily taking notes. If I made a joke, I’d get written up. If I tried to make TJ do his own work, he’d file a complaint about being targeted. Sigh. In fact, it became the rhetoric for the rest of the school year. It was what it was.

But this isn’t a story about TJ. This is a story about Dally. Because I really liked that kid. And I was really proud of how far he’d come. How far we’d come in our student-teacher relationship.

As TJ acted up - huffing and puffing about how much he hated English class and the teacher (me), emboldened by the administrators taking notes.

One day, in preparation for an in-class essay, the kids got in pairs and were supposed to be finding quotes and posting them on the class slide show, so they could all access the quotes for their upcoming essay. TJ and Dally were paired together, and while Dally was starting to work TJ went in and deleted another kid’s work, then the kid deleted their work in revenge, I tried to warn them that this was work they needed for their essay and I would be tracking who was deleting what, but they ignored me. At the end of class, Dally was furious with me, “Why didn’t you do something about it!” He was right, I could have frozen them all out of their computers, but I hadn’t thought of that in the moment. I thought reasoning with them would work. It didn’t. He had a right to be frustrated and I told him so. I should have had better control of the class.

On the day of the essay the kids were now woefully unprepared for, the administrator was in my room taking notes on whether I was targeting TJ. TJ comes in and declares he knew nothing about the essay and complaining that he has to write an essay in class, the other kids take up the chant. They love a good show.

Soon after that, Dally stopped bringing his book to class, he stopped participating and taking notes. During a quiz, another student asked one of the test questions aloud and he shouted out the answer. It was his second offense, for the same thing, so I had to send him to Honor Council. I was watching this kid go sullen and withdraw and now after everything, I didn’t know how to pull him back in. I was too busy dealing with the TJ situation.

One day I finally pulled Dally aside in class and asked what was going on. He said he didn’t want to be there. He just didn’t want to go to the school any more. I asked his coach and advisor what was going on. The coach attributed it to Dally breaking up with a girlfriend. Within a week, Dally stopped showing up to school. I asked the administration about it and no one had heard anything from his family. They’d ghosted the school.

I never saw the kid again.

And that’s the thing about teaching. You’re just one person in this kid’s life. They’re not your kids. You see them a few hours a week in your classroom and you get to know them and then, they’re gone. Whether they drop out or graduate or you go to another school or get a new job, or they change schools, or in the very worst of cases, they’re killed in a car accident over the summer. These are not your kids. As a teacher, you’re just borrowing them for a small period of time.

So maybe they’re one of your favorite students, or maybe they’re a kid who really needs remedial reading help and instead has a parent whose “advocacy” is directed at taking down teachers his son dislikes. Either way you only have this short time with them and chances are you aren’t going to suddenly show this kid how working hard is better than cheating or that despite all the bullshit going on around them, you appreciate seeing them in their seats engaging in your class and you care about hearing what they think. Or maybe you would, if you were given the chance and trusted to find your own way. In my case, we’ll never know.

So, go ahead and get attached. But do it at your own risk.