Dear Fred,
I'm a substitute teacher, but in the course of this year I have had two long-term assignments, first at Glover and currently at Stevens, which have brought your work to my attention, and I would really like to get a chance to talk to you sometime. My questions revolve around what substitutes can do to better engage students under the paradigm of restorative practices, and how you feel the conversations around Help For Billy have gone. I feel bad that I missed the opportunity to join in on the book study, but I did recently borrow the book and found it provocative reading.
I hope this finds you well,
Wesley
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is what I wrote. Here is more of what I would want to discuss:
Help for Billy? Help for Mrs T! What is the consensus on this science, especially of the brain? Where is the line between behavior and trauma, and how can these be bridged? Between learning and relationship? Just detach is the final word, which is strange given the equating of love and attention throughout the book--what is the status of such conditional love? What consequences or beyond-consequences does projecting such inexhaustible attention-love and patience have on the teacher--especially when not seeing the results of the labor ultimately bear fruit? On the learning of whichever, if any, students in the class are not pre-conditioned by complex trauma? What if relationship is not so much a prerequisite for teaching as it is an inextricable element of teaching? Otherwise the pyramid dictates that instruction and intellectual practice should become a vanishingly small part of the school week, inverting the current ratio of classroom to specials time: math and literacy will be the specials, and therapy of one sort or another the bulk of the time spent in school. “A perpetual physiologic state of dysregulation” 58 and “subconscious mind will work to sabotage” 65 make this a paradigm self-defeating not only for the student, but for the teacher, too, as teacher--collapses into surrogate parent, childcare provider, foster--and especially for the substitute teacher, who has not been able to build any relationship with the students...A Christian paradigm of love? But even if I don’t yell at them, I don’t live up to it, quality of mercy is strained, and I am a hard-working hypocrite, at best!
And pyramids based on Maslow’s hierarchy, just remember, are metaphors, icebergs to remind how much is beneath the surface, not piles of blocks to bury a dead king in. A living paradigm, rather, a braid or tree, even a house might be more illustrative. Not beyond consequences, but facing the natural follow ups, logical ramifications. Looking squarely at your beliefs--asking, how has that choice gone for you? Rather than, how could you do that?--and the scales may fall--even if a great deal of fear, insecurity, anger remains to be worked through--a logical and loving question can touch, and not only a mantra of safety or validation of the negative or false or aggrandizing perceptions. And a great source of courage or determination might only come with taking responsibility for the next generation, one’s own children, to give them something better. Non-profit industrial complex--alarm bells triggered for me when a book is published by an institute rather than a university or even a publishing company honestly dedicated to its market. Critique implying I could do better? Humbly submitting that working as a sub is doing something, as well as giving time to writing about all I would do. Massive overhauls to peel away the band-aids, to make relationship and teaching rather than professional esprit de corps and bureaucratic data-collection the main job of the schoolteacher, and learning the activity of the student, rather than regulating behaving or undergoing therapy--and freeing up the resources to provide that therapy, or perhaps better, to simply give a lot of money back to people, and to redistribute it so they can spend time with their kids with less stress, if the science really is so clear on that or not--anyone can tell that time with family and friends is preferable to work and school, and that much more is learned in these interactions than from lessons anyhow. So flip the classroom off, give everyone a computer and an internet connection, and be done with it; a teacher and a therapist or counselor in every classroom.
Joe’s take: on the spectrum Relativism- Dogmatism with the phenomenological approach as the mean, understanding the culture and language with which to even begin a conversation, not labeling it all trauma and washing hands of it. Tending to be white folks at the one extreme, black folks at the other, and all genuinely caring, wanting to provide something: love, coddling or abrasive, but neither by itself can change the behavior without first going deeper to questions and coaching around the child’s own values, sense of self, goals, and trust of self, love of self, before and beyond that of anyone else, however well-intentioned. Not keep your eye on the ball, but which way was it spinning? Not ice cream sales and shark bites, but the seasons, the weather, the beach--facile interpretations of statistics, but what sorts of outcomes were there from these reading groups anyhow? What was he doing, teaching this book or interrogating? And how different from a great book, where the two are synonymous! Trauma of a kind, after all, is the goal of exercise of muscles: growing stronger.
Something like this.
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