Trauma and Grace in the Classroom
Refusing to Reproduce the Polite Hell of Education
For the last couple of weeks, I have been writing some reflections on what it means (in theory and in practice) to work to create trauma-informed classrooms. This is Part 4. You can find the introductory post in the series here, in case you want to go back and read from the beginning.
A decade ago, when I was teaching undergraduates, I was angry all the time.
I know that may sound harsh to say, but it is an objectively true statement, confirmed not only by my own experiences, but also by the testimony of my wife, who had to endure the waves of emotion that rolled off me when I would get home from campus.
It was not pretty.
Why was I angry? Well, lots of reasons. But probably the central one was that I felt this pressure to push students to be rigorous, which I understood to mean a kind of monastic devotion to the subjects I was teaching (various classes on religion and the history of Catholicism, at the time), but also to the minutiae of academia itself.
That minutia includes things like proper citation, and grammar and the right way to conduct oneself during a class discussion.
Oh, and not falling asleep in class.
Man, did I get furious when kids fell asleep in my classes.
I remember leaning down and shouting in a young man’s ear to wake him up. After class, he asked me why I did that, and I asked him why he was sleeping in my class.
“I was working all night,” he said.
“Do they let you sleep at work?” I asked.
“No,” he said, a little confused.
“Well, it’s the same here,” I said. And I turned, and walked away.
Another time, I dismissed a whole class fifteen minutes in when I called on three people and it was clear they hadn’t done the reading. “Don’t come back until you have learned to read,” I said as they filed out the door.
The most insufferable thing about my anger back then (and I think my wife will confirm this, as well), was how goddamn righteous it felt.
I walked away from teaching back then, for a lot of good reasons. It was the right move. The fire that was burning in me was unsustainable, like an oil-burning addiction. I was determined to shape students into something greater, even if I had to destroy them to do it.
In philosophy, I learned the term for this kind of madness. We call it “the noble lie.” IT is a confusion of means and ends, really, by which you come to convince yourself that the only way to fight off the monster you fear is to become the monster you fear.
And what was that monster? The ignorance of my students? That’s the noble interpretation, of course, but I don’t think that was it.
I think the monster I was really afraid of was the disapproval of my colleagues. I was a junior professor on the tenure track, and I had just come out of the mental hazing of a grad school that did its best to leave me feral and crazed, and so I think I was passing along that suffering to my students.
I was afraid that if I didn’t scare the crap out of my students, my colleagues would think I was soft. That was the monster I was fighting, and that I was becoming.
It’s amazing the noble lies we can tell ourselves on the way to a major collapse. After four years, I left that gig, and we moved up to Chicago and I spent time recovering. I ran a nonprofit. I got into producing media. I started raising kids of my own, and I began to realize how terrible I felt when they were afraid.
I say that like it was an abstract phenomenon I was observing. I meant to say I realized how terrible I felt when they were afraid of me.
But what I discovered, being a father, was that those same invisible dynamics were coming into play. I had these internal voices that were trying to convince me I wasn’t a good father to my kids if I wasn’t tough—that is to say, if I wasn’t rigorous with my children.
Love, and patience, and therapy helped me to grow past those expectations.
Time helps, too. Being ten years older, and having been away from academia for most of that time, it gave me a lot of time to think about the way I approached the classroom, and what I wanted to get out of that experience, and especially what I wanted students to get out of that experience.
I had these things on my mind when I happened to read a recent piece by “ex-vangelical” Laura Jean Truman, “Hell No: Why Grace is Coming for Us All.”
The essay documents Truman’s movement away from her Evangelical roots, through atheism, and eventually back to faith. Part of what drove that trajectory, Truman says, was the tremendous pressure she felt to turn every interaction into an instrumental relationship, focused on the single goal of keeping everyone, both loved ones and strangers she just met, out of Hell:
In our fear, though, the people that we loved became a project to fix, and whether we intended all these relationships to become manipulative or not – once we have particular outcomes in place for conversations and relationships, that is manipulation. As we try to mold those around us, we stop loving them fully, as they are, without requirements and without strings attached.
What struck me about Truman’s description was how closely it mirrored my experience of myself in those first years of teaching.
I was walking into the classroom each day with a preconceived notion of my students: in particular, I saw them as the ones in need. They were in ignorance, and it was my job to move them to knowledge, and more than this, to the minimum-bar human decency that I had convinced myself can only come through education.
To the extent students responded to that missionary zeal in my heart, I responded to them. To the extent they didn’t, well, I think I just wrote those students off at some level.
What I discovered was I was teaching more and more to the students who looked like me and talked like me and wrote like me and thought like me.
The philosopher of science, Nick Bostrom, has written a fair amount about how observer bias gets in the way of all manner of clear thinking. This comes to mind now because it was certainly true in my case.
In his 2002 book, Anthropic Bias, Bostrom puts forth the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption:
All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class [and that] all other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all possible observers.
…which is a way of guarding against assuming that, in any given observation, you could assume you find yourself in the most privileged position as an observer.
This epistemic humility must be extended to the classroom. This is to say, the narrative that professors live in is that they are (of course) the most accomplished and most learned persons in any given educational moment with students. This narrative must be actively challenged and intentionally resisted.
In other words, the assumption that the teacher is the smartest (and therefore needs nothing) carries the tacit assumption that students are ipso facto deficient and in need. Further, it reinforces the power dynamics that have been discussed in earlier entries In this set of reflections.
The narrative that we are the needless ones, and that students are always needy, brings us right to Truman’s observation above: students become our problem to fix, instead of persons to be encountered in their full dignity.
That kid that fell asleep in my class was sleeping because he was tired, and what he was attempting was ultimately unsustainable. Had I been a better teacher (and a better human being) I would have started there, with that, rather than with the righteous indignation of my “lofty standards.” I did that student violence with my reaction. It was intended to “shock” the student into realizing he needed to “shape up.” But my expecting that interaction to have that effect was more like throwing a pile of screws and scrap metal at a wall and expecting it to spontaneously assemble itself into a carbureter for my car.
After nearly a decade away, I am back in the classroom, teaching graduate students this time. But they are not the only coordinate set that has changed in this equation; I have changed, too.
I no longer view myself in the position of ultimate privilege (although there is always the undeniable imbalance of power, and that must be intentionally addressed), but rather I am a co-laborer with my students. I walk into each educational moment expecting to be transformed by it. Sometimes I am the one who creates the movement, but more often than not, I am the one being moved.
Again, the parallel here with the insights arrived at by Laura Jean Truman:
God’s judgment is restorative, not punitive. If Hell is just a place people get sent to punish them, to separate them from God without chance of reunion, than Hell is just another kind of human prison system. But our God is an abolitionist. God is not a God of arbitrary punishment – God’s justice heals the wounds that causes the evil in the first place.
As I grow as an educator, my wish is to become more and more an abolitionist. I do not want to have my classrooms become polite prisons where I am the warden; I want them to be vehicles for liberation of the minds and—yes—the souls of my students.
But this does not happen by accident. It demands being intentional, and it demands most of all that I become committed to healing: the healing of my students (rather than trying to “save” my students), but also to my own healing.
That process has begun. I am a better father and a better teacher than when I began those dual madnesses some ten years ago.
What I should have seen, back then, when I was so angry, is that my students were coming into my classes with trauma, not with stubbornness or lethargy. Moreover, I wish I had realized that trauma often looks like stubbornness or lethargy, but acting like those latter conditions are really there, but ignoring the trauma(s) behind them, creates further injury.
The task for educators now is not to devise better ways to destroy their students (for their own good, as we continue repeating the noble lie to ourselves), but rather to destroy the very idea of the classroom we have inherited. We must destroy that inherited idea because it is not working for our students.
May we have the strength and grace to undertake the task.
As I mentioned, this is part 4 of a series on “creating a trauma-informed classroom.” You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment, and if you want to ensure you get access to the whole series, please consider subscribing. Also, if you think others would benefit from reading these ideas, it would be wonderful if you would share them. Those links are below. Thank you.