Carla Shalaby Quotes

requires that we call ourselves out in order to call others in.18 It requires that we be willing to confront one another, and that we be willing to listen generously when we are being confronted—letting go of our personal feelings for a commitment, instead, to the shared goal of freedom.

This approach begins by asking, What is good here? This search for goodness was particularly helpful in providing the empathic approach necessary to lovingly understand children so often understood as “bad.” It prompted me to recognize the need to see these four children outside of school, to wonder who they were in other settings.

In the absence of reciprocal and equal relationships with her peers, she opts for one of assumed authority, and I often see that authoritative stance ramp up just after receiving a scolding. “She’s one of the class bosses,” another child tells me at lunch, with a tone of dislike.

The children in Room 1/2A very often scold, redirect, and regulate one another, and they receive mixed messages about whether or not this is acceptable. On the one hand they are told only to “police yourself” and are sometimes reprimanded for bossing one another. On the other hand they are also told to “help each other do the right thing” and assigned positions of authority like “head of table,” which become implicit and explicit encouragements to police one another.

Despite the obvious frustration that accompanies a difficult-to-manage child like Zora, Mrs. Beverly insists on the teacher’s responsibility to stand by the child, to insist on her full participation, to like her. Still, though, and ironically, accepting the child means forcing the child into a particular definition of acceptable.

Similarly, Jackson provides a theoretical understanding of Lucas’s difficulty sharing space. He names four key features of school life: delay, denial, interruption, and social distraction. And he writes, “Each is produced, in part, by the crowded conditions of the classroom.”12 These four features require that children—even very young children, whom we know to be active and impatient—wait a whole lot, get denied the choice of their own work, get interrupted from their own play, and become distracted by the requirement to be with others socially only at “appropriate” and designated times. These are all normalized school demands and they are largely considered unproblematic, even as we make such demands of five- and six-year-olds, whom we know to be naturally unsuited to them. The fact that the demands are considered normal makes them hidden, part of a neutral and unproblematic school culture. This invisibility draws us to the conclusion that classroom life is regular and children who don’t comply with it are irregular. Thus we rely on changing children rather than changing classroom demands.

In its central mission statement, the school touts a belief that “the learner can be trusted” and “the teacher is also a learner.

Rule number one: You’ll get in trouble if you don’t listen. You will definitely get in trouble if you’re too slow. When you’re at school, don’t think about anything besides learning.

as the misbehaving children struggle for visibility and voice in an institution that works to ensure their invisibility; as they work to be embraced by their classroom communities but behave in such a way that will ensure their exclusion; as they seek interdependence in a setting where the norms of independence prevail; as they raise their voices louder and louder hoping to be heard, but know they will be silenced.

These often idealistic and earnest teachers-to-be are taught that good teachers command control over students, and they are encouraged to learn to use behavioral systems of reward and punishment that are actually more appropriate for training animals than for educating free human beings.

As Philip Jackson, a researcher of schools, long ago reminded us, there are only three institutions from which Americans are allowed no escape: prisons, mental hospitals, and schools.3

have learned to think of deviance as informative, and often as an exercise of power and free will. The child who deviates, who refuses to behave like everybody else, may be telling us—loudly, visibly, and memorably—that the arrangements of our schools are harmful to human beings.

On the one hand, I agree that Lucas needs to do all he can to be flexible, to adapt to collective and community needs. On the other hand, school is a place in which there is an incredibly high demand to be obedient and to reject one’s own desires in favor of what is required.

they speak of uniformity and conformity, management and control, of achievement and success as measured by narrow assessment tools and remote, quantifiable metrics.

Rather she speaks about “teaching love and learning freedom” as deeply relational, respectful endeavors that must be threaded into the fabric of a humanistic education.

Whatever the case, her noncompliance marks the need to evaluate the demand, not just the child. And her behavior reminds us of her power.

Despite the way he behaves, Sean’s mom describes him consistently as a “very social kid.” It is undoubtedly true that he wants to be in relationship. Many of his antics are about clowning, trying to get a laugh from other kids, trying to be noticed by them. He spends an exorbitant amount of time at school trying to get the attention of one particular peer whom he considers his friend. Indeed, countless incidents of getting in trouble stem from his desire to inappropriately entertain and win the affection of this particular child.

I believe it would have helped Marcus to know Emily better as a person—as a human being rather than a teacher. His misbehavior allowed him more intimate time with her, but because that time was wrought with authority and consequence, she was forced into her identity as teacher all the more.

Feeling invisible—unheard, unseen, unrecognized—made the children more fiercely insist on drawing attention to themselves. But, of course, their efforts were often wildly inappropriate, ensuring that nobody could possibly pretend not to see them.

What do we learn from the children’s refusal to be unseen and unheard? Centrally, and simply, the children are saying, We are here. They want to speak, not just listen. They want to play, not just work. They want to perform, not just sit in the audience. They want to stand out, not fit in. They want to be teachers, not just learners. They want to be known and seen as children, not just students. They are reminding teachers to teach people, not content.

Classroom conversations are mainly about academic content. They invite children to be students and learners. But I wonder about a conversation that could invite them to be people, and also teachers. Knowing what Marcus might like to talk about would mean needing to know him as a person, but mostly I only get to know him as a troublemaker.

He did like to be helped. The relationship Marcus sought with adults was consistently a helping one. He refused any dynamic in which an adult tried to exert power over him, instead insisting that the job of any older person was to help him—academically and emotionally. He was not willingly independent, and independence is a core principle of Emily’s teaching. This conflict in their values caused tremendous difficulty. Marcus felt people should help each other and Emily felt people should be self-sufficient, to the largest degree possible.

Still, being “social” doesn’t just mean wanting to be around people; it also includes knowing how to be with those other people in a reciprocal relationship. Here Sean’s social skills fall short and he too heavily relies on disruption, which most often then results in his exclusion from the community altogether.

When a child is excluded, it teaches the other children that belonging to the classroom community is conditional, not absolute, contingent upon their willingness and ability to be a certain kind of person.

The four walls of your classroom can be the world we want, hope for, dream of, rather than the world we have now. It can allow children to practice the skills they need to create and to sustain a place where people are neither shunned nor labeled; a shared, public place in which every community member is treated as a free person, an invaluable person, a gifted and good and loved person.

Kids are smart enough to be distrustful, and adults always try to pretend they’re going to say something nice when really they’re going to follow the niceness up with something the child needs to improve upon.

Understanding disruption and transgression as one language children speak helps to reframe misbehavior as an expression of a set of demands—a strategy for being heard and seen. If adults were better at bearing their responsibility to see and hear children, the need for children to rely on disruption as a strategy for visibility might decrease.

We can ask, How does trouble get made as these children interact with school? Such a question redirects our attention away from “fixing” people whom we assume to be broken and instead toward addressing the harms that seek to break them.

There are significant consequences for getting in trouble, for being a problem. Both academically and socially, the central consequence is exclusion—exclusion from class, but more important to these children, exclusion from community.

Both educators and more mainstream writers have begun to capture the relationship between stress and misbehavior, trauma and transgression—and the related need for schools to offer a healing rather than punishing approach to addressing noncompliance.

Educators are often heard complaining that noncompliant children are “just trying to get attention.” They often believe the right response is to ignore the child’s attempts. I believe it’s true that those who misbehave are often trying to get attention. Children, human as they are, require and thrive on attention—loving, generous, patient attention in which they feel seen, heard, and understood. But school is a crowded place, an increasingly sterile place, and too often a place in which children are expected to pay attention, not get attention.

He was asking for relationships in school that mirror the relationships modeled at home—care and commitment regardless of how much “trouble” someone is in.

Classroom management” seems a neutral and harmless phrase. But the management of classrooms requires the management of children—which means power over people, control over bodies. These efforts cannot possibly be neutral or harmless. In classrooms human beings are told how they will line up and walk, when they will be permitted to use the bathroom, to eat, to speak, to sit down or to stand up. Such stringent limits on human freedom are bound to be fraught with trouble.

But school shouldn't be preparation for life. For young people, it is life. Young people in America will spend well over a full decade of their lives in school, by law. Their daily life in school is their social and professional world. It isn't just preparation for it. They demand to matter in that world, every day. These children are saying, 'We are here now, to be seen.' For the people they already are, already full human beings, exactly as human as their teachers. No more, and no less. They have things to learn as citizens, and as scholars, and as family members, and they will grow and change and develop and learn. But they are already full human beings, and none of these lessons will make them more so. They already feel, and love, and hurt. They already desire to be entertained, and engaged, and embraced. They already insist on being taken seriously, and cared for deeply. They will not be ignored, and they will not be invisible. Reflecting on the school lives of these children, recognizing the refrains in their warnings, I am reminded again of the epigraph that opens this book, from Labi Siffre's song 'Something Inside So Strong,' sung each morning by children in freedom schools across the country: 'The more you refuse to hear my voice, the louder I will sing.

Our schools are designed to prepare children to take their assumed place in the social order rather than to question and challenge that order.