Listening to Students - Jonathan Hall

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“School is boring”

“Teachers are boring”

“No one here really cares about what we think”

“I hate school”

“School should be more fun”

Sound familiar? It didn’t surprise me to hear what students were saying in response to the question “what do you think about school?”  Well actually, these were the justifications given to the overwhelming response of the students that school merely sucks.

Like most teachers would probably do, I immediately began to devise a defense on why these statements are simply not true. Moreover, in my mind, I also began to construct intense, irrefutable notions that not only equalized these harsh statements with evidence of good intent, but would drive these insensitive opinions into the ground—never to be brought up again, due to their unworthy merit in the arena of sincere public education.  However, I did not spill my defense. I did not call them out for blindly conforming to an immature teenager ideology. I listened. I listened intently. I probed them for further reasoning on why they thought this way, which inevitably lead them to these conclusions.  Afterwards, my mind was swirling with several fundamental questions. 

If teachers want to make genuine differences in the lives of their students, why do we (teachers) instantly try to disprove many of the things they say about us?  Are we boring? Do we really care about what they want? Do we empathize with what they are going through? Do we ever stop to ask the question why do kids hate school? 

I don’t have many of the answers.  However, I know that in order for me to survey the effectiveness of my own teaching, I have to—at some point—take into consideration what the kids are saying.  They are smarter than the credit we give them. Their intellectual capacities and abilities to think critically, stretch further than what is often times measured and more importantly, often times allowed in our classrooms.  Teachers that instantly dispute critical remarks against them, do so while building barricades around themselves, disconnecting them even more from the true reasons why students are not enjoying their educational experience.  It is easy to rebuff criticism and uphold a stubborn doctrine of “my way or the highway,” in a class environment where the students are subjected to the control, order, rigor and demands of a teacher.  Nevertheless, it takes time, energy, patience and talent for a teacher to examine their influence in an environment where they honestly serve the students.

If we want to teach children how to become responsible decision makers, producers and consumers in society, productive parts of a community, self-directed learners and humanitarians, when will we give them the chance to matter? Are they only significant when they are obeying the rules, following each other in a neat and orderly fashion down the hall or making straight A’s? Teachers can begin to answer some essential questions on the effectiveness of our schools by not setting themselves apart from students as agents of control, or by adhering to traditional methods of manipulating the behavior of students with threats, punishments and rewards.

There is a larger purpose for why we teach and choose to influence young lives. Learning the content of a particular lesson is important to students, if we provide an environment where they are significant and the degree in which content relates to them, considerably matters.  Agreed, there is a fine line between judgment derived from intellectual maturity and opinions that are based on a fallacious, malicious, uninformed—often times impulsive creed, which is regurgitated from young adults because of how it resonates with their emotions. The quest of the teacher though, should not be to quickly call attention to the two disparities of how teenagers think, instantly disqualifying the latter through prerequisites of childishness. We already know there is a discrepancy.  If we want to get to the heart of why students hate school, we need to listen to the students (not necessarily agreeing with them automatically) and be sensitive to what they think. We need to figure out why they think the way they do, in order to—if nothing else—strengthen our own teaching pedagogy and philosophy.