Fill in the blanks:

If I didn’t have to ____________, then I ____________.

If my students were____________, then I ____________.

If my class size was____________, then I ____________.

If my salary was____________, then I ____________.

If I had more ____________, then I ____________.

If the parents ____________, then I _________.

If the standards ____________, then I _________.

If my room ____________, then I _________.

If my contract ____________, then I _________.

If the community ____________, then I _________.

If my colleagues ____________, then I _________.

If I had ____________, then I _________.

If the __________ teachers ____________, then I _________.

If my administrator ____________, then I _________.

If I could just remove ____________, then I _________.

Check yourself. How many of the if-then statements above we positive?  How many were negative?

Positive or negative answers to hypothetical statements don’t have much impact. But the way we frame our verbal and written language to our students, colleagues, families does have a huge impact.

I constantly am checking myself and my language. I make mistakes, but I work hard not to fall into the trap of ‘if-then’ negativity. And when I step into that trap, I feel the bite of its teeth. So I work to get out of it immediately.

When I heard the news from the Parkland School Shooting last Wednesday afternoon, I was numb. I didn’t have much time to process due to the busyness of my schedule that day, I just felt an overwhelming sadness for the community that is and surrounds Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. My wife, son and I had plans to go out to eat for Valentine’s Day after we all met at a doctor’s office to get an update on my son’s broken finger. As I rushed through my afternoon and early evening, I pushed down the sadness and anger because I wanted to just be with my family and appreciate the time we could spend together.

Finally reading the news about Parkland later that night horrified me. I put my phone down and ignored social media completely for a few days. I assumed Parkland dominated my feeds because about 90% of my online connections are teachers or news agencies. I needed time to think without the constant barrage of tweets, facebook posts, images, and articles.

When I felt I was ready to emerge from my cocoon of avoidance, one of the first things I saw was the video from a rally where a survivor passionately called for us to act. Emma Gonzalez shook me to the core.

Because I have lived a relatively comfortable life, it can be easy for me to look away and shield myself from the bad things because the bad things rarely happen to me. With the exception of cancer killing my first wife at the age of 33, just about all my bad things have been temporary setbacks at best. It took me two years to get a full-time teaching job, but I know plenty of teachers which that journey took far more time. I occasionally get into arguments with family, but who doesn’t? There are days that work frustrates, but if you are a teacher and haven’t been frustrated at some point then I may need to drink what you are drinking. My current struggle is dealing with a shoulder injury caused by a car accident this past summer. Which isn’t fun, but it is legitimately my first injury since high school. I have never been the victim of a crime, sexual harassment or racial profiling. Nor have I ever had to worry when I would eat next or stress about paying my rent or mortgage. I can afford numbness because while I work very hard at what I do, I have it very easy compared to at least 95% of the world.

I have watched Emma Gonzalez’s video several times. I get teary-eyed, I get angry, I worry about the safety of my son at his high school, my daughter at her college, my wife at her school (she is also a teacher) and I worry about my middle school. And I ask myself, why would any young person want to be a teacher? If the 20-year old Tony Keefer was an undergrad now I know he would have never considered going into education. He would have said, “Why would I want to go into a profession that is under attack – both literally and figuratively?”

If we want stronger communities in our schools, we need to become better at many things. One of the things I feel we need to do better is not hiding from the issues that can break down attempts to build strong communities. I know I need to be more visible and vocal about what I think needs to change. I need to be more like Emma Gonzalez.

When I started teaching, somebody gave me the book The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. It was one of the first books that inspired me to connect more with my students. When I leafed through it while trying to write this post, I came across this, “The personal can never be divorced from the professional. “We teach who we are” in times of darkness as well as light.”

Sadly, as I write this post, it is yet another time of darkness. Back in the front of my brain is the disbelief of how we, myself included, have become observers in a dystopia that sends ‘thoughts and prayers’ after a mass shooting, but can’t figure out how to take action. I am not sure if I completely know what I will do differently yet, but I am not hiding anymore. The professional in me will make things more personal. And I won’t keep my personal thoughts to myself anymore.

photo credit: arjan.jongkees Broken Hearts and Broken Promises via photopin (license)

There are a couple of kids each week that I check in with on Monday, set weekly goals, and then follow up with on Friday afternoon. I try to vary the hours in which I call them down so they don’t miss even more class than they already do. I have one young man whose goal is strictly attendance. We are still trying to make it to every class, every day. Sometimes I call in to his classes; other times I simply walk by his classroom and wave at him just to make sure. Another’s goal is to focus on just one class. She can get overwhelmed and her transcript shows that she hasn’t passed a class yet. For another young man, we are working on developing necessary “soft skills” of making to-do lists, setting deadlines, and following through with actually turning in the work. This all came about after I learned he does many of his assignments, but they rarely make it in for credit.

But I’ve been thinking a lot more about how I approach these students, especially after my Wednesday afternoon. On Wednesday, a student was taken to the hospital. Whenever we cannot get a hold of parents or they cannot be there in a reasonable amount of time, an administrator goes with the student. Thankfully this post is not about that student. He’s fine. Mom and dad eventually arrived. There was no major concern.

But this post is about other students. As I sat in the emergency room waiting area for the student to be checked in, I overheard, “There’s Mr. English,” whispered behind me. I turned around and I saw a student I didn’t know by name, sitting there with who I assumed to be his grandfather. I nodded and smiled, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to protect his privacy and not intrude.

As I kept waiting, another student walked in with her mother. We smiled and nodded, but we didn’t have to say anything. Her mother was in pain. That was her focus. They, too, sat down, and began waiting to be called back.

I was at the hospital for over an hour and a half. The student I was with had arrived by ambulance and was seen quickly. These other students had arrived by car or by bus. They were still waiting when I had left.  This is not commentary on the process of the hospital for choosing which individuals to see first. I have mad respect for healthcare workers.

This is, however, a reflection on what I noticed in these students the very next day when I saw them in school. I called one of them over during passing time, and whispered, “Is everything all right?” He kindly shared that it was a “late night.” I patted him on the back, reminding him that I was glad he was at school. “Yeah, but I didn’t get all of my homework done.”

I encouraged him to talk with his teachers about what had happened, where he had been, how he was trying to offer comfort and support to a loved one that was in considerable pain. He nodded, but I also respected his request to not tell anyone about his “personal business.” Growing up and having spent countless nights in the hospital with my own mother, I understood completely.

So I write all of this because I’m thinking a lot more about the time when we don’t see students. When they’re at the hospital with a loved one in pain, or they are taking care of their younger siblings and just cannot find a quiet space to do their school work. Or when a student is working multiple jobs to help support his family financially because his father was injured at work.

And I am thinking through my approach, especially when one of the students I checked in with disappointed me. The three goals that we had set for the week weren’t met. I was disappointed, and I am sure the look showed on my face and in the tone in my voice. I don’t know all of his circumstances, like whether or not he was just like some of the other students I saw earlier in the week and had spent the night at the hospital. As much as I try, I cannot fully fathom all of the hardships that my kids go through.

But we agreed again that we would re-focus and meet on the Monday after break and that this time, he wouldn’t let me down. I asked him what he needed from me. He paused for a long time, looked me in the eyes and said, “I hear that adults are disappointed in me all the time. Please don’t give up on me.” I nodded. He stuck out his hand, and I assured him that I wouldn’t.

A few years ago the idea that teachers make hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions a day bounced around the internet. A remember reading posts like this Larry Cuban’s “Jazz, Basketball and Teacher Decision Making” and thinking something like, “No kidding – I am usually exhausted at the end of a day and it isn’t because of the physical labor.” The idea of teacher decision-making sparked my curiosity for a while. I looked for more information about teacher decision-making. Read a lot about it, talked to people about it, thought about my own decision-making, read some more, talked some more, thought some more.

I muck into metacognitive swamps like this often. I overanalyze the decisions I make in the classroom. One good side effect of my thinking about decision-making in the classroom is I narrowed the focus of my daily reflections. I shut down a great deal of internal noise to start with one consistent question. How am I responding to students? Then, I check myself frequently when I think I might be causing shame.

Justin Stygles, a friend/mentor, who teaches in Maine started pushing my thinking about the role of shame in education at the 2015 NCTE Annual Convention. Our discussion about his passion of working to counter the impact of shame in teacher-student relationships challenged me to learn more about shame. Shame is something we all deal with, but we are very unwilling to discuss, especially in public conversations. I am pretty sure that Justin’s thinking led me to Brené Brown’s work. If you don’t know her work, a good place to start is the videos page of her website.

My learning and thinking about shame, which led to more understanding about vulnerability, empathy, connection, and guilt, is the reason my thinking about my daily decision-making always starts with how I responded to students during the course of the day. Sometimes I feel like I had a great day, sometimes I know I screwed up a few times, but I am getting better at understanding that how I respond to students has a profound impact on not only my relationship with them as individuals, but the entire classroom community.

Brian Wyzlic shared a moving story about a response he had to a student transgression on this site last week. To be honest, his post reminded me of the thinking I have done the last few years. I had another post ready to go, but his ideas of grace and mercy and choosing to build connections rather than tear them down kept running through my brain.

I am not sure how I would have handled a student saying, “Oh, f***” in my room. Depending on the student I may have been disappointed, concerned, surprised or maybe I would have laughed out loud (because I love a well-placed obscenity as much as anyone I know). That being said, I am sure, like Brian, I would not have ripped into the student. Rarely, maybe never, does a verbal lashing help diffuse a difficult situation in the classroom.

We need to be honest with our students, we need to hold them accountable, and we need to let them know what is acceptable and unacceptable while at the same time showing compassion and empathy. When a student is not respecting the norms of the classroom or the school, we need to be able to respond to students in a way that lets them know that their behaviors are the problem, not that they are the problem.

I believe too many of our students feel they are wrong or they are awful. I have too much hope to think that any child is wrong. Behaviors can be wrong, but a child? I don’t think so.

The other day, I had a student in my office and she asked about the quote I had set as my desktop background: “It’s much easier to nurture a dream than to deal with an explosion,” a line from Ernest Morrell’s speech at the 2014 National Council of Teachers of English’s Annual Convention. Over three years later, it remains a line that I quote often to colleagues and use to guide my work with young people every day.

Before I knew it, I was down a rabbit hole. I was talking about Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”; I was talking about the English teachers I have learned so much from yet do not directly know; and I found myself endlessly talking about why I want to teach, the safe space I want to create as an administrator, and how I can always do a better job of helping my school become the place where kids’ dreams are nurtured.

If we aren’t nurturing our kids’ dreams and sense of hope, who else is?

For some, no one.

So when I recently read Eric Jensen’s Teaching with Poverty in Mind and Jensen’s comments about hope, I started to think differently.

As Jensen points out, “learned helplessness” is not a “genetic condition.” Rather, it is “an adaptive response to life conditions…” in which “[students] believe that they have no control over their situations and that whatever they do is futile” (113).

I think we can all point to a student in our careers who has lost hope, who thinks that he or she can do absolutely nothing to change their life trajectory. I encourage you to pause right now, and picture them. Remember their name? Remember how they used to frustrate and challenge you? You may have even blamed them for a gray hair or two. They never seemed to respond to what you would say, and they would tell you again and again that they “don’t care or “will never care.”

That kid needs our help finding hope.

Jensen encourages teachers to talk to students about their dreams, their hopes, and their aspirations. But this talk also has to go beyond the mistake that Shanna Peeples, the 2015 National Teacher of the Year, shared in this podcast. If we only do surface-level work of just asking kids about their dreams and not really listening and talking, we can get—and accept—responses like that of the student she worked with, whose negative response ultimately became his outcome.

As educators, we also have to be aware that “Students raised in poverty are especially subject to stressors that undermine school behavior and importance” (27). This doesn’t mean that all students who live in poverty are subject to poor behavior, nor does it mean that that these students will perform poorly. They are, however, at a greater risk. If we really want to tend to those dreams, we, as educators, must be aware of that and teach students to recognize and overcome some of these stressors.

We must nurture those dreams, make relevant connections in our curricula, and continue insisting that students can take small steps to accomplish their goals. If we don’t, then we can find ourselves managing more of the “explosions” that Morrell talked about in his speech. After all, it’s easier for a student to realize that yelling, screaming, stomping out of our classroom will earn him or her a “pass” at the day’s work. But if we are truly serious about nurturing those dreams, we have to think in terms of empowerment and persistence. Like Jensen also argues, “Instead of telling students to act differently, take the time to teach them how to act differently” (30). We won’t accomplish it in a day or a quick lesson about grit or mindset. Instead, we have to be as hopeful and relentless as we can be.