On Teacher-Student Distance and Disclosure

Carlsberg Brewery: My favorite PD

So far, the summer teaching program I’m working with (TALMA) has simply wined and dined the heck out of its teachers. The orientation was held in a gorgeous hotel in Maale Hachamisha, on a hilltop overlooking Abu Ghosh. We were plied with wine, information, food, information, more wine… and then taken to Ashkelon and given a tour of the Carlsberg Brewery. Tomorrow we start to teach, and put to use all that we’ve learned during orientation. Mostly: planning while inebriated is more fun than planning sober. It’s going to be a good summer.

The sessions were varying degrees of helpful. Most fascinating was the Israeli teacher of the year speaking to us about Israeli classroom management. At one point she had all 200 teachers on their knees, quietly drumming a beat on the floor. Another interesting session was the one on abuse and neglect, because teachers started sharing stories and tips for reporting and working with students who are abused. It was empowering to sit there with so many experienced teachers arguing about the best ways to help a child in these situations.

Walking out of that session, I thought about the natural distance I keep from my students, and how it’s based on my deep fear of abusing the teacher-student relationship. I worry that the imbalance in the student-teacher relationship is one that can almost naturally lead to abuse of a student’s privacy as soon as a teacher starts to inquire, and so I maintain a strict distance unless a student approaches me first. As someone who greatly values my own privacy, and resents when authority is used to make me disclose, I try not to ask students to share things that they may regret afterwards, or use my relationship with them to make myself feel like an emotional savior. But does that mean that some students have one less adult in whom they can confide? I need to do some self-reflection over the summer.

My regular school (that I teach in during the year) is currently dealing with a student’s accusations of inappropriate handling of her report of a serious problem (not a student whom I teach or know well—this isn’t about her accusations). So much goes on at a boarding high school, and I’m aware of only a tip of the iceberg, but when I think about the way my colleagues lean in to work with students through heartbreaking problems, I shake my head in awe. They, like the teachers in the TALMA abuse PD session, step forward, they hug and they question and they invite kids’ confidences in a way that, while it doesn’t feel right for me, means that students at our school have many safe adults to whom they can turn. I know barely any of the specifics of individual situations, but I have been called by sobbing teachers late at night or sat behind the school building with them as they cried for hours, overwrought by their pain at what their students are experiencing and the complexities of the situations that they are attempting to navigate. And at the end the teachers soldier on and return to lavish as much love and care as they can on teenagers who are trying to survive, with all of their joy and their compassion and their health and their bodily autonomy intact, to adulthood.

Although I understand that there’s been lots of social media outcry about these recent accusations, as the student posted them online, I’m luckily shielded by my lack of contact with social media. What I did see was a letter composed by alumni, requesting that the school clarify its policies, its support in these situations, and how both are disseminated. I’m proud of the alumni for continuing to care about EMIS, and for working to protect future students that they have not even met. While the request for confidential information about her case didn't take into account the ethics of confidentiality (most of the staff doesn’t—and shouldn’t—get access to individual case information, and it would be inappropriate to publish it to alumni), the push behind it was full of the strong passion for justice and transparency which I remember from them when they were at EMIS, and hope they continue to push for.

Ashkelon TALMA teachers hit the beach

Tomorrow I begin teaching sixth grade English in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. My main goals for teacher-student relationships is to provide the students with a safe space in which to learn English, a positive school experience, however short, and to not allow my Hebrew to overshadow their relationship with my American co-teacher. I have three weeks with these students, and I come to them with a renewed sense of the urgency of building close student-teacher relationships—I’ll work my best with them, and then return to my regular school with some new ideas.

Wishing all TALMA teachers luck tomorrow!