Was it Abusive?

 My sister recently finished a leadership fellowship, and in her closing interview with the boss, he asked her, “did the program's emphasis on vulnerability and sharing ever feel abusive to you?”

“Yes!” I shouted when she reported the question to me. I wasn’t responding to his query about his program, of course. I was thinking about my tenure with Teach for America, and what they should have asked at the event they call, creepily enough, “alumni induction.” Of course, they might have asked it, I don’t know; at that point I was feeling sufficiently violated by the program to skip the free booze they offered to celebrate the end of two years of torturing America’s youth.

A word cloud of feel-good bullshitting TFAery

You see, what the boss of my sister’s program was aware of, and what TFA remains so priveligedly ignorant of, is that where most people may experience a call for transparent vulnerability as brave or cathartic, my sister and I struggle to find a word less vivid than “rape” to describe the quid pro quo style of invading privacy in the name of bonding that TFA demands. But rather than wax poetic on the sins of the beast that is TFA, there’s something more important I must do now that I am a teacher outside their slimy grasp, and that is to ask myself, “is my teaching abusive at any time?” In the same way that I squirm under forced disclosure, do I ever demand that my students be “vulnerable and transparent” (Jesus, Allah, and Shiva forbid!) and invade their souls with prying, authoritative hand?

Lately, my students have been sharing a lot. A lot a lot. Some spoke about their experiences with violence at our school’s recent international Memorial Day service. Beforehand, I wiggled through words as I tried to ask students to share personal stories without demanding that they bare their souls uncomfortably before an audience. One student and I met at least six times before she bowed out, confessing that we still couldn’t find a way to phrase her thoughts without feeling damaging in disclosure.

On Israel’s national Memorial and Independence Days, students and teachers alike struggled to express their identities without impinging upon others. How to celebrate or mourn properly, beside people doing the exact opposite from you, and to arrange a suitable atmosphere for all the students, without breaching their comfort zones? Some students, mostly Palestinians, spoke up, asking for certain treatment or exemptions; many of the Israelis stayed silent and in their silence left us wondering if we hadn’t made legitimate space for their voices. It seemed equally problematic to be delicate and blunt; both ignoring or engaging with the culture clash enacted in our hallways was difficult. The teachers fretted over what to do. Silence and speech could be equally abusive when coming from our positions of authority. We didn’t settle on anything, really. We have one year to get it right before the next Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut.

But sometimes you have to consent to silence

This same month, my students engaged in some in-depth identity work. I’d felt that our school is merely dancing around the edges of the peace work in our mission, letting students of different cultures live together, but not helping them to actually dialogue about the issues we’re meant to be treating together. So I created an identity project related to the autobiographies we’ve read, in which they submitted photographs that represented a certain set of words for them. They watched the video in which each of them defined “fear,” “faith,” “family,” etc. through pictures with widened eyes. After we screened it in class, they came up to thank me; “I know my class so much better now, Miss,” they said. I wonder if there was anyone who felt it was knowledge without consent.

Two weeks later, students partnered with a student from a different culture—or from the rival culture next door—to create slam poem duets on identity. The performances were deeply informative. Students leaned forward in their seats, visibly grasping after the visions shared by their fellows. They were flushed with pride and excitement afterwards. Some signed the disclosure forms I handed out to allow their work to be shown online, indicating a comfort with sharing. Others chose non-damaging things to speak about, spoofing the assignment with stand-up routines on the benefits of glasses, or merely reciting the places they’ve lived like a travel itinerary. It’s important to me, as a teacher, that they always have this out—that they can always satirize an assignment rather than bare their souls. Yet a surprising number choose to share, coming up quietly to ask me, “Miss, you’re the only one who will read this, right?” or even contributing their thoughts to class discussion afterwards.

Last week, a man I used to know in Toronto was murdered in the streets. He was an Aboriginal man who came to the university soup kitchen every week, sharing conspiracy theories about 9/11, banging on the piano in the church basement (not on the keys—on the wooden back of the piano), and harassing me to try the ham and cheese sandwiches instead of just serving the soup. His death was gruesome enough to make it into the newspapers, and leaves me wondering if my small intricacies of silence and speech matter at all when weighed against the abuse that homeless and mentally ill populations face daily.

But I also remember the insistency with which he, and the other patrons, sought our attention; the urgency he felt in explaining to me exactly how Aboriginal populations were treated in Canada by describing his own stories; the way he and other patrons asked increasingly personal questions about my life. I really didn’t like the way he and the others would take whatever facts they knew and then spin them into a larger story about my life, interwoven with advice that I’d better take or else. And yet I get it. The power dynamic was so unequal there, that they wanted some kind of power. And knowledge, of course, is power. 

So when, in class, my students share, or don’t; when I ask them for insight or allow them to wiggle out of the literal meaning of an assignment; when they ask me about my personal opinion or after-school activities, well, there’s a balance there. A tricky tension between allowing for the human need to share, and respecting the human need for privacy. Most important for me is to give them choice. And what they choose will be of more than passing interest to us all.

“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.” –Mary Oliver, Wild Geese