Responsibility and Consequences

As a teacher, I enjoy being responsible for the mathematical and biological education of my students. Being the authority figure to a group of 40 students is exhilarating and the maturity I have gained from the experience is invaluable. However, sometimes responsibility feels like a blow to the heart.

It began when I was outside supervising my class while they were studying in groups. I heard what sounded like sizeable party going on in a neighboring classroom and stuck my head in the door to see if there was a teacher in the room. There wasn’t and the students had decided to take the opportunity to run around the classroom and generally cause as much noise as possible rather than study. Just as I was about to tell everyone to sit down and be quiet, in through the door came one of the chief trouble-makers carrying one of his scrawnier friends who was yelling to be let down. This was too much and I decided that it was time for an example to be set for the rest of the class who, even though terminal exams were a mere four weeks away, had been slipping farther into behavioral rowdiness and academic lassitude.

“Put him down and both of you come with me.” I said loudly enough to be heard over the din in the classroom. There was no response to this command from the two main offenders, but the rest of the class quieted down and turned towards me and after several seconds the boy was set down. I tried again, “Both of you come with me, let’s go.”

The boy who had been carried came over, but the one who had been carrying him kept walking away with his back turned all the while saying, “Okay, okay Madam.”

“No, let’s go right now.” I said again.

“Okay okay Madam,” he kept saying and as he reached the back of the room he sat down in his seat.

At this point I realized that he was not going to come. The school has a policy of suspension for open defiance and insubordination and so I decided to remind him of this fact to give him another chance to change his mind and follow my directions.

“I am very serious,” I said, “Do you really want to disobey me right now? Let’s go now.” Still he refused to follow, so I repeated my order twice more before saying, “Alright, that’s it, I am reporting you to the discipline committee.”

Maybe he didn’t believe that I would actually do it. The school has a long history of making obviously empty threats as well as making reasonable threats which they never carry through with. Jesse has also been dealing with effects of such lackadaisical discipline on a problem student in his home room class. However, I have a feeling that my student did believe that I would report him, but couldn’t bear the embarrassment of having to get up in front of all of his friends and follow a female teacher who was half his size. Maybe if I had handled the situation less publicly he would have come with me and avoided the ensuing consequences.

I went directly to a member of the discipline committee and reported the incident. Within three hours a letter was drafted and the verdict was final; the student would be expelled from school and would only be allowed back to take his exams. Upon reading the letter I learned that this student had been suspended twice previously this year for insubordination and that the transgression against me was merely the final drop that overflowed the pot. Several teachers came up to me that day voicing their support of the expulsion decision. The right thing had happened, they said with varying degrees of gleefulness, he needed to be expelled and now finally his class (which had been having problems all year) would become more serious in their studies.

I felt an empty sense of vindication. I felt triumph that I had won and that the school was finally proactively supporting its own discipline policies. As a young female teacher from a foreign culture, my authority and words are all that I have to maintain discipline. If students do not respect me then I am sunk. I cannot do my job and more importantly I cannot guarantee the safety of myself and the students in my classroom. A student who demonstrates a lack of respect to a teacher must be dealt with or removed lest the isolated incident spread to the rest of the class.

But this is a cerebral argument. My heart feels that this was an empty victory. Beneath his macho careless attitude was a student who really wanted to learn. Despite failing test scores, he repeatedly indicated to me that he wanted to do better in biology, but his poor behavior kept getting in the way of his studies. After being informed that he was to be expelled, the student’s reply was to say that the school couldn’t make him leave and that he would keep coming to class. Only a threat of police involvement convinced him that the school was in earnest and that he needed to pack his bags and go.

Throughout the day of his suspension I kept wondering if there was another way to rehabilitate rather than punish. If the student had not been expelled and instead studied hard in school for the next four weeks, I truly believe that he may have passed some of his exams. As it is now, I do not think that he will pass any of them. And I was the one to do it.

I do not feel guilty, but I do feel that I need to acknowledge the consequences of my actions. Yes my involvement was only the last straw, but a straw it was. No, I was not the one who made the decision for expulsion, but that was the end result. In a country where a young person is lucky to even have an opportunity at a secondary education, a high-school dropout doesn’t get second chances. There is no GED and a person who cannot afford to pay for additional school or to retake their exams is a person who will not advance far in life. Employment options are orders of magnitude lower for an uneducated Malawian than for someone who has passed their high school exams. I can rationalize my actions in the classroom and the school’s decision as much as I want, but in the end it comes down to a simple statement. A young man no longer has a chance to succeed and I am responsible.