There is never one thing
that defines a challenging student, never one cause, never one life event,
never one disability. If it were one thing, the solutions would be simple. One
of my own teachers confronted me with this important and demanding advice:
“Keep the complexity as long as you can.” My stories in this book invite you to hang in with
the complexities of our challenging students and to take action with no
guarantees of immediately observable success. The only guarantee is more evidence
that you can use with the next challenging student—because I can guarantee you,
there will be another one who challenges your capacity to hang in.
Once, in a meeting
convened to develop an intervention with a particularly idiosyncratic student,
I said, “This is a lot like our work with Harry a few years back.” No sooner
did I offer that bit of wisdom then hands shot up around the room with a chorus
of, “No, this is not like Harry at all.” We had never shared our various conclusions
about what had caused Harry to be so challenging; with the passage of time, the
team was unable to reconstruct the events in Harry’s story in order to craft a
shared understanding. Our stories are valuable only in as much as we
collectively construct their meaning and articulate a shared wisdom. Set time
aside to tell stories. The learning must be made explicit; we hang in
collectively.
I have learned so much
from working with our traumatized, neglected, and remarkably alive students and
with their teachers. What I learn, the gift to me, is how this student and this student and this student are coming to
understand this lesson in the varied and unpredictable ways the human mind can
work. To be fascinated with the thinking and growth of each student is a formula
for lifelong learning as an educator. Small classes are prime real estate for
such adult education. The teachers in our schools who embody this accumulated education
should be treasured and exalted, but too often they work without the resources
and support their challenges demand. The admiration they get is often in the
form of “I don’t know how you do your work,” but rarely are these teachers
asked to say how they actually do their work, as if the teachers of our most
challenging students are in a different profession or possess superhuman
qualities. This is a loss for us all, because the accumulated stories of
hanging in with our most challenging students are vital to maintaining a
diverse and just society.
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