New Girl

Here's a scenario--It's the first day of school. There's a kindergartener crawling on the floor and screaming while the rest of the class is trying to read a book. The teacher has tried reasoning with the child but he's not listening. The teacher insists that the boy follows directions, but he is not. I, as the "principal of afterschool" am called because things are becoming chaotic. I'm happy to help, and remove the boy from the class so the rest can focus. I take the boy by his hand and find an empty conference room in the front office. He is quiet.

I have two goals:
1. Figure out what's keeping the kid from listening to his teacher.
2. Figure out how to get him to listen to his teacher.

I've done this before, lots of times, albeit not for someone this young.

We sit down.

And the school counselor walks in. She is nervous that the boy is being punished. She wants to help.

She asks, "do you have a relationship with him?"

"It's the first day of school."

"I think it would be a good idea to ask him how he's feeling before writing him up, I think he might be--" and I tune out. She wants to model the conversation for me. I wait for her to finish.

Anyway.

The boy sits down. He looks sad. I ask him how his first day at school was. He didn't like it. He misses his mom. I remind him how brave he's being for being without her all day. I ask him to pull out his homework. He stares at the page. I ask him whether he thinks his homework is really hard. He nods. We look at a math problem and I ask him to read the directions. He reads them.

I ask him, "so what is it asking you to do?"

"I don't know."

"This first part here, let's read that again."

"Count the dots in the box."

"And what does that mean?"

"Just like 1, 2, 3, 4."

"Good! Now what's this?"

"and circle the greater value."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

"what does 'greater' mean?"

He shrugs.

"Greater means bigger, so what are you supposed to do here?"

"Circle the bigger one."

"Good!"

It took him 10 minutes to finish the the page.

We talked about what he can do the next time he feels like his work is too hard. We talk about why it's important to listen to his teacher. We walk back to class. He's fine for the rest of the day.

I can't recall when the counselor left the room. But I can't shake off how patronizing it felt to listen to someone try and teach me something I already know. It didn't feel annoying; it felt disrespectful. You really think I'm so incompetent that I'm going to bring in a 5-year-old and yell at him to scare him?

And she's not the only one. During a coaching conversation about being firm with expectations with students, I said something like, "when you're counting down 3, 2, 1, don't say "one and a half" or "one and three quarters" because that's showing them you didn't really mean what you said. If a student isn't lined up silently by the end of it, just give a check and move on."

The previous manager follows behind me and adds, "relationships are the foundation to classroom management."

Since I've started my new job, I've been open to giving everyone my time and listening to what they have to say, because I thought that it'd give me ideas on how to be better. But the only person who has given me anything useful is my boss. Everyone else is trying to give me ed 101 lessons, and it feels really patronizing. It makes me feel like those people don't actually believe that I'm competent, and it makes me question myself instead.

Because I am afraid. I'm afraid that this program will turn into daycare. I'm afraid that I won't be able to realize the vision and goals I've set for my staff and the program. I'm afraid I won't do a good job.

Over the past 2 weeks, I've heard everything from "be more stern because you're not inherently intimidating" to "be less mean because you want them to like you." I don't tell them I want kids to do things because they see value in it, not to get my approval. Yes, relationships are important, but they should not be the only thing holding a class together.

Everyone is rushing to help because they don't know me. They don't know that I've managed classes with 45 people at a time. They don't know that I've helped kids who couldn't multiply in August solve quadratics by May. They don't know that I've coached teachers before, that I have a masters in education, that I can tell them two hundred or so stories of incredible kids who've done awesome things.

They don't know that it wasn't some stroke of luck, and that I worked my ass off. I learned and unlearned and relearned constantly--still am--to become better at what I do.

I canceled my "brain dump" meetings next week. Unless you have an efficient organization system I don't know about, I don't need to see you. (Because I need to spend that time finding efficient organization systems.)

As hard as it is, I have to be okay with other people underestimating me.

Because here's something else they don't know about me--

I love proving people wrong.