Smashing Gauntlets

Sandra Jensen reads hate to the Alberta Legislature

Sandra Jensen is pounded by misogynistic insults because she crosses the floor of the Alberta legislature to join the NDP.  She reads the insults aloud in the house and her male colleagues sit in silence, some of them stunned, some of them nodding and perhaps, some of them, wishing they had said it.  If any of them has been a teacher, he or she has heard it before.

In secondary schools, female teachers can wade through this type of behavior, this culture of hate, for long periods of time.  Like Sandra Jensen, the hate springs from the constituency they serve. Fortunately Ms. Jensen does not have to spend day after day with it but female secondary teachers can end up swimming in it for long periods of time.

Now, some of my colleagues may like to deny this behaviour exists and to be perfectly candid, currently at my school, I think we have managed to stamp it out for now,  but I have seen it rear its head on several occasions and it will do so again.  The behavior first appears as a gauntlet.  Young men line either side of the hall, leaning against the lockers and they use this gauntlet to rate female students, harass what they perceive to be weaker males and attempt to intimidate teachers. Their language is foul, their behaviour, boorish.  It is like a pack trying to mark its territory .

In good schools the teachers own the halls.  Good teachers know the school.  They move through all parts of it.  They take different paths to their classrooms and they go out of their way to find students who look like they might be alone.  They are in the halls between classes, before school, after school and they walk them with their ears and eyes wide open.   They make eye contact with everyone, they call students by name as they move.

Good administrators walk the halls too.  They know their students, they know their teachers.  They visit all the areas of the school, starting with a daily and unannounced visit to the darker places:  the smoking pits, the areas outside bathrooms and locker rooms.  When a teacher reports an incident in a hallway, the good administrator knows that, in this case, there is no student side of the incident.

Let's learn the lesson of Jordan Manners

For the most part, the society recognizes the work teachers do in classrooms but it rarely recognizes the work in halls and cafeterias and gymnasiums.  Society expects and gets the delivery of curriculum but the truth is, it is the socialization of young adults that is the essential work of schools.  A good school spends as much time developing an environment of fairness, equality, empathy and compassion as it does in the delivery of curriculum.  It demands that every person in the building behave in a manner that is respectful and polite. It makes these demands in a myriad of ways.

Confronting kids in a hallway is not for the faint of heart:  "You take off your hat in a public place."  "You make eye contact when I speak to you."  "Stand up straight."  "You address me as sir."  "Move along." "Are you alright?" "Get to class."

This is the essential work that the critics of our system and the critics of teachers never acknowledge goes on.  The "can't do, teach" crowd never recognizes the subtlety, the consistency, the strength of will and the determination that is required to foster the values of compassion, empathy, and equality in young people. My hunch is that they never recognize this work because they miss the gauntlets they formed in high schools in the "good old days."

When female legislators are attacked, when female reporters are harassed at sporting matches, when rudeness goes unchallenged on streetcars, teachers recognize the behaviour.  We've seen it before, we try to stamp it out and when we see it manifest itself in these places, we recognize we have more work to do.