I found myself today remembering a kid I grew up with who had trouble in school every year. Every single year the mantra was, "My teacher is mean to me." "My teacher doesn't listen." "My teacher doesn't care." Eventually, he decided that all teachers were just unfeeling, un-listening, uncaring people. His parents supported this attitude. I remember often seeing them on campus, headed in to talk to teachers, to the principal, to administrators. While as a child I was rarely privy to these conversations, I can remember coming in from recess one day in time to hear the parents shrieking at the teacher with whom they had been meeting that "All teachers at this school have it in for our child!" I was in 6th grade at that point: old enough to realize that all his teachers probably had had conversations about this boy. I was able to suppose that those conversations probably did set each one up at some level to be predisposed to see the worst in him. I wondered if any of them had given him a fair chance. I wondered if they didn't begin by being impatient and a little stern with him from the get-go based on what they already "knew" of the boy.
As a kid myself, I don't remember being able to expand my thinking too much beyond that. It didn't, for example, occur to me to remember that this boy was not just difficult in the classroom but out at recess, too. Nor did I remember that he was a person all the rest of us kids avoided at any cost because he was mean and demanding, loud and pushy.
It also didn't occur to me to realize that I'd had many of the same teachers that this boy had had and that my experience of them towards myself had been consistently positive. I wasn't able to have a wide enough vision to see that the common denominator in all of these interactions was the boy, not the individual teachers. But then, I was a kid, and I identified more strongly with other children. The school understood the situation better. But again, because of previous interactions with the boy, I am certain the teachers as well as the administrators did approach this child with at least a little un-ease, and no doubt each year a pre-conceived idea of who he was, a bias. In every interaction there are at least two people. Therefore when there is conflict, when there are problems, at least two people have a part in those problems. Sometimes the responsibility is more heavily weighted towards one side or the other, but where there is human interaction, both sides have at least a little culpability. So, I'm certain the teachers were not completely blameless in this situation. This kid obviously had problems and approaching him as someone in need of help rather than as just a problem to be dealt with might have changed the dynamic immensely. But I write from the place of knowing I was a kid at the time, not privy to the exchanges of the adults, and certainly not knowledgeable about what had been tried, or what even could have been done. I also know that we've come a long way in understanding the challenges our kids face and in finding appropriate ways to deal with them. Resources exist now that simply weren't available when I was young. It's easy to be condemning of the past and fail to remember that time has taught us some things.
But my point here is that it was not easy for the parents or the child to see that if the kid was the one having an issue with all of these teachers, while other children were not having issues with all of these teachers, that chances were good that the kid contributed something to the problem. They were so busy attacking and categorizing "all teachers" as uncaring, unfeeling, and unkind that they could use this label "teacher" to divide the world into the good and bad, with "teacher" being on the bad side. Just as the teachers probably approached this kid with some preconceived ideas, this boy and his family approached "teacher" with a lot of preconceived ideas.
They all came with their tunnel vision to the conversations. And while it was probably easy for an entire school to band together in mutual condemnation of this boy and his family, it was also amazingly easy for the boy and his parents to band together in a conviction that it was "all the teachers" in the school that were at fault. From that place, there wasn't going to be a whole lot of movement on either side towards reconciliation, healing, change or growth. There just wasn't.
Condemnation is easy. Labeling is easy. Deciding that one side is wrong/bad and the other side right/good makes the world neat and tidy. In this scenario, I know who my friends are and I know who my enemies are. I know what to think and believe. I know who to trust and who to fear. I know where to place my anger and my disappointment with the world, and I know where to look for salvation and hope. I know who to convict and who to redeem, and I know that to be loyal means to choose the clear-cut side I've come to believe is always the right side.
Oh, if only that matched reality in any way!
The truth is so much more complicated. But truth is very, very hard. No one of us will EVER have a complete grasp of truth, because truth includes everyone's experiences, and opinions and feelings. We will never have everyone's experiences and opinions and feelings so none of us will ever grasp the full truth. Truth is also hard because it involves seeing that everyone has good gifts, and everyone has faults. Everyone does some things right, and everyone makes mistakes, whether they are able to see them or not. The best any of us can do is to keep trying to do better. The best any of us can do is to keep searching for genuine understanding. But let me just say the obvious here:
Genuine understanding is not easy. And it is far too easy for us to avoid seeking it. If we were to seek genuine understanding, we'd have to expand our views. If we were to strive to listen to the other side, or to engage those with whom we are angry, we might have to change. If we were to open our eyes to a bigger vision that goes beyond us and them, black and white, my side and your side, we might have to face the reality that we aren't always right, or good. And we might have to admit that we have not always been just to people who have deserved to be treated better.
This seems like such a hardship for most humans. And that makes me very sad. But my commitment this day is to try harder to see the greys, and to hear the other side of things. My commitment is to be quicker to say "I'm sorry" and to forgive the other, but also faster to forgive myself for my part in conflicts (because, really, it is easier to face the truth of our errors if we know there will be forgiveness for them!). My commitment is to not just take the easy way of deciding who is right and who is wrong, but to recognize that everyone in a conflict is both right and wrong. Everyone comes with stories and histories and everyone is in need of healing, reconciliation and forgiveness. That's all I can do. I can't change anyone else, but I can strive to do my part.
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