Refuge from the classroom
By: Leah Garchik
Tags: Schools, Education, Technology, Bullying

I was sure about what I thought. Then a teacher gave me a lesson.

Our son was visiting from the East Coast, and one of his old college friends, having settled in San Francisco, had come by to see him. Mindful of the surge, they sat outside on the back deck, drinking, eating and chatting. We geezers stayed out of the way.

But on his way out after dinner, the friend stopped in the kitchen to talk with us. He’d become a teacher, and with headlines about San Francisco school controversies (mural destruction, removal of school names tainted by charges of racism, enforcement of race ratios in enrollment and more than everything, closings and reopenings) in the news all year, there was lots to say about how he was.

I was certain of my own opinions, I thought. A few days before, I’d signed a petition to recall the San Francisco School Board, which seemed to me more concerned with arcane issues of political correctness than it was with making a plan to get the kids back to school. I launched into my by-now burnished rant about getting the kids back into school, complete with speculation on the many kids who’d never return and criticism of the teachers’ union for finding reasons to stay away.

Politely but with certainty, our guest said he had another point of view. He leaned against the stove and talked about it. One of the places in which he teaches is a middle school with a tough reputation.

“I think the opportunity to not be on campus all the time has been beneficial for some students,” he said. “Because not all students at every school site experience a safe environment, being away from constant bullying.” His remarks made me flash back to the misery of middle school. Even in the tame bobby-soxer ’50s, I and everyone else I knew worried: Did we look okay? Were we popular? Were our friends the right ones?

The teacher settled into his stance, as though he were in front of a classroom.

At the time the pandemic started, he said, one of his students “ was an eighth-grader. I had him for 7th grade and for that year. He was one of those children just a little bit on the prickly side; he took things wrong.

“You would try to be encouraging, say some things that would give him some hope. But there were things that would trigger him. He would be standoffish, mean.

“A lot of times you chalk it up to just being young. As the year went by, my second year of having him, I was watching him with the (other) students, I witnessed a couple of fights that occurred. It was definitely a situation where I witnessed him being bullied, kids bringing up things about his past, whatever he’d done in the past.

“We tell those kids to ignore those things, not to say anything. But it’s just that environment that he’s around so often that doesn’t help. In the classroom, I saw him fight.

At one point, for example, “He came into the classroom. One student who was the school-wide bully, she saw him come in, started calling him names. Very awful mean things were being thrown his way. And he responded in kind, with as much verbal force as he could muster, and there was no backing down from either side.”

Always, “There is an uncontrollable escalation. It is quick. When it is ‘go time,’ it’s go time. Words become actions very quickly. And I just saw that he had to be that way, he had to respond so forcefully just to survive, not to be a further target. He already was a target, but ignoring it wouldn’t make it go away. I saw a couple of altercations like that.”

Then, in the Spring of 2020, schools closed and on-line learning started. “During on-line learning last year, I saw him on my class roster and I was a little scared. I was unsure how he’d be in that environment.” The teacher, still standing by the stove, uncrossed his legs and stood a little straighter, speaking with an almost fierce emphasis..

“And he was incredible. He was an angel. He was always asking for permission, permission for things he didn’t need to ask permission for. … In this environment, he was allowed to be a kid again, without threat from someone saying something to him that would trigger him. It was a controlled environment that let him be young again.”

The student, aggressive and defensive when physically surrounded by classmates, wound up on-line doing many projects on his own initiative, proudly showing them off to the teacher. “The niceness was shocking; he was so open and not defensive.”

During Zoomed sessions, “he was one of the few who always had his camera on, always engaging. A lot of young women would not turn on their cameras because they were afraid that other students would take screenshots and show them online. So many students didn’t want to be seen. They had their cameras off, and that was okay with me.” This boy was eager to be seen, protected by the limits of the computer screen.

What struck the teacher was the difference between on-site middle school learning, where the kids have their guards up because “bullying is problematic,” and virtual learning, where a kid could have the luxury of relaxing. This particular student “would engage with other kids; curious about what the other kids were doing. He would collaborate with other students. It was fun, he was fun. It was a beautiful time.”

In general, said the teacher, students whisper threats and insults to each other, and those “micro-aggressions” hit their targets and evaporate before the person in charge can turn from the blackboard. In an on-line chat during a Zoom, “If they say something that’s inappropriate, I immediately screen-shot it and send it to the parents. In a classroom setting, live, you don’t have that control of kids. You don’t have that impulse-control tool.” A girl might say something in class, “and a boy would say, ‘oh, that’s stupid.’ Every young girl would remember that. On line, you don’t hear anything like that.”

Out from under a cloud of threats, the kid the teacher was describing, liked “being around other people.” But in that bullying situation, physical response is “all he knows. ‘Someone steps to me, then I step to them. So if no one steps to me, then I’m good.’ There’s no part of his consciousness that says this is a world where I don’t have to experience this.” Fighting is “what you do when someone gets in your face. You push back harder. That’s how you survive.

“I know there was a lot of suffering for a lot of people,” he said, “but I think no kid should ever experience the bullying that my student experienced on campus, and he experienced it every day. No parent would want that. The fact that we tolerate it is something that gnaws at me. The impact for kids is really not understood. We are so numb to it, we don’t have the tools to deal with it.”

Is there any way for educators to take advantage of the safe haven virtual learning gives students? “I have no idea,” he said, but maybe some kids would benefit from the option.