The Bad Teacher

Starting off strong and doing a deep dive into probably my worst “bad habit” as a teacher. This is something I will never budge on, I feel so passionately about this that I would set aside time any day of the year to argue with any body about it. Trust me on this.

Listen, I will crack jokes with my students all day long. Honestly, sometimes at inappropriate times but I’m a firm believer in if I don’t laugh I’ll cry. But having a strong and trusting relationship with your students is 100% different than being besties. It’s a fine line to toe and I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that there still has to be a very clear distinction within our relationships with students. That being said, there is nothing, in my entire career, that I believe in more strongly than the relationships you build with your students being the most important impact you will have as a teacher.

I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that my students do the work I assign them because of the relationships I build with them. Honestly, it truly boils down to the fact that I’m not an asshole. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying if your students don’t do their work that automatically makes you an asshole. At the end of the day, some of these kids just refuse to do their work. That’s an accountability thing that I’ll talk about in a different post.Anyways, what I am saying is if you have a good relationship with your students you’ll be able to get to the bottom of why they’re not doing their work, and in turn, maybe find a way to convince them to do it. Or work together to come up with a plan or compromise that works for you both.

Now, this next part is going to make me sound a little full of myself, but you can honestly fact check me if you really want to. Almost every single student I have built a relationship with, give or take maybe one or two, remembers me and refers to me as one of their favorite teachers. I know this because I can’t get rid of them! A bunch of them are still coming back and telling me they wish they were still in my class, or they wish I was still their teacher. The reason I’m sharing this is because that was always my goal. I knew in college that I wanted to be a trusted adult for kids that didn’t have one.

This whole “build relationships” and “be there for your students” mentality didn’t come out of no where. It stems from my experience with my favorite teacher. I’m not going to name drop her because I don’t want to make it weird but I’m going to tell you guys all about my AP English teacher my junior year of high school. If she ever reads this, she’ll know exactly who she is. Junior year I was a disaster. My parents had gotten divorced two years prior and their relationship was contentious. I felt alone and stressed out and had a lot of health (both mental and physical) issues that I was trying to work through. While just about all of my teachers seemed not to notice, or maybe just not give a damn, she did. I had just gotten a big essay back from her and I’d received a C. But the letter grade wasn’t what stuck out to me. It was her note at the top of the paper. It had said “McKenna, please come see me so I can help you with your essay, I think you missed a lot of important classes that would have helped you do better.” Now, it might be important to talk about the fact that the topic of my essay had been a little telling about how my life was going at home, but I won’t get into all that. I just know this teacher noticed. She noticed I was struggling and she helped me be successful. She’d showed me what a caring adult looked like when I felt like I didn’t really have one at that point in my life. I think of this teacher often, and I have based my entire philosophy off of that one experience. I wanted to be what my AP English teacher was to me to every student that I came across that was struggling.

Obviously rapport is important to me, I’ll get on this soapbox all day long. But the purpose of this little post is to give you some tips on how to build rapport. So for the rest of the post I’ll drop some of the tips that I use in my classroom and stop talking about myself.

Tips to Build Rapport with Students

1. Know your audience. Whether you have 25 or 160 students, every single one of them has a different threshold for what kind of banter and relationship you can build with them. It’s important to recognize this because if you’re not paying attention to how your students respond to your jokes you may say something that actually hurts their feelings or effects them negatively. I wasn’t perfect at this, I made mistakes that I needed to apologize for and own up to. So pay attention.
2. Know your timing. Alright, this is starting to sound like advice for a stand up comedy skit. But timing really is everything, because while I will always stand by rapport being the most important thing a teacher can have with students, it cannot be the only thing they have. If you’re always chatting it up with your students there’s literally never any learning happening. While that’s a student’s dream, it’s not a very effective teaching practice.
3. Listen. Being the coolest teacher in the building is not the goal of rapport. The goal of rapport is to make your life in your classroom easier and more beneficial to students by building a trusting bond with them. The point of talking to your students isn’t so they know everything about your life, it’s so you get to know them. For example, I know Johnny loves to play Fortnite on the weekends, so when he’s struggling to come up with an argumentative essay topic, I use this little tidbit of information to help him choose a topic. Like, “Violent video games do not make kids violent.” I’ve done two things by helping Johnny with his topic, I’ve helped him make a decision so he can actually get started, and I’ve also reminded him that when he was telling me all about how his parents let him stay up late last weekend to play Fortnite I was listening.
4. Know the trends. At least a little bit. Honestly if I could take back the time of my life I wasted looking up where students got “skibity toilet” from I would. But at least I knew it wasn’t some weird code word for “let’s go smoke in the bathroom.” Which they do by the way, as early as sixth grade. It also opens up an opportunity to use the stupid term and really make my students laugh, or cringe.
5. Smile. Possibly the weirdest and worst advice I have ever gotten as a teacher was “don’t smile until Christmas Break.” WHAT??? Imagine going through your regular morning routine; saying good morning to your partner and children, getting coffee at your favorite coffee shop, getting to work and saying good morning to your co-workers. Now imagine if you did this and not a single one of these people smiled at you. Smiling is a common courtesy, it’s something most humans do naturally. You would have to actively try not to smile at your students and I’ll never understand why someone would do this. Especially when you may be the only safe space that student has in their entire daily routine.

So there you have it friends. Bad Habit #1. Maybe you read this entire thing and thought “How is this a bad habit? Building relationships with students is so important!” Or maybe you read it and increasingly believed I was the most delusional teacher on the planet. If that’s the case, this is definitely not the blog for you, because I love to live in my little delulu world where my students enjoy my class and open up to me. Either way, I hope you enjoyed it! I’ll keep posting either way.