Working with young people: Hope

By Ed Piper

Dale Ackerman, a close friend of our family and a mentoring influence, once told me, "As an educator, I want to be taken advantage of. I want a student to have a chance to redeem himself."

As a high school assistant principal, not in this geographical area, he was talking about his role with students who misbehaved and had to serve Saturday school (detention to make up for wrongs).

His words really stuck in my mind--"I want to be taken advantage of"--because of how unusual they were.

We think so much as people with good boundaries and senses of our selves that we don't want others trampling on us. Be loving and caring, but don't be a doormat, we're told. Love yourself (in a healthy, balanced way), just as you love others.

So Dale's sage advice to me while I was a public school teacher--probably substitute-teaching at that point in a district in Ventura County--encouraged me toward letting students have a chance to show responsibility or not.

Having grown up in a fairly responsible family of well-behaved students, I entered my teaching career with a very rigid view of classroom management. While teaching Spanish, English, and journalism at a private parochial school, I had a student representative to the student council who cheated on a test. I removed him as class rep, but in my inexperience, I failed to provide him a way to earn his way back into good graces. Not intending to, I shamed him in front of his peers, and left him in that status. Gary Pinedo, wherever you are (this was in 1978), I apologize.

In juvenile court schools later on, I started out teaching English grammar (which I loved), and eventually moved to pointing out "grammar crimes" (stealing the term from one of my granddaughter's teachers) in my students' writing, so as to use teachable moments and bend more to a student-friendly approach. My old school approach didn't work.

The same with behavior: In court schools, all of the students were there because they had left regular schools under a cloud. Most had been forced to leave. Others, though not disruptive, plain just didn't attend school enough to stay current.

Anyway, applying Dale's advice "to be taken advantage of", I now began to put the most irresponsible students in positions of responsibility, in a reverse kind of thinking from my earlier approach. I now found these "problem kids" to be behaving better, because they warmed to the new positions of authority they were given. They had more invested in class, and not infrequently it would turn them around to be more productive and contribute more to the good of our schools (often rented spaces in industrial parks).

Hope. I'm talking in a larger sense about hoping people will turn around, and allowing the time for that process to happen.

I'm also thinking of other situations which could benefit from a change in status, and that we hold out hope for change in. My feet, for instance, are numb from neuropathy. Undiagnosed, it turns out this is related to high blood sugar for an extended period of time. But, with my most recent A.1.c. blood sugar reading such a dramatic improvement from last year's diabetes-range score, I'm not giving up hope that my feet will be restored to a healthier state. My circulation is good. So that's not the concern.

What do the different situations hold in common? Giving time to allow change to occur. My student, who formerly has broken trust by failing to turn in work or by violating a school rule (in my school before I retired three years ago), needs a chance to earn his way back into trust--like I didn't know to do with Gary Pinedo 40 years ago. My body can also recover, over time, to its former healthy state.

All of this is under-girded with prayer. These processes don't take place in a vacuum.

Do you know what occurred recently that illustrates this recovery process? Our weather station, which sits inside our front sliding door, went dark a week or more ago. I finally took out the old batteries from the remote that sits outside our abode and transmits the outdoor temperature to the monitor indoors. I tried two different sets of AA batteries, but the monitor still read " " (nothing).

I didn't give up, having seen the same remote a couple of years ago recover overnight and resume sending a reading to the monitor.

The next day, I looked down from the second level of our place to the weather station, positioned on a small side table next to our couch. Voila! An outside temperature was once again being displayed.