How can we help one another face "I can't" moments?
Teachers' experiences building the trust for students to push through challenge help me to think through the capacity of adult relationships to do the same.
Two days ago, a regularly scheduled meeting with a student began with tears. They came on quickly, but they left almost as quickly as they came. The student, between a few sobs, slipped out the words “I can’t.” As the tears on her eyelashes began to dry, she described feelings of hurt and of disappointment that she could not meet her own expectations on the math test she’d just received back. But eventually – and without too much prodding, as it turned out – she acknowledged that she could and should persist in accelerated math. We unpacked it together: the choice to take the right path is often a difficult choice. It sometimes leads to moments of pain. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right path.
I’d been thinking about paths since I spoke with Cally (whose interview I’ll post soon on IRT). Cally spoke about her favorite teacher in memory, a college theatre professor. She said:
“I was nervous in this class -- it was an elective for majors, and they all seemed much more
talented than me -- and for our first big assignment, she paired me with the best actress in the grade. It intimidated me and also forced me to question what makes a good student or a good actress. The experience inspired me to be more confident. I’ve kept that with me as a teacher: I want my students to feel like I believe in them and trust them, that every challenge I give them is designed to lead them to success.”
Cally’s aspirational statements about trust and confidence sound like universal goals that every teacher should hold, but fostering those feelings in students can be very challenging. For example, Cally’s professor made a wise move in pairing Cally with a seasoned, talented actress, but that pairing (of weakest and strongest) could also have backfired, leaving Cally wallowing in the deficit of her awareness or the more experienced student resentful of the imbalance. Even teachers who know their students well sometimes make missteps in class organization, overreach with sense of humor, or coddle when they need to be firm. Those misjudgments can undermine otherwise attentive teaching.
Even in a classroom in which kids feel most of the time that their teacher “[believes] in them and [trusts] them,” that challenges will “lead them to success,” most students experience doubt, either because of their own performance in an evaluation or because of an aforementioned teacher misstep (or, sometimes, both). The work of teaching, then, often rests in the moment of helping a student to face down and contextualize the “I can’t.”
Contextualizing “I can’t” moments is actually a lifelong discipline, and one that many adults don’t cultivate, which is also part of why many parents don’t excel in talking students through these crisis moments. People like me who struggle with either resilience or persistence know very well what it means to back down from a challenge because it feels like we can’t do it, but most adults selectively remember the challenges on which they succeeded, because they’ve naturalized them as part of the mythology they’ve built around their own life. Part of that focus on the challenges we’ve successfully overcome is imperative because it makes us happy and helps us to build optimism around future challenge. The other part of that focus, I think, comes from the fact that we all know we need to face challenges strategically and patiently. Doing so, however, remains easier said than done.
Take this time last week, for example. I was finishing up writing my newsletter post, moving chunks and ideas around aimlessly, but I was also, like the student who visited me, distracted by a challenge that made concentrating difficult. I was distracted, frustrated, and pretty sad, and I just couldn’t shake that feeling. I’d made some difficult but appropriate decisions about my life earlier in the day, in response to a challenging situation that I’d come to recognize in the days prior. I was thinking similar thoughts to my student: what am I doing wrong? I’ve approached this part of my life with the correct motivations, and nonetheless, I feel that I’ve failed or haven’t met my own standard. I knew that I was cut out for the situation that I was in and well-equipped to handle it, but I still felt terrible, and I wanted to find a way to get out of the gutter and feel that ideal approach to the challenges of life again. I wanted to be in Cally’s professor’s classroom, confident that I had the courage and ability to meet the challenges before me. Last Friday, I couldn’t move myself back there. The newsletter wasn’t that good (sorry).
School, at its best, teaches us how to face these moments of adequate and appropriate challenge. Teachers’ jobs then become guiding students to the experience not only of meeting the academic challenge, but also of building mature skill sets to cope with it. Trusting relationships help teachers to build those skills with students. This is not to claim that teachers always use those skill sets expertly in their own lives.
Does anyone, really, know how to handle the gap between where they want to be and where they are?
I spoke with another student yesterday about some issues with her friendships. I realized that I had absolutely no good advice to provide her with, other than “just wait until friendships shift and change.” This is poor advice, though it is better than what some adults might proffer. How do I guide a student to shift her perspective, to accept feelings as natural, to let go of what she can’t control, when I’m so aware of how much easier that advice is to say than it is to enact?
This article, called “How to Accept the Things You Can’t Change,” from this week’s Atlantic, was useful to me. I love what it says about accepting feelings as they come; that explains how distracted and unshiftingly sad I felt last week. Many parents treat their kids’ emotions as SOS signals, but though emotions are important to attend to, they’re usually part of any healthy person’s ability to cope with inevitable separations between desire and reality.
What I didn’t like about the article (and sure, this guy’s a researcher, so I guess I’m not supposed to feel like I can argue with him) was the idea of “lowering your expectations.” For example, if I tell a student to accept that a B+ is a great grade and to focus mostly on sustaining it, I might preclude her from excelling in math, or worse yet, I might hold hers back from discovering a deeper passion that she might only find through deeper engagement and effort with course material.
I think that a better idea is to differ your expectations. Return to Cally’s theatre class. She knew that she wasn’t the best actress in the class, and she couldn’t really change that fact. Still, though, she could act, and she could work within the perhaps more limited repertoire, knowledge, or skill set that she had. Often, when people think of ideal performance in important areas of their lives, they think about a more narrow expectation or desire than they realize. For example, a friend might say: “I want to have more authority at work.” The core desire here might be “I want to have more authority,” and by cutting off the work part, she might find a new place where she can have more authority. Alternatively, she might start to think more deeply and realize that what she really means is “I want to have authority at work now.” Most often, for me, the frustration that comes with the distance between where I want to be and where I am lies in the time I’ve subconsciously attached to the goal. If I can shift the description, I don’t have to lower the standard. This is an exercise that I use for students, but I need it just as often for myself. I think that we all do.
Once the student in my office was smiling again, we established the game plan for the rest of her day. We decided that she would hit pause on thinking about math and spend the rest of the day focusing on other things. The next day, she would come back to math, because tomorrow is a good day to take that next step. Teachers’ responsibility in response to kids’ difficulty can’t be to change the circumstance, unless the demands placed upon the student are truly unfathomable. Most of the time, our response has to be to focus on caring for and shifting the mind of the student, not her life.
Adults need to devote the same care, attention, and patience to one another. Social energy in 2021 often relegates perspective-taking and challenge-facing to the therapist’s room, which can be very helpful, but adults are also responsible for building these kinds of relationships and encouragements with one another. Certainly, adults know that persisting through a challenge, even one that they know that they can face, is difficult, but that persistence is made more challenging without willing guides and anchors – true friends, attentive to the complex experience of overcoming. We can be that help for one another, but we will have to try.