Why do teachers agonize over relationships?

Relationships - whether positive, negative, or benign - are the center of teaching.

Teaching is foundationally relational. 

I’ve believed this since my first days working in schools. Now that I know a little bit more about teaching, I still believe it, but like a high school writing student, I’ve learned to identify the evidence that’s convinced me of this truth. When a teacher applies to jobs, she generally submits a document called a Teaching Philosophy, in which she articulates what motivates her, what her investments in teaching are, how she hopes to develop her practice. Historically, my Teaching Philosophy has always centered on this belief that everything relies on a teacher’s ability to relate and connect to people, especially (but not only) her students. Teaching is exciting because, given its relational quality, the job is never the same from one day to the next. If I were to rewrite the Teaching Philosophy I wrote three years ago (though, as the study I recommended in this In REAL Time post points out, teachers, unfortunately, rarely revisit and revise these statements), I would certainly have plenty to add, but the contours would likely be similar, and they would still affirm this general foundational belief that all teaching relies on relational work. 

My conversation with Myles - the first ever “Protagonists” interview on IRT - reminds me of another layer to this truth: that doing relational work requires healthy relationships beyond it.

We held the interview over phone during a break in our online teaching schedules in the middle of one day in early April, 2020. It was an unseasonably warm, sunny day, and I walked to the park near my Manhattan apartment for the call. Myles and I have been friends for almost a decade, ever since we landed in Fes, Morocco for a semester abroad. We established our bond through long conversations about learning and culture conducted while scouring the medina for the best maakouda sandwiches. The interview was going to be a practice round for the “real thing” - conversations with strangers - because Myles and I had been talking through our teaching together since we both became teachers. By April, about a month in, we are already so tired of virtual teaching. We complained about the headaches and the disengaged students and the nonsensical adapted schedules handed to us by administrators who had no better options, and the best part, in retrospect, is that we had no idea how much worse everything would be become. 

Myles also believes that teaching is relational. Most of the hour and a half we spent talking was about our students, though most of that relational content didn’t make the cut for publication. We both put too much pressure on ourselves to build, sustain, and repair relationships at our schools. Myles will agonize so deeply over his college recommendations that he’ll send them to me, though I’ve never met his students, to make sure the letters read just the way that he wants them to. Once you’ve built the relationship required to effectively teach a student, it becomes impossible to leave your work at work.

I’m not going to drop this belief that teaching is, at its core, relational, but it’s important to acknowledge that this is a debatable statement, especially if we conflate the term “teaching” with “education” or “learning.” Education serves a variety of purposes, and learning can happen in many ways divorced from the classroom. Socially, “education,” as in the systems and structures designed to educate, serve purposes as diverse as caring for and administering food to children, providing activities for people whose frontal cortexes we hope to develop in a somewhat controlled environment, and (though most thinkers acknowledge that this function has been on pause in many schools for a few decades) a means to foster community feeling and civic investment. Even I, who always loved school and generally my teachers, can admit that a good proportion of the important lessons, materials, and even skills that I’ve acquired in life I learned outside of the classroom, from people other than teachers, and/or through independent inquiry. There are ways in which every person can become her own best teacher, and there are relationships outside of education through which I’ve learned the most useful lessons that shape my daily perception. So learning doesn’t rely on relationships. 

Teaching, though, requires relationship. Regardless of what the relationship is, and how successful it is by conventional standards, and how close it is, the translation between the thoughts and questions of one person to another requires relation: one person has to listen to another and consider, with some degree of attention, what that other person says to them. 

Myles’ answer to my question about his pet peeve in class discussion, “When a kid seems to think to himself, ‘thank God ____ spoke up so that I can just agree with her’” reveals the same kind of nerves about relationships that, I find, most teachers have, whether or not they have the bandwidth or ability to change those relationships. Noticing that “a classroom culture leads to students just relying on a student to tell them what to think in the absence of a teacher doing so” is a way of acknowledging that teaching is relational. Is this a stretch? Well, no, because the statement itself acknowledges Myles’s perception that distancing himself from being the transmitter of knowledge (being “absent” and not “[telling] them what to think”) might lead students to doubt him or see him as lacking. The coping mechanism that they create, leaning inappropriately on another classmate, is another social or relational move to fill the void students feel without the relation they expect. Though this particular kind of relationship to students is intentional and intended to strengthen, not weaken relationships in the classroom, it can lead a teacher to self-doubt: do my students feel abandoned, or are they just lazy? How do I combat a classroom culture like this? How can I stand firm in the approach that I feel is best for the students, who I know, and also convince them that what feels like abandonment actually isn’t?

This question, about pet peeves in student discussion, is one that I ask in every interview. The answers that teachers give almost always reflect back on decisions they’ve made about the role of a teacher in the classroom, and the way that students have (mis)perceived them. The mistranslation of (best) intentions is frustrating regardless of your workplace. Teachers usually calibrate classroom tasks and structures to the needs of a specific age group and the context in which they work; gradually, as they get to know students, they shape and reshape those practices in response to the specific group of students who they’ve gotten to know. More often than not, teachers pause when before they answer the question about pet peeves. They’re often reluctant to criticize students, acknowledging that their offputting behaviors are also usually just part of the process of learning and maturing. To admit one’s own annoyance is to admit that, even if there’s an explanation for the behavior, it’s still frustrating to watch the work that goes into a relationship or set of relationships go awry. That every teacher I’ve ever talked to has been bothered by these breakdowns in class practices illustrates the point that teaching is relational, even if the teacher doesn’t seem from the outside to be “good at relationships” (I, for example, am not a “people person”). When relationships don’t work, teachers bear the burden of repairing them, even when that challenge is insurmountable. Even in the most hands-off classrooms, in Waldorf schools or Harkness communities, teachers ultimately bear both the brunt of disfunctional classrooms and, even if and when others aren’t faulting them for those classes, they usually put that burden upon themselves anyway. If the class is mine, then it’s also mine to fix. 

Unfortunately, whether a teacher’s relationship with a student is negative, benign, or positive, the work of building it, I learn more and more every day - and Myles and I especially feel during the pandemic - is impossible to do alone. Moreover, it can be contingent on student and teacher biases, which are always already unequally distributed in a school. Where suspicions rise that teachers don’t care about their relational work, I’d counter that they almost always do, but that other factors (both inside and outside the school) are clouding those links. It’s important not to conflate results with intention in any teacher-student interaction; rather, addressing the environment around those relationships might be the best way to change those outcomes.

We really can’t give up on the effort. In this interview with Nina Kumar and Suniya Luthar, I learned, among other things, about the importance of avoiding negatively charged interactions with students. Kumar and Luthar, who study mental health and well-being in schools, find that the positivity we bring into students’ lives has much less of an effect than the negativity. It’s a fact that surprises many teachers and shifts the way they relate to students. The fact that this discovery, in Kumar and Luthar’s studies, deeply shifts practice for the teachers who learn about it reveals that teachers are attuned to the work of designing and fostering relationships with their students. This seems impossible to a lot of people outside the world of education, especially those who remember so many negative relationships with teachers. But Kumar and Luthar revealed to me why that seems to be a dominant belief: because the negative interactions shape us in the present and coalesce in our memories so much more powerfully than the other thousands of minutes that we spend in front of our teachers. 

The day that Myles and I talked, there was so much in our classes, in our students, and in our relationships with them that we couldn’t begin to fix. Remote learning didn’t create a complete fracture in our relationships with our students; unlike teachers in rural school districts or in schools full of students without wifi, we didn’t experience a complete break, but rather a set of hairline fractures. Usually, our classes might just be a little bit off the mark, our relationships not quite what we want them to be, because we don’t have the bandwidth (for whatever reason) to give everything to them. When I sat on that bench in the park one day, the pigeons settling around me and the East River swirling under the sun before me, we were sharing a specific concern about our relationships with our students: the dreadful feeling that, for the first time, none of them were right, and that we couldn’t have the tools to fix them.

Thank goodness, then, that we had one another. Thank goodness that we could escape into a conversation about “the rhetoric and reality of American exceptionalism,” the task of teaching History, the purpose alignment we were striving for in designing future courses. Here’s something teachers offer to society: a finely honed perception of their relationship to other people, a vision of what it means to build and question and worry about how people relate and how it could be better. This idea fills every interstitial of Myles’ and my conversations. If we - the broader social community - seek to understand how people work together toward a problem, how to build community, and how to repair relational bonds, teachers might be a greater resource than we realize. We do that work, and we talk about it, together, every day.