How does a nonviolent teacher cope with school violence?

Joshua Kaplowitz wrote a haunting personal account for the City Journal of his experience a 5th grade Teach For America teacher at a school in the “other half” of Washington, D.C.

Here’s a choice quote:

My optimism and naiveté evaporated within hours. I tried my best to be strict and set limits with my new students; but I wore my inexperience on my sleeve, and several of the kids jumped at the opportunity to misbehave. …

On a typical day, DeAngelo (a pseudonym, as are the other children’s names in this and the next paragraph) would throw a wad of paper in the middle of a lesson. Whether I disciplined him or ignored him, his actions would cause Kanisha to scream like an air-raid siren. In response, Lamond would get up, walk across the room, and try to slap Kanisha. Within one minute, the whole class was lost in a sea of noise and fists. I felt profoundly sorry for the majority of my students, whose education was being hijacked. Their plaintive cries punctuated the din: “Quiet everyone! Mr. Kaplowitz is trying to teach!”

Ayisha was my most gifted student. The daughter of Senegalese immigrants, she would tolerantly roll her eyes as Darnetta cut up for the ninth time in one hour, patiently waiting for the day when my class would settle down. Joseph was a brilliant writer who struggled mightily in math. When he needed help with a division problem, I tried to give him as much attention as I could, before three students wandering around the room inevitably distracted me. Eventually, I settled on tutoring him after school. Twenty more students’ educations were sabotaged, each kid with specific needs that I couldn’t attend to, because I was too busy putting out fires. …

To gain control, I tried imposing the kinds of consequences that the classroom-management handbooks recommend. None worked. My classroom was too small to give my students “time out.” I tried to take away their recess, but depriving them of their one sanctioned time to blow off steam just increased their penchant to use my classroom as a playground. When I called parents, they were often mistrustful and tended to question or even disbelieve outright what I told them about their children. It was sometimes worse when they believed me, though; the tenth time I heard a mother swear that her child was going to “get a beating for this one,” I almost decided not to call parents.

If you’re not used to it, calling a student’s parents can be the most terrifying experience imaginable. This is compounded when the purpose of the call is to “tell on” the student – “I wanted to let you know that Deangelo was throwing wads of paper in class today…” It’s only natural that, if the parent perceives that the issue is teacher-vs-student, it quite rapidly becomes either teacher-vs-student+parent (the parents are mistrustful, etc.), or, even worse, teacher+parent-vs-student (“going to get a beating for this one”). The nonviolent teacher must take the incredibly tricky step of making the issue not about punishment, but about working together to help Deangelo learn to calm himself down when he’s agitated – and to expect better of himself. But after all, they’re just kids. Many adults lack the self-control to sit in a classroom for hours learning things they’re not interested in without getting even a little agitated – it’s unreasonable to expect this of our children. But hopefully it’s a skill that can be taught; and what better age to learn than childhood?

It’s my feeling that if anything can solve these most basic classroom control issues, it will have to incorporate nonviolence. From an outsider’s perspective, we can see that Mr. Kaplowitz’s “classroom-management handbooks” recommended only consequences for “bad behavior” – and he makes no mention of preventative measures. Kids respond to reactionary discipline with either indignation (“That’s not fair!”) or rebellion. The question of the year, though, is what to do instead.

Gandhi’s radical solution was to take punishment on himself.  Presupposing that the students have some respect for you (and they will almost certainly have more than they let on: it’s natural for kids to want to respect adults), they will see your pain when they have let you down, and that internal pain will correct them more than anything you could impose from outside.

If you think about it, not just TFA but our whole education system is doomed from the start, because it’s trying to be corporate rather than personal in, for example, acting as if people cannot trust each other but must rely on sanctions and ‘accountability.’  Gandhi went to extremes trusting others, most notably his opponent in South Africa, General Smuts, often to the despair of his own followers, and yet in the end it all worked powerfully in Gandhi’s favor.

Mr. Kaplowitz also describes how broken the D.C. legal system is in terms of handling student violence:

When I asked other teachers to come help me stop a fight, they shook their heads and reminded me that D.C. Public Schools banned teachers from laying hands on students for any reason, even to protect other children. When a fight brewed, I was faced with a Catch-22. I could call the office and wait ten minutes for the security guard to arrive, by which point blood could have been shed and students injured. Or I could intervene physically, in violation of school policy.

Believe me, you have to be made of iron, or something other than flesh and blood, to stand by passively while some enraged child is trying to inflict real harm on another eight-year-old. I couldn’t do it. And each time I let normal human instinct get the best of me and broke up a fight, one of the combatants would go home and fabricate a story about how I had hurt him or her. The parent, already suspicious of me, would report this accusation to Ms. Savoy [the principal at Emery], who would in turn call in a private investigative firm employed by D.C. Public Schools. Investigators would come to Emery and interview me, as well as several students whom the security guard thought might tell the truth about the alleged incident of corporal punishment.

I had previously heard of three other teachers at Emery that year who were being investigated for corporal punishment. When I talked to them—they were all experienced male teachers—they heatedly protested their innocence and bitterly complained about Ms. Savoy’s handling of the situation. Now that I had joined the club, I began to understand their fears and frustrations.

The nonviolent teacher has a responsibility to use his or her body, if necessary, to prevent students from hurting one another. To do otherwise was in violation of Mr. Kaplowitz’s core principles, as he describes — and again, even Gandhi said that if ‘a madman with a sword’ is terrorizing a village the person who ‘dispatches’ that unfortunate one will have done a service to all concerned.

And if all else fails, we must deal with the law as Gandhi did: because sticking to his principles was against the law, he broke the law but not his principles – and challenged the British government to impose on him “the strictest punishment possible”.

…But I’m only a young idealist, much as Mr. Kaplowitz was when he began TFA. I will probably one day have to scrap most of what I’ve said here for more effective strategies. But I’m sure of this: if Nonviolence is needed anywhere, it is needed here – and if it can help anywhere, then I’m sure it can help here.