Why Do Teachers Have To Be #Teamanything?
Why Can’t They Just Be #Teamcommonsense?
So I notice now that Team #nopajamapolice is showing up as remote schooling starts up and teachers and schools grapple with whether or not rules of appearance should be imposed on students when they attend class remotely (via Zoom or similar).
Implicit in the #nopajamapolice is the implication that Team #pajamapolice (a hashtag I’m assuming doesn’t exist) is being overly Draconian, that their focus on pajamas is authoritarian and unnecessarily punitive. But this seems to me to be micro-politics in action, i.e. the application of the destructive tendencies of debates around national and incendiary political issues to issues of less importance. Like pajamas.
Because both teams want the same thing, right? They want success for their students. They want online schooling to be successful. They want to create meaningful and in-depth learning experiences for their students. And they want their students to be active participants in those experiences because they know that that active participation is an integral part of that success.
The debate then is not the what (pajamas vs no pajamas) but rather how: how do we create an environment within which students can be successful? And how do pajamas factor into the creation of that environment?
I‘m going into my 26th year of teaching high school. (Full disclosure: 21 of those 25 have been at a wealthy, high-achieving, suburban Boston public school and the other 4 were at a private say school; I realize that my experience isn’t everyone’s.) As I’ve taught, I’ve grown more and more disillusioned with the p-word: policy. What’s our policy? We need to craft a policy. We should form a committee to wordsmith the policy. (Should I continue? I can drop buzzwords all day.)
And where do policies live? The dreaded handbook. Easiest way to get an eye roll out of me? ‘What does the handbook say?’ I would love to take every handbook and run it through the shredder. (Clearly, I don’t have administrator aspirations.) Policies, and the handbooks that contain them, introduce rules. And rules can be circumvented. The more detailed the rule, the easier it is to discover what it doesn’t cover. Principles, on the other hand, are more difficult to circumvent. My handbook would say one thing and one thing only, attributed (at least by me) to Bobby Knight (a source, I realize, problematic in his own right): ‘Don’t do anything to hurt the team.’ It pretty much covers everything; it is the ultimate principle.
But back to the pajama debate. I don’t care what my students wear to virtual class as long as it meets the same requirements of in-person school, i.e. it doesn’t prove distracting or dangerous. They wear pajamas to their face-to-face classes plenty (at least my students do); why is virtual class different? (And, yes, I do know that the #pajamapolice are shouting answers to that question as they read it.)
I care about my students’ investment to and participation in my class. If they can be effective in pajamas, I am fine with them wearing pajamas. If that commitment to and participation in class drops, then we have a conversation about why. Parents getting divorced? Homeless? Food insecure? Pajamas on; go for it; bigger fish to fry. Feeling generally unmotivated but things are otherwise good? Maybe try something other than pajamas (as well as some jumping jacks and/or a good breakfast in the morning) and maybe check in with Guidance too.
Pajamas to me are a detail. And, ultimately, an irrelevant detail. If teachers want to expend energy fighting for or against pajamas, I’m not going to complain about that. I am going to suggest, however, that a little common sense goes a long way. Try treating students, and their situations, individually. My guess is that you do that in plenty of other instances. Why not this one too?
An added benefit? You don’t get so frustrated by trending hashtags and irrelevant details that you end up writing an essay as a way to exorcise that frustration. Common sense would suggest that I stay off of Twitter. (So I came to Medium instead.)
