In Survival Mode

I had forgotten.

I was talking with students in a class the other day.  Younger students.  I noticed early in my first year as a teacher how resistant students at a certain age can be to new ideas.  It was interesting watching them outgrow it as they grew older, but in those first years of adolescence, new ideas are even more uncomfortable than they are for older people, I think.

I haven't read much on it anywhere, but I formed some theories, and further observation hasn't shown me the flaw in my theories.

In a young adolscent's world, so many changes are taking place.  They are changing.  The way they are treated and regarded by adults is changing.  I came to believe that it was very, very important to them to find ideas and ways of looking at the world that seemed indisputable, inarguable.  Any new idea or different way of looking at things threatened this comforting constancy they had found, and was to be rejected, and even ridiculed.  This is a defense mechanism.  With time, with maturity, with confidence, most will outgrow this to a greater or lesser extent.

My observations showed me that adolescents who came from homes where they felt secure, who had some degree of confidence that change was not always going to  come as the result of difficulties (marital, economic, health, all the problems that threaten families), were likely to be more accepting of new ideas and different perspectives than the ones they currently held.

Then there were the kids in survival mode.  Students who came from homes that may have been supportive, but were also full of change.  Divorce.  Custody battles.  Foster children.  Kids with parents who were there one day and gone the next.  These students not only rejected new ideas, they rejected any possible form of change as much as possible.  Change is uncomfortable to all of us, but it is necessary.  Without change, there is no growth.

So how to teach to students who refuse to grow, to change?  It's not easy.  And sometimes, sometimes, it may not even be possible.  That is hard for anyone who really desires to teach to admit, but it is a truth every teacher faces at one point or another.  For those students, the teacher has to take whatever small inroads into educational growth can be produced.

But the important thing is to be there.  If nothing else, be as constant and as consistent as possible.  Like the student, and let that student see your approval every chance you get.