I care about my students.
That’s an easy thing for a teacher to say…and I hear teachers say it all the time. In fact, I say it all the time.
But what does that actually mean? What does it mean to care about someone else’s child …or 30 of them?
I don’t think caring about students means making them happy. I certainly don’t think it means protecting them from consequences or giving them everything they want. It doesn’t mean believing everything they tell me (teenagers lie…sorry, they do) or excusing every bad decision because something difficult is happening in their lives.
Although I have to admit, sometimes something difficult happening in their lives changes everything about what I expect from them that day.
So there’s that.
Maybe this is why I keep coming back to the question.
What does it actually mean to care about a student?
They aren’t my children. They have parents and families and entire lives that existed before they ever walked into my classroom. I actually know so little about them.
I meet them because of some random confluence of decisions made by other people. A computer somewhere puts their name on my roster. They show up. I care for them and about them…and then they leave.
For just a little while, they are entrusted to me.
I take that seriously.
I was a mom long before I was a teacher, and I’m sure that affects the way I see teenagers. I so distinctly remember hoping beyond hope that my own children would be cared for by their teachers. Not just taught. Cared for.
And I know you can love a young person tremendously and simultaneously want to say, What on earth were you THINKING?
Those things are not incompatible.
Teenagers are unfinished.
I think about that a lot.
A teenager who lies isn’t necessarily going to become a dishonest adult. A kid who makes an incredibly selfish decision isn’t necessarily a selfish person. A kid who cannot find the assignment that is literally sitting directly in front of them may someday run a company. Or a hospital. Or become somebody’s accountant…which is mildly terrifying when I think about it.
They’re practicing being people.
And sometimes they’re really bad at it.
So…what’s my job while they practice?
Sometimes I think caring means grace.
Sometimes caring means absolutely NOT giving grace.
Sometimes it’s, “Okay. Try it again.”
Sometimes it’s, “No. We’re done. This has gone far enough.”
And then I have to wake up the next morning, walk back into that classroom and allow for a fresh start. Because they’re evolving.
I’m evolving.
I’ve had to make decisions about students that I know did not feel remotely caring to the student at the time. Decisions that had real consequences.
Those are the situations I keep thinking about.
Because I wasn’t acting out of anger—or at least I try very hard not to make decisions about kids when I’m angry. Sometimes something just has to change.
And here’s where it gets even more complicated…
There is never just one kid.
There are 28 other kids sitting in the room.
Or 30…or 34.
I care about them, too.
All of them.
Each of them.
I think we sometimes lose that when we talk about meeting individual student needs. Of course individual students have needs. Of course circumstances matter. There are kids who need more patience or support or flexibility on a particular day—or for an entire stretch of days.
But the other kids get to matter, too.
They deserve to learn. They deserve my attention. They deserve a classroom that feels safe and reasonably predictable. They deserve not to have one person’s needs or behavior consume all the oxygen in the room.
So maybe caring about a student sometimes means protecting the community from that student.
Oof.
Even writing that makes me uncomfortable.
But I think I believe it.
And maybe caring about that same student means refusing to pretend that behavior that is clearly becoming a serious problem isn’t a serious problem.
Maybe consequences are care.
Maybe getting other adults involved is care.
Maybe saying, Something is going on here and we cannot keep doing this is care.
I don’t know.
This is what I want to think about.
And then my brain goes somewhere even bigger—which it has an annoying tendency to do.
Who am I actually working for?
I offer a service, right? Education.
So who’s the customer?
The school district pays me, so…the district?
That doesn’t feel right.
The student is the person sitting in front of me receiving the education, but they’re a minor. They didn’t choose me. Most didn’t really choose my class. And they’re legally required to be in school.
So…their parents?
That doesn’t feel quite right either.
Parents are enormously important stakeholders in their children’s education. Of course they are. But I’m not sure that makes them my customers. Public school isn’t a private service that a family purchases and then gets customized entirely around that family’s beliefs and preferences.
I keep landing somewhere else.
Society.
Maybe “customer” is completely the wrong word. I suspect it is.
Stakeholder?
I don’t know.
But I think somehow I answer to something larger than the kid, the parent, the school or even the district.
Because these kids are going somewhere.
They’re going to grow up.
They’re going to live next door to us. Work with us. Hire people. Work for people. Raise families—or not. Vote—or not. Sit on juries. Drive next to me on I-5.
They’re going to encounter people who think differently than they do. People who live differently than they do. People they like. People they don’t particularly like.
They’re going to have power over other people sometimes.
Other people are going to have power over them.
And I want them to be decent at all of that.
I want them educated, obviously. I am a teacher.
But I think I care more about producing solid, compassionate citizens than I care about producing perfect students.
Actually…I’m certain I do.
I want them to understand that other people matter.
That you can disagree with someone without being cruel.
That making room for another person to be fully themselves doesn’t somehow diminish you.
That actions have consequences AND that doing something terrible doesn’t necessarily make you a terrible person.
I want them to know how to apologize and how to start over.
I want them to be able to be wrong.
That’s a big one.
And I want them to know how to exist in a community that isn’t organized entirely around their comfort.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I believe so deeply in public education.
Because public school is messy.
You don’t get to choose everybody.
Neither do I.
We take hundreds of kids who come from all sorts of different families, with different beliefs and experiences and abilities and ideas about the world, put them in the same building and basically say…here you go. Figure out how to live together.
And then we adults are supposed to help them do it.
That’s kind of extraordinary when you think about it.
And hard.
Man, is it difficult.
Deliciously complex.
Because caring isn’t neutral.
At some point I’m going to bump up against a student or parent whose idea of what is right for that child conflicts with something happening in my classroom. Maybe it’s accountability. Maybe identity. Maybe religion or politics or books or language or something I haven’t even thought of yet.
I don’t think my job is to make students think like me.
But I absolutely think my classroom has to be a place where every kid gets to exist.
The kid I don’t understand.
The kid whose beliefs I don’t share.
The kid who is still figuring out who they are.
The kid who is driving me absolutely bananas today.
That kid, too.
So I’m back where I started.
What does it actually mean to care about a student?
I don’t think it’s just affection.
There’s tenderness in it, certainly. But there’s accountability, too. And boundaries. Forgiveness. Fresh starts. Consequences.
And occasionally getting really pissed off and then having enough sense not to make an important decision while I’m really pissed off.
It means caring about the kid in front of me AND the other 28.
And maybe I’m also caring about the adult this kid is becoming.
I don’t always know what the caring thing is.
Maybe that’s the part I find most interesting.
There are going to be moments this year when something happens and I have about twelve seconds to decide what to do. No educational philosophy, district policy, parenting experience or amount of good intention is going to hand me the perfect answer.
I’ll get some of them right.
I’m quite certain I’ll get some of them wrong.
And maybe that’s what I want to pay attention to this year.
Not whether I care about my students.
I know I do.
I want to figure out what the hell I mean when I say that.
…and why I care so damn much.
Learning is why. 