Dear colleague,
A fellow teacher wrote in to me some time ago with the following dilemma:
My strongest suit is connecting with my students, on an academic level as well as a personal level. My students trust me and come to me with personal problems regularly as they sense that I care about them. I've been an avid follower of yours for years, and I need advice on this subject. How do I remain a teacher of substantial content, show my students that I care deeply about their learning, and remain at arm's length when it comes to their personal lives? I actually care about their personal lives, but I'm finding it interfering with their learning in some cases.
This is a great question. We want our students to know that we care — and to help with that, we need to actually care — but then again, our sanity and time constraints require us to keep the job of “teacher” from taking on too much of the jobs of “counselor” or “parent.” There's a bit of counseling and parenting work that comes with teaching, sure. But when there's too much of it, my core work of teaching suffers.
I don't have hard-and-fast advice here, but I have found some things that help. Before I share, I'll say that as my career has progressed these eighteen years, I've noticed a growing “sense” for when a student-teacher relationship is becoming too personal. From that sense, I can use the following moves to signal to students that there's a professional line we're going to maintain in our relationship to keep things from getting unhelpfully or inappropriately personal. I know that sounds kind of bad, but just return to the prior paragraph for the reasoning.
That said, here are a few things I do that help in this area:
- I don't ask students many questions about their home lives or personal relationships. Instead, my questions during MGCs focus a lot on themselves (e.g., interests, likes, aspirations, people they value). So it's really not a normal thing for me to be talking to them about things that early-career-Dave could get bogged down with (e.g., friendship drama, romance fluctuations, home struggles).
- If a student does bring up these kinds of extra-personal, thorny topics, I like to ask things like, “Do you have anyone you can talk to about this?” This signals that I'm happy to serve as a connector but I'm really not the person to act as confidant or counselor — that's not my role.
- If a student ever shares something super heavy (e.g., thoughts of self-harm, intense depression or anxiety, unsafe home), I get the student connected with the proper folks ASAP (e.g., counselor, admin, social worker, etc.).
- I keep my room closed during lunches and after school, except by appointment. If a student wants a quiet place to study or rest, I will often make my room available for that. But if a student is coming just to chat and it happens a few days in a row, I'll let them know that I have work to do and am happy to provide a space for them to work as well. It's a gentle but firm assertion of a boundary that I need in order to not bring work home, which is very important to me.
I hope these thoughts help if you've found yourself in similar quandaries, colleague.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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