Working at ROOTS Academy with hurting and underserved inner city youth, I am the brunt of a lot of aggression. Stopping to think, it seems to me that a lot of the anger that is directed toward me and other staff members is misdirected anger coming from, as I said, hurting young people. Our students may be mad at a teacher, but I think they are, generally, expressing their hurts and emulating the aggressive, abusive, and violent behavior that they have experienced and have had directed towards them. They are broken people expressing their brokenness the only way they know how.
I was sitting in my classroom this morning, getting ready for class, as I do most days. I like to be the first one at school and spend some time preparing for the day. This week I’ve been getting to school, organizing my classroom, and chilling out to Belle and Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit (such a catchy album). Today I was looking back over the last few years and tried to recollect all the aggressive (both physical and verbal) confrontations I’ve had. Here are a few:
- Eighth Grade: School teacher accusing me of ‘karate kicking a girl across the hall and into a set of lockers’ (an absolute falsity)
- High School: being accused of “rummaging through the principle’s filing cabinet and stealing his possessions”
- College: School administration calling me “a moral relativist” and suggesting I was on a “dark path toward relativism”
- College: my anatomy and physiology teacher yelling at me and calling me a liar, in the middle of class, because I mis-heard him and read the wrong assignment
- Confrontations with older brother, usually my fault and over dumb stuff
- Angry parents in the Linmar Terraces in Aliquippa
- Being mugged in Toccoa, GA
- Angry soccer moms chewing me out over coffee while working as a barista at Starbucks
- Being hit in the head with a marker my first week as a teacher
- Having paint-water thrown in my face in art class
- Having a door slammed on me while I was standing in the doorway of my classroom (three times)
- Having my notebooks, pens, and classroom materials thrown around my classroom (at least twice a week)
No matter where we are, what we are doing, who we are dealing with, it seems that this kind of aggressive confrontation is built into life. I guess it is human nature. I doubt it is an exclusively American phenomenon, it is certainly not an exclusively urban issue. I think I am getting better and better at dealing with it. Looking back, I guess I am thankful for the crazy things I have gone through prior to working here, I think they have helped me to keep my cool here at work. Every time I am confronted, I get better at dealing with confrontation.
Proverbs 15:1 “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” I remember getting in a fight with my brother when we were kids. As punishment, my mom, or maybe my dad, made me write that verse out, something like 25 times. Funny, I just remembered that. Anyway, it seems I have had that verse memorized and ingrained into my mind since then, and I always recall it in the face of confrontation.
Be nice to a stranger today.
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