On Relationships Between Teachers and Students

Recently, the propriety of my relationships with various students has been called into question. This has resulted in some mandated time away from said students, and a revision to the rules for my interactions with students. I understand that I currently operate in a system where I do not have the discretion to draw lines in relationships as I see fit, and that concessions will need to be made going forward. But, my actions have been guided by reasoned thinking, and I would like to share here my thoughts on what the proper relationship between a teacher and a student might look like, at least in my conception of a proper education system.

So, you’re not going to believe this, but I think, fundamentally, that the ideal relationship is a voluntary one. That is, as long as both parties agree that certain interactions are appropriate and desired, then the interactions should be okay. Now, there are issues of age and maturity involved when discussing relationships between older people and kids, but many of these issues may be resolved through parental oversight and consent, or through the adult’s judgment of what is best for the child. Of course, when considering a working relationship, such as the one between a teacher and a student, the objective of the relationship must be remembered. The teacher has a duty and a responsibility to the student, and the student is interacting with the teacher for a specific purpose. There are some activities and behaviors and interactions that not only don’t contribute to the purpose of the relationship, but are actually harmful to it. However, I must stress that every individual student is different, and thus the education goals of the relationship may be accomplished in different ways with each student, thus calling for different types of relationships. So, back to first principles, I think that there should be flexibility for the teacher and student to determine what kind of relationship works best for them in pursuing the objectives of their working relationship. They should draw upon the experiences and wisdom and suggestions of others, while also recognizing the desirability of adapting such feedback to their particular situation. 

I also think that education is much more dependant on relationships than is generally recognized. Genuine education, which is not driven by grades or standardized curriculum or compulsory attendance laws, happens through conversation and collaboration and interaction with others. If a teacher wants to have more influence over his students, he should work on developing stronger relationships with them. To get these relationships, the teacher should recognize their voluntary nature and not push himself on any of the students; he should just be open to the possibility of more than professionalism. Also, to earn the respect and trust of students (or anyone), the teacher must give them respect and trust. That is, elevate their status in the relationship from one who is forced to participate and obey to one who can choose whether or not to interact with the other and who participates in the decision-making of the relationship. My own students do not have grades; therefore, the only leverage I have to get them to do their work is my relationship with them. They write their journals and draw out their formulas and come to round table meetings because I ask them to. There’s no penalty to not doing so, but I treat them with radical amounts of respect (such as not imposing penalties for not doing what I ask), and as a result they respect me enough to actually do what I ask. 

As one half of every relationship that I have with my students, I have lines which I am uncomfortable crossing with them. But, my relationships with students are indeed much less professional than one might consider appropriate. A few aspects of these relationships have been questioned: my interactions with students outside of school, the content of the conversations I have with the students, and my availability for the students. I will explain my thinking on each of these issues to show why I’ve allowed these relationships to develop as they have. 

First, any interaction or activity that would be appropriate in school, I think is appropriate outside of school. For example, a conversation is appropriate in school, as is a lecture, and other instructional interactions. Therefore, they should be allowable outside of school. Similarly, fun activities such as going for walks, playing games, watching video clips of certain things, and sharing meals would all arguably be considered appropriate between teachers and students who are in a school building. Therefore, I think that they should be considered appropriate outside of school. [Activities and interactions that are inappropriate in school, such as sexual relations, the use of illegal substances, the defacement of property, and even bullying, would a fortiori be inappropriate outside of school.] Now, normally school is the one and only setting where these interactions take place, since that is where teachers and students gather each day. So it would look unusual for these interactions to take place outside of school. However, my situation is rather unusual in that I am not in the school every day, and in that I don’t clock out at the end of the school day, as I never really clocked in. I’m low-key just always working. And, let’s be real, so are my students. They do a lot of schoolwork outside of school. Indeed, education does not just occur in school. So I never saw the sense (or feasibility) in limiting my interactions with students to just the school. Apparently, the fact that these interactions occurred outside of school itself makes the interactions different and thus inappropriate, but I would argue that a child’s education is really directed by a child’s parents; if they approve of continued instruction in interactions outside of a normal school day, and both teacher and student agree to it, then the interaction should be allowable. 

Second, I am not a traditional teacher. My job is not to teach certain material in a specific subject matter; my job is to teach students how to think. As I’ve written in a previous post, the best way to learn is through conversation. This is the method that I tend to employ. And because students think and talk about all subject matters, I believed that it didn’t matter what the topic of conversation was for me to do my job and help the student question, argue, and think critically. So I wasn’t going to limit the content of our conversations to issues directly related to their research topics. Of course, there’s a difference, apparently, between discussions that have some academic value, such as Supreme Court decisions and the economics of Bitcoin, and other topics, such as certain weekend activities of certain students. While I get that society sees a difference between these things, I struggle myself to understand why it’s relevant to my goal of encouraging the development of critical faculties. Any and every situation demands thinking skills. Furthermore, because these inappropriate topics are what kids like to talk about, working with these topics allows me to influence the students in a way that they enjoy more and that might be subtly more effective in that it teaches them the ubiquity of the need for these skills. Two other points: part of my tolerance of inappropriate topics of conversation is grounded in my radical respect for the students. I want to treat them like people, with lives and personalities and agency. I don’t want to try to force them into a box where they can’t be themselves around me. If this is what they want to talk about, I’ll listen to them, not shut them up. Additionally, while the fact that I, by virtue of these inappropriate conversations, have knowledge of certain things that I agree are inappropriate for me to know, I think that it is ultimately better for students to have an adult in their lives that they trust and talk about these topics with, so that they’re not just relying on people as inexperienced as themselves, and so that the adult can watch out for any truly dangerous activities, activities which he would have never heard about if students always felt they had to shut up around him. 

Finally, my availability is a matter of my respect for students. I work for them (they should be in charge of their education, not me). And, again, I’m not in the school every day, and my work day doesn’t end at dismissal time. If I’m at my desk at 9 o’clock at night doing work, and a student has a question, why shouldn’t I answer it? If I’m just spending the day reading in the library, and a student wants to meet at the coffee shop across the street, then why shouldn’t I go meet him? I live to serve, and to serve to the best of my abilities. If a student wants to learn something, I feel kind of obligated to go help him with that. Of course, if I’m busy, that’s a different issue. But if I’m available, I should be available to my students. There’s also the issue of texting, my primary method of communication with my students. Again, this is a respect thing. I refuse to try to fit my students into a box and pretend that the rest of them doesn’t exist. Kids text. That’s how they communicate. It’s convenient and casual. If that’s how they want to communicate, then I should accommodate them. It’s not a problem for me. If it helps them learn and increases my influence over their thinking processes, then I’ll take advantage of it. It would, indeed, be strange if I were waiting outside students’ houses or always had my ringer up, waiting to be needed. But to just be more available than other teachers...I see that as a good thing.

Of course, I have always stuck to the voluntaryness principle in my interactions with students. My relationship with students can be as informal and close as they wish, subject to my own lines (partially described above), which are drawn for the purpose of ensuring that the relationship fulfills its educational purpose. But only to the extent that they wish. If a student wishes to keep things professional, or even wishes to push me further away than would be normally expected, I have always been extremely tolerant of such behavior and respect the student’s wishes. 

Anyway, there are clearly some incongruities between what I think is appropriate and what is considered appropriate by others. I do, in fact, understand many of the concerns expressed, but feel that theses concerns miss the unique nature of every relationship. I think that relationships are very important, critical, even, to a successful education, and I have worked hard on cultivating my relationships with my students so that I would be able to do my work as effectively as possible, and because I respect my students more than the average teacher (seeing them more as equals). The result has been deemed unprofessional. But the line between professional and unprofessional, appropriate and inappropriate, is vague and arbitrarily-drawn. The line between voluntary and involuntary is much clearer and meaningful. Seeing students as human beings, rather than as students, and treating them as such, necessarily results in a different type of relationship than the kind usually seen in school. This is a sign of the dehumanizing nature of modern public schooling, and deviations from it should be celebrated, in my opinion. There must be lines, of course, purposeful lines drawn through reasoned argument. But for genuine educational relationships, where the teacher is not just delivering facts but training minds, much stronger relationships are called for, with more respect and less formalism. One of the first steps to fixing our educational system is to reduce the lines between teachers and students. The system currently sets them up as adversaries; imagine the results we would get if they saw each other as friends.

J37 - Note Ramblings

I really don’t have time to write now, because I have so much other stuff to do, but I can’t get anything else done because I feel like I really have to write. I’ve got too much clutter in my mind; I need to draw the thoughts out. So, this journal’s only purpose is to help me clear my head, so it might end up being random and messy and irrelevant. We’ll be back to our regular programming shortly. [Normally this sort of thing would stay in my notes, but it’s a problem I’m currently grappling with and I want it published so that I can consider it against the background of my other thinking this year, which is better synthesized on this site than in my notes.]

One of the really big projects that I’ve been (supposedly) working on this year is writing an academic journal article, called a “Note,” as part of my membership of the Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology. Technically, I should have been working on this article all year, submitting five pages at a time to my supervisor as evidence of progress at predetermined checkpoints. But, that’s not really how I work. I like to use large blocks of time (like 12 hours) to start and finish projects in one or two sittings. I really don’t even know how one would write a paper one page at a time, one page each week, or whatever the schedule I was given works out to. As a compromise, I submitted an outline of my entire paper to my supervisor at the beginning of the year, and was waived from having to show anything at any of the deadlines between then and now. However, one of the two deadlines I was not exempted from, when a draft of my full paper is due, is approaching rapidly. Here’s the thing: I no longer want to write the same paper. My research and thinking since the beginning of the year for this paper and generally look nothing like the stuff I put in the outline. It’s not a huge problem, I think, to deviate from an outline I crafted months and months ago. But it is difficult to stare a deadline in the face and not even have an outline to follow in writing 25 pages for that deadline. I need to rethink what I want this Note to be. There’s a lot of things I’d like to write about, of course. But I also need to find a way to connect it all back to law, and that’s more difficult for me, as I spend all of my free time thinking and reading and writing in subjects like economics and education and philosophy, not law. These subjects are all related, of course, but I need to work hard on making the connections solid and explicit, and to have the law appear to be the focus of the writing, rather than a support of the actual focus.

It’s an amazing moment, when a period of sustained study suddenly culminates in a flash of insight that somehow makes all the academic slogging seem worth it. In my senior year of college, I really threw myself into the study of monetary economics. It was always part of the subject that I struggled with; I was interested in human beings, not numbers and equations, so I naturally struggled to focus in classes that dealt with such aspects of economic science. But, I felt that it was necessary to be conversant in all areas of economics before I graduated with a degree in it. So, most of my personal studying during my senior year was dedicated to the money problem. Through this study, I could tell that something was missing in most of the standard discussions of the subject. This is a common feeling for me. But, until I understand the rest of the discussion, I can’t see what exactly is missing. When I do come to understand the rest, the flash of insight that accompanies it is the realization of what was missing. And that’s an amazing experience. Such a realization provided the inspiration for my senior thesis.  When I originally applied to write a senior thesis, the department chair rejected all of my proposed topics because they seemed too literature-reviewish. I explained that I was analyzing and critiquing others’ theories, rather than analyzing new data with those theories; I wanted my paper to be a theoretical contribution, rather than an empirical one like everyone else’s (most senior theses are just regressions of new data sets and explanation of the findings). The department chair explained that real economic theory was just math, and there wasn’t any math in my proposals. So, rejected. Then I kind of faked people out by submitting a proposal for a paper entitled “The Redistributive Effects of Monetary Inflation,” which could have been an empirical paper if any other student was writing it. Instead, it contained no numbers, and explained that all the math in monetary economics entirely ignored the process of reality and thus, while formally true, had no applicability to the real world.

Similarly, during my summer as a fellow, when I was teaching grad students about the history of economic thought, much of time was spent preparing lecture notes rather than researching new topics in economics. But, I was reading and writing a lot, and, again, I noticed that there was some sort of disconnect in the literature, and I was low-key trying to figure it out all summer. A 3-credit course works out to be about 45 lecture hours (not that you really get to use all of them). For my class, I allocated an hour-and-a-half to economists before Cantillon, three hours to Adam Smith and the other Classical economists, an hour-and-a-half to Marx, and three hours to J.B. Say and the Physiocrats. Nine hours down, right? The next nine hours were all spent on the Marginal Revolution, the birth of modern economics. Nine hours on three economists. And I spent all this time on this period because I felt that the lessons from this revolution had still not been fully absorbed by the economics community. But, during these lectures, I felt that there was actually tension even among the marginalists. Of course, Menger and Walras used different methods, but there was something else, too. Back to that in a moment...my flash of insight from all this work was the realization that the real contribution from Menger was not just that agents operate on the margin, but that the mind is the source of goods-classification and that, as a result, all of economics was actually a product of the mind and occurred therein. This lent itself to my original project this year, which had as its premise the idea that climate change was not merely an economics problem, but a perspective problem. 

My work this year, which spanned many different topics, depending on which hat I was wearing at the time, really came down to a study of what it means to be human and possess a human mind. And, through it all, I was looking for what was missing from other discussions of the topic. And I learned so much, discovered so much, grew so much. My work as a coordinator, designing and implementing a class that rejects the classic public school paradigm and seeks to improve the cognitive abilities and critical faculties of students on a voluntary basis, I came to understand the level of ignorance in all people and the need for humility in the learning process. As a mentor and advisor for students in the class, I more fully developed my Theory of Black and White, which I think will be one of my more significant contributions in my life, the idea that everything exists on a spectrum, despite the human tendency to think in absolutes. My study of being human taught me the significance of society in the rational processes of man. My study of the price system helped me realize that there are not different economic systems, just different levels of intervention in the natural one. I could go on and on about other things, such as the constancy of change, the epistemic barriers to justifiable legislation, the importance of questioning, and the ubiquity of market processes. One of the most important things I realized is that what separates the Austrian School from neoclassical economics is its doctrine of economic action, as opposed to economic equilibrium or nonaction. It’s not that Austrians study man as if he is a man, it’s that Austrians study man as if he is living a life, as if he is a being with purpose. Like I said, just tons of insights from working so hard in so many different subjects, and seeing their interconnectedness. [You can see why I broadened by topic to the study of human beings generally.]

Now, how do I incorporate this new discoveries which so dominate my thinking now that they’ve all illuminated my every thought into a freaking law review article? They are surely applicable to law, but they’re all so new to me that I haven’t even finished fleshing them out into their own articles of exposition. I don’t know if they’re ready to support an original analysis of a legal problem, especially when I have not written the articles I need to cite to if my law paper is to avoid becoming just a massive explication of these new concepts. 

Originally, my Note was going to be about the effect of judicial language on the public perception of climate change, as a way of connecting my Note to my EMC2 project. As you know, my EMC2 project has changed, and thus I think my Note should, too. But, I don’t want to stray too far from my original plan. I think that now the Note will be kind of about the effect of judicial language on public perception of change, or maybe about the conceit of judges in thinking that they can decide complex issues. I mean, specifically in the environmental context, there’s a lot of judicial deference to regulators because, after all, the EPA is full of scientists who are experts on the environment, while the courts are not. But, the judges are actually passing judgment on environmental issues, by deciding who should handle them. On the one hand, the judges are pleading ignorance about a subject, and at the same time indicating that another group of people possess enough knowledge on a subject to make all the decisions necessary. But, as my studies have shown this year, there is no group of people who could possibly know enough about a problem to justify regulating the world in an attempt to fix it. Same thing with economic legislation. [See the language of the Nebbia case, which put an end to the Lochner era of economic freedom in the United States.] It might also be worth considering the natural law method of adjudication versus the modern approach of statutory interpretation. However, my advisor for this paper is an environmental law guy, so my options are somewhat limited.

Of course, having a general idea about a problem with judicial opinions is a lot different than writing a detailed research paper articulating and defending such a broad critique. I’ve got a lot of research into regulations and such before I can begin to piece together a substantive argument. And I need to publish a few articles to cite to so that my arguments don’t seem unsupported (law has this annoying practice where every single assertion needs a citation). And, of course, this critique is not one that’s only applicable to judicial opinions. And this idea is still rather amorphous, subject to change in the writing process. It might just turn into a general criticism of regulations, which I think would be unwise in terms of feasibility (page count and research). It doesn’t help that there are so many other projects to work on and ideas to think about. Alright, I might be whining now, so I’ll sign off.

J34b - Addendum to "Plans For Moving Forward"

For my Theory of Being Human final product, I have decided that I would actually like to create a series of lectures which set forth my ideas and arguments. Instead of forming the beginning of a book wherein I apply the theory to a bunch of other issues, I want the theory to form the first 9 hours of a 45-hour course (3-credit course) that I would call Civilization 101 or something cute like that. I want to somehow make the lectures reflective of my educational philosophy, even though my educational philosophy is somewhat critical of lectures. But, regardless, I want to get back to teaching, and I want to work on lecture notes and deliver speeches and use whiteboards and generally remember who I am through this project. And, I think that my theory will have a greater impact if it is delivered orally as well as through writing, as the modern trend is to watch YouTube videos rather than read books. So...yeah. Lectures. The educational piece will still be written.