What We Can Learn From Leo

In the final semester of my formal schooling, for my MSEd in English Education 7-12, for a class project, I embarked upon a quest to shore up my most serious deficit as a teacher: classroom management.

I took as my inspiration one of my cats, The Right Honourable Leopold Tiberius, 2nd Viscount Fluffypants – Leo for short. Leo, though normally a very good boy, sometimes decides to act out – scratching at random doors, chewing on charger cables, getting the zoomies (running around hectic and pell-mell), fighting with our other cats, etc.

Ineffective techniques for getting misbehavior to desist include raising our voices to call his name or scold him, hissing “psssssst”, picking him up and moving him away from whatever he’s messing with – when presented with these responses, Leo will either not desist, will promptly go right back to whatever he was doing wrong, or will switch to some new misbehavior. Even if we lock him in the bathroom for ten minutes, he’ll frequently resume the behavior once released.

Techniques that do turn out effective involve redirecting Leo from the behavior: making a kissy noise to call him over to be petted, lavishing him with affection, giving him a treat, throwing a cat toy to play with. It could be that he’s only misbehaving out of boredom, and being given something more interesting to do quells the boredom; or perhaps he genuinely enjoys his misbehavior but he enjoys affection, treats, and cat toys more; or perhaps he knows I might give him affection, treats, or cat toys, and is misbehaving for the purpose of acquiring these things.

I embarked upon a campaign of research, observation of other teachers, and interviews with teachers and students, to answer the question: are there some effective techniques, perhaps equivalent to the techniques effective for redirecting Leo’s misbehavior, that a teacher can use with students who scratch at doors (metaphorically), chew on cables (metaphorically), get the zoomies (in some cases literally), or fight with other students (physically or verbally) – to descend from the analogy: to reduce behaviors such as getting out of seat, talking during quiet work or when the teacher is instructing, or staying out of room for excessive lengths of time on trips to bathroom?

Obviously human young people are somewhat more cognitively complex than cats, but analogy with Leo inspired pedagogical contemplation nonetheless. Just as it is unclear why Leo misbehaves, human students come to the classroom carrying their own individual backgrounds, histories, identities, experiences, and even trauma, which could be what drives them to behave in various ways the teacher does not want. They might misbehave out of boredom; because they enjoy the misbehavior; or because they want to get something from the teacher; they might behave in a way that’s normal in their home or in their culture, but which is not conducive to learning in the classroom; they could be neurodivergently stimming; there could be other, more complex reasons.

To return to the Leo analogy: yelling and physical redirection are obviously ineffective, not to mention cruelly unconducive to learning itself (plus a risk to the teacher’s job – and correctly so); sending a student out of the room (to some disciplinary location) leaves them missing out on content, is a squeeze of the pump of the school-to-prison pipeline, and then the student is likely to resume the behavior as soon as they come back anyway.

Are there some teacher analogues to giving Leo affection, treats, and cat toys – ones which ideally do not invoke the moral hazard attendant with rewarding and incentivizing misbehavior? Perusing the literature led to the conclusion: If misbehavior is occurring, it's already too late. This conclusion was borne out by observations and interviews: prevention is much more effective.

Successful means of prevention that are within the teacher's control include, primarily: establishing relationship between teacher and student; and implementing structure and consistency.

Speaking English Correctly

If an idea originating in your brain successfully ends up, more or less intact, in my brain, then you have used language correctly -- regardless of such niceties as formality level, spelling, complexity of grammar, or number of emojis you use. If the idea ends up mangled or isn't transferred at all, then you have used language incorrectly. That is the only valid metric for correct and incorrect language use.

Language may be used suboptimally, in that e.g. failing to modulate your formality level to your audience can reduce your audience's opinion of you. (Which goes both ways -- the problem looms equally large whether you're speaking lolcat at an academic conference or using $10 words and academic jargon to trash-talk your Fortnite opponents.)

High-stakes standardized exams, colleges, and many employers all expect a certain level of mastery of formal Standard American English (SAE). I, as a teacher, am expected to prepare students for standardized tests and job and college applications. There is some tension here between this expectation and my personal beliefs.

Personally, my natural mode of communication is somewhat formal (even, some might say, highfalutin') SAE, occasionally meshed with the jargon of Internet memes, so I can naturally teach SAE by modelling it, and by assigning readings of SAE, and I can teach code-meshing by modelling it. Reprimanding students for 'improper' informal English serves more ill purposes than good ones, and vocabulary words and quizzes are well-established in the literature as being of limited value.

Not every assignment should require formal SAE writing -- it is effectively a foreign language for some students, who may more naturally speak, for example, African-American Vernacular English. To require mastery of SAE exclusively privileges some students (mostly white) over other students (mostly Black and English Language Learners), regardless of whether or not they have good or creative ideas, and regardless of what we're actually interested in assessing: whether or not they understand the content. Requiring mastery of SAE to the exclusion of all other Englishes is not just testing the fish against the squirrel on their tree-climbing abilities (as the quote commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein goes); it may be tantamount to requiring the student fish and squirrel to first walk to the tree they'll be tested on climbing.

Gentleness & Emotional Literacy

One of my chief inspirations in my teaching philosophy is not, strictly speaking, an academic, but I venture to call him an expert philosopher of education nonetheless. Fred “Mister” Rogers, creator and host of the children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001, exemplified gentleness and espoused a philosophy of emotional literacy. As Rogers said to the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969,

We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively. [...] This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.

I have encountered a concept non-academically called the Two Rogerses principle of masculinity. I once had a philosophy professor sum up one way of doing virtue ethics as “pick somebody you want to emulate, and emulate them” – the most famous example being the concept of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ The Two Rogerses principle is a simple matter of virtue ethics in that sense: consider, on the one hand, gentle children’s television show host Fred Rogers, and, on the other hand, Marvel comic book and movie superhero Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America, who frequently uses his great strength to defend the weak and to defeat bullies and Nazis and is often held up as an exceptionally moral voice among superheroes. If neither Mr. Rogers nor Captain America would do whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it; that thing is probably toxically masculine, not healthily masculine. (There is, of course, a great tension between Fred Rogers’ oft-stated distaste for violence in children’s entertainment on the one side, and Steve Rogers’ habit of solving problems with violence on the other. I focus my own emulation on Fred Rogers – ‘Are you being the kind of person Mr. Rogers knew you could be?’ has for years been a core component of my ethics – but I suspect that Steve Rogers would find a more receptive audience in today’s schoolchildren.)

See Also: Vogt, G., & Monroe, A. (2021). What Mister Rogers can teach us about teaching. The Phi Delta Kappan, 102(8), 46–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27083858