This maxim has special meaning for us K through 12 educators.

I’ll tell you a story. *Ignores collective groan*.

In June, we had one full week of school after grades had been submitted. Still in the shadow of COVID, as we are now, there were no exciting end-of-the-year activities slated for the children, and we teachers, as we often are, were left to our own devices.

On Monday, I charged my sister’s Amazon Prime account with Hercules first period, Spiderman Into the Spider-Verse third period, and Remember the Titans third period (they’d tuned out before they could even integrate the school).

Then came Tuesday. We started the top of every period with a drawing tutorial, which most students enjoyed. (Pro-Tip: Start drawing tutorials with a pep talk. Explain to the students that no artist starts as a Picasso, and that skills require effort. What makes this activity worthwhile is that all of our drawings will be unique, although we all watched the same video. Try this video with your students on 0.75x speed.) And to close out the period, we played “Cross the Line,” an SEL activity I learned in high school.

By Wednesday, I was grasping at straws. I pulled out the board games, they weren’t having it. The coloring sheets, even the ones from my Naruto and Air Jordans coloring books, not hitting. My students were ready to go, and I was too. Two of my students, Ryien^† and Daemon^†, began throwing a bean bag across the room. Despite my repeated objections, the game quickly escalated into a full-on match. They weren’t listening to me. I became angry. I felt powerless, although all but five students were following my directions.

As teachers, we’ve all been in this position before. We are conditioned to doubt our value as educators when our iron fists are revealed to be alloy.

Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether I am authoritative enough, and more than once this has led me to be more authoritarian than was probably necessary. We’ve all been there, embarrassed of our students’ behavior, left contemplating what it means for our ego. Today’s rhetoric applauds teachers who rule their classrooms with the pathos of fear. They say things like “Oh, she doesn’t play with them kids,” or the teacher themselves will say, “they know not to mess with me.” As recently as October, I had a colleague advise me to use curse words when scolding children, because “it’s important to speak the same language” as my students. But it just isn’t me.

What if we changed our language? What if we could learn to equally value the teacher who fearlessly loves her students? The teacher who seeks compassion, not control. The teacher who made room in her heart for nuance, recognizing that often the child who is the hardest to love, is the child who needs love the most.

I look forward to the day when parents, teachers, and administrators alike act with the understanding that a child’s behavior cannot solely be attributed to a teacher they did not know just one year prior.

I also look forward to the day when we can comfortably acknowledge that the way students receive authority from us depends on whether they have been conditioned to receive authority from people who appear like us. I’m talking about educators who are women, educators who are queer, educators who are black or brown, educators who live with a disability, or at the intersection of any or all of these identities.

Epilogue: Only one of the five boys playing beanbag football showed up on Thursday, the last day of school for students. Because I taught with an emergency permit, I wouldn’t be able to teach at the same school again. And I realized I may never see those faces again. The Saturday after school finished, I received the following email (written entirely in the subject line) from Daemon.

That’s it. He was bored, and why wouldn’t he be? So often we seek control, we take the behaviors of our students personally, reducing their feelings into interpretations of ourselves.

Seek compassion, not control.

^† These names have been altered