Day Fifteen: Compassion/The Struggle is Real

So I have this one student who refuses to turn in work. He is in my AP Lang class, and he has expressed this anxiety of submitting anything in to me because "it's not perfect yet." And I tell him, it doesn't need to be, I just need to see that he's on the right track.

I've had this blog post partially composed for five days now, and I didn't want to click publish because I didn't have the time to make it perfect yet... Which brings me to my biggest strength as an educator:  compassion. I don't mean that I feel bad about the amount of work assigned and I just let them slide by; it means that I totally get the struggle. This is difficult. I first thought about this idea of compassion when I was reading The Elements of Teaching by Banner and Cannon, and the chapter "Compassion" was mine to use to lead a class discussion. While the entire book covers other elements of teaching that are important (the other two elements that I think are my strengths are "Learning" and "Imagination") this chapter came with one very specific warning:

"Anyone contemplating teaching as a profession should consider compassion as a measure of suitability. The physical and emotional toll exacted by teaching will be too much for those lacking it... Those who experience difficulty in accepting the place of compassion in the classroom, who resist the idea of sympathetic emotions, or who prefer their working lives to be exclusively intellectual should avoid teaching altogether and probably consider devoting themselves to less demanding occupations, such as politics or crime" (89).

It is the only time in that book where they discuss any one element as vital - all of the others had ways to work on each element, but the element "compassion" was listed as a necessity already established in our personalities. This doesn't mean we dumb down anything out of pity; we don't change anything our students need, but we meet them where they are. We can acknowledge that the struggle is real, and help our students move from the struggle to work on that skill. The inability to do this (or the inability to see the value in compassion) is detrimental to our effectiveness as teachers.


And this blog post is far from perfect, or what I really wanted to say, but I'm going to click publish because I need to model this struggle for that one student.