Draw a Line in the Sand
It is incredibly important that when we talk about relationships, we talk about them in a purely professional sense. There have been far too many children who have suffered because their relationship with their teacher became more than professional. Keep yourself personally safe. To do this, you have to make some boundaries for yourself, and stick with them.
- Children are your students, not your friends.
You need to build a relationship with them, that doesn’t mean you have to be their friend. You can be likeable, you can be funny. You can be there for them when they need you to be, but there’s no need to accept an invite to their birthday party or play on the swings with them after school.
Draw that line in the sand. - Teachers are their teachers, not their friends.
You are their teacher, not their friend. They might like you as a person, but you
r job is not to be liked – it is to teach. Don’t let the guise of “friendship” stop you from keeping them accountable or making the hard call to follow consequences or make them do the hard work.
I often get students saying “Sup Mr…”. I tell them they can say “Sup” to their friends. Not to me. I’m not their friend. At this I usually get a stink face or a “Awww sad” in reply. I follow it with “I’m your teacher”.
Draw that line in the sand. - Personal Cellphone is your personal cellphone.
Don’t share your personal number or other details with students. Too many teachers I’ve seen got caught up with this. It’s just not worth it. This also applies to all other forms of communication, including social media, personal emails, etc…
Draw that line in the sand. - Your class is more than one student.
Never get into a situation where you are solely focussed on one student. You have a responsibility to the others. This will hopefully stop you from having favourites. It will also stop you from getting into one on one situations which could lead to trouble. Always have more than one student in a room with you, or have open windows for all to see (for one on one testing for example). Simple.
Draw that line in the sand.
Over the course of the mid 2000’s, the culture of society changed, and the lawmakers began putting child rights to the top of all law making. Domestic violence cases where punishment and beatings to keep children ‘in-line’ were the target, but ultimately covered every kind of physical discipline for children within the home, and outlawed parents who were discouraging certain behaviours through use of smacking (most of whom will have only ever seen and used this form of discipline, as it was how they were disciplined as a child as well). I don’t advocate the use of physical discipline in any way, but when you remove the one strategy that parents use, you completely de-power them. Some parents stepped up their game and use other discipline methods. Many were left with nothing, so did nothing, in fear of being ‘caught’.
The other worry is of course those parents who treat their darling like the fount of all things true, will go in to bat for their child, and will fight every fight. They enable them through allowing them to stay home rather than face the bully, call meetings with school leadership instead of with the teacher, see their child as blameless in every situation, regardless of the all-too-common phrase “Oh I know he/she’s no angel…”, and encourage the drama of otherwise very small and meaningless situations that other children deal with on their own in the course of a day. Anxiety levels are raised for all involved, until eventually, instead of fighting, they take flight – uprooting that child from one class and finding another school that will take them for a fresh start, where all to often the process is repeated because the child has not learned how to actually deal with the situation. The only thing the child learns from this is not resilience (the one thing that child needs more than anything else), but that it doesn’t matter what happens, I can go to Mummy and it will all be fixed.