Overly Attached

One of the great things about being a teacher is that you get to develop connections with students. When you are a classroom teacher, you "belong" to your students, and they in turn, "belong" to you in a special way for that year that you are together. I've heard that some educators are reluctant to become specialist teachers because they fear that they will not have bonds as deep or as meaningful with students that they don't see every day. If any of you reading this blog house this worry inside you, let me reassure you that you can have meaningful connections with students who are not your primary responsibility. In fact, today's blog post considers the downside of having super-strong student-teacher relationships.

A goal for education is to allow students to develop social skills such as respect, collaboration, responsibility, resilience, initiative and independence. Sometimes, when students become overly attached to a teacher, they become dependent on their presence. When faced with other adults that aren't their preferred leaders, students can be rigid and resistant to taking directions or other ways of doing things. Decades and decades ago, when I first began teaching as an occasional teacher, I encountered this. As a supply teacher, you aren't surprised to hear the chastisement of "That's not the way OUR teacher does it!". Twice this week, there were incidents at school where students wanted to be in my class instead of elsewhere, and it let to some emotional outbursts. It's lovely to be loved, but how might I support these students in a way that helps them see that spending time with me isn't the sole answer?

Just as I've been in the shoes of both the adult that was wanted as well as the adult that wasn't wanted, I can also relate to the perspective of the students who really like working with a specific individual. I have to try hard not to become dependent on help from people - but it can be hard! For instance, I needed some assistance with a collaborative teaching unit for the Grade 7s in the Grade 7-8 class related to coding. (I mentioned it in this post from December.) My son initially helped me but I wanted to explore using Lego Spike Prime - the programmable robots we used for our First Lego League Robotics Team. (We just finished competing last month.) I turned to Matthew Malisani for help. Not only did he help me figure out the tasks that the students could do to lead up to using Spike Prime (he recommended to go from Scratch to Blockly Dash and then to Lego Spike Prime), he came and helped me teach the lesson! He even did a mini-lesson with the students on writing effective code. I scampered around, quickly taking pictures of the code they wrote and the Dash robots following their Keva-Plank tracks, so I wasn't useless, but I was impressed with how seemingly effortlessly Matt shaped the lesson and reinforced the concept of control structures (sequencing lines of code, repeating lines of code (loops), or selection to execute or not execute specific lines of code (conditional statements).

You'd think that I'd have an answer to becoming more independent and less reliance on the help of specific individuals because I'm experiencing it myself. Sadly, I don't. There are no nuggets of wisdom at the end of this blog post, just observations.

• I'm grateful for the affection and devotion shown to me by students.
• I promise to always keep it professional.
• I'll remind myself that no one is irreplaceable (You might be a student's favourite this year, but next year, they might not even say hi to you in the hall! Feelings change.)
• I will continue to build relationships with others / I will build communities of care involving many different people instead of a single entity / I can "diversify my portfolio", so to speak (this fits with advice I provided when I was recently interviewed by the wonderful Manjula Selvarajah for CBC Radio on what parents can do if they think their children are turning to AI chatbots for companionship - tune into your local CBC radio station to hear the short clip)