Students aren’t equations

The meeting took almost an hour. There was a solid plan of support. The student and family were in agreement. Everyone walked away from the meeting with high hopes and an optimism for the future. We put in the time. Maybe it was time spent too late. Maybe we didn’t do enough early enough. These are the highs and lows of working with young people when you watch them commit to a new path forward and then cave into pressures that undo all the progress you were hoping for. We might think to ourselves “I did everything right and it didn’t matter.”

Students don’t fit into simple equations like this. This is the risk of using data in education. We oversimplify what it takes for students to find success. Humans are a complex system and require more from us than simple conclusions that place us at the center by thinking we did everything right and the student just didn’t comply. Data is important but humility is more important when working with people.

Resist the urge, dear educator, to withdraw. Resist the urge to label student’s as too far gone or unreachable. Resist the urge to build a boundary so big around yourself that achieving relational safety with students is no longer a possibility. Resist throwing your hands up in the air and writing a student off because it’s too painful or too frustrating to continue to engage.

Instead, strive to maintain connection over compliance. Do the work to ensure you can provide a regulated nervous system when dysregulation stares you in the face. Strive for curiosity instead of certainty. Our complex students deserve this from us.

Remember, relational safety is not about getting the response you want all of the time as if that’s even possible.
It’s about being the adult a student can return to, even after they struggle.