I’m a veteran of the teacher wars. I’ve spent 25 years on the front lines, protecting Denver from roving bands of wild Colorado second graders. Besides elementary school, I have taught deaf and hard of hearing children, grades K-12. Last year I spent 180 days locked in a room with one or two public school students. And lived. Danger is my business.
However, today’s lesson, boys and girls, is not about what I’ve taught, but about what I’ve learned.
I started my career in the second grade. Students would return from recess with the usual complaints.
“Nikki called me a bad word. Several bad words.”
“Antonio pushed me and laughed when I fell.”
“They won’t let me in their club.”
For a year or two, I gave my students the same advice that my second-grade teacher had given me in 1954. “I’m sorry that your feelings have been hurt,” I would recite in my sweetest, most sincere teacher voice. “If you go out on the playground tomorrow and you are nice to the other kids, they will be nice to you.”
It’s standard teacher talk and there’s only one problem. It simply isn’t true. It wasn’t true in 1954 and it’s even less applicable in 2011.
The real truth is, of course, something like this: “If you are nicer to other students, eventually it is more likely most of them will be nicer to you.”
For several years, I gave students this modified version of the teacher talk. Then I began to add something like, “Kids will say things you don’t like on the playground, family members will blurt annoying things at home and when you grow up and go to work, people will sometimes act like jerks on the job. Deal with it.”
When I left college, I thought I was a patient person and a good listener. In my first few years of teaching, I realized I had no idea of the level of patience required and I was a very poor listener. It took me four years to develop the proper patience and 10 years of paying attention and hard work to learn how to listen to children.
Many teachers don’t know how to listen to their students. They let the kids talk, because that’s politically correct, but while this is happening, the teacher is plotting how to advance his or her agenda “for the good of the child.”
Real listening requires total concentration. One cannot be planning the response.
As my teaching career moved along, I learned. I became a more patient and nicer person.
Then one day, I heard this on the radio from an unknown source: The reward for being nice is not that others will be nice to you in return. The reward is that you get the privilege of being a nice person. The reward for being honest is not that others will be honest in return. You get to be an honest person.
Niceness is underrated. It’s an honor to be a nice person.
“Nice guys finish last,” according to baseball manager Leo Durocher. There is a school of thought in business, sports and socializing, that nice people are suckers and a savvy person can take advantage of that.
To these people, I reply, “Go ahead. I said I was nice, but I’m nobody’s doormat.”
Rory McIlroy won the U.S. Open, one of golf’s four major tournaments. He is widely regarded as one of the nicest men on the tour. Rory credits this to his father whose creed is, “It’s nice to be nice. And it doesn’t cost you a penny.”
John Walsh (beaucoupcats@msn.com) taught deaf and hard of hearing children for Aurora Public Schools.
