How To Handle A Student Who Rejects Your Kindness
You give and you give.
You give your patience and humor. You give your positivity and respect. You give your heart and hope for their future.
And they discard it. They crumble it up and toss it in the trash.
They meet your smile, your generosity, and your kindness with indifference—and even cruelty.
They roll their eyes at your attempts to build rapport. They stare off into the distance and mumble when you try to engage them in conversation.
They laugh and make fun of your mistakes and generational quirks.
Yes, you’re their teacher. You’re paid to do your job. But it still hurts, more than you care to admit.
When you think on it—as you often do—when you think about this one student, and how you’ve gone out of your way to help them and give them the benefit of the doubt, anger seeps in.
A trickle at first, it turns into a rush as all the slights and sighs and sarcasms cycle fresh through your mind.
You daydream about putting them in their place. You lay awake rehearsing a lecture they won’t soon forget. You fantasize about running into them at Target in a few years and telling them what you really think.
But maybe, just maybe . . . your kindness frightens them.
Maybe they’ve been burned so many times and so deeply that if they allow themselves to like you—or worse, look up to you—and you let them down, the blow would be too great.
Maybe they’ve erected a hard shell over shattered trust and the possibility of disappointment and betrayal.
So you breathe. You suppress your basest urges. You shake off the resentment you’ve been hanging on to and humble yourself with memories of your own pain and struggle.
You consider all that you don’t know about this student and what may await them at home—or what may not await them.
As you stand at the doorway to your classroom greeting students as they walk in, you notice them, head down, making their way toward you. They approach, and you soften. You nod and smile simply as they walk past.
Maybe this will be the day they accept you and let you in. Maybe it will be in a week or a month or on the last day of school. Doesn’t matter. You’re going to be the leader and model and strength they can count on every day.
So you give.
You give your patience and your understanding. You give your steadiness and your consistency. You give your unrelenting, unbending, undefeatable kindness.
It’s teaching, and it’s what we do.
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