Last Week of School and Rule #8
I initially planned to post this on Sunday, but I felt I needed to process it a little more. On any given Sunday, my mind is typically straddling between the week before and the week after. I’ve been trying this practice where I reflect on the week before, and mentally prepare for the week ahead. I thought to use this reflection to introduce the next rule.
The week before:
It’s been an emotional week at work for me—on several counts. My JC2 students graduated, and I worked with my JC1 batch to see their first-ever planned event come to fruition after weeks of preparation. It’s not over yet: there’s still the After Action Review for that Event, plus a separate meeting for next year’s Orientation on Monday at 7:00 a.m. (!!!) tomorrow. Finally, I felt like a few pieces on my personal board started to take shape and move ever so slightly.
Let’s skip the anticipation and go straight to:
Rule #8: It takes greater effort to build than to burn. Build anyway.
To contextualise this rule, I want to share a story about how I approach culture building in class.
One of the things I’ve been trying to introduce to varying degrees of success in my classrooms is a kind of positive relational culture. This year, it hasn’t been easy primarily because I’ve inherited the classes I taught, rather than journeying with them throughout their two years in JC1. For the very first lesson, I recall meeting their previous tutor to pow-wow about the potentially challenging students as well as to discuss the general vibes and attitudes of the class. To compensate for my introversion, I typically like to compile a mental dossier of all my students—which celebrities they are crushing on; how plugged in they are into school gossip; what kind of music they listen to; whether they inherited any generational trauma from being forced to partake in an instrument since young (Okay, I might be projecting just a little on the last one).
This serves two purposes for me:
It’s a great conversation starter when I need to Have a Difficult Conversation with a student. In typical counselling circles, we are taught to bridge that connective gap through common interests or sharing similarities. It’s a very Human thing and also a strategic inroad into understanding people better and getting them to open up.
I get to learn more about Young People. I do think that I’ve learnt from my classes the lives and aspirations of young people, as much as I hope they’ve learnt from me. On occasion, I do feel like a vampire, literally sustaining my inner child on the zeitgeist of teenage adolescence. More importantly, it’s what brings me both hope and despair for the next generation of leaders whom I’m supposed to be nurturing (What in the world is SKIBIDI).
Anyway, as a teacher, you learn with experience how to quickly assess a room and gauge the general mood and relational energy of the people in it: who’s friends with someone else; who’s not really on talking terms; what are the broad cliques and lone wolves; in short, this nebulous idea known as group culture2.
As is typical of the first time I get to know a class, I use a facilitation technique called Circle Time. It’s useful for me as I get to see how they work together as a team, if at all. In addition, I get a glimpse of which students are comfortable sharing physical space with others, which can clue me into their relationship. Never underestimate the power of seating arrangements with teenagers.3
It’s back to Primary School seating anxiety again
When they were all settled, I gave them a prompt. In this case, it’s an easy one: what are your feelings for this year? Remember, this was when they were just fresh from their holidays and emerging from the chrysalis that was JC1. Once they’ve responded, the next person then has to respond. The response order can go one of two ways: either in a rotation around the room, or they call on someone else who hasn’t previously gone. I find the latter format more suited to creating familiarity, and the former a little anxiety-inducing—you can see when your turn is coming, and you’re running over your prepared answer in your head. Many of them gave typical one-word answers: excited, stressed, anxious; occasionally, some of them were called on to explain. I could tell that for many of them, the year had barely registered. Relationships were still very raw, though there were still quite visible cliques. People had their preferences. This would have been your typical JC classroom culture and was my challenge for the year.
In any classroom, most teachers contend with a fundamental tension between results and relationships, which interestingly coheres with what Adam Grant said about his four deadly sins4. According to Grant, when organisations prioritise results above all else, disregarding the importance of healthy relationships, people are often subjected to disrespect, abuse, exclusion, and unethical behaviour. On the flip side, when relationships take precedence over results, what results is a culture that celebrates mediocrity. When individuals focus more on getting along than on achieving excellence, results tend to dwindle as there is no paradigm for accountability. Additionally, the fear of rocking the boat can lead to the abandonment of quality work for ‘good enough’, or worse, ‘whichever will make the bosses happy’.
Sometimes, school meetings can feel a lot like this—especially cringe is the use of the phrase ‘best practices’
It’s a difficult balancing act for teachers then, because there are a multitude of factors that affect this tension. As a Beginning Teacher in the past, I have personally tried both extremes in my classrooms, often to disastrous results either for me or my charges. That teachers are expected to do both from the get-go and do them well, also signals to me the unfair amount of expectations heaped onto teachers today. It’s tough to remain at the top, as most Singaporeans expect a lot from our education system. Yet the myth of the maverick teacher swooping in to shape and mould even the most hardened of hearts might play well in Hollywood, but rarely do we as teachers possess the luxury of both time and energy to do so. For most in Singapore, grades are paramount.
In addition, classes are typically grouped by similar subjects and ability levels and are usually not homogenous, nor should they be: my students typically come in pretty much fully formed albeit still adults-in-training, each with their dispositions, quirks, and icks gained over the past 10 or 11 years of socialisation (or sometimes, a lack of it). This can result in a scenario where students end up reifying social groups to intentionally ostracise or put others down—a real-world Mean Girls. I feared that with the classes I inherited, it would have been difficult to instill new rules, values, and paradigms with only the eight months I had with them. Even babies require nine.
I repeated Circle Time for the very last lesson. This time around, the mood was more somber. Many who earlier proclaimed they wouldn’t feel sad became visibly so. A few of the boys revealed they had a betting pool for which one of the girls would start crying first (thankfully, this lifted everyone’s mood mid-sharing). Many shared that they would want to have a reunion five years later. Others shared their many core memories and how these relationships, despite being built in a short time, were done so on firm foundations. To me, culture is invisible to the eye, yet deeply affects the behaviours of all who are immersed in it at a very visceral level. When even my most rebellious boy said, You all know I’m so done [with the school], but I’m glad I’m in this class, I knew I had done something right.
When it came to my turn—I usually close the circle—I shared a little about my hopes for them in the future (a good sharing also takes a bit from oneself). How I hope they go on to be better than my generation, and how over the short year, they’ve shown me how great of a class they are, and it’s time for the world to see how they can even be a good one. Lastly, I ended with these words: I teach you all because all of you are you, no more and no less. I do so out of habit and not a chore, and I am wholly glad that I did.
And the tears started flowing.
Till next time, thank you for reading this far, and keep being the brightest star for others.
To external observers who might find this odd: this is a norm. Due to manpower staffing issues, sometimes JC teachers revisit a level as you’d want your more experienced teachers in the graduating class (Side note: experienced doesn’t necessarily mean ‘best’ in the qualitative sense).
A lot of my knowledge and understanding of culture stems from the great work of Adam Grant, whom I will be referencing throughout this post.
True story: I change my class’ seating arrangement each term, just to shake things up. I typically want the better-performing ones to sit next to those who need more help; and the more extroverted ones to open up to the more introverted ones. Some of them have begged me to release the plan, or even give them a CLUE, saying it will affect their mood and whatnot.
The four deadly sins of organisational culture according to Grant are toxicity, mediocracy, bureaucracy, and anarchy.