Fobbing

So last fall, I had a student show up in class and attempt to hand me work that was a week past due. She identified what it was loudly enough for the class to hear, and I said "That was due a week ago," which they all knew, since they'd all turned it in. At the end of the term, three students put on my course evaluation the complaint that I had publicly embarrassed someone in front of the class. My mind flashed back to that day, and I thought I didn't embarrass her; she embarrassed herself!

Now, I know the discreet way of handling such encounters: just tell the student "Hold on to that for now and let's talk after class." Usually I do that automatically. But this occasion was so very absurd that I had a hard time feeling much regret at not being my usual, careful self. It was the student's own words and volume that drew everyone's attention to her attempt to turn work in a week late. They all knew my policy was not to accept late work. What privacy did she have left after she got through attempting, publicly, to do something a roomful of people knew wasn't going to succeed? If she'd jumped out the window and tried to fly, would I have "embarrassed her publicly" if I'd said "Oh dear, she seems to have hit the ground?"

Paul Watzlawick, a Stanford professor of psychiatry, wrote a book in 1967, Pragmatics of Human Communication, in which he talked about how the parties to a communicative encounter punctuate the exchange differently. Each one perceives a different moment, act or utterance as the starting point, and then views what follows as set in motion by that precipitating event. When I teach it, I always recite this quip by Ogden Nash, paraphrased slightly: "He drinks because she nags, he thinks. She thinks she nags because he drinks. And neither will admit what's true, that he's a drunk and she's a shrew." Neither side sees themselves as the provocateur, but only as a helpless respondent.

I do know that I have to tread very cautiously when dealing with students, that I have to think carefully about every word, every facial expression, and the timing of all of it. I know that things which seem to me entirely innocent or forgettable can stir up all kinds of headache. But I also know that a particular type of student thrives in a very dysfunctional, rotten way in a climate of gentleness and discretion: the one who's learned to play the system. I've made it a practice to be blunt and abrupt in many situations just because I'm positive that a lot of students need exactly that: no leeway, no ambiguity, just a very sharp boundary.

Sometimes students bear an external locus of control, putting all the responsibility for their classroom experience on everyone except themselves, because they lack the help they need, or they're still overcoming past nightmares from teachers who have no business being in the profession. But some, I'm convinced, deliberately exercise that external locus, positively refusing to take ownership of how they feel, because that choice generates leverage against their professors, a way to take charge of the situation. As a strategy for changing the subject and moving the pressure off themselves, it can be very effective in the short term if the professor isn't ornery enough to put up some resistance to it.

So I do think this particular student did do more to embarrass herself than I did to cause her embarrassment. And I think at least two of her classmates offered misplaced sympathy, which made matters worse. It grieves me that she probably managed to insulate herself from the entire setback, to arrive at a decision that she did nothing wrong, that I just didn't do a good enough job of teaching her. That's tragic. Setbacks in classes can actually be good things if students take the feedback that what they're doing isn't getting the results they want, but when they satisfy themselves that the problem lies elsewhere, outside their control, that's when they set themselves up for repeated failure. If they can do it once, they pave the way to do it again and again, in all subsequent iterations of the lapse, and the older they grow in the pattern, the more stubbornly lodged it becomes, and the more sophisticated their rationalizations. I must admit, I'm not very optimistic about this one.

Watzlawick would say that all of the above is just my own punctuation of the encounter, but there comes a point where I push the squooshy academic "All knowledge is situated" stuff aside and say, she brought it on herself.