The good, the bad, and the difference

Starting a school year is always an exciting and nostalgic time for me. It’s the bittersweet end to summer and the excitement of a new school year spread out before me.

For the past 15 years, I’ve looked forward to the first weeks of school. I’ve been excited to meet new teachers, to set up my classroom again and to nestle into the groove of the next nine months. It’s a time to lean on my experience and welcome the challenges of a new group of students; a time to listen, and to think and do what I know is right and good for children.

Education has an interesting cyclical nature, and the saying that there is nothing new in education really does hold true. Ideas for teaching, learning and administration run the gamut from traditional to New Age and everything in between. It’s nearly guaranteed that every new school year will bring a message along with it, and that the message will be an attempt at a new way of addressing an age-old challenge. Sometimes the message is about curriculum, sometimes its managing learning styles, sometimes it’s meeting the needs of special education students or suggested wording to use with students, maybe which catch phrases you need to incorporate or what charts need to be integrated into classroom routines or committed to memory.

If you’ve been in a classroom for more than five years or so, you’ve heard shades of the same messages over and over again. Some of the ideas are great and are worth holding on to. They make sense. They work. They honor educators and they honor children. Sometimes, though, the messages seem to come out of left field. You stumble over the words as you try to implement them. They don’t fit and just don’t feel right. Most of the time, it’s because they aren’t right.

I was told recently that saying please and thank you to your students is a form of begging and that unless it’s for a personal favor, saying please and thank you should be limited when speaking with students. I’ve been struggling with the idea since the moment I heard it. I’ve been stumbling over it in my head and turning it round and round to try and make sense of it. I just can’t.

I believe that practicing good manners, saying please and thank you to children being the most basic of these, is an extension of being an active and valuable part of a community — inside and outside of a classroom. A teacher’s modeling of manners and politeness is of the upmost importance, as sometimes teachers are the adults who spend the most time with students during a given school day.

Through the modeling of politeness and manners, teachers demonstrate a consideration for a student’s willingness to meet a given expectation. This is vastly important as it models for students the values underlying good manners — respect and empathy — and it demonstrates that manners are not a chore or an option; they are an opportunity to convey gratitude and respect. The use of manners is not an instructional choice, and saying please and thank you is not begging. Manners are a vital part of our culture, in school and out.

In the past few weeks, I have been working on classroom management for my sizable group of 36 fifth-grade students. Their numbers, personalities and experiences have combined to make for a challenging classroom environment, and I’ve been laying down a framework of trust, mutual respect and meaningful conversation since the first day of school.

Weekly class meetings have become a point of interest for my students and nearly constant, consistent and polite reminders of expectations through pointed comments, compliments and modeling are starting to sink in. I’ve been working on how to discuss problems, how to deliver a meaningful compliment and the value of basic manners in and outside of the classroom. I don’t view these interactions with students as optional activities. I don’t view them as my requests to students to follow my guidelines or to meet my expectations. I view these interactions as ways of modeling polite, decent and socially acceptable behavior. I view them as opportunities for students to engage in kindness and understanding toward their peers and adults. I view these interactions as a way to meet on a human level with my students. These interactions are an opportunity for all of us to listen and to practice socially acceptable behavior, including manners.

The start of the school year will always bring new challenges and rewards. It will always hold potential and the excitement, and it will always present a new challenge each day. How we choose to address those challenges doesn’t have to be a huge choice or a sweeping change that goes against what we know. Incorporating manners, saying please and thank you should be automatic and daily activities.

For me, using manners with my students isn’t part of an action plan or a guideline I’m striving to meet, and it certainly isn’t begging. The basics of polite interaction are integrated into who I am as a person and the teacher I’ve become after years of experience as a student and as an educator. My teachers, my parents and my community modeled these behaviors for me in the past, and so I learned.

Each time a student thanks me for teaching him or her a skill or offers me a meaningful compliment for some act of kindness offered throughout the school day, I am rewarded tenfold. That reward means more to me than a pat on the back for following along with the newest approach or an integration of an idea that just doesn’t fit what I know to be right and good for kids, and it always will.

Vanessa Powell is a National Board-certified fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary in Wasilla. Her Chalk Talk article appears approximately every five weeks.