Reading "The Student from Hell"

From The Courage to Teach, by Parker J. Palmer, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco (1998)

....There were thirty students in that classroom. It is possible that twenty-nine of them were ready to learn, but I will never know. For in the back row, in the far corner, slouched the specter called the Stu­dent from Hell.

The Student from Hell is a universal archetype that can take male or female form; mine happened to be male. His cap was pulled down over his eyes so that I could not tell whether they were open or shut. His notebooks and writing instruments were nowhere to be seen. It was a fine spring day, but his jacket was buttoned tight, sig­nifying readiness to bolt at any moment.

What I remember most vividly is his posture. Though he sat in one of those sadistic classroom chairs with a rigidly attached desk, he had achieved a position that I know to be anatomically impossible: despite the interposed desk, his body was parallel to the floor. Seek­ing desperately to find even one redeeming feature in the specter be­fore me, I seized on the idea that he must practice the discipline of hatha yoga to be able to distort his body so completely.

At that point in my life, I had been teaching for twenty-five years. Yet faced with the Student from Hell, I committed the most basic mistake of the greenest neophyte: I became totally obsessed with him, and everyone else in the room disappeared from my screen.

For a long and anguished hour I aimed everything I had at this young man, trying desperately to awaken him from his dogmatic slumbers, but the harder I tried, the more he seemed to recede. Mean while, the other students became ciphers as my obsession with the Stu­dent from Hell made me oblivious to their needs. I learned that day what a black hole is: a place where the gravity is so intense that all traces of light disappear.

I left that class with a powerful combination of feelings: self-pity, fraudulence, and rage. On the heels of a highly touted work­shop on teaching, I had put on a stunningly inept demonstration of the art. The regular teacher had taken my presence as an excuse to skip his own class, so my travesty had gone unobserved by any peer, as usual. But my self-respect was gravely wounded, and I knew whom to blame: it was the fault of the Student from Hell. Self-pity and projected blame—the recipe for a well-lived life!

I was desperate to get out of town, but I had to suffer through one more event, dinner with a few faculty at the president's house.

There, the workshop received fresh praise, but now the praise was painful, driving me deeper into feelings of fraudulence. When the president announced the arrival of the college van that would haul me to the airport, I was flooded with relief.

I went out to the driveway, tossed my bags into the back seat of the van, climbed into the front seat, and turned to greet the driver. It was the Student from Hell.

I am a religious person, so I commenced to pray: "I have sinned, I do sin, and given attractive opportunity, I will probably sin again. -But nothing I have ever done or plan to do merits this punishment—an hour and a half in a van with the Student from Hell."

We backed out of the driveway and wound our way through the neighborhood, staring ahead in silence. When we reached the free­way, the driver suddenly spoke: "Dr. Palmer, is it OK if we talk?"

Every atom in my body screamed "No!" But my mouth, which was trained in the suburbs, said, "Sure, fine, yes, you bet."

I will always remember the conversation that followed. The student's father was an unemployed laborer and an alcoholic who thought that his son's desire to finish college and become some sort of professional was utter nonsense.

The young man lived with his father, who berated him daily for his foolishness: "The world is out to get people like us, and col­lege is part of the scam. Drop out, get a fast-food job, save whatever you can, and settle for it. That's how it's always been, and that's how it'll always be."

Daily this young man felt his motivation for college fading away. "Have you ever been in a situation like this?" he asked. "What do you think I should do about it?"

We talked until it was time for my plane to take off; and for a while afterward we corresponded. I do not know whether I helped him—but I know that he helped me. He helped me understand that the silent and seemingly sullen students in our classrooms are not brain-dead: they are full of fear.

The Student from Hell is not born that way but is created by conditions beyond his or her control. Yes, one or two of them may have been sent here directly by Satan to destroy Western civilization as we know and love it. But this particular student whose plight represents many others—forced me into a deeper understanding of the student condition; one that is slowly transforming the way I teach.

Students are marginalized people in our society. The silence that we face in the classroom is the silence that has always been adopted by people on the margin—people who have reason to fear those in power and have learned that there is safety in not speaking.

For years, African Americans were silent in the presence of whites—silent, that is, about their true thoughts and feelings. For years, women were similarly silent in the presence of men. Today all of that is changing as blacks and women move from the margins to the center and speak truths that people like me need to hear.

But young people remain marginalized in our society—and their plight has worsened since the 1960s as we have become more and more fearful and dismissive of our youth. Implicitly and explic­itly, young people are told that they have no experience worth having, no voice worth speaking, no future of any note, no significant role to play.

Is it any wonder that students, having received such messages from a dozen sources, stay silent in the classroom rather than risk an­other dismissal or rebuke? Their silence is born not of stupidity or banality but of a desire to protect themselves and to survive. It is a si­lence driven by their fear of an adult world in which they feel alien and disempowered.

Of course, some of our students are not young in years. Some have returned to school in midlife and may even be older than their teachers. But the fear in our younger students has its counterpart in our older students as well. Nontraditional students often return to school because of an experience that puts them, too, on the margins—a divorce, the failure of a career, the death of a spouse. We think of them as more expressive and self-confident than their younger peers, but perhaps their years have merely given them more practice at keeping their fears tucked away. Inwardly, these students relate to teachers as "elders," even if the age difference is reversed, and they may easily be as apprehensive about how we will respond to them as younger students tend to be.

If I want to teach well in the face of my students' fears, I need to see clearly and steadily the fear that is in their hearts. No technique could have altered my classroom debacle with the Student from Hell, because the trouble began in a more inward, less tractable place, in my failure to read him and his behavior perceptively. I read that stu­dent not in the light of his condition but in the shadow of my own (a point to which I will return shortly), and my self-absorbed misread­ing led me into one of my lowest moments in teaching.

The behaviors generated by fear—silence, withdrawal, cynicism—often mimic those that come with ignorance, so it is not always easy for me to keep believing, when I look at some of my students, that anxiety rather than banality is what I am looking at. I need to keep renewing my insight into my students' true condition in spite of mis­leading appearances.

It is not easy, but it is rewarding. As I have come to understand my students' fears, I have been able to aim my teaching in a new di­rection. I no longer teach to their imputed ignorance, having rejected that assessment as both inaccurate and self-serving. Instead, I try to teach to their fearful hearts, and when I am able to do so, their minds often come along as well.

I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to "hear people to speech."' Be­hind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken—so that someday they can speak with truth and confidence.

What does it mean to listen to a voice before it is spoken? It means making space for the other, being aware of the other, paying attention to the other, honoring the other. It means not rushing to fill our students' silences with fearful speech of our own and not trying to coerce them into saying the things that we want to hear. It means entering empathetically into the student's world so that he or she per­ceives you as someone who has the promise of being able to hear an­other person's truth.

In the story of the Student from Hell there is a powerful image that offers a clue about how to hear students into speech: that young man found his voice when he was literally "behind the wheel." Sit­ting passively in the classroom while I held forth, he was reduced to silence. But given a real responsibility, put in charge of my schedule and my safety, he found a voice to speak of significant things....