I’ve mentioned before, on several occasions, that one of the most profound and affecting lessons I learned about being a teacher, back when I was still reading up on pedagogical basics, is that when you don’t teach that something is capable of being changed, then you teach — through your silence — that it can never be changed. This doesn’t mean that change is likely, or that attempts to change won’t be met with strong resistance, or that teachers shouldn’t caution students about the difficulties involved with trying to effect some particular change. What it does mean is that teachers have a duty to respect when a student decides that trying to effect a certain change is so important to them that it’s worth all the challenges and risks that come with their attempts. To do anything less is to disrespect students not only as students, but also as intelligent people capable of making their own decisions.

It’s ironic that I first truly understood this concept when I was learning about how to be a good teacher, simply because it reminded me of so many of the bad teachers I had when I was younger. I can point to any number of factors that contributed to those teachers being bad teachers (you might even say that I could do a whole video series on them), but blocking off the merest possibility of change to me would be pretty high up on the list. It was bad enough that some of my teachers adopted this as an attitude for all their students, but many teachers singled me out specifically for this kind of treatment.

To be fair, some teachers who engage in this kind of behaviour legitimately don’t understand that they don’t have to teach that way.  We humans are often creatures of emulation, and I certainly pattern my own teaching style, in a very conscious way, after those of the best teachers I had in college. I was just lucky enough, after I got to college, to have a number of very good teachers, but for those who were only exposed to closed-minded teachers, they might not understand that there are other ways to teach students about change and possibility. Especially if teachers weren’t exposed to that style in their student days, it can be a very difficult concept to learn without the benefit of being immersed in it over the course of a semester. This isn’t to say that these teachers aren’t still doing harm, but it’s hard to justify getting angry with them because they aren’t consciously trying to hurt their students.

Further down the scale, though, you have those teachers who know that they could teach in a more open way, but choose not to because to do so requires much more work on their part. There’s no overt malice towards students here, but this is still something that really bothers me because there is a conscious choice being made here, and it’s a choice that affects every teacher, not just the one choosing to close off  change and possibility. Apart from the brazen hypocrisy of expecting students to push themselves to their limits in their classes while being lazy-ass teachers — a hypocrisy that even grade school students can see right through — this kind of thing gives every teacher a bad name, and makes it harder for those of us who are trying to improve our students’ lives to be recognized as such by our students, let alone get full-time jobs in a field that’s relying more and more on working part-timers to their limits for less than a living wage.

Then there are those teachers who are deliberately mean to students just because, to be blunt, they’re assholes. No student should ever have to deal with one of these teachers, and I had dozens of them. Everything I said in the previous paragraph about bad teachers making things harder for the rest of us goes about a hundredfold for these jerks, and one of the primary reasons I got into teaching is because I know all too well, from repeated personal experience, how much harm these teachers can do to the students they harm, whether they treat all their students poorly or single out particular students for whatever twisted reasons they can come up with. (Can you tell that I had mostly the latter?)

I can still remember a lot of my teachers, as I suffered through their classes, saying words to the effect of, “I had to suffer through this when I was  in your place, so now I’m going to enjoy watching you suffer through it.” That should be prima facie evidence for firing a teacher in any sane society. I wish I could say that the normalization of this kind of sadism is a relatively new phenomenon — you’d think so by watching the news these days — but the deep history of teachers doing this kind of thing to students (long before I was ever born) proves otherwise. I certainly have a great deal of empathy for people who remember the horrible things that their teachers put them through, but there are two big reasons why I don’t go into my English classrooms and subject my students to all the horrible things that the shitty English teachers I studied under did to me: First of all, because (contrary to popular belief) I’m not an asshole; and secondly (and more importantly), because I get no pleasure out of making people suffer, especially when those people are doing me the honour of paying good money to take my class.

This whole idea of “I’m going to make students suffer the same way I suffered when I was a student” goes back to one of the most toxic ideas that continues to persist in modern society: “We do things that way because that’s the way we’ve always done things.” Some people might call that an appeal to tradition. Some might call it the lazy person’s favourite excuse. Having seen the harm that it can cause, and having experienced far too much of that harm in my lifetime, I call it a cancer on modern society. Worse yet, when this idea is combined with the kind of unbridled sadism mentioned above — especially in a culture like the one I live in now, where many people have twisted religion into a tool with which to celebrate that sadism — the idea of stopping all change dead in its tracks becomes yet another tool with which to bludgeon the less fortunate not just to reinforce their disempowerment, but just because, in their sick minds, it’s “fun” to do so.

“It’s the way we’ve always done things” is a phrase that’s far too easy to run into. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to its pernicious effects in academia because of my past experiences (and current career) there, but it’s hard to avoid seeing variants of it every time I examine power dynamics in almost every aspect of life. The fact that the phrase (or its variants) shows up so often in the news these days just makes it even harder for me to tolerate this notion whenever I run into it. I’ve suffered enough from that idea, but I’ve run into far too many people (especially among my students) who have suffered even worse, and as I keep seeing how this kind of thinking ruins life, I just get sicker and sicker of dealing with it.

Effecting change is never easy, and the people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are usually quick and merciless in marshaling their resources to stop those who would try to change things. Some of us take those risks because the danger we put ourselves in is worth the chance of making things better for ourselves and others. Some of us take those risks because we don’t have a choice. Whatever the case, we’re needed more than ever right now, not just for ourselves, but for all the others who stand to suffer if we don’t put a stop to this kind of thinking and the sadism behind it.