Recovering character over credits

I worked with a student last year with whom I was supposed to help "recover" a credit. The student had failed a grade 10 math course. We worked on her math skills, but I was more interested in recovering her dignity, her belief in her capability and value as a person.

Perspective matters. Imagine an education system that focused on justice and equality rather than competition for the highest marks, where the highest goal would be to seek the most just solutions for today's challenges, where seeing a struggling student would lead one to infer they needed to be cared for, not to be disregarded as lazy and disinterested.

A caring relationship requires relating and that requires empathy and compassion. Building a relationship requires trust, which requires vulnerability, and that's too often where things break down. Being vulnerable means that you may experience emotional and psychological pain, your own and another's. It seems our most common response is to defend ourselves from vulnerability.

Realistically though, how can a high school teacher who sees over 100 students a day find time or emotional energy to build relationships and care for so many? Valid question. But we can't ignore our students' reality. Caring about others is a first step in caring for. Modeling care will help develop a community of caring.

A few months into the semester this math student in my care gave me a written proposal to hold a fundraiser with computer gamers to raise money for people in need (this was a student in government care). She both wanted to raise the image of gamers as people who care and to help others. Her personal goal was to run her own charity some day. Without regret, we put the math aside and got to work on her proposal.