Windknots

 

                              Lessons from the Back of the Room

 

Just shut up.  Shut up, shut up, shut up.  We’re preaching to a congregation that already believes.

It’s the preaching that’s the problem.  We’ve got it right: the guy's a shyster, a grifter, and a con, but calling him out with sophisticated statistics, references to history and economics, and analyses of his warped psychology—this strategy is not going to work for the people who need to understand his blood is bad.

I've worked with a few of these folks.  Year after year since the early ’70’s in the backs of the classrooms in the rural junior highs and high schools where I've taught, I've seen them, smirking, making fart noises with their armpits, and talking about cocks and titties under their breaths when the rest of the class considers fanaticism in Lord of the Flies, disillusioned youth in Catcher in the Rye, or irony in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Arms crossed over their chests, they might as well be sneering, “You ain’t gonna teach me nothing.”

These folks haven't heard the warnings that it’ll be their willingness to consider new ideas and their ability to learn new skills that'll save them in the future.  Earning pocket wages at odd jobs after school instead of studying and learning useful skills they can earn with in the future, they don't help their struggling families.  Instead they buy branded toys that make a lot of noise burning gasoline, or clothing that connects them to some group.  Competing for peers’ attention, they know how to get it.  And when along comes somebody with a big mouth, bravado, and a rude t-shirt, they kowtow, expanding distraction at the back of the room.

Years later, with few marketable skills, little world-knowledge beyond reality TV, and anger that their wages can’t buy the marketed stuff they believe they're entitled to, they band together as adult children—calling names, bullying, threatening physical harm, deliberately ignoring rules they don’t want to understand.

How to reach them before another election?  

We stop calling excessive attention to the bigmouth.  We stop spending hours and hours refuting his drivel with big words and abstract assaults.  We ignore the insults, ignore the bullying, ignore the empty glitz.  We turn off most of the cameras and microphones, and we let the bad behavior go unnoticed, unrecorded, as much as possible.  Facts must be reported, but the more the bad behavior is reprised in social media and on TV, then endlessly critiqued by thinkers, writers, and opposing politicians, the more heroic such behavior seems to others at the back of the room.

And, yeah, (believe me, this is tough for a teacher) we ignore the plagiarism and the fact-fudging.  Of course it’s stealing and lying, but when people think they're entitled, well, they think everything belongs to them anyway, so argument won’t work.

Words abandoned, let's respond as we should to any commotion at the back of a classroom:  To a seat at the front of the room one at a time we invite each person we’d secretly rather smack upside the head.  We look the person in the eye, one-on-one, and we take real interest in that person’s humanity (family, lifestyle, personal history--whatever) .  We engage the person in honest, personable conversation, and we listen.  We learn.  We earn trust, and we value it.  

Once this happens, reasoning conversation--one-on-one--can make a difference.  Not until.