Four veteran teachers share candid memories of the students they missed, and principals shares insight into how we can help those girls in the future

A baseball player who makes a hit one out of every three at bats is considered excellent. A stockbroker who consistently performs a few percentage points better than the market average is an industry leader. But when it comes to our children’s chinuch, the goal is nothing less than 100 percent success.

Teachers face classes of two dozen or more impressionable souls. They aim to reach every one, and usually do so remarkably well. Inevitably, though, every teacher has encountered a student they couldn’t reach or somehow overlooked or underestimated. Here, four veteran teachers share candid memories of the students they missed, and principals shares insight into how we can help those girls in the future

Chaya

Middle school
Brooklyn, NY
15 years’ experience

At times, you think you’re doing so well with a student, and then something shows you how tenuous the relationship actually is.

Daniella was a smart kid, and so good at hovering on the edge of the line without actually crossing it and getting into trouble... at least, not too badly. I thought I was getting through to her. I made sure to communicate my faith in her, both during class and outside, and I thought she knew how much I cared.

Still, she sometimes challenged me during class in ways that were inappropriate. I was firm but compassionate, reiterating that I had high expectations of her and believed in her potential.

After one particular altercation, I said, “Daniella, you’re better than that.” To my surprise, the self-possessed, sharp-tongued eighth-grader started to cry in the hallway. Clearly, something was going on, but I had no idea what struggles she was facing outside of the classroom.

The school policy is to share very little about students, and I had to compensate with informal sharing. “How’s Daniella doing in your class?” I’d ask. It wasn’t gossip. If I know she’s struggling in multiple classes, we need to get our act together. If it’s only in mine, do we have a relationship problem? A specific subject issue?

I learned that Daniella had a rocky relationship with her parents; they treated her like an adult, without healthy boundaries.

I decided to be totally consistent with all policies, marking every absence, and firmly following up with consequences. My consistency, coupled with my frequent reminders of my confidence in her abilities, were helping Daniella learn to operate within a healthy framework. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Since the students in our day school are pretty technologically connected, we use a course management platform and a lot of email communication in the upper grades. During one particularly busy winter, Daniella wasn’t happy with the workload, and she decided to let me know, in an indignant, disrespectful email on which she cc’ed the entire class.

I kept my cool, responding with an even-keeled reminder that I’d be happy to discuss any issue that was raised in a respectful, private setting. She responded with yet another attack.

As that point the principal intervened and imposed consequences, which the parents fully backed. Daniella wrote a politely remorseful letter and everything settled down.

But I wonder.

I’d told her I loved her and believed in her, so many times. I thought it had penetrated. But I’m convinced that if she believed me, she wouldn’t have acted as she did and reverted to the anything-goes model she’d learned at home.

I remind myself frequently that though it seems as though nothing I’d been trying to teach her penetrated, a teacher’s impact isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps the grounding I’ve given her will help her out sometime in the future, when she’s ready to apply what she learned.

What bothers me most was that our breakdown in communication could have been prevented had the faculty worked together to create a unified plan to deal with her challenges. My approach could have been far more effective if there was more cooperation in the teachers’ room.

Still, though they haven’t borne fruit yet, I hope the lessons I tried to teach will remain in her consciousness, and one day, they’ll reach her.