Lots of viral buzz about a post, on a blog called cuppacocoa, from a teacher named JoEllen, about how she makes her class apologize. Some of her ideas work for me; some emphatically don’t. Let’s discuss!
Have you read the post? OK, I like JoEllen’s notion of urging kids to:
a) say precisely what they’re sorry for.
(In her words: “Wrong: I’m sorry for being mean. Right: I’m sorry for saying that nobody wants to be your friend.”)
b) say WHY their actions were wrong.
(“Wrong: This is wrong because I got in trouble. Right: This is wrong because it hurt your feelings and made you feel bad about yourself.”)
c) say what they’ll do differently from now on.
(“Wrong: In the future, I will not say that. Right: In the future, I will keep unkind words in my head.”)
All very SorryWatch-y. But I take issue with her final step, asking, “Will you forgive me?”
JoEllen says, “This is important to try to restore your friendship. Now, there is no rule that the other person has to forgive you. Sometimes, they won’t. That’s their decision. Hopefully, you will all try to be the kind of friends who will forgive easily, but that’s not something you automatically get just because you apologized. But you should at least ask for it.”
I disagree. Asking to be forgiven at the same time you apologize puts the onus back on the person you’ve wronged. You’re the one who has screwed up; you have no right to cap your apology with a request for a quid pro quo. Effectively, you’re making asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness equal, and nope, you’re only entitled to the asking part. If the other person wants to volunteer forgiveness, great, but I don’t think you’re being fair by ending your apology with a request for absolution. Give the other person some time to stew, for heaven’s sake. If he or she doesn’t say “no problem” immediately, wait a while and then go back, apologize again, and ask to be forgiven. (This is what the philosopher Maimonides suggested back in the 12th century, as we’ve noted.)
But JoEllen truly lost me with an anecdote about forcing one of her students to apologize.
Usually, it was the same kids that weren’t paying attention and held up the whole class. One day, surprising even myself, I stopped, turned to the offending student, and demanded, “Apologize.”
“Huh?”
“Apologize. To me.”
“Um…” he began, looking around bewildered, “I’m sorry for… not paying attention. This is wrong because… I wasn’t paying attention…”
“Try again.”
“…because you’re upset?” he offered.
“Nope.”
“…because I’m not learning?” he asked.
“Yes, and?”
“And because…” he glanced down nervously.
“Because,” I finished for him, “Now the whole class is waiting for you and you’re wasting our time.”
“Because the whole class–”
“Start from the beginning.”
Yeah, I can be pretty tough on them sometimes. Tough love.
I don’t think this is tough love. I think this is shaming a child. JoEllen points out that this kid is a repeat offender in terms of not paying attention. Is it possible that he has ADD, ADHD, or some other learning issue? Is it possible that he wants to be a good student, but has a hard time not daydreaming? Granted, I’m reading this situation through two filters: that of a parent whose child until recently had an IEP (a specialized education plan because she had trouble with attention and motor skills, with sitting still and staying focused), and that of a person who isn’t a follower of a Christ-centered philosophy, as JoEllen is.
My daughter, now in fourth grade, desperately wants not to tune out. She tries hard. Sometimes, though, in spite of her good intentions, she goes off into her own wee dreamland. This past Sunday, she sobbed late into the night, anxious that she couldn’t understand her notes about the homework because she’d been in la-la-land when it was assigned. She actually wound up doing two DIFFERENT essays (one about Central Park and one about Prospect Park, because she’d written “Brooklyn Central Park” in her notebook and wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do). Then she second-guessed herself and wound up handing in the wrong assignment. What if her teacher had embarrassed her in front of the class for tuning out during the lesson? How would that benefit her or the class?
So no, a teacher demanding an apology for poor attention doesn’t sit right with me. And it’s not just me. I recently read a delightful, if not so Christ-centered, book called How to Be a Mentsh (& Not a Schmuck) by Yiddish scholar Michael Wex (Harper, 2009). He quotes the Talmud: “It is better for a man to be suspected of adultery with another man’s wife than for him to shame his fellow in public…an adulterer is executed by strangulation, but has a portion in the world to come, whereas one who shames his fellow in public has no portion in the world to come.” Ooh.
I didn’t know that little snippet of Jewish ethics, but I did know that in the Jewish tradition, someone who causes someone else embarrassment is said to have committed a sin akin to murder. (The exact phrase in the Babylonian Talmud is “If anyone makes his friend’s face turn white in public, it is as if he spilled blood.”) As Dr. Erica Brown, Scholar in Residence at The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and author of several books on Jewish life and leadership, points out:
The Ba’alei Ha-Tosafot, medieval commentators on the Talmud, explain that true embarrassment whitens the face. All the blood that gathers in the face at the moment of embarrassment drains from the face leaving the skin white and ghastly. The Talmud focuses on the height of embarrassment – not only its sudden shock but the after-shock. The immediate impact of what was said to us or about us has left, and in its place are the awful consequences, the change of public opinion, the humiliation.
i cannot shame this lobster-eating jew. i have tried.
Recently, we got an email from a reader telling us what her sister, a new preschool teacher, had learned from her Master Teacher about apologies. The Master Teacher had said that the words “I’m sorry” don’t inherently mean much to a four-year-old; most think of those words as the syllables you have to say to get out of trouble. (JoEllen’s experience clearly dovetails with this. So does mine.) But where JoEllen urges her students to name what they’ve done wrong to take the “I’m sorry” to a meaningful place, this teacher suggests that rather than forcing a kid to apologize, “have the child ask if there is anything they could do to make things better for the insulted child.” Our correspondent says that she’s adopted this strategy herself, finding that it works for grownup life too.
I’d argue that the combo of apologizing ALONG WITH trying to figure out what to do to make things better is the truly mature approach to seeking forgiveness. (Better than asking the other person what you can do is to simply do it, if the path to making things right is clear. Again, if you can possibly avoid putting the onus on the other person, bear it yourself. But if the path to redemption is murky, then yes, asking what you can do is the way to go.) We can’t expect our kids to get it right from the get-go. That’s what modeling good behavior is about, and that’s what education is about. Start in the way you wish to go on. We all sin. We all screw up. We all owe other people apologies more often than we’d like.
I think the Christians and the Jews can agree on that. But the question for every individual, every parent, every teacher, is how we get from the mistake to the expiation.
people of all ages and faiths like cake.
When I was teaching at a school for kids with learning disabilities, we did a lot of role-playing for the simple fact that I agree that some children who have trouble tuning in to frequencies outside their own head often miss social cues. So, we practiced them. We practiced apologies, too, because we frequently needed that exercise. I am not a fan of forcing forgiveness, nor would I have ever required the class to apologize to me. This is the opinion of a childless person here (and while I believe I’m right, I’m just giving any parents the opportunity to get off at this exit and say “she doesn’t know what she’s on about,”) but many children – not all, by any means, but many – don’t see adults as anything but extensions of themselves sometimes for a long time. You know how infants are — they see the ability to get up high, get a bottle, get dry pants, period. We’re caretakers, drivers, and medical personnel. Maturity gives them the ability to see us as “Hey, Mom is someone other than Mommy…” and to allow you to take on other identities in their eyes, but you can’t demand maturity at apology-point in the middle of a classroom, especially if you have a repeat daydream-y offender who might not be able to help it.
I did sometimes tell my students, “When you guys are noisy and don’t want to listen, I feel…” usually something like “taking a nap” or something, because we practiced articulating feelings. However, again: mine were the least important in that room, because I’m the grown-up. School is not grown-up time, it’s kid time. I’m a facilitator, not the main event. If this sounds ridiculously self-sacrificing, trust me, there was plenty of time during my free periods when I locked the classroom door, wouldn’t allow them to come in for ANY reason, and read a book at my desk. I’m sure parents delineate that sort of time, too.
I like the scholarly discussion the Talmud provides in this. When we were kids, I remember big thoughts on things like “Thou shall not kill,” and how “kill” wasn’t as cut/dried as it appeared; that you could kill someone’s reputation, their sense of self-worth, their joy. These philosophical explorations make the entire discussion more meaningful.
Great, great comment, Tanita. Thanks.
Yes, thank you.
“I’m the grown-up.” That really nails it for me.
Agree. great comment, Tanita.
IJWTS, Having been apologized to both with and without an accompanying request for forgiveness, I must say that “with” gave the apology an added urgency and weight (the person was apologizing for a pretty dreadful deed committed years before). It didn’t feel to me that i was obliged to forgive her, more: that she honestly wanted to know whether I could forgive her, that this was something she needed to know, and if i hadn’t been there yet, she would’ve accepted it. I saw it more as an opportunity for me to let go of any resentment i might’ve still harbored. Forgiveness always feels like something i do more for myself than for the apologizer anyway. But that’s going off on another tangent.
However, I can see how being asked for forgiveness cd make some people feel put upon, and how it may not be appropriate to train little kids to ask in a rote way for someone to forgive them.