Dec 6, 2020
When I apologized, I taught students a lesson and learned one
https://www.vnews.com/column-keane-vn-032517-8871807
Paul Keane
The Valley News
When I apprenticed as a high school teacher in 1986 at Whitcomb High’s English Department in Bethel, Vermont, I was 42 years old, not exactly a wet-behind-the-ears kid fresh out of college.
It was definitely a mid-life career change, and a friend’s wife, who was a teacher in Connecticut, gave me one piece of advice: “ Never apologize to your students” she told me.
She was wrong. Dead wrong.
Over my twenty-five years of teaching (1986–2012) one of the most successful behaviors I learned was to apologize out loud in front of the entire class as soon as I realized I was wrong or had been unfair.
If I lost my temper at a particular student, I would apologize to that student out loud by name, and then to the entire class for having embarrassed the student.
I learned to say these words on the first day of classes after a few years: “ I am big (6’2”) and I am loud and if my tone of voice or loudness hurts your feelings please tell me, because feelings are not negotiable. They aren’t right or wrong. They simply are. And if I hurt your feelings I want you to tell me so I can apologize and let you know I did not mean to be rude.”
If I did not realize I owed an apology until after the class was dismissed, I always began the same class the next day with an apology rather than starting off as if nothing had happened. If it was over a weekend, I often suffered apprehension while waiting to offer the apology which I knew was owed.
By the time I retired, I had come to believe that apologizing in front of the entire class was one of the most important things I could do as an adult. My apology let young people know that they were important not simply as learners who performed tasks to demonstrate that I was teaching them a curriculum, but as human beings whose feelings were equal to mine, even if they were only 16 years old and I was 42 — (and later the year I retired 67).
It was an equalizer between us. Otherwise the teacher-student relationship was simply one of power based on grades.
Around my fifth year of teaching in 1990 or ’91, teachers were told to give a survey to students on the last day of class to better understand how students felt about the experience of being in the course. I threw the standardized group-think survey away and created my own.
One of the questions I asked was “Did the teacher apologize when wrong?”
One time, and only one time, in the decades I administered that survey I got an answer to that question which made by heart beat with delight. One student (the surveys were anonymous so I have no idea who it was) answered with this wonderful word: “Always!”
“ Always!” I felt proud that day.
I felt I had grown as a human being to be a better person. And I felt glad that one of my students appreciated the effort I had been making to honor students’ feelings with the dignity they deserved.
Have I continued to grow? Am I perfect? In fact, I emailed an apology to a relative just before I typed this piece. I was short tempered on the phone and said a few words I regret.
I know a leader in Washington who stubbornly holds that apologizing shows weakness.
I wish he could have been in my classroom and watched my students’ faces when I said “I’m sorry.” They were always silent, as if I had said something sacred.
And I had.
Paul Keane is a retired high school English teacher living in Vermont.
