Teachers, both real and fictional ones, often work to create school cultures devoid of cruel teasing. In many ways, teasing is rejection, which we try to shelter our students from. But lately, dealing with junior highers contemplating the adults they will become, I’ve been mulling over whether we threw a baby out with the bathwater when we decided that rejection and teasing were completely bad. We laud difference so much in our topsy-turvy Enlightened culture that we have stopped considering whether the differences that students are teased for are worth defending.
Take for example a student teased for enjoying books. People questioning his decision should cause him to question his decision. Are they teasing him because he reads books, or because he traps people into listening to him recount the minutiae of a complicated plot? (Sorry for doing that repeatedly, Dad.) Reading is great, but having someone challenge him about it is also good, even if just causing him to establish what role books have in his life. Or what about the student who chews with her mouth open? Sweet, “nice” classmates will merely avoid her; others might complain about having to sit across from her without explaining why they don’t want to. Both behaviors will make her feel bad in the moment, but her poor table manners can alienate her if it persists into adulthood. Having a peer teasingly say, “Gross! I don’t want to see that!” once or twice could help her see a need to improve, which could save her from more rejection. People can change these behaviors. I think that’s where we well-meaning teachers lost sight of the issue. Jordan Peterson tells of a species of bird in which the male creates art to court the female. If the female rejects the male, he will destroy his art and improve it until a female accepts him. The bird doesn’t give up after one attempt; the bird doesn’t pout, defend his art, or call everyone else haters. He accepts the rejection and improves because of it. (This process of giving feedback to produce improved work is something we teachers are trained for, incidentally.) Students teasing others about things that they cannot change is wrong; students teasing others about things that they can change is an opportunity for growth, just like the bird’s art getting rejected, just a student getting a low score on a quiz. We could brush the rejection aside and assure the teased student that he is better than the bullies. Or we could talk with all students involved about why one group thinks the behavior is teasable and whether the teased student thinks that behavior is worth keeping in the face of rejection. If it is worth keeping, the discussion will encourage him and may challenge naysayers’ thinking. Last week, my roommate told me about her evening, which gave me a hint to my students’ future. She had gone to a party where a mutual friend tried to set her with a friend. As we hashed out the night, I asked, “Do you think you’ll see this—wait, is he a man or a boy-man?” Perhaps an odd question unless you, like my roommate and I, are a woman who has dated in the adultescence era. Even though the guy in question was a man, the question prompted a continuation of an earlier conversation: why are women just supposed to accept that many guys don’t become men until they are married with kids? Every church I have ever attended has a men’s group. Do they really just talk about the Bible and never apply it to practical moments of telling the boy-men how to become men? Do the older men really never come alongside the younger men and guide them into socially appropriate interaction? And if not, why aren’t they? Students check each other’s behavior through teasing. Adults seem less sure about how to address social ineptness. Most often, we ignore it, avoid the person, or complain about it to another person. A truly brazen person might tease the socially awkward person, but then reduce the truth by claiming it’s just a joke. A student doing something not normal in that social setting will have someone ask, “What are you doing? with the subtext of “That’s weird. Are you sure you want to do that?” I don’t think adults should behave like students, but I wonder what we are missing that we have so many stuck in adultescence. I remember my mother when, as a child, I hovered on the edges of her conversations, telling me to go away. She taught me that my behavior was not polite: either join the conversation or leave, but don’t stand there creepily watching others have a conversation. It’s easy to do that with your child; it’s hard to do that with a peer. But unless we step up and kindly say, “That’s not okay; try this instead,” they won’t have opportunity to learn. They aren’t learning from rejection. And unless we guide our students through teasing and rejection, they will become the socially awkward of the future.
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