I love reading Seth Godin’s blog. For those of you unfamiliar, Seth is a marketing guru. The short, to-the-point posts he provides are usually all about marketing, selling, market saturation, and the like. And yet, reading them with a sideways glance they really speak to teaching and teachers. A few weeks ago, I marked a post from Seth that I wanted to come back to for my own blog. In part, it reads:
Stalling provides a hurdle that allows you to filter out requests.
If you put people on hold for six minutes, the trivial calls hang up. If you tell people that they can have something they’ve requested but will have to wait a long time, the unmotivated will go away. (I’m not proposing that this is a good way to handle customers, I’m merely saying that it does in fact triage the incoming requests.)
The question is, what do you do with the people who, from the start, are obviously not going to go away?
If a woman is in labor, you can try every demotivating tactic you can think of, she’s still gonna have a baby. Might as well accept this and get her a room in the maternity ward, right now. Anything else is just annoying and a waste of time.
As teachers we face these kinds of kids every day. Some kids continue to “bother” us with questions or complaints because they simply don’t want to do the work. They have a plan: Get the teacher off track and the whole class will love me.
Other kids have genuine questions, genuine concerns, genuine problems. If we aren’t careful, we’ll put them off as just another set of pesky people that bother us and keep us from what we are here to do: teach. Indeed, if we aren’t careful, we will do anything but teach.
It is a fine line to distinguish between those kids just filling up or wasting time with their questions and those who are genuinely needing our help, even at the expense of serving the rest of the class. It is a gift for some teachers. Others, like me, have to work at it. It means being fully present in each class. It means having a plan and not a straight jacket. It means filling the room with compassion and understanding rather than sarcasm and criticism.
But if it is done right….wow.