Hate in the Classroom (original) (raw)

2019, Finding Hope in the Turbulent Classroom

suggest that hate exists there, but not hate as it might be thought of as an emotion that exists irrationally as active antagonism-sometimes violently enacted⎯between racial or ethnic or religious groups; or between boys and girls; or even between Packer and Viking fans. That presence I will refer to as rage that stems from anger! Rather, I am going to talk about the important and necessary hate (that also, indeed, stems from anger) that is experienced between teachers and students even as that similar hate necessarily manifests itself between parents and children. In the classroom, teachers exist in relationship with students, and so I think now to explore the nature of that relationship, some of which is obvious and some of which-the part I mean to consider here⎯ remains significant but often unacknowledged. I am going to consider hate in the classroom: what I define as hate, how it may come to exist, how it gets manifested, how it may be managed, and what its presence in the classroom portends for the work we all intend to do there. Because I am certain that hate exists there: I feel it and I have felt it. I have hated and been hated., D.W. Winnicott, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst says, "However much [the psychoanalyst] loves his patients he cannot avoid hating them, and fearing them, and the better he knows this the less will hate and fear be the motive determining what he does to his patients." (1949, 69). The same might be true as well for teachers, 1 and I have become convinced that unless we account for the presence of hate in the classroom then whatever we mean to do there will be compromised. I think teachers work in the classroom under extreme conditions; if we can better understand those conditions then perhaps we can better work in them. 2 And the work we do is difficult work because in addition to the almost impossible job of teaching academic material, 3 teachers must also appreciate and engage in psychotherapeutic work for which they receive little training and less support. In his talk to teachers of mathematics, Winnicott says, "Teachers of all kinds do need to