Students Need Skills to Say No to Fist Fights

We must teach conflict resolution, empathy and individual responsibility [2] to students as deliberately as we teach math and science. Schools will not get better until we do.

The following is an excerpt from a journal I kept during my second year of teaching in New Orleans:

Yesterday it was police dogs.

This morning another one of my students was in handcuffs.

A special-ed student. In my class last year. Rarely caused much of a disturbance. He would try when I could sit right there at his shoulder. When I could walk him through the steps and help him spell words most first graders know. This morning he was the 3rd arrest on campus [3].

At 7:25 a.m. the dean and supervising teacher wrestled a pair of boys into the office where I was busy talking to the secretary. The first boy was screaming, his mouth full of blood. "I'll f*cking kill you motherf*ker! I don't care! I f*cking put my life on that!" And he knelt for a minute before they could grab him again. He crossed himself like we do when we eat at Grandma's house.

The other boy was so enraged that the dean, a fit woman from the inner-city, physically pushed him into a seat, while the on-campus cop got the other kid into his corner. My vice principal, very rationally said, "Okay, you've gotta act like a student now."

Three minutes later, two girls were at it. The [other] kids were all standing on the bleachers, stadium-style. Some of them pumped their arms and chanted. Many were laughing. Not the clear, silly laughter of children though. It was harder than that.

I had a really hard time understanding it when I first arrived here: their near-obsession with fighting. But I've come to understand it more. They have to fight so often [4]. For attention from adults. For enough to eat, for a fair shot, to not-get-shot [5]…  fighting at school is usually safer, easier than those other fights. At school, you know that there's going to be someone to pull you apart. Socially, you prove that you're not "scary" (their word for "weak"), but you don't run so much of a risk of the other kid having a gun on his hip as you would if you started the same thing on the street. At least at school, you get some attention, and all it might cost you is a black eye or bloody lip. And as a spectator, you get some aggression out vicariously, and cheer because:  1. It's a distraction; and 2. It's not you.

I altered my lessons that day so we could watch Obama's speech to students, an annual event in which the president addresses students all over the country and encourages hard work, good study habits and goal-setting. It made for a good discussion of personal responsibility.

We can't forget that we, as teachers, are responsible for teaching that too. 

We live in an age where the ability to recall many facts is no longer a valued skill. We are also living in an age where violence is glorified and the gap between rich and poor grows wider everyday. Even if it’s not in the job description we get from HR, it is our responsibility to teach empathy and conflict resolution. I don’t believe most educators go into the profession because they’re passionate about content standards. I believe good teachers teach because they want to make students’ lives better. Undermining violence is one way we can begin to do that.

We can explicitly teach alternatives to fighting. We can use one period of enrichment a month to teach strategies for peacefully addressing conflict. We can establish peer-mediation groups [6] in our classes and schools. We can work toward a restorative justice [7] model to address issues like fighting. There are a million small steps we can take to start chipping away at this overwhelming, violent reality.

We can. 

And we must.

Craven is a middle school English teacher in Louisiana.