Extraordinary Emotional Issues
Some strong emotional reactions may be short term and the impact short lived, such as a feud with a friend, anxiety over a test, or a fight at home. Or they may represent long-term, cumulative, and more significant psychosocial issues, such as being convinced one is a failure, homelessness, abuse, or mental illness. Some adolescents and even middle elementary students bring a sense of aliena- tion and hopelessness to school that manifests alternately as withdrawal and disengagement or defiance and hostility. Consult Chapters 15 and 16, “Per- sonal Relationship Building” and “Classroom Climate,” which contain more guidance for working with these students. The issue for these students is not discipline; it is motivation and meaning. Whereas the foundations for orderly classroom life that are presented in this chapter are necessary for alienated stu- dents, they are insufficient; those foundations will not be enough to get them engaged. Students who do not believe school has anything for them in life or who have given up on their own capacity to improve their lives through educa- tion require reaching beyond this chapter. The “Arenas” section in Chapter 14, “Expectations,” and the teacher behaviors laid out there aim directly at students who do not believe in themselves or in the value of school.
Despite all the best efforts in responding to these issues, there may still be a few students who resist learning and do not function well in school. They may be passive and withdrawn or act out severely and consistently. The final section of this chapter addresses these students—the few, not the many; the troubled, not
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the norm. There are at least seven major systematic approaches for dealing with resistant students, each cohesive and each different, and they are all effective if used with the right students.