What really came through to me in both of this week’s readings was the need for teachers to be more empathetic–the way a friend (or really any caring individual) acts. A friend gets to know you. As a corollary to that, a friend knows what your interests are and how you work best, and probably what you could be better at too. But a friend would never be rude and callous enough to just tell you what you’re bad at. If they did, they wouldn’t be your friend very long. Instead, knowing you and acknowledging your shortcomings, I think most friends usually try to help you slowly improve in your less-than-shining areas by helping you along and focusing on what you already have. Think about the first time you went to a school dance and you didn’t know how to dance and so you embarrassed yourself. Did your dance-savvy friend ridicule you? Make you feel lesser? No. Of course not. That’s not how friends behave. Friends work together. They’re in the same boat, both working for mutual benefit.

But all too often that’s just how teachers behave. Maybe not with such harsh terms as ridicule, but doesn’t the result often feel the same? Think back to the teachers you hated, and why. Did they roll their eyes when you asked a stupid question, almost as if you were an annoying underling who just couldn’t seem to get it right?

In my experience, the teachers who got the most respect from their students–and the ones who got the most hard, sincere work out of their students–were the ones who treated their students like equals and like people they sincerely cared about. And what’s most interesting to me is that it seems like if a teacher starts from this point, only good things can follow. It seemed to me that most of the points in Dunn’s article essentially stemmed out an attempt to be more compassionate towards disabled students; to empathize with them and see their perspectives and insights as valuable, the way a friend would.

Now of course this is overly simplistic (we clearly shouldn’t be too involved in students’ personal lives), but I just wanted to expand upon an insight Mitchell made because I think it’s a useful way of re-imagining the role of a teacher in the classroom and I think it’s a really useful perspective to start from.