Children mimic the behaviors that are modeled for them.

Children, to an excruciatingly acute degree, mimic the behaviors that are modeled for them.

Kids are new to this world, trying on different phrases, actions, and identities, and their frame of reference is limited to their frame of exposure: their peers, the adults in their lives, and the people in the books they read and television and films they see. These are their examples of how to be in this world. The more prevalent a given behavior, the more likely it is that they will mimic it.

Children will often come home from school and, much to their parents’ dismay, try out new four-letter words they picked up on the playground. Older siblings will put their hands on their hips and reprimand their younger brothers and sisters using the exact words that they have heard from their parents. Children at play will take on the roles of characters they like or people they know, experimenting with new mannerisms, modes of speech, and even responsibilities, as doctors or soldiers or magical beasts. I remember seeing the movie Mighty Ducks as a kid. Immediately following the film, and for days afterward, I wanted to play hockey. There was a new type of experience in my ever-expanding frame of reference, and I wanted to explore it.

This process of absorption and mimicry is a key component in growing up. Children start their lives as empty vessels and logically piece together the tapestry of their own identities out of the patchwork of their own experience. It is a fascinating process, and an essential one, and it can and does create an infinite number of possibilities and variations among all who undergo it.

The problem is this: what if a child’s frame of reference is exclusively negative? What if their peers, the adults in their lives, and the fictional characters to whom they are exposed are largely dishonest, unreliable, short-tempered, and violent? What if they live in a world where the behaviors that are modeled for them on a daily basis are deeply destructive? What if the principles underlying those behaviors are the pervasiveness of hopelessness, the raw power of violence, and the inevitability of failure?

Well, then, that’s what they will mimic.

That is the problem I am facing.

My students are surrounded by negativity on a scale I did not, until recently, know existed outside of the world of fiction. They are exposed to gang violence, corporal punishment, gross disrespect, drugs and alcohol, unemployment, and failure—every day. They are 10, 11, and 12 years old. They are threatened by teachers and hit by security guards. A mother of a seventh-grader came in drunk to a parent-teacher conference earlier this month. I called in one parent to deal with a challenging student and she screamed in her face and threatened to beat her in front of the whole class.

The results: students roam the halls threatening teachers. There is a pregnant eighth grader across the hall from my class who is carrying a baby as a present to a boy who is in jail. There is a sixth-grader two doors down who supports his family by dealing drugs and comes to school high.

In my own classroom, there is very little respect. Students talk throughout lessons, yell at me and their peers, steal things, throw things, simply walk out. They tease each other, threaten each other, fight each other. I never know on any given day whether we will be able to learn something in this building that is still referred to as a “school.” My despair at the lack of respect comes into sharper focus when I see how much worse things get when a substitute is in the room. It would appear that they do ‘respect’ me, after all… relativity has become a coping mechanism.

There is a pervasive and sinister belief lingering in the whispered depths of the teachers’ lounge and the front office and the graduate school classes and the conventional wisdom in general. It states that ‘these kids’ must be treated differently from ‘normal kids.’ They need, essentially, to be dealt with harshly. That is what they know. That is what they ‘respond to.’ Otherwise they won’t ‘take you seriously.’

I hate the phrase ‘these kids.’ It stinks of repulsion and otherness and comes attached to a racially driven superiority complex most recently brought into the public eye by John McCain’s reference to then-candidate Barack Obama as “that one.” It is a separating mechanism, and I have spewed its hypocritical venom more than once. It is an excuse.

To argue that ‘these kids,’ by which we mean poor minority students, need to be dealt with differently is not entirely untrue. In fact, all students need to be treated differently. All teaching should be culturally responsive. All students deserve to have their experiences and frames of reference taken into account by their teachers.

To argue, however, that we must yell at them in order to gain their respect, is idiotic. To argue that our effectiveness hinges on our ability to mimic the oppressive structures under which they struggle on a daily basis is barbaric. It is an idea fraught with logical fallacies, because the truth is that while it is “what they know,” it is certainly not “what they respond to.” They may shut up for a minute. If this is the goal, then we have solved the problem. But if this is not the goal, then we have not found a solution, because after being pounded into submission, students will rise again, with startling resilience. And they will once again test the boundaries of disrespect. The reason for this disrespect?

It is what they have had modeled for them.

It is inherent in virtually every interaction they experience.

Children mimic the behaviors that are modeled for them.

This is the ugly truth behind the state of urban education.

Students are simply responding to their world. They show us what they have been shown, every day. It is all too easy to take it personally, and virtually impossible to move forward with understanding in the heat of moments that we never thought we would experience.

But it is true.

And it is devastating.

And it is the clearest reason I can come up with for the utter destructiveness with which they go about their days.

* * * * *

If I have learned anything over time, however, I have learned that the surest way to prove the truth of something is to prove the truth of its opposite. This situation is no different.

While this pattern of modeling and mimicking may lie at the epicenter of the problem we face, it also presents an obvious, dare I say simple, solution.

If children mimic what they see, we must change what they see.

We must model what we want them to mimic.

For some students, it may take days or weeks or months to sink in.

For some students, it may take years.

For some students, it may not work.

However, to treat ‘these kids’ in the way that ‘they are used to’ is to perpetuate the cycle that has brought them to us as bent and broken innocents. They arrive in our classrooms years behind their higher-income peers in their academic and emotional growth, yet decades ahead of pretty much anybody in their exposure to negative worldly experience. To treat them as they have been treated—to mimic, in the end, the behaviors that we see them model for us—is to infantilize our own intellect and accept defeat. If that is the path we choose, we can sit down now, for it will take us no effort and lead us nowhere. We can simply throw in the towel and await our pensions.

Or, we can try something.

We can try to show them what it is to be respected. Rather than demand their respect, we can try to earn it. Not earn it by disrespecting them, but earn it the only way true respect can be earned: by showing it. Honestly.

Why not combat violence with non-violence, impatience with patience, negativity with positivity, feelings of failure with feelings of success?

Certainly, our sphere of influence will be limited, and we may be a few voices among many. But we’ve already got a foot in the door. We see them every day. And if children really do mimic what they see modeled, then it will only be a matter of time before they mimic what we model.

So we need to model wisely.

We need, also, to allow them to inspire us. They are resilient. They show up again and again and again. They try again and again and again. They cope. They have not disappeared. Helen Keller said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

Rather than survive by perpetuating, let us overcome by changing.

We won’t succeed every day.

But if we are not willing to try, then we are willing to fail. And if we are willing to fail, we have no business being their teachers.

I need to block out the same negativity with which they cope all day long. I need to buck the conventional wisdom and refuse to accept, as one teacher down the hall brilliantly put it, that “what I’m seeing is the truth.”

What I’m seeing is simply mimicry.

And they are still young enough to mimic something new before they cement their ways.

Let us give them a new type of experience in their expandable frame of reference that they can explore.

Because they are, after all, children.

And I am, for better or worse, their teacher.