Teaching Virtue in an Age of Affirmation

Series: The Labor of Christian Education

Die Bergpredigt by Fra Angelico, Wikimedia

This is the first in a series that will give insight into the work of Christian education from the perspective of a first-year teacher in the Baltimore Catholic school system. In this essay, Ann Marie O’Donnell reflects on her past experiences teaching in public schools, and wonders what those experiences might mean for the year ahead.

Lately, it seems impossible for me to escape the words affirmation and empowerment. Although the initial connotations of these words seem to push a positive message, I have always felt uncomfortable with them. As a future educator, I was taught to affirm and empower my students. Seems okay, right? These terms consistently appear within the educational atmosphere, especially in teacher training programs. But when you get into what the terms really mean, it raises a lot of questions.

Am I meant to affirm my students in all their opinions, even the ones that seem wrong? Is it possible for an opinion to be wrong? If an opinion can be right or wrong, is it an opinion anymore? If I am meant to affirm my students, is it okay for me to tell them that they are wrong? Where is the line drawn?

Should I empower my students to pursue all their endeavors? What if those endeavors don’t lead them to truth? What if it leads them into moral or even physical danger? Does empowering my students mean giving them authority over the classroom? Does that usurp my authority in the classroom?

I know that the teachers who use the terms affirmation and empowerment simply mean to encourage their students. The problem is that some opinions and actions simply should not be encouraged. This, however, sounds very oppressive. If I express a distaste for these terms in public, I’m afraid I’ll be labeled as authoritarian; people might get the impression that I desire to wield power over others, and that I would only like to be empowered myself. But I don’t want anyone trying to empower me because it makes me think that they believe I am weak.

As a student teacher, I observed a lot of different classes. I witnessed the efforts that many teachers made to empower their students. With the best of intentions, teachers gave students four different choices for how they would like to complete an assignment. Students were rarely expected to read or write because teachers knew they weren’t good at it. Teachers didn’t give students honest criticism on an essay but rather chose to only highlight the strengths of their writing (which were few and far between, quite frankly). Teachers gave pep talks on how resilient and wonderful the students were, but I could not help feeling that the students were being spoken down to.

Many education systems push new ideas that might sound great on the surface, but ultimately send students the message that learning does not matter. A prime example can be found in what is called the “compassionate grading system.” My older brother teaches physical education in another county, and I remember when he first started and told us about his new school at dinner one night. He explained that they used this so-called “compassionate grading system” so that students would not feel discouraged when they received bad grades. The idea was also supposed to combat issues many lower-income students were facing. Some students may work after school to support their families, while others may be full-time caretakers of their siblings because their parents work multiple jobs. Obviously, these students and their families do not have the resources they need. With hearts of compassion, Christians should desire to help people who are in situations like this. In name alone, a compassionate grading system sounds like the perfect solution.

But here is how a compassionate grading system works. A student cannot receive anything less than a 50% on an assignment if they submit it. Ideally, students would put forth their best effort. Even if they got many of the questions wrong on an assignment or two, they might be able to pull away with a decent score for the class. Since compassionate grading has been put into practice at my brother’s school, though, the system has been taken advantage of. As part of the compassionate grading system, the assignment a student submits can be completely blank except for a name at the top of the worksheet. A name-only worksheet must still receive at least a 50%. My brother told us that he had several students who consistently submitted assignments with only their names on the top. Additionally, students had to receive at least 50% even if all the answers they put were complete nonsense. My brother had some Spanish-speaking students who submitted all their assignments in their native language. They did not expect their physical education teacher to actually translate what they wrote—it turned out that they had simply translated the worksheet questions into Spanish and put that as their answer!

Does this sound like compassion? On the contrary, I believe we have sold students the message that their work no longer matters. Now, if education doesn’t matter, and knowledge doesn’t matter, and truth doesn’t matter, and work doesn’t matter—do you even matter? That is how these students feel. That is the result of a compassionate grading system, which only comes about when the sole focus of education is supposedly to “empower” students.

When I entered my internship, I started to see the results of the affirmation and empowerment mindset firsthand. While my county did not employ a compassionate grading system, they did everything in their power to avoid putting too much pressure on their students.

Let me paint a common picture for you: a student whose parents are either divorced, in jail, on drugs, or nonexistent. This student feels like their parent, parents, or guardians do not care for them. They blame themselves for the situation they find themselves in, but they have also formed a habit of blaming everyone else at the same time. They spend nearly all their time looking at a screen, because then they don’t have to think about reality. They’ve learned from adults in their life that authority is a threat, work isn’t worth their time, and relationships never work out.

Now put this child into a school system where they are one of two thousand other students. The teacher says they have four options about how to complete the assessment at the end of the quarter. This assessment should help the teacher to see whether the student has successfully retained and applied all the skills her or she was taught over the last 10 weeks. The options are: write a four-page essay, record an interview a parent, make a short film with a script, or draw a picture. Which option do you think this child will take?

I know that most of my students would have chosen to draw a picture, because most of my students were that child I described. I can say without any doubt that there is no possible way a teacher could properly assess a student’s retention and application with one drawing. The students know this, too, and they know that teachers aren’t really testing them. Teachers are pretending to test the students, and that’s insulting. Just like every other adult in their life, the child recognizes that their teacher does not believe in them either.

I understand that many of these teachers see their students struggle and only desire to build their confidence—but that’s not how it works. I tried to put myself in the students’ shoes. If a teacher spent half our class time expressing their desire to empower me and other students, I would get the impression that they think I am weak. If a teacher made assignments easier for me and never pushed me to become a better version of myself, telling me I was perfect just the way I was, I think I would lose my confidence.

I had one particular student during my time in internship, whom I’ll call Julian, and all the teachers had trouble with him. Julian was in eighth grade, and he was very much like the student I described above. Without going into any detail, Julian also had heaps of trauma piled on top of what many of my other students considered the “norm.” He was ready to pick a fight with anyone, especially his teachers. I was lucky enough to make a connection with him on the first day of school. We both liked The 100.¹ Although we could talk about this show a couple times, he still refused to participate in class. I tried asking my mentor teacher and Julian’s other teachers for advice on how they got him to participate in class. He had not turned in a single assignment yet. So, what did I learn from the other teachers in the school?

“It’s not worth the hassle. I just let him play on his phone during class. At least the other students can learn instead of being distracted.”

I had trouble keeping my jaw from dropping when this was the response I got. There were so many things wrong with it. Not only was Julian being taught that education didn’t matter at all, but the other students were getting that same message. I sat down with him one day to try and motivate him. Without looking up from his phone, he told me,

“Why should I try? They’ll still pass me.”

There was nothing I could say, because it was true! In my county, failing students simply had to be enrolled in summer school in order to move on to the next grade. The trick was that you never actually had to show up to summer school classes. The only requirement was that you should be enrolled. If you missed that, you did a two-week remediation course from home and that was basically just a series of videos that played automatically. You could hypothetically go through the entire school system up until eighth grade without doing any work if you understood how to skirt the system.

Julian was smart. He knew he didn’t have to do any work, and that no one expected him to. This attitude diffused into the rest of the students. If Julian could be on his phone throughout class and still graduate middle school, why couldn’t everyone else? But I wouldn’t let him off so easily. I wasn’t burnt out yet like the rest of the teachers. I had the time and patience to bug Julian until he would turn something in. I made it my goal to get him to turn in one assignment by the time I left. Julian would know someone was paying attention to him.

We moved on to our next unit, and our anchor text² was Chasing Lincoln’s Killer. I admit that I felt discouraged when I read the unit plan. I was not interested in Civil War history, and I did not want to teach it. I did a bunch of research to amp myself up on the topic. I decided to introduce the unit with some Civil War-era trivia and a setup of digital resources for students to explore. I had all the students stand up as I flipped through questions on the projector. If someone thought they knew the answer, they raised their hand and I passed the ball. That student would then pass to another for the next question, and so on. I asked Julian to stand up, but he wouldn’t respond to me. I read the first question on the screen. Before I could pass the ball to anyone, Julian answered it.

Shock of the century—Julian was really into history, and he knew a lot about the Civil War Era. With his eyes still glued to his phone, he told me that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States.

“Who knew we had an expert back here?” I said. All the students were looking around at each other because Julian never responded to questions in class. I continued, “But you can’t answer if you’re not playing.” I flipped to the next slide and asked the question. The question was about what causes the Union and Confederate armies fought for, respectively, but none of the students knew the answer.

“Anyone?” I asked, holding up the ball. Julian laughed a little to himself.

“Come on,” he said. He was looking up at the others.

“Do you think you know the answer to this one, Julian?” I gestured with the ball.

“The Union was—”

I interrupted him. “Ah,” I said, “can’t answer if you don’t have the ball.”

He stood up and waited for me to toss it. He explained that the Union fought for the freeing of slaves and the Confederates were against it. He added that the Union was in the North and the Confederacy was in the South. He tossed the ball when the next question was asked and sat back down. He didn’t participate for the rest of class, but my plans started forming. For the rest of the semester, every single time I made a lesson plan for that class, I made additional materials that would be more engaging for Julian. My mentor teacher told me he would never do any of them, and I knew she was probably right. But every time the other students were doing something in groups, I would go back to his desk and set something different down.

“You can participate in class today, and I’d love if you did. But if all you want to do is focus on this alternative assignment, it can be done individually and it’s pretty much the same. You can leave it on your desk at the end of class.” The first time I did this, he actually looked up at me in surprise. He almost never responded when I would bring alternative assignments to his desk, but I often saw him glance over at them or read them for a bit. By the time I left my internship, he had gone from a zero to a 5%. It wasn’t much, but I hope it was something.

When teachers focus on affirming and empowering students, they are blinded to the fact that sometimes a little pressure is a good thing. Affirmation and empowerment are not always good, and although there are circumstances in which they could be valuable, they are not applicable to all situations. I do not want affirmation and empowerment to be the focus of my future classroom. Rather, I want my students to know that they are capable of challenging tasks through their practice of virtue.

I think the issue surrounding the affirmation and empowerment culture within our schools actually reflects a deeper issue regarding values versus virtues. While affirmation and empowerment can be valuable, they are certainly not virtues.

Values typically enter conversation as semi-subjective principles. People express that they really value the relationship they have with their family. Other people who have very small families spread across different states may not value family in the same way. Neither one of these is necessarily better than the other. Virtues, on the other hand, are universal. There are few people who do not consider honesty, prudence, justice, or other virtues as essential to what it means to be a good person. At least, that’s the way it should be.

The similarity and overlap between value and virtue has caused a confusion in moral standards during our time. What we once considered values are now virtues and vice versa.³ It seems to me that affirmation and empowerment should fall into the values category—but the secular world tells us that these are virtues. This confusion is part of the reason the use of the words affirmation and empowerment make me uncomfortable. I think that there are two words that make many secular people uncomfortable: humility and obedience.

Humility and obedience are Christian virtues that directly oppose the secular values⁴ of affirmation and empowerment. If affirmation tells you that you are perfect the way you are, humility tells you that you are not. If affirmation tells you that your personal journey of self-discovery is the highest good, humility reminds you of your servitude. If empowerment tells you that you are in control of your circumstances and future, obedience tells you that you are subject to both God and others. If empowerment tells you that pride and strength are your greatest assets, obedience reminds you that you do not know everything. The secular brain says that affirmation and empowerment will leave students feeling affirmed and empowered; my own teaching experience tells me that this is not the case. The Catholic brain says that teaching virtues like humility and obedience will lead to security in one’s identity; my teaching experience has told me that this is the case.

To the hyper-individualized Western mind, humility and obedience seem insulting. However, when seen in action and understood through the Christian lens, practicing virtue is freeing. When a child is affirmed in all their choices, and empowered into self-reliance, they are left solitary. Humility teaches students to ask questions and accept their mistakes. Obedience shows students that they do not have to be perfect or rely solely on themselves—there are adults and mentors who want to take care of them and guide them. Teachers should encourage students with the fact that they are still growing.

We need to take a firm look at the way the Western world has adapted language to modernity. Language is foundational, and it deeply affects the way we understand the world around us. Helping students to build confidence is a pursuit that secular teachers and I can agree on. The difference appears in how we go about building that confidence. I propose that we re-align ourselves with true virtues and start from there.

These issues are on my mind as I prepare for the year ahead. How will I relate to my students? What do those relationships look like? How will I help them grow in virtue, because without virtue, how can we call an education “Christian”?

1. The 100 is a popular science-fiction TV show on The CW.

2. An anchor text is the main novel that students will be reading for a particular unit. All the supporting texts during a unit will have similar themes or elements that the anchor text also has.

3. For example, tolerance was once considered a value in the sense that we must be tolerant of one another’s choices (to a certain extent) in such a way that allows us to live in harmony with one another. Nowadays, the secular sense is that it is essential to be tolerant of people’s choices, regardless of whether they are seriously morally right or wrong. Anyone who is intolerant is committing a sort of “sin,” thus tolerance has been elevated to a virtue in the secular world. As Catholics, we would still consider tolerance a value rather than a virtue.

4. I use the terms ‘value’ and ‘virtue’ properly defined, not the way the secular world tells us they should be used.