I taught elementary school for 3 years, middle school for 17, and now I teach graduate students and do teacher training. Lately I have been thinking about the concept of grace and how it should be applied to students.
In Christian theology, grace refers to love and mercy given to us by God regardless of anything we have done to earn it. I am not talking about that, but rather the more human idea that we all deserve love, mercy, and compassion because we are human. Oftentimes I find myself, or teachers I work with, wanting to ascribe the worst motivations to students. "They're lazy". "He's defiant". "She just wants to push everyone's buttons". Here I remind myself that all of us are human, none of us is getting out of this alive, and the world can be a lonely, stressful, and scary place. How can I extend grace to my students? If they miss an assignment, is it because they're lazy? Defiant? Or is something else going on? Can I offer mercy? Compassion?
I know we often say that we are teaching them a real-world lesson by not doing so, but are we? Many parts of school have nothing to do with the real world, so is that a phrase worth parroting? Maybe school needs to be better than the real world. Maybe school needs to be a place of grace.
