Why I Compete With My Students
The boys at the single sex school where I teach play a game called “shadowboxing.” Here are the rules:
You cannot lay a hand on your opponent. This is a contactless contest, gents. There are two players who “point” and “look” in alternating turns.
Your goal is to preemptively point in the same direction in which your opponent looks.
So, imagine you and I are playing. You look in one of the four personal directions (up, down, left, right), and I point. If we choose different directions, we swap. If you do look in the same direction where I point, left for instance, then we move to a second round. In this round, you have to start by looking left. Now I try to guess which of the three other directions you’ll look in next. If I am wrong, it all resets. But if I am correct, then we narrow it down again: you have to look left, then down. At that point, I’ve got a 50/50 chance of guessing your last two moves correctly.
You would think from the intensity with which they shadowbox that the results determine placements into college or starting positions on varsity teams. There is — I used to think — an outsized celebration when one of the boys wins. It’s as though they have been shown to be unequivocally, publicly, and constitutionally superior to their poor colleague who, in all likelihood, just happened to look in the wrong direction.
When I began teaching a few years ago, I was annoyed by shadowboxing. It was a symbol of a competitive streak in my students that I felt was warping classroom dynamics. I bristled when they played it before class in the same way that I bristled when they would introduce win-lose scenarios in the classroom. But I’ve begun to see something deeper in the rules of shadowboxing: it is a striking mirror to the ways my most beloved colleagues interact with their students.
As a younger teacher, I was surprised to see how often and in how many ways my students tried to enter competitions with me. They want to know if they could outrun me or correct my grammar or make more money than me in their imaginary futures. It was, frankly, a bit unsteadying as I looked for my pedagogical sea legs.
My first instinct was to extract this competition from our relationship. I didn’t want to tussle with these kids — I wanted to teach them, for god sake! I wanted my classroom to be a fostering and supportive environment which was decisively free of any possible shame, disappointment, or deflation of self-confidence. The presence of student-teacher competition just didn’t seem to jive with that vision.
But through Dr. Michael Reichert, I found a key insight that helped me reinterpret this competitive streak. To sum up Reichert’s profoundly helpful research: adolescent boys are looking for reliable guides. If you interview a couple thousand teenage boys (which is exactly what Reichert and his team did) that’s the big takeaway. Boys are looking for people they can trust to help them make progress in life.
In this light, the competition that the boys initiate with me looks considerably different. I now realize that the students are trying to determine if I am reliable. They want to know if I am competent and therefore trustworthy.
Think about the myriad ways that students have to trust teachers. They usually can’t verify secondarily what we claim on the spot, which is to say they have to take our word for it. We grade them, which is to say we appear to decide whether or not they are succeeding. We structure the environment that prepares them for life, which is to say we mediate them to their own futures. It’s a lot to be reliant on someone for, and they are trying to figure out if we’re trustworthy.
Is it any wonder they compete with us? They want to know whether we’re ahead of them – whether we’re faster, stronger, smarter, more experienced. They want to know if we are further down the road of life. If we aren’t, then why follow us?
So I’ve started shadowboxing with my students, pedagogically speaking. The goal isn’t to best or outshine them. It’s simply to let them know that they can trust me. I teach the New Testament with Koine Greek in hand. I tell them stories about my own experiences. I don’t back down when they toss me a challenge. It’s a contactless contest where I am trying to gain their trust and direct their gaze. They can tell, I hope, that I’m doing everything I can to help them get where they want to be.
Peter Hartwig is Chaplain at Christ School in Arden, NC and a graduate of St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, VA. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies & Classics from the University of Virginia. He then went on to receive graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge (Master of Philosophy) and Princeton Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity). His writing has appeared in Comment Magazine, the Hedgehog Review, and Earth & Altar. Peter’s articles for “The Classroom” address a range of education topics and we couldn’t be happier to have his contributions.