Gang Banger in the Classroom – Principle # 4 – Understanding

Intolerance for Ignorance 

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”- Fourteenth Dalai Lama   

One of the great qualities of all the world’s most influential religious teachers such as; Buddha, the Prophet Mohamed, Confucius and Jesus Christ, was their demonstration of patience and understanding for the ignorance of their followers as they endeavored to take them to deeper levels of knowledge, wisdom and spiritual insight.  For example, there are many examples of the Disciples of Christ asking for an explanation and greater understanding of the sometimes very unorthodox teaching of Jesus.  What patience and understanding he exemplified for us teachers as he walked the Disciples through their ignorance and into the deeper knowledge of eternal truths.  The tolerance and understanding, skill and simplicity with which he dealt with their ignorance serves as a good model for any would be teacher, aspiring  to reach the not so easy to teach.   Ignorant is what we all are when it comes to a new area of knowledge, and the gulf between knowledge and ignorance can be deep and wide depending on a number of different factors such as age, culture, background, language, emotional health, and motivation to learn, just to name a few.  The wise teacher is aware and empathetic to all these factors and assumes nothing about those they are about to teach a particular subject.  They keep in mind that they were also once ignorant of many things and it was because of someone who had the patience and tolerance for their ignorance that allowed them to grow and gain the knowledge and expertise they now possess. 

This understanding and attitude helps students to learn and not be afraid to show their ignorance to a teacher who they feel safe with because they are assured, encouraged, and understood by the “master teacher”.  Thus, tolerance for ignorance is an essential quality teacher’s need.  The effective teacher knows that expertise or knowledge of the subject matter is not enough, but must be coupled with understanding of their students in order to effectively communicate and cause the transfer of knowledge from the learned to the ignorant.   The ability to take what is difficult and make it simple, or at least seem simple, is the teacher’s task.  

 “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”- Hans Hofmann 

A teacher is one who clarifies, sheds light on a new path, and while this is not always easy, it goes a long way in the class room where students are dependent on the teacher for growing in knowledge.  However, if the teacher does not possess this quality of tolerance and patience with the ignorant, it can make for a frustrating time for both the teacher and students. I’ll never forget an incident that took place in my seventh grade math class, which was loaded with the “lower track” students, in regards to our capacity in math problem solving.  One day the teacher was frustrated because we just weren’t “getting it” and he decided to pick on one of the students by asking him in front of the whole class what the “obvious” answer was to the problem he was showing us on the chalk board.  I remember sitting there as the teacher continued to ask my friend for the answer and berating him each time he answered wrong, to which we all laughed for each wrong answer and to which the teacher grew angrier and angrier.  “Come on Stephen, this is one you can get right” I remember saying to myself as we could all see the anger building up in the teacher’s face.  He finally called my friend up to the front of the class to embarrass him even more and finally grew so angry that he slapped him across the head (Back then a teacher could get away with that as corporal punishment had not been outlawed yet) because he couldn’t answer what was a seemingly easy problem to figure out that he had been explaining for most of the time in the class.  The class suddenly grew silent and I will never forget the look of embarrassment, humiliation and loss of dignity on Stephen’s face that day due to the teachers’ lack of tolerance for ignorance.  It wasn’t that my friend knew the answer and was just trying to give the teacher a bad time to make the class laugh at the teacher.  He really did not know the answer, but worse yet; he was really trying to figure it out as we all laughed and the teacher got angry.   This might seem like an extreme example, but, the point is the student in the above scenario did not learn, grow or advance in knowledge that day and I can’t help but wonder how often this occurs in the class room, particularly with “at-risk” youth, where the teacher has little tolerance for student’s who can’t “keep up” and either doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to go the extra mile to re-explain in different terms, exercise patience or try to understand what is holding back a student or the class from growing in their learning of the subject matter at hand.  Don’t get me wrong here (especially if you are a teacher reading this), I am not suggesting that a teacher put up with consistent defiance and lack of cooperation from unmotivated students in their classes.  I have been on both sides of that equation and understand quite well that a defiant, unmotivated student is sometimes beyond the patience and tolerance I am talking about here.  Nevertheless, it is also sometimes true that a teacher needs to acknowledge their lack of tolerance for ignorance, and I suggest that one way to counter this is by responding to ignorance with understanding first and then seek to be understood by the student.  Dr. Stephen Covey calls this one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; “seek first to understand”, and I believe if teachers practice this principle with students who are having difficulty grasping the knowledge in a particular subject, it will eventually produce the transfer of knowledge needed. 

There is something very liberating to the soul when it feels “understood”.   The quote below was taken from a study that was published in 1960, Mexican American Youth: forgotten youth at the crossroads, by Celia S. Hunter of Hunter College (Random House).  It is very interesting to read this study and realize that not much has changed in the public schools since that time.  But for our purposes here, this quote re-enforces my suggestion on the principle of tolerance for ignorance, especially when it is understood that many Hispanic/Latino student gang members are coming into the situation with cultural, environmental and emotional handicaps and any hint by the teacher that gives these students the perception of inferiority, is a sure catalyst for the ongoing statistical nightmare of the Latino student drop out rate; “…the teacher probably occupies a strategic position for influencing Mexican American upward mobility.  One gains insight into the potential importance of this position when talking with Mexican Americans who have been occupationally successful.  Careful questioning reveals that there is almost always an individual, often a teacher or principal, whom such mobile persons credit for their accomplishments.  For example, a Mexican American college graduate described his school history; “I was discouraged about even going to elementary school until I reached the fifth grade…I had been kicked out of four schools already as a problem child.  In the fifth grade, at California Street School, the principal, without asking any questions as to why I had transferred, asked if I wanted to be a safety monitor…from then on I became interested in school in spite of the fact that I was afraid the other boys would razz me for being a school stooge.  Another Mexican American, a student at the University at California, testified: “As long as I live I will never forget a sixth grade teacher I had…her encouragement made me want to make something of myself.  She planted the seeds of college in my head…words of encouragement and acceptance meant a great deal to me.” – (pg. 49, 50) 

As I have been careful to point out in my book, Got Gangs?”, in my opinion the parent has the major role in assuring the future success of their children.  However, second to the parent is the teacher and my hope is to encourage the teachers role as an inspiration to high risk Latino youth in the classroom, and exercising or developing tolerance for ignorance is one way of doing so.