Trust and Listening Are Needed for Learning

by Marlena Hirsch January 2010
I work for the Home and Hospital Program of Santa Rosa City Schools. We teach students who can’t attend schools due to illness and a variety of other reasons. I believe one of the unspoken reasons some of our students end up on this program is that they have given up. They are discouraged. The following is a description of the early stages of working with a discouraged teenager.

One of my students had a tough exterior. When I first met her, she acted like people on the Jerry Springer show who loudly display their disputes as if they are proud of making a spectacle. She was so far behind that she wanted to take the high school equivalency test. Yet on two practice tests, she got 12% correct. I spoke to her about why she was in this situation hoping we could gain insight on how to correct what had gone on before. Why hadn't she learned this material? Did she have trouble focusing? Were there distractions in her life? Had she ever been comfortable with school? Assuming that I was putting her down, she became angry. When I was talking to her, she talked over me so that she couldn’t hear me. I informed her that when she does that I can't teach her. She continued becoming more angry and saying she wanted her other teacher from last year. I told her that her previous teacher doesn't teach high school equivalency test preparation. I prepared to leave. She left the house. As her mom and I were talking in the front yard, her mom began to cry. She told me she had tried everything and didn't know what to do. Her daughter returned at that moment and saw her mother crying. I was hoping this would have some calming effect showing the daughter that her mom cares. Hoping she would listen to me, I again began to talk. This time I got right to the point. I told her I was angry that our education system was failing students like her and that the high school drop-out rate was over a third in her neighborhood. Beautiful young people like her were not being served, and I wanted to try to correct this.
She decided to try again. The next day she tried another grammar placement test in the front of a grammar book with the same dismal results. We worked on the first lesson. When I talked to her about how she learns, she bit her tongue and listened. She was not happy about it, but she listened. At the end of the hour, I asked her what she learned and she said she had learned to listen. It is from the solid foundation of trust and listening that learning takes place.
Two months later, we enjoy our lessons together. She wrote an essay about learning from her mistakes. I told her, “ I see learning from mistakes as a hallmark of maturity.” Getting to this point was a gradual process of building trust and learning to enjoy working together.