Jeans Passes Are Infantilizing
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that requiring teachers to purchase permission to wear jeans is infantilizing and unprofessional.
Key Takeaways
- It's either OK or it's not - If jeans are professional enough to wear with a pass, they're professional enough to wear without one
- Don't create artificial scarcity - Making comfortable clothing a 'privilege' that must be earned or purchased treats adults like children
- Professionalism is about performance, not pants - Judge teachers by their teaching, not their wardrobe
Transcript
Are jeans passes a good way to reward teachers?
I got a message from a teacher in a school where the principal is constantly sending out emails about how you can earn a jeans pass as a reward for doing something.
I don't know, helping out, staying late, I don't know.
exactly what you do to earn a jeans pass.
But my reaction was that, like, this is not good leadership.
This is not what instructional leadership should look like to take something that is either okay or not okay.
Like, I don't know if it's appropriate to wear jeans in your context, if the culture is such that that would be considered too casual or if it's okay.
Like, I don't have a problem either way.
But the idea that the privilege of wearing jeans should be restricted artificially so that it can be doled out as a reward.
Let's think about that for a second.
How insulting is that?
How infantilizing is that to teachers to say, it's okay for you to do this.
It's okay for you to wear jeans, but only if I say so.
Only if you please me by jumping through some hoop.
People can tell how infantilizing that is.
People feel it.
when they're not treated like professionals and when they're treated in ways that are like basically manipulative, right?
It is manipulative to say, you need to jump through this hoop for me in order to get to wear jeans, which should be kind of like a basic workplace expectation anyway.
And again, if your setting is more formal and jeans aren't really appropriate, then that's fine, but they're not appropriate in that case, whether you have a pass or not.
Like the whole pass idea just makes no sense to me.
Like, why would you have a pass to do something, like if it's okay with a pass, it's okay without a pass.
Like it just doesn't make any sense.
And we have to understand that teachers are adults and professionals.
And sometimes people forget that because we're working with kids.
We think, hey, what kid doesn't like a prize?
What kid doesn't like a treat?
Okay, well yeah, kids like prizes and kids like treats and adults like them too, but that doesn't mean that you should turn your staff into this kind of token economy experiment where you dole out these little rewards.
Take your staff to Chuck E.
Cheese and see how that goes.
See if that's a thing that people like.
It's not.
So if you want to get people to do things, what do you look at?
Well, look at intrinsic motivation.
Look at being a good leader.
Look at being competent.
Look at giving people a reason to do the things that you care about And don't try to like bribe them with dumb things like gene passes.
That's my take.
Let me know what you think.