Let's Stop Weaponizing Good Things by Making Them Do Things They Can't Do

If we could stop weaponizing relationships and other good things in education, I think this would be a profession that would be a lot more sustainable, and I think we could be a lot more effective in a lot of what we do.

But we seem to have this tendency to take a good thing, like building relationships with your students, and then overpromise on what that can do, and then take away something else that needs to work with it.

like consequences and then kind of beat people over the head with the original good thing, which has now become a bad thing.

Are you seeing this happen in your experience where, you know, relationship building is important, but relationship building is of course not an alternative to having consequences for serious safety issues.

Like if you have a student who's violent, well, you're probably going to need to send that student to the office and the office is probably going to need to send that student home if they're being violent.

But a lot of educators are being told, well, just build a relationship or they're being asked, what did you do to build a relationship with the student?

And in some cases, they're being told, you know, to do things to diffuse the situation.

They're being asked, well, what did you do to set the student off?

And of course, there are good things implied there, like don't do things to antagonize your students.

Of course, none of us want to do that.

Do build relationships.

That's very positive.

But when you flip that around and weaponize it and take away something that is necessary for it to function correctly, like relationships only function correctly if there are healthy boundaries.

Relationships are not a solution to violence, right?

Relationships are not an answer to unsafe behavior.

Relationships depend on the boundaries that we need to keep people safe, to keep ourselves safe, to keep our students safe.

So I guess there's just a big difference between knowing for yourself that something is important, like building relationships with students, and being told that by an administrator or by a coach or by a consultant or by a therapist or by someone else, that you need to do that good thing as a way to get out of a problem that that is not really the solution to, right?

Like if there is poor discipline in your school, if there are not predictable consequences for bad behavior, you might be told that relationships are the solution to that, but that's never going to work, right?

Because relationships can't happen in a vacuum.

They can't happen without boundaries.

And I think we just have to be on the guard for that kind of weaponization of a good thing.

Another thing that is good, but that can become a bad thing if it's weaponized in this way, is restorative practices and kind of conflict mediation between students.

And I've said before that I think there are some books that are good on restorative practices for resolving conflict or beef between students.

You know, if you have kids that are gossiping about each other or just have misunderstandings or friendship issues or they're not getting along, or, you know, the kind of he looked at me or she said this, you know, kind of just low-level stuff that's not really a discipline issue, restorative practices can be great for that.

But if we weaponize them and say, well, now restorative practices can handle all discipline issues, even violence and drugs, well, now we're into dangerous territory.

So is this happening in your world?

Let me know what you think.