The Boy the Staff Room Has Written Off

Thursday lunchtimes, in your room, with the door open because that is the rule, and he sits in the fourth seat by the window and does about eleven minutes of actual work.

Year nine. He is fourteen and he is not a difficult boy, which is the part nobody outside believes. He is a boy who has stopped, and stopped is different from difficult, and stopped is much harder to write a report about.

Nobody had a meeting. That is what you keep coming back to. There was no moment where anybody decided. It happened in a staff room, in fragments, over about two terms, in the way those decisions always happen: a raised eyebrow, a comment about his brother, a resigned tone in somebody's voice at the end of a hard week.

And now there is a consensus about him and nobody can point to when it formed.

Two colleagues have said something to you this term. One of them is somebody you genuinely admire and who has been teaching for twenty-two years, and she said, kindly, that you have thirty other children and a finite amount of yourself.

She is not wrong about the arithmetic.

Last Thursday he asked you a question about something that had nothing to do with the work. It was a real question. He waited for the answer.

You have not mentioned that to anybody in that staff room, and you are not entirely sure why.

The keeper asks for one more year

There is a short parable of Jesus about a tree that has produced nothing for three years.

And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.Luke 13:8-9

Look at the keeper's speech, because every clause of it matters.

He does not argue that the tree is fine. He does not dispute the three fruitless years or accuse the owner of impatience. He accepts the whole assessment.

And then he asks for a year, and offers to do the work himself, and he ends with and if not, which is an honest clause that most people would have left out.

That is not optimism. It is somebody who knows the odds asking for one more season and volunteering for the digging.

You are standing exactly where that keeper stood. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture has the keeper say let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, Luke 13:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person asking for a year rather than demanding a guarantee.

Your colleagues are not the enemy

Put this down before we go on: they are not against that boy.

The one you admire has been doing this for twenty-two years. She has watched people your age burn out on exactly this, and what she is protecting is not the department budget, it is you.

And the arithmetic is real. There are thirty other children. Some of them are quietly having a hard year that nobody has noticed because they are compliant, and compliant children are the easiest people in a school to overlook.

We are not making a villain out of a staff room. There is a version of this page that turns you into the only person in that building who cares, and it would feel wonderful and it would be both false and corrosive.

You have not been asked to choose between hearing her and keeping Thursday. Scripture says in the multitude of counselors there is safety, Proverbs 11:14, and the Holy Spirit is as free to speak through twenty-two years of experience as through a parable.

The part where I would say change it

Now the honest half.

If Thursdays are eating the only break you get, change the shape. Twice a month is a real thing. Ten minutes at the end of a lesson is a real thing.

If you are doing this because you cannot bear that nobody else is, that is worth saying out loud tonight, because that is grief about a school, and grief makes a poor engine and it will run you into the ground.

And if there is anything in that boy's situation that belongs with safeguarding rather than with a Thursday lunchtime, that is not a question for a Christian article. That goes to the people whose job it is, today. Scripture puts the protecting of a child above every other consideration in the room, Matthew 18:6, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to handle that alone.

You are not required to prove anything by wearing yourself out. Scripture says a bruised reed shall he not break, Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in your classroom on a Thursday with a clipboard.

The part where I stand with you

And here is what I will not let stand.

A consensus formed with no meeting is not a professional judgement. It is a mood that hardened, and everybody in that staff room would say so if you asked them directly, which is exactly why nobody ever asks directly.

That boy has been assessed by a process that nobody would defend if it were written down.

And you have information nobody else in that building has. He asked you a real question last Thursday and waited for the answer. That is not on any system. It cannot be entered anywhere. And it is a fact about a fourteen year old that the consensus does not contain.

You are not standing on results and you never were. Scripture says be not weary in well doing, Galatians 6:9, and the Holy Spirit does not read a child off a staff room's tone at the end of a hard week.