What It Takes to Win

Learning as tactical advantage
(photo credit)

Like at all schools in the district I believe, my high school uses Aeríes to management its student data. When I first heard the name of this student information system (SIS), I thought that for some reason my teacher had mentioned the Roman god of war (I’m still a little unclear why the database was named after a bird of prey, which is only a little better than a god of prey). But the misconception stuck because in fact there has been something elusively militant about each of the instances that I have looked up a particular student in this database: either I’m wondering about previous behavior interventions, or about how far their test scores have fallen, or whether they are SED (socio-economically disadvantaged), or whether they live at an address requiring them to take a long bus ride to school, or whether their parents both work, and where, and did they graduate from high school, or whether an AP has entered counseling notes, or really any reason that students might have a violent reaction against short blond English teachers or short blond teachers’ content delivery or classroom management. Aeríes gives me nearly endless ammunition to use in my battle to understand my students and their performance, whether they like it or not.

Do I sound a little reluctant? Yet acrimonious? Until this week I would have continued to grit myself against using the system and used it anyway.

But this week Aeríes helped me to deflect the nearest miss to my teacherly identity yet. When a conflict with a student mushroomed from a verbal tiff during class to a walking away from me after class to a third-hand report from the student’s case manager to a spectacular personal insult (as spectacular as an insult can be coming from a high school freshman), I armed for battle. Not to understand the student, but to understand her documented identity. All of those elements listed above—where she’s been and what conflicts she’s been in before and how they were handled—any hint or whiff of why she and I ended up in a clash and how I might possibly find some—any—point of mutual contact with her—all of those elements were available to me through Aeríes within five minutes.
External conflict with this student hasn’t been resolved, but my own internal conflict has. And now I’m conflicted about that.Being able to learn about a person—even a student, whom sometimes we forget are people too—from a distance with limited firsthand conversation gives one a sense of power. And teachers need power. In order to manage the classroom education of dozens or hundreds of power, we need power. Informational power.But the more I know about my students from records and documents and cum files, the more the power of their identity becomes shared between them and me. They may not like it or they might not even know about it, but I have a say in their identity because I have a say in the way their identity is documented.

All I know at this point is that I want a truce. I want my students to have much of a say as possible in who they want themselves to be and how that information is stored and communicated and passed along to the next people in their lives who facilitate their learning. If there’s any hope for armistice, students need to own their identity more than I do.