Modeling What You Teach

Because we have used the word "mandate" a lot in the past two years, I think we have come to believe that we weren't all subject to mandates before.  We have a lot of them, from daily things like clocking in and out on your job to the ones that may only happen a few times, like mandatory TB tests.  A stop sign is a mandate that restricts your freedom for the safety of the community.  For my entire life, I have entered restaurants with signs reading "No shirt, no shoes, no service" without viral videos of barefoot individuals hassling the hostess about it.  Rules and mandates, even those we disagree with, are simply a part of living in a civil society.  I remember a middle school teacher telling us that he had a right to swing his arm back and forth as much as he wanted but that his right ended where my nose began.  He couldn't punch me in the face and then claim that I was restricting his right to swing his arm.  

When you are a kid, you think that you won't have to deal with rules as an adult.  If anything, there are more rules when you are an adult, and the consequences are far greater.  For my entire adult life, I have had traffic rules (can't drive on whichever side of the road I want), camp rules (can't have a bottle of aspirin in the same room as kids), school rules (can't leave kids unattended), travel rules (had to have a yellow fever vaccine and MMR booster when I went to Zambia), and the simple rules of living in the world (can't streak through Moore Square).  Rules aren't new, and they are necessary.  

As a teacher, I have had many, many, many conversations with my students about rules.  One of the most important things I teach them is what to do when they disagree with a rule.  Their first instinct is to ignore it or disobey it while complaining about it.  I always ask them if they believe I agree with every rule I have to follow.  They assume that I do.  For the record, I do not.  It's not possible to agree with every rule that I am subjected to.  There are simply too many made by too many people for that to even be a thing.  But I talk to them about the right way to go about dealing with those kinds of situations.  If I really care deeply about the rule with which I disagree, I go to my authorities to discuss it and present my case or do what I can to get the rule changed by going through proper channels.  If I do not care enough about it to go through that kind of process, then I just follow the rule and hush.  I'm not talking about a rule that is illegal or immoral; that's a different and rare scenario.  I'm just saying that you don't have to agree with a rule to follow it.  Most of the rules we are talking about aren't immoral.  They are just things we don't like or don't understand or aren't the way we would do it if we were in charge.  When I worked in child care, I thought it was really stupid that we were required to keep medication in a locked box on a high shelf inside a locked closet in a room with children who couldn't yet crawl; yet I kept this regulation because it was not immoral.  When I have this conversation with students, it is good that I have these examples because they need to know that their teachers are humans with opinions but also people who submit to authority.

I intentionally did not name this post "Practice what you preach" because I think this goes deeper than that simple cliché conveys.  We aren't just talking about hypocrisy; we're talking about teaching.  When you model something different than what you say, you teach kids that what you say doesn't mean anything.  If I tell them to follow rules with which they disagree, but then I only follow the rules I agree with, I have undermined any ability to enforce the rules I have written in my own class.  I have taught them, but I haven't taught them what I hoped.  It would be like telling them how to solve a physics problem but then doing it a different method on the board for every example and then expecting them to do it the way I said on their test.  That would be confusing and unfair.  The same is true when you try to exert authority while undermining the authority of others.