Ultimatums, Part 1

All photos found on the internet

I've been thinking recently about ultimatums. As has become a practice for me, I am feeling the need to write about the topic to find out what I think.

I remember little Iris (not her real name) from my multigrade classroom in California many years ago. Iris was a smiley little sprite with stringy blond hair and iffy hygiene. She wasn't particularly energetic. She liked dawdling about, dreamy-like, wafting from her desk to a friend's desk, wandering over to meditate on the new bulletin board in the corner, gazing out the window as she slowly sharpened her pencil at the pencil sharpener. She liked listening and learning, it was just getting her work done that was not the first thing on her priority list for the day.

As a very task-oriented person which extended to my teaching, I tried and tried to get Iris on task. In order to not fall behind, she needed the practice of working her math problems. If she was going to learn to write well, she needed to write. To get decent grades, she needed to finish and turn in her assigned work. So my job was to figure out how to help her focus and finish. Reminders, rewards, scoldings, chats with mom and so on--the usual tricks in a teacher's bag--didn't work. In fact, there's nothing that can make you feel worse than to scold a little, vulnerable kid and see tears well up in her eyes, and know that she's brokenhearted because she didn't intend to offend you.

At one point the back work was piling up enough that I started feeling desperate. In retrospect, I suppose that my inability to get Iris to do what I wanted her to do felt like a reflection on my own self-worth as a teacher. In any case, it felt like time for drastic measures. The row of blank squares in my grade book testified to a mountain of assignments that Iris had not turned in. And asking for help from home had not worked (maybe I wasn't specific enough?).

I issued an ultimatum. "You just have to catch up," I declared. "So you're going to spend every recess, including lunch recesses, inside doing your work until you have everything caught up. Every last thing."

The first day it took all three recesses just to get things organized. I dumped out the contents of Iris's desk on the floor and we discovered half-eaten lunch sandwiches, crumpled up partly-done language arts papers, and math sheets with problems showing repeated erasures and re-writes. Iris sighed heavily and helplessly, viewing the pile on the floor. Soon it was me who was doing the work alongside her, smoothing out the papers, tossing old food and old home newsletters into the garbage can that I'd pulled up to beside the chaos.

Day after day we spent recess times together--at least the ones where it wasn't my recess duty; on those days she stayed inside and tried to focus herself on her own, with me keeping an eye on her through the classroom's large windows toward the recess field. If there had been no new lessons and assignments, there would logically have been an end to the work and Iris would eventually have earned the privilege to go out and play. But it was a never-ending task.  Iris sat at the group table one day, tears rolling down her cheeks from those big, discouraged blue eyes.  She wanted to be out on that field with her friends, and here she was caught pushing this Sisyphean rock up the hill, finishing something off only to have it roll down again each day with new tasks noted on the assignment board.

The ultimatum had become a nightmare for Iris and me, both. I had asked of her something that she simply could not do. I was in the wrong. We needed to find some other solution. It was time to drop it and get on with life. And we did.

For years and years I felt guilty about my stern interactions with Iris, about how I had been well-meaning but had probably made her feel like dirt, about how I had handed her that ultimatum and cheated her out of seemingly weeks of recesses when she simply couldn't live up to my standard for her. She simply could not do what I had asked of her.

And then about five years ago I just happened out of curiosity to google my own name, and saw a result that I didn't recognize.  "My Heroes," it said, followed by my name. I followed the link and there I was, on Iris's MySpace page, listed as her very first hero. I was floored. I contacted Iris, telling her how I'd found her, and wondering how on earth I got on her Heroes list. She wrote back with delight at finding me, and said she had thought I was a beautiful teacher and so nice to her, and she had always admired me.

It was grace I did not deserve.

(to be continued)