My mother died the night before I began 8th grade. The next morning, I went to school carrying a kind of grief I could not understand, much less explain. Instead of participating in my morning class’ discussion, I was fidgety and doodling in my notebook as a coping mechanism until I felt calm enough to join the class. My teacher interpreted that disengagement as misbehavior, decided it needed correction, and threatened to call my father—who had just lost his wife.
I do not tell this story because schools should ignore difficult behavior. They cannot. Teachers must protect learning, maintain boundaries, and respond when a student disrupts a class or harms another person. But educators make a serious mistake when they treat behavior as proof of character before asking what the cause may be.
That morning in 8th grade taught me how quickly a struggling child can become the problem in an adult’s story. The adult saw something I was doing. The adult did not see what had just happened to me. A response intended to make me behave instead deepened my distress and left me with a memory that has lasted for decades.
More than 20 years of work with young adolescents—as a teacher, administrator, instructional coach, professor, and school-based therapist—have shown me how ordinary this misunderstanding can be. Grief may look like defiance. Anxiety may look like avoidance.
Sensory overload may look like disrespect. A shutdown may be labeled laziness. A literal response may be heard as sarcasm. None of those possibilities excuses harm, but each should change what an effective educator does next.
I learned this lesson again during my first year of teaching 5th grade. One day, I found a student sitting in our classroom library and throwing books across the room. From his cumulative education folder, I knew he had experienced severe abuse and significant emotional disturbance. I could have raised my voice, reprimanded him publicly, or demanded an immediate explanation.
Instead, I went and sat beside him.
Sitting beside him did not mean that throwing books was acceptable. I knew that trying to reason with him before he was able to self-regulate—or manage his behaviors and feelings—would not teach the lesson I wanted him to learn. Calm came first. After I sat beside him and waited patiently for a moment, he gradually began to mirror my calm demeanor. Once he had settled, I asked a few gentle questions about what had upset him. He appeared to recognize that he may have frightened his classmates. Some reassuring words and an invitation to take part in the science experiment we were about to begin helped him become interested in rejoining the class.
Years later, another student who had witnessed that moment in class told me she still remembered it. What stayed with her was not the disruption. She remembered that I had not insulted the child, shamed him, or turned him into the “bad kid.” She saw compassion joined with boundaries and she told me the experience helped inspire her to become a teacher.
Her memory reminded me that an educator’s response to one child also teaches the children who are watching. When teachers shame a student who is unable to regulate their emotions, classmates learn that vulnerability is dangerous. When teachers ignore harmful conduct, students learn that boundaries are meaningless. But when an educator calmly responds, students see another possibility: A person can be responsible for their behavior without being reduced to it.
Teachers can put that principle into practice in their classrooms with a brief change in sequence.
- Regulate before reasoning. A student in an overwhelmed state may know the rule and still be unable to use the emotional, social, or neurological skill the moment demands. To regain a sense of stability, teachers can look for individual signs of stress and consider the group’s overall emotional state and then respond calmly and avoid making the distressed student the center of attention. Afterward, teachers could offer a constructive way for the student to reengage with the class.
- Separate observation from judgment. Teachers should describe what happened without assigning a motive: “You left the room,” rather than, “You do not care”; “You raised your voice,” rather than, “You are disrespectful.” Then, ask the student what skill was missing or inaccessible. Did they need help with emotional regulation, communication, perspective-taking, impulse control, boundary recognition, or repair? Adults cannot teach a skill they have replaced with a character judgment.
- Take accountability. Compassion is the refusal to confuse consequences with condemnation, not the absence of consequences. In my experience, when speaking with students arguing with friends or classmates, once emotions had settled, I would encourage them to examine what was behind their anger or jealousy and consider what they admired or wanted to emulate. We talked about redirecting that emotional energy toward constructive action and relationships. After the immediate conflict had passed, students were better able to think about how their actions affected others and what they could do differently.
That approach does not require teachers to diagnose students, become therapists, or uncover every private detail. Often, educators will never know the full story. It asks only that we leave room for the possibility that behavior is incomplete information.
The adult who confronted me on the morning after my mother’s death could not have undone my loss. But a pause, a private question, or a moment of human curiosity might have changed how I carried that day with me. Educators have to make rapid decisions under enormous pressure, and no one responds perfectly every time. Still, one question can interrupt the rush from behavior to judgment: What might be happening underneath?
A child’s hardest moment should not become a permanent verdict on who that child is. We can hold students accountable, protect the classroom, and teach necessary boundaries while remembering that the behavior in front of us may be only the part of the story a child knows how to show.
