The 50-Yard Line

There’s an old Buddhist legend about a seeker named Huike who went to the cave where Bodhidharma, the one who brought Buddha’s teaching from India to China, had been sitting in meditation for nine years. Huike appeared at the cave entrance and asked Bodhidharma to teach him, only to be turned away. He stood in the snow outside Bodhidharma’s cave all night until the snow reached his waist. 

 

In the morning Bodhidharma asked him why he was still there. Huike replied that he wanted a teacher to "open the gate of the elixir or universal compassion to liberate all beings." Bodhidharma again refused, saying, “how can you hope for true religion with little virtue, little wisdom, a shallow heart, and an arrogant mind? It would just be a waste of effort.” Finally, to prove his resolve, Huike cut off his left arm and presented it to the First Patriarch as a token of his sincerity. Bodhidharma then accepted him as a student. 

 

I think about telling that story to some of today’s entitled kids who think that the teacher is there to fully understand their particular emotional needs, wants and desires, to fulfill their differentiated instruction mandates to make every lesson 100% relevant to each student’s preferred learning mode, align all their pronouns, ensure cultural relevancy, to entertain the students and reward them just for being who they are and then be prepared to be insulted or ignored by the students, critiqued by the parents, unsupported by the administrators. 

 

We’ve come a long way from Bodhidharma’s time. And some of it is good and I certainly have done my part to push along the progressive education cart by imagining that everything that didn’t work in class was my fault and then, re-shaping my lesson to engage students more fully. But as often happens, in our efforts to straighten a bent stick, we have bent way too far in the other direction. 

 

This came up in a discussion about a student at the school where I’ve been helping out. The student in question has an attention span measured in seconds, is constantly asking irrelevant questions and interrupting, cannot—or will not—stay focused on a  given task, rarely succeeds in the simplest musical activity, thinks improvisation is doing everything differently regardless of musicality and generally, steals time from the class and the other students. With the Spring concert looming, there is the difficult question of how this student can successfully participate. 

 

One solution is simply not to have the student in the concert, as the behavior clearly did not earn him a spot. Another is to find something that he  can do well, like Emcee the event and shine the light there. Teachers met to discuss it and some felt that offering an opportunity for success in something the student liked to do could be interpreted as rewarding disruptive behavior. Though I wasn’t at the meeting, my suggestion would have been to make a concrete list of behaviors that needed to be improved that required the student to make an effort and then if sincere effort and progress was made, go for the Emcee compromise. As it turned out, teachers decided to simply not have him participate and my music teacher colleague was feeling some sense of guilt, remorse and failure about it, though I had witnessed him making every effort to reach this kid. So I wrote to him and said: 

 

“Don't spend a moment of regret. You did everything you could and he did nothing. This is an appropriate natural consequence that he'll either learn from or he won't. I sometimes tell difficult kids that learning takes place at the 50-yard line. I'll walk there to meet you, you walk there to meet me. Since I'm the adult, sometimes I'll go 75 yards to your 25 and occasionally 95 to your 5. But at some point, you have to step out to meet me. You have to choose to make an effort. If not, good luck with your life!”

 

I understand that this student needs help and that he simply doesn’t have the tools at the moment to improve. But what he does need is an adult community to constantly remind him, hold him responsible, walk him through possible steps to improvement, let him know that he has to make an effort. He has to recognize how his behavior affects others and his own learning. He can’t get the feeling that his confusion or learning issues or challenges of race or gender identity or adoption status gives him a pass. He doesn’t have to stand out all night in the snow, but he does have to start walking toward the 50-yard line. 

 

Between the student cutting off his arm and Bodhidharma being sued for emotional abuse, I’m leaning toward the former. (After all, his student eventually did “open the gate of the elixir or universal compassion to liberate all beings" and went on to become the second Patriarch of Zen.) But no need to choose the extremes. Let's agree to meet at the 50-yard line, the teacher making the effort to wholly see and understand and encourage the student and the student making the effort to work hard, meet the teacher’s offering and go beyond where they thought they could. That’s where the game takes place.