JONATHAN JANSEN | Honest conversations are so important with young people with behavioural problems

It is a memorable line from a favourite movie where Jafar muses of Aladdin, “Beneath the dirt and patches you are a diamond in the rough.”

Every school has a few of them. Highly talented students with mild to severe behavioural problems. Sadly, schools do not always know how to deal with young people, often cast aside as misfits. They see only the dirt and patches and make judgments that can cost the individual, the family and society the benefits of such a talented persona.

It is not easy and I had a fair share of such encounters with the brilliant and dysfunctional these past 22 months. When I confronted an extremely rude student she responded with such venom that I backed off.

The ego bruised, the first and understandable instinct of a teacher is to impose discipline by bringing the pupil to book. If that is all you have in your school management arsenal, you could be kept busy with command and control reactions for a very long time. This pupil was top in her class on a consistent basis. The first response, hard as it is, is to understand why such a prodigious talent would unravel day after day.

A bit of scratching might reveal a broken home, a father who left without notice, a life unsettled by having to move to a crowded bedroom with relatives for financial reasons. That child comes to school angry with an explosive attitude to adult authority.

A different approach is needed. One is to sit down in a calm setting without judgment and ask what is going on. There might be no responses for a while. Trust must be built, care shown, and in most cases the young person will open up to a sincere adult.

The approach has to be both firm and understanding, clear about the expectations for behaviour while at the same time open to listening to the learner’s issues or struggles. Build the relationship. In serious cases, assign a professional like a counsellor or psychologist. Make much of the pupil’s achievements in the right forums. Pull her aside when necessary because now you have earned the right to call out bad behaviour. Find opportunities for self-care and personal development; schools are overrun with requests to help young people. Mix and match, the right workshop for the right student.

It always astounds me how a fuller curriculum can bring out the best in talented youth who are at risk from sliding into the kinds of activities that do them harm.

This is where honest conversations are so important with young people. Make them aware of the consequences of the imbalance: clever on the inside but dysfunctional on the outside. No employer will hire you because you are a risk to the company. Smart is not enough.

Then there is the real possibility that the smart, seemingly dysfunctional student is, quite simply, bored. This is what happens to highly talented children when they feel less challenged in environments where teaching tends to sink to the lowest classroom denominator. You are lucky if the clever kids simply tune out and fall asleep in class; sometimes, out of sheer frustration, they act out their boredom.

Once again, it is easy to attack the symptoms of the problem when the underlying reason for the behaviour is not addressed. Few teachers know how to do differentiated instruction well — stimulate the top kids, remediate from the bottom and keep the middle (neither very smart or very slow) interested as well. For the unstimulated child, this is an invitation to spend their latent energies on unproductive or disruptive activities.

It is nice when you have a school where the highly talented student is also a highly disciplined student; these are the kids who become prefects, teachers’ pets. But how do we keep the talented-dysfunctional kid in the game?

One way of doing this is to encourage every school to have an enrichment programme, a curriculum that goes way beyond the essential CAPS subjects that get you through school.

Good schools have a healthy balance of programmes from choirs, eco-clubs, robotics, gymnastics, hiking groups, athletic teams and more. These activity sets are outlets for youthful energies, distractions from the routines of subject teaching, and opportunities to excel beyond the math and science classes.

It always astounds me how a fuller curriculum can bring out the best in talented youth who are at risk from sliding into the kinds of activities that do them harm.

Unfortunately, one of the saddest responses of schools to out-of-control youth is to medicalise their charges. Everything is ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Medication can slow you down and make you less of a burden for exhausted teachers. In the process, we misrecognise a special child: one with prodigious talent but without meaningful interventions that calm their more dangerous selves.