JONATHAN JANSEN | What’s love got to do with it?

Mondays, I have found, are the toughest days for teaching high-school children from challenging communities. They seem agitated. So this week I tried something different. As my grade 9 science class shuffled around with dragging benches creating a screeching noise and chit-chat all over the place, I stopped the commotion. For the next few minutes, I told them, each would share with the class ONE thing for which they are grateful.

To be sure, many in the class have a whole lot of things to grumble about such as the lack of basic material necessities that middle-class children do not have to worry about. “I will start,” I told the learners hoping to free them up to share their own items of gratitude. “I am grateful to God,” I told them, “for the privilege of being able to teach you. You changed my life.” Then it happened, one of the most beautiful moments I had ever experienced in a high school classroom.

I am grateful to simply be alive, said one, coming from one of the dangerous areas of the Flats. I am thankful for my parents, offered another. I am very grateful to you as our teacher because I have learnt so much from you.

In my half-day job, I have come to understand the connection between love and learning. To be clear, this does not mean the absence of discipline

This is not easy, said one student, because we don’t do this. I know what she meant; in tough neighbourhoods, this is not how people, young or old, talk. Suddenly, my class was calm, and I could teach them about the use of universal indicators in chemistry and how to read the degrees of acidity off a pH-meter. I love you and respect you, I told the grade 9s.

These moments with precious children reminded me of one thing I know for sure: that the most powerful form of discipline is love. That in the harshness of education where examinations drive school cultures and humiliations follow underperformance, what’s love got to do with it?

A lot actually. Children sense whether a teacher cares about them or not. Their ability to listen to you depends on whether you are able to connect with them. That is why online schools for children fail the majority of learners. They need to be seen and, more than that, recognised. A soft hand on a troubled boy’s shoulder can be just the calm the child requires. A high-five with the teacher after a learner does well in an assignment makes a huge difference. Touch matters.

The gratitude exercise opened up the heart of a child when so much counts against them in the surrounding community. My father died in a shooting on his way to church, one learner confided. Not much solace on the outside and yet schools and teachers can amply provide the discipline of love that makes acceptance and learning possible.

Teaching, moreover, is all about connection. That is why, years after leaving school, children — now adults — do not remember expertise in a subject or the range of pedagogical routines that a competent teacher brings to the act of teaching. They remember a teacher who cared, who walked the extra mile and who loved them.

It is a decidedly uncool conversation, this love thing, when schools are more likely to talk coverage given crowded curriculum or BOT (back on track) programmes to ensure better matric results. I understand. But in the process we pay scant attention to what really makes teaching efficacious — and that, unashamedly, is the power of love.

In my half-day job, I have come to understand the connection between love and learning. To be clear, this does not mean the absence of discipline. Tough love is crucial especially when out-of-control learners turn on teachers and deny through their behaviour the learning opportunities that brought the rest of the children to school in the morning.

Tough means the insistence on good behaviour; love means enabling that behaviour to emerge as in the gratitude example. Tough spells out consequences for bad behaviour; love implies a second and even third chance when a child backslides into wrong. Tough sets boundaries beyond which behaviour is unacceptable and could lead to suspension, even expulsion; love means finding other pathways for that child to pursue education outside the school.

The call to love in teaching is therefore not a free-for-all attitude in which children can do as they please. It is a love that disciplines, that guides, and that is crystal clear about consequences.

In the end, you cannot force a child into submission; you can only love them and, in the process, hope that they take the upper road.