I myself have never had any "authority" problems, though I use a friendly approach. I feel genuine respect for students and want to meet them half way. However, I have never taught in an inner city school where mildness is taken for weakness, and I'm not sure how well my methods would work there.
Mostly I've taught at the college level & in functional urban schools.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- MIchael Y: "What do others think of this scenario? I used to teach workers in Johnstown, PA. Steelworkers mainly, and therefore mostly men. It could be a rough group, profane and macho, to use Wojtek's word. No grades and none of your standard teacher-student inequality. I asked a women with whom I taught if she was interested in teaching a class. She said yes. I was glad since we didn't have many women teachers in this program, and she grew up in a mining town nearby and, I thought, would be connected to the students because of this. However, she lasted one term. She couldn't deal with the men. I was disappointed, thinking that she should have dealt with the situation from the beginning, and if she had, the class would have gone smoothly. I wondered, too, if the authoritarian atmosphere of the college classroom, to which she had no trouble adapting (I had observed her class at college, and a woman I know told me that she was extremely dismissive of views with which she did not agree), !
hadn't made her incapable of dealing with the more egalitarian (if male and somewhat macho) classroom of steelworkers."
[WS:] I think women in positions of authority (such as teachers) often face the threat of not being taken seriously and tend to resort to formal procedures to maintain their authority. My wife often tells me about teachers eagerly using disciplinary means against even mildly disruptive students instead of trying to de-escalate the situation. However, de-escalating means abandoning the authority position and developing a more personal relationship with the student, which carries a substantial risk of being altogether dismissed or even attacked. So it is a lose-lose situation: if she tries to play by the formal rules she is seen as a bitch, if she tries to be develop more personal approach she is dismissed as being "too feminine." Sticking to formal rules and authority structures at lest gives her some backup which she otherwise does not have. So the reaction of your colleague is hardly surprising - she could hardly afford giving up the only defense she had in this situation.
-- Wojtek
"Modern conservatism is just a neoliberal gloss on medieval domination." ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk