If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may have a good bead on why my teaching team at school has affectionately dubbed me “The Hippie.”

I let the kids work on clipboards out of their seats. I assign homework once a week, if that. I spend inordinate amounts of time conferencing individually so I can match students with books they’ll fall in love with. And our first whole class assignment was to compile a list of, and vote upon, procedures for dealing with behaviors that violated the two root norms I gave them (participation and respect).

It’s important to note here that I list all suggested procedures for the vote, even those with which I disagree. This is one of the central components of the constructivist and autonomist learning theories on which I build my instruction. In otherwords: after laying down some tools and guidelines, it’s usually a better choice for a teacher to mainly shut up and let the kids figure things out for themselves.

I’d tweaked the rules-creating thing considerably since last year, and was really pleased with the reception. Kids were surprised, engaged, invested. I began with an idea stolen from a colleague: ask for a list of teacher behaviors that kids hate. This is an assignment for which students have no end of enthusiasm (or, sadly, material).

Among them were the hysterical (”Coffee breath. Could you people please chew some gum?”), the horrifying (”I hate it when teachers have long conversations on their cell phones in the middle of class”), the obvious (”I hate it when the teacher punishes the whole class for someone one person has done”), and this near unanimous statement: We hate it when the teacher deliberately embarrasses us in front of our peers.

Fast forward to our voting results. Imagine my seriously disconcerted amusement when out of approximately 80 kids, 42 vote to handle misbehaviors by putting the offending student in an isolated desk, in full view of all, in the middle of the room for the period. (The desk in question, ironically, was a temporary base for my digital projector and wasn’t supposed to be there at all.) The students were quite clear that the purpose of this was shame and mockery.

Interesting. Very interesting.

So I whip up a Powerpoint slide showing the voting results and the initial list of hated teacher behavior, with the bold red title: WE HAVE A CONTRADICTION. I gently ask a representative sample of my class sections to fill out index cards telling me how this contradiction could be.

Read their tallied answers, and ponder with me.

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#4: I don’t think kids took the voting seriously.

This, I think, was a key issue. No matter how earnestly and thoroughly I present a co-government model to the students, it goes so deeply against the grain of the majority of their classroom experiences that they refuse to buy in, despite themselves. Mark Windschitl calls this cultural dissonance one of the strongest forces working against constructivism in schools today. So much for our cherished myth of the Lone Ranger Teacher. (Or the Lone Hippie, as it were.)

#3: You’re not being embarrassed by sitting in a corner. You’re being embarrassed by your behavior.

A undeniably strong cohort of kids feel public humiliation to be an appropriate and effective punishment, even though– perhaps because– they hate it personally.

#2: We think it’s funny to laugh at our friends.

This commendably honest insight, you’ll note, has nothing to do with the efficacy of the punishment; it just highlights its pure entertainment. I find myself wondering all kinds of things when I read this. Is our generational gap so unbridgeable, our curricula so existentially useless, our instruction so god-awful boring, our teens’ collective media-shaped sense of humor so cruel, that kids rely on the enlivenment of a classroom solely via crime and punishment? This could keep me up at night.

#1: We don’t want to be embarrassed, but we want to embarrass other people.

It’s tempting to wash my hands of this ambiguity by attributing it to the traditionally regarded shift in preteens from Piaget’s concrete operations to formal operations. I do think there’s some broad truth to the idea that preteens are only just beginning to think outside their little bubbles. A Summer 2008 article from cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has me rethinking cognitive stages entirely, however. He makes this bold and terrifying statement: Recognize that no content is inherently developmentally inappropriate.

Whoa. So once again, it comes back to me. How am I, as teacher, actually asking my kids to move beyond their simplistic (if only human) concepts of equality and justice? How am I teaching them compassion?

And is this something I can even teach?

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I don’t think any of this constitutes an infallibly damning argument against autonomist approaches for middle school kids. However, I think it does– painfully– point out that these approaches cannot be considered some kind of magical silver anti-establishment Bullet of Happiness. (Someone needs to do a cartoon of this. Any takers?)

Let’s summarize. Via autonomy, preteens are not only being asked to stretch their moral and social thinking in an already tumultuous time, but to do so in a wacked out classroom environment which is explicitly unsupported by the infrastructure of most public schools. Additionally, unlike younger counterparts, preteens will have that many more years under their belts to internalize and solidify survival tactics in the social totalitarianism that is standard fare in both the classroom and the lunchroom. Indeed, they may be well on their way to swallowing it all with a smile.

There will be backfiring, incomplete thinking, dissonance, resistance. These challenges need to be met very thoughtfully and carefully indeed. A mere vote on whether to use a dunce cap or not ain’t going to cut it.

For now, I’ve split the difference with the kids by going with their second procedural choice for misbehaviors, which is a system of warning cards used by two other teachers on my team. It’s effective, silent, respectful, and doesn’t re-invent the wheel. But at bottom this merely sidesteps the problem of how not to become an autocrat when when what the kids want, even democratically, is something that I don’t think is right. I’ve copped out, and I don’t like it.

The Hippie has some things to think about for next year.

Dan Willingham’s website: http://www.danielwillingham.com .