Last week I wrote part 1 of my interaction with Jordan Peterson. Here is part 2, grouping several of his 12 rules for life. Discipline is one of the hardest aspects of life as a teacher. Discipline for parents can be quite difficult. But discipline is even harder when you are dealing with other people’s kids. Peterson addresses discipline in his 5th rule, “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” In this, my second reflection on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, I will dive into discipline.
We are adults – for many of us, the only adult in the room for long stretches of time. We have a cadre of young people enter the four walls of our classrooms with all their wonderful curiosity, their endearing innocence, but also their deeply vexing immaturity. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher who did not at some point want to pull out her or his hair through sheer annoyance at childish ways of acting and speaking. Our task is to inform their ignorance, to support their weakness, and to challenge their rebellion. Yes, we are the adults in the room, but we often are confronted with our own immaturity, making us feel hypocritical when we need to instill moral fortitude in our fledgling flock. Peterson describes well the paralysis parents feel when it comes to discipline.
“Modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason. They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it.”
Peterson, 12 Rules, 123
This is also true of teachers as well. We want to create a loving and caring environment, and somehow it feels like discipline would be too harsh, killing the rapport we are trying to build with our students. However, this misunderstands discipline for two reasons. First, discipline is a loving action. It is not an expression of love to leave a child wallowing in their immaturity. It is truly loving to challenge that child so that they can become empowered to grow toward maturity. Second, discipline is not something we do to the child, but for the child. It is a good thing to promote the child’s wellbeing. There is a fear lurking in the back of our minds that discipline is brutal and degrading. But when properly considered, true discipline gains for the child something valuable and indispensable. Discipline is correction, bringing a child back from error, so that they can live in harmony with the world around them. Peterson gets at the heart of what correction is.
“Without that correction, no child is going to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader social world. It is no simple matter to organize a mind.”
Peterson, 12 Rules, 126
The greatest difficulty teachers encounter with discipline is finding proper methods. Physical discipline carries the connotation of abuse. A long talk amounts to a lot of hot air on our part with little impact on the child. I worked with a student once who gave frank and open feedback that all he needed to do was sit through another lecture, and then he could go right back to doing what he always did. When we see a child doing wrong, our own emotions often get involved, clouding our ability to discipline effectively. Peterson is perceptive in his understanding of what our response ought to be.
“It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child. It is not anger at misbehavior. It is not revenge for a misdeed. It is instead a careful combination of mercy and long-term judgment. Proper discipline requires effort – indeed, is virtually synonymous with effort. It is difficult to pay careful attention to children. It is difficult to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child’s care.” (pg. 124)
Peterson, 12 Rules, 124
Despite the difficulties discipline entails, we know we must discipline. Understanding that children aren’t born with an innate sense of how to comport themselves in academic settings helps us to perceive the nature of our task. “They do so,” that is to say, push against the boundaries, says Peterson, “to discover the true limits of permissible behaviour.” (pg. 126) When we push back, we are telling our students that they have gone beyond the limits. They need to hear “no.” It needs to be clear, direct, unflinching and uncompromising. Children should learn how to respond to “no” well, without tantrums, negotiations or deviancy. This is the boundary. Cope and adjust.
Beyond the “no,” children also need to learn how to receive correction. Teachers should begin by giving students specific, honest feedback, without emotion. Teachers should be constantly watching everything their students are doing. Don’t let anything go unnoticed. Even better, be noticed noticing. In other words, tell your students what you are seeing. Note the chair tipping, the slouch in the back row, the line that’s not straight, the knowing glance between the girls, the goofy drawing a student is trying to hide under the math textbook. After only a few callouts, the students will know quickly that nothing gets by you. This is of first priority, far above the content you’ve planned to cover for the day. Clearly set your standards. No tipping in your chairs means absolutely no tipping. Otherwise, don’t make the rule in the first place.
Charlotte Mason teaches about natural consequences, which I think is an idea in concord with Peterson’s thoughts here. Too often we think about meaningless rewards (a sticker on a completed assignment, or candy distributed for good work) and harsh punishments (with visions of Victorian rods in the hands of robed lecturers). Natural consequences, though, provides a means of supporting proper habit acquisition without the pitfalls of the less natural alternatives. Mason writes about discipline, or the dealing out of rewards and punishment.
“[Discipline] has its scientific aspect: there is a law by which all rewards and punishments should be regulated: they should be natural, or, at any rate, the relative consequences of conduct; should imitate, as nearly as may be without injury to the child, the treatment which such and such conduct deserves and receives in after life.”
Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 148
When a child is grown, the adult world doesn’t provide stickers for completed work or strike blows for indolence. The reward for hard work done before deadline is leisure time. The consequence for missed deadlines may be the loss of a sale or the mistrust of a colleague. How do we apply this idea of natural consequences in the life of the student? Mason speaks most often about the loss and gain of free time. A student disrupting class during a lesson would spend time in the classroom while the rest of the class goes out for recess. The child who finishes all exercises in math can now spend time reading their favorite book or drawing. The severest natural consequence is a poorer life due to the inability to take responsibility. But the long view is difficult for a child to take in the immediacy of the present disobedience. So we must think creatively about ways to impress upon the child the consequences of their actions. I recall a time one of my colleagues took a group of boys who couldn’t keep their shoes tied to spend their lunch tying and retying their shoes. Another example is the teacher who expected lines in the hallway to be straight and silent. The consequence? Repeat the journey as many times as it takes to get it right.
Peterson’s rule to not let children do things that cause us to dislike them sounds like it is centered around our preferences and sensibilities. But underlying the rule is the wellbeing of the child. A child in disobedience causes an impulse in us, and we should respond to that impulse by investing time and effort in the correction of that child.
Enabling children to take responsibility for themselves is the basis of rules 2 and 4. There comes a point where they need to supply their own energy for their own improvement. Rule 2 states, “treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” and rule 4 states, “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” How one deals with oneself makes a big difference in gaining confidence and a sense that one’s life has purpose and meaning.
As teachers, we are called upon to help our students. We help them to understand new ideas, we help them to acquire new habits, we help them to bring order to the chaos of their daily routines. But we do them a disservice if they never help themselves. There must always be a transfer of responsibility from us as teachers to them as people developing toward maturity. We help them because it is impossibly complex to acquire all that is to be learned all at once. We map out a course of instruction to help them building on what they know and encounter what they don’t yet know. Peterson explores this idea by contrasting chaos and order.
“You can’t tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you’re learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood, and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then, you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
Peterson, 12 Rules, 44
Peterson’s reasoning is sound. It points to an understanding of education as bringing order to chaos – the chaos of human existence. And once students have caught the idea that they are the ones who bear the burden of responsibility to shape the course of their lives, they are able to find meaning in their lives.
This blends into the other rule, to “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Personal, incremental growth is really what matters, not whether I’m better or worse than the person next to me. There will always be someone taller, smarter, or faster than me. Get over it! It doesn’t matter. Whether I have done something – anything – to improve myself is fundamentally my point of comparison. We live in a competitive world, and there is no shortage of data ranking us against others, whether it’s standardized tests or how many “likes” we get on our latest posts on social media. We want to win, and we feel it keenly when we lose. But there are more important things in life than winning.
“I should be winning at everything. But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning, but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.” (pg. 88)
Peterson, 12 Rules, 88
The growth mindset is a superior goal to the static/fixed mindset, according to Carol Dweck. This is exactly what Peterson is pointing to. Effort, consistent and concerted, is what makes a person stronger academically and physically. Unfortunately, most students think of themselves in terms of a fixed self image. “I’m not really a math student.” or “Music is my thing.” These static ideas have underlying them the idea that the person can win at music but not at math. Instead, redirecting students to the idea that you can grow both as a math student and as a musician will benefit the student long term.
I find this idea most hard to implement when handing back tests. As soon as there’s a big red number on a paper, students rank themselves against the numbers their classmates received. Obviously, we all need to learn how to handle competition. There’s no denying that there are winners and losers in all kinds of fields of endeavor. However, helping them to see how their score relates to their personal growth trajectory instead of how they rank against their peers would be a more meaningful piece of feedback.
Obviously, this impacts us as well as teachers. How often do we compare ourselves to our colleagues? I’m reminded of Jason’s post on practicing education. I might find my lesson plans inferior to someone else’s, but are they at least better than they were yesterday? I might be struggling to get the level of discussion out of my class that I see other teachers getting. How do I make a plan for myself, though, the gets some forward movement where tomorrow’s discussion is at least a little better than today? Ultimately, the value of Peterson’s book is that it impacts us as teachers, because we are both modeling what it means to live a meaningful and purposeful life as well as training our students towards these same ends.