I Had A Student Storm Out of the Classroom

I’ve had students walk out of class before. Unless they tell me ahead of time, and unless we’re talking about something boring such as the number of pages in the DSM-5tr, I wonder if I’ve done something to embarrass or trigger the student into leaving. I don't want that, and probably worry about it more than I should. 

What ordinarily happens is that we’re discussing something personal—such as domestic violence. One student explains something they witnessed one time when they were younger. Everybody is quiet while the story is told. Then a student gets up and leaves. The student continues telling their story, but my mind has followed after the student who has left. I wonder, “Did I just create a triggering environment for this student?” I follow up by email or in person and almost always learn that they stepped out for some other personal reason. 

Except for one time.

 

Last semester a conversation topic did result in a student getting up and walking out. I could tell from her face that she was upset. And it was uncharacteristic of her to leave class. I was telling a true story from my own extended family—how a cousin of mine is serving back to back life sentences for something terrible he did. I apologized to this student later in the hallway (she had actually waited around to apologize for leaving class). It was clear that she had experienced similar trauma that still haunted her. She was back the next class period.

 

And then just last week I had a student accuse me of behaving malevolently before stomping out of the classroom. It was the second week of class, and this same student, I’ll call her Ms. Irate, had been asking another professor to help her with a project for my course. My colleague sent the rather long email chain, which explained how confused Ms. Irate had become. She needed someone to toss her a lifeline, and so early in the semester! I found this strange, because Ms. Irate had never asked me anything. I double checked her involvement with the course from that first week—how many resources had she accessed and so on—and learned that her engagement was essentially zero.

 

At the beginning of the class that ended for her with a slammed door, Ms. Irate raised her hand and asked me what she was supposed to be doing. She explained that she had read everything, watched my lectures, and that she and her group members still had no idea what to do. She wanted to know if maybe I could just spell it out item by item—if maybe I could give her a sort of paint-by-numbers method for completing her research project. 

 

I asked her to walk me through what she and her group members had started and where she ran into the first issue. You see, I had created resources to make this process as easy as possible. The project was for students to design an original research project. I had provided, for instance, a 20-page summary of how students might do it. I had recorded a thirty-minute lecture, and I had provided four examples (complete articles demonstrating the approach I was asking them to adopt). I was curious which of these confused her, and I wanted to know what she had understood.

 

(Perhaps you can see that I’m giving her many opportunities to take ownership for her learning.)

 

I swear that Ms. Irate smirked when she said, “Nothing makes sense.”

 

Paired with the email thread where this student tried to con a colleague into doing her work for her, this felt a little bit like a game that students sometimes play, which might be called “Helpless.” In the game, students pretend to be dense and incapable so that nearby teachers and classmates bend themselves over backwards to take responsibility for learning. This often works, because it’s hard to watch someone be helpless. It’s much easier to dive in and end their apparent suffering. But I stubbornly refuse to take the responsibility for learning away from students. 

 

That’s when I suggested to Ms. Irate that she hadn’t done the reading she so adamantly claimed to have done. Her response surprised me: she said nothing. She was dumbfounded. In the vacuum created by her speechlessness, I explained that I can see who looks at what and for how long in the learning management system. Still speechless, I speculated out loud to myself that maybe that was news to everyone. Ms. Irate eventually gathered her wits and condemned me for being a smart-aleck, and that I shouldn’t ever speak to a student that way. (This reveals that it was a game, because Ms. Irate switched her ego state from helpless Child to Critical Parent. This means she believed that she had the upper hand the entire time.)

 

Ms. Irate, bless her, appealed to her classmates for support. “Someone back me up. He can’t talk to me like that.” Her classmates shrank away. Ms. Irate stood up and threatened to go to the chair, which I encouraged her to do, and she left.

 

I explained to the rest of the class that I was unhappy with how that had played out, and I asked about what I should have done differently. The consensus was that I had handled it just fine.

 

I emailed Ms. Irate later that evening to apologize that the confrontation had occurred in front of class, and that I was sorry if she had felt embarrassed. I invited her to talk with me privately before returning to class. She ignored the email and my invitation, but, to my surprise, she returned to class (rather sullen) a week later.