Practising Tough Love

I distinctly remember a perceptive MSN conversation I had with a friend which was to influence how I started off my teaching career.

Friend: How? Excited to start teaching?

Me: Yeah, I like my subjects. I enjoy both Eng and Lit.

Friend: In this job, it is not enough to love your teaching subjects. You must love people.

The advice he gave made a lot of sense to me. I recognized there and then that in this line, we meet all kinds of students everyday; and for me to make this a life-changing job, I have to love people. Bearing this in mind, I walked into the school compound each day challenging myself to love the kids, to find worth in even the most trying students and to make a difference.

What I failed to recognize, however, is that even in love, there has to be a component of discipline in-built into it. I like the term “tough love” which I stole from my fellow colleague because I think it captures the essence of what I am trying to say quite nicely. Sure, love our kids; but like a good parent who disciplines his child when s/he goes astray, we teachers have to take our kids in hand when they do make a mistake. There are things that we cannot compromise on, there are things that we cannot "close an eye on".

Because the idea of discipline seems to conflict with love, disciplining the kids is not always the easiest thing to do. Nevertheless, I have decided that ‘tough love’ is the way to go. What I need my students to understand that when I do scold them, I am not against them. I am just against their actions. The objective of disciplining a kid should never be to humiliate or hurt them; always to ‘bring them back to the right track’—an intent which is essentially grounded in love.