We Never Know the Whole Story

When I was in high school, I had a teacher that annoyed me. He punished the whole class for things that one person did. He tried too hard to be a friend to the students and then lashed out in anger. And then I saw him one afternoon when I walked into his classroom on his prep, forgetting it was fourth period instead of fifth. He was crying. His mom was dying. His wife just cheated on him. I'm not excusing his behavior. However, what I lacked as a high school student was an understanding of context. It wasn't until years later that a friend of mine told me this teacher talked him out of suicide. You wouldn't have known it from a five minute snippet of teaching when he railed against us and accused us all of being lazy and assigned us book work as punishment. And truth be known, we all have at least five minutes of class time that would make for a pretty crappy viral video. We never know the whole story. I had a student who was disrespectful toward me, falling asleep at random times, rolling her eyes and physically moving away if I walked up to help her. One morning, I caught her stealing extra breakfast packets for her little brothers. She wept and truth be known, my eyes watered a little too. Seeing another side of her allowed me to reframe what I had already seen: that she was often compassionate, a leader, a deep thinker, a fast learner, a creative type. It's not that I hadn't seen those, but in the midst of the defiance, I couldn't see anything more than the disrespect. We never know the whole story. So, there's a video going viral and the kid (yes, he's still a kid) is being hailed as a hero or a villain, as a talking point on both sides. And the teacher, who remains relatively calm in the video, comes across as either lazy or indifferent. But here's what we don't know: what happened before, what happened after and what both people brought to school that day that changed the deeply human interaction that one sees in a classroom. You can't get that in a snippet of video. We never know the whole story.